The eternally smiling, eternally young face of Yuri Alekseevich Gagarin in the famous portrait that has gone around the whole world. This face was at one time a symbol, a banner of an entire era, an era of great hopes and aspirations... And in March of this year we are celebrating the 75th anniversary of the birth of the first cosmonaut of planet Earth. We note and wonder how this modest, short boy, born on March 9, 1934 into a peasant family in the village of Klushino, near the ancient Russian city of Gzhatsk in the Smolensk region, was able to rise to the high heavens... He lived only 34 years. Died while performing a training flight on March 27, 1968. But when he was only 27 years old, in 1961 the whole world already knew him. It seems that his entire life path was made up of nothing but successes. But is it? A writer from Kaluga, Vyacheslav Bucharsky, tried to open new, little-known pages in the life of Yuri Gagarin. He did not immediately become a pilot and astronaut. Where, under what sky did the dream of flight first take possession of him, where did he first manage to feel the joy of flight? Which skies first became familiar to him... There is an answer to this question - these are the Saratov skies.