The museum’s collection includes a typewritten manuscript of the literary script of Arkady Petrovich Gaidar’s novel “The Drummer’s Fate.”

The manuscript consists of sheets of thin paper with typewritten text and the author’s corrections in violet and blue ink. The sheets are bound in a cardboard cover with a brown fabric spine.

In March 1938, Arkady Gaidar traveled to Odessa and lived there throughout the spring and summer. There, he worked on the script for “The Drummer’s Fate” for the Odessa Film Studio.

In the text, he not only changed the main character’s last name from Shcherbachov to Batashov but also altered the plot: Sergey’s father became an engineer and a factory chief at a military plant. The secret packet was lost through no fault of his own. The military came to Batashov with an arrest warrant, and the father was arrested:

Six months later, Sergey found the packet, which had fallen into the hands of criminals. The plot then develops similarly to the one in the novel.

The screenplay has numerous corrections on every page, made by the writer’s hand. It also contains many details not found in the novella. The character descriptions vary slightly as well. The title page bears the date June 18, 1938, and in the corner, another date, June 23, 1938, is handwritten in ink by Arkady Gaidar.

Work on the script coincided with the June 20, 1938, arrest of Gaidar’s ex-wife, writer, screenwriter, and journalist Lia Lazarevna Solomyanskaya, in connection with her second husband, journalist, bibliographer, and editor Israel Mikhailovich Razin. Solomyanskaya was sentenced to five years in a labor camp.

Largely due to the petitions of Arkady Gaidar, on December 29, 1939, the case against Lia Solomyanskaya was dropped. On January 17, 1940, she was released from the camp and went to Moscow.