The exhibition of the Penza Literature Museum features a lifetime edition of Alexander Malyshkin’s story “The Fall of Dair.” The book was reprinted repeatedly, and in 1931, it was published in its fifth edition in the publishing house of the Soviet Writers’ Association “Federation.”

The plot of the story “The Fall of Dair” was based on events from the military life of the writer himself. In 1916, Alexander Malyshkin graduated from St. Petersburg University and was immediately drafted into the army. After training at the school of warrant officers, he was appointed to the Black Sea Fleet. Between the February and October Revolutions of 1917, Alexander Malyshkin was in Sevastopol. At one of the meetings, he was elected commander of a sailor volunteer detachment formed to defend the revolution in the Crimea.

In 1918, Alexander Malyshkin was demobilized from the fleet, returned with the last train to his native area, and settled in Saransk. During this period, he published sketches from the life of the revolutionary province, satirical articles, reviews, and opinion pieces in Penza and Saransk newspapers. In July 1919, Alexander Malyshkin was drafted into the Red Army and appointed commander of a rifle platoon: with a train of Red Army soldiers, he went to the front. But on the way there, he received a new assignment. A survey was held among the Red Army fighters on board the train in search of historians and people with liberal arts education. As a result, Alexander Malyshkin, a graduate of the School of History and Philology, got to the headquarters of the Eastern Front and, until the very last days of the Russian Civil War, accompanied Mikhail Vasilyevich Frunze as the head of the military-historical department of the Eastern, Turkestan, and later Southern Fronts.

“You probably don’t know and wonder — why, a historian. As is always the case at a time of war, histories of armies are written — this is material for military science and commemoration of glory. This work is certainly more interesting to me than any other,” Alexander Malyshkin wrote in a letter to his wife Nadezhda Nikolaevna Kuzovkova.

Alexander Malyshkin was a member of a task-force cell of the 6th Army which took part in storming the Crimea. Inspired by the events of this military operation, Malyshkin wrote the story “The Fall of Dair, ” which brought him wide fame.