The three short stories in this reader provide a window into the Soviet childhood experience in the years 1945-49, when the country was just beginning to recover from the devastation and hardships caused by the Second World War. The stories are semi-autobiographical, based on Ulitskaya's childhood memories, and each portrays child protagonists facing challenging situations in everyday life. Ulitskaya's detailed descriptions of landscape, objects, sounds, smells, weather, evoke the atmosphere and harsh realities of Russian life in the early postwar years; yet each of these stories ends on an optimistic note, engendering hope for a better future. The reader provides ample support for the learner, including marginal glosses, historical-cultural, and grammatical commentaries, as well as a range of exercises on word- formation, vocabulary building, and participles.