Liya Geraskina. In the Land of Unlearned Lessons

CHARACTERS
Vitya Perestukin - a fourth-grade student; a poor student, lazy; kind, but irresponsible.
Kuzya - Vitya's cat; can talk in the Land of Unlearned Lessons; Grumbling, cowardly, but devoted to his friend.
Zoya Filippovna is Vitya's teacher; strict, but fair and caring.

PLOT
The story is told from the perspective of fourth-grader Vitya Perestukin, who doesn't want to study well. Vitya returns home from school sad: he had five lessons that day and got a bad grade in each one. Vitya considers one of them undeserved: he was asked to talk about the water cycle in nature and when asked where water evaporates under the influence of the sun, Vitya answered that it disappears. At home, while doing his homework, he tries to solve a problem about navvies and ends up getting a strange (but not for him) answer: one and a half navvies. Vitya neglects the rest of the assignments and, finally, in a rage and shouting, "Go to hell! I'm fed up!", he throws his textbooks on the floor. Suddenly, the textbooks come to life and decide to send the boy to the Land of Unlearned Lessons; one of the books, a geography textbook, warns Vitya that he can call on it for help when things get really tough. Suddenly, Vitya's pet cat, Kuzya, who suddenly started talking like a human, expresses a desire to go with him. Vitya is given a soccer ball as a guide: he must go only in the direction the ball is rolling. After this, Vitya and Kuzya feel something lifting them into the air and quickly carrying them somewhere into the distance.

Following the ball, which acted as a guide, Vitya and his cat Kuzya find themselves in front of a gate. To open it, they need to correctly write two words: "key" and "lock"; Vitya struggles to recall a grammar rule—the only thing he knew for sure—and manages to master it, finding himself in a castle hidden behind the gates. There, Vitya encounters King Verb, the Comma, and two signs—the Interrogative and the Exclamation. Having assessed Vitya's knowledge of Russian grammar extremely negatively, the Imperative Verb, who served as the sovereign in this kingdom, presents him with a task involving the placement of commas, which determines the travelers' future fate.

After liberation, the comrades liberate the forest and save many animals from the evil old Drought, summoning rain by correctly formulating the concept of the water cycle. Next, they correctly solve arithmetic problems after seeing the consequences of solving them incorrectly—an innocently imprisoned tailor; a "half" of a navvy whose only remaining legs are those of a willful walker, constantly trying to kick Kuzya the cat; a cyclist forced to travel at a speed unachievable by a cyclist because of Perestukin's incorrect solution; and a brother and sister who, conversely, were supposed to be walking toward each other 60 years apart. Then Perestukin encounters historical figures—boyars from the time of Ivan the Terrible and Tsarevich Feodor, who nearly falls out of favor with the Tsar due to the unexpected outbreak of war with Napoleon. But he manages to remember that this war is supposed to begin in more than two centuries; the attack ceases on its own, and the enemy disappears. In the end, they explain to the "carnivorous" cow that she is a herbivore and that nature forbids her from being interested in cats. They meet a kangaroo-bird, as the boy declared her to be, and then—with the help of a textbook—they send the polar bear, suffering from the heat, and the Chukchi boy back to the Far North, and the monkey and the black boy to Africa.

After this, the hero and his cat (who has forgotten how to speak human language) are transported home, finding their geography textbook on the doorstep, once again transformed into an inanimate book. With this, the adventures in the Land of Unlearned Lessons end, and Viktor Perestukin finally understands the role of education in a person's life and begins to put effort into his studies, successfully passing the exams that previously terrified him with the prospect of repeating a year and moving on to the fifth grade.