Timur and His Team

Arkady Petrovich Gaidar 1904–1941 - a Soviet writer, author of children's books Chuk and Gek, The Hot Stone, The Fourth Dugout, The Fate of the Drummer, and others, participated in the Civil and Great Patriotic Wars. He dreamed of going to the front and fighting, just like his father. A.P. Gaidar was only 14 years old when he became the commander of a detachment. In 1922, he was demobilized from the ranks of the Red Army. A.P. Gaidar's first work was published in 1925. It was the novella In Days of Defeats and Victories. Since 1932, the writer worked as a special and later military correspondent for various newspapers and magazines. Many works by A.P. Gaidar were included in school curricula and found readers in different countries of the world. The novella Timur and His Team is one of A.P. Gaidar's most famous works. The work on the book was completed on August 27, 1940, and on September 5 of the same year, the first excerpt from the novella was published in the newspaper Pioneer Truth. Almost immediately, Timur teams began to appear in many corners of the Soviet Union. The action of the novella takes place in a small dacha settlement, where a secret organization operates, helping children and the elderly, caring for the families of military personnel, defenders of the Motherland, and fighting against a local gang of hooligans and garden thieves. The boys do their good deeds in secret, expecting no gratitude or praise. The proud and fiery commissioner Timur Garaev leads the detachment, and the boys obey him unconditionally. A.P. Gaidar was often asked the question, what is the strength of Timur, why did the boys obey his orders so readily. "When I was 15, I commanded a company. In my company, there were bearded men, there were people of bad order, there were people who did not want to listen to you. How could I keep them? By the fact that I firmly believed in what needed to be done. And at the cost of this, I achieved that they listened to me," Arkady Gaidar replied. And with this faith in the just cause, the writer generously endowed the heroes of his novella, showing readers how important it is to live by helping others.