Irina Glushchenko’s book is a cultural investigation. The author invites the reader to check the presence of parallel motifs in three works that at first glance cannot be compared: “The Fate of the Drummer” by Arkady Gaidar (1938), “The Gift” by Vladimir Nabokov (1937) and “The Master and Margarita” by Mikhail Bulgakov (1938). Revealing the hidden commonality in the books of a Red Civil War commander, an emigrant aristocrat and a former doctor in the White Army allows us to capture the spirit of the times of the late 1930s. As a research approach for this, the author develops a method of almost arbitrary parallels that are not determined by causal relationships. The author's investigation outgrows the literary framework: the book uses previously unpublished archival materials relating to the same - devilish and everyday - time in which the mysterious drummer, the generation that read about him, and Arkady Gaidar himself lived his destiny. The book is intended for historians , culturologists, philologists, as well as for a wide range of readers interested in the Soviet past and its inclusion in world history.