The second volume of the Collected Works of V.P. Astafiev includes stories written by him in the late 50s and 60s (the author later returned to the story “Starfall,” distorted for “ideological purposes” by the then Komsomol publishers); “The Pass” tells about the sad fate of a boy left without a mother, and about kind people who sheltered an orphan in difficult times; This story became a kind of “literary pass” for the writer. The hero of "Starodub" also appears before readers as a boy and, growing up, learns all the complexities of life. In Starfall, a Siberian young man, wounded in the war, meets his first love in the hospital. "Theft" is a story about the life of a teenager in a children's camp in the Arctic.