Writing
An obnoxious magpie returns to the forest from abroad and finds a most unenthusiastic audience for her jazz music.
Based on Verne's book The Mysterious Island, five POWs escape from a camp in a balloon during the Civil War and crash-land on an uninhabited island in the Pacific. Trying to settle with their lives they find someone is helping them.
In a world of ventriloquists an unblinking kitten exhausted by hunger seeks solace in extreme walks on the cornice.
Old Ahmed with his grandson and dog goes to the market, having only four coins. But the tax collector and the rich take his money. Wanting to take revenge on them, Ahmed pretends to be a wizard and threatens to turn them into donkeys...
Arkasha Pryakhin, the son of a cook, is accepted by the "ladies' committee" as a free pupil at the gymnasium. Treasury discipline, reigning in this educational institution, methodically kills in students a genuine love of knowledge. Gymnasium students, resisting the soulless school system, invent all sorts of pranks, sometimes very evil. Once, when Arkady refused to name the perpetrator of the mischief, he was expelled from the gymnasium.
