Valentin Petrovich Kataev is one of the classics of Russian literature of the twentieth century. Prose writer, playwright, war correspondent, first editor-in-chief of the magazine “Youth”, he left a significant mark on Russian culture. Kataev’s most famous work, which was included in the school curriculum, the story “The Lonely Sail Whitens” (1936) tells about the growing up of the Odessa boys Petya and Gavrik, who had the opportunity to meet a sailor from the revolutionary battleship Potemkin and themselves take part in the 1905 revolution. The story is largely autobiographical: this can be felt, for example, in the unusually vivid pictures of Kataev’s native Odessa. The famous story was continued by three more works, united in the tetralogy “Waves of the Black Sea”: Petya and Gavrik meet again - first during the Civil War, and then during during the Great Patriotic War, when they became underground fighters in occupied Odessa.