The museum’s collection includes a book by Arkady Petrovich Gaidar titled “The Hot Stone.”
The illustrations for the tale were made by the artist Olga Ludovikovna Rosenblatt. The print run was published in Moscow by the Printing Factory of Moskvoretsky district Trust, in 1949.
The fairy tale was written shortly before the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War, in April 1941. In July, Arkady Gaidar went to the front as a correspondent for the “Komsomolskaya Pravda” newspaper. In August-September, the fairy tale “The Hot Stone” was published in issues 8 and 9 of the magazine “Murzilka.”
The story behind the creation of the fairy tale “The Hot Stone” was told by Alexander Vasilyevich Gerasimov. As a child, he, along with his friend Dmitry Vorobyov, often visited abandoned quarries in Gorki Leninskiye near Moscow.
One day, they saw a stranger in blue pants and a tunic, wearing polished boots, standing by a large red stone. The man introduced himself as Arkady Gaidar and showed his ID. The boys were thrilled by the encounter. In his excitement, Alexander struck the red stone with an iron rod, causing sparks to fly and a burning smell to fill the air. Gaidar shouted, “Hush!“, pulled a notebook out of his bag, and drew a Red Army star with rays extending in all directions on the first page using a thick green pencil. On the next page, he wrote in large letters, “About the Hot Stone,” underlined it three times, and framed it. A bit lower, he wrote the word “grandfather.” Then he looked at Dmitry, at his curly white hair, drew a funny face next to the word “grandfather, ” and beneath it, wrote, “Ivashka Kudryashkin.“
Arkady Petrovich moved into a room rented to him by
Alexander Gerasimov’s mother. The next day, local kids brought the writer a
stone on which the words were inscribed:
