This story about a short but glorious life and about the feat of a sixteen-year-old village schoolboy-partisan Sasha Chekalin. Writer Vasily Smirnov, himself a participant in the Great Patriotic War, collected and studied everything, at first glance, even minor episodes of Sasha's short life. In the book in an artistic form, he managed to vividly show how the future partisan was brought up, how the environment, Soviet reality made him a Hero.