In 1940 Gaidar added "Blue Cup" into two of his compilations, Rasskazy ("Short Stories", Detizdat) and Moyi Tovarishchi ("My Friends", Sovetsky Pisatel).

The story incited the heated discussion, parents, teachers and librarians participating in disputes, held by the Soviet literary and pedagogical journals and newspapers.

[2]The protagonist and his six-year-old daughter Svetlana arrive at a dacha in playful moods, but their (respective) wife and mother Marusya has other ideas: she burdens them with petty tasks, then departs (apparently in a sulk) to accompany her old friend, a pilot, to the station.

It involves pacifying the two boys (one of whom accuses another of being 'a fascist' for using an insult word 'jidovka' with regards to a Jewish girl), walking straight into a military exercise site with a lot of shooting going on, losing their stock of gingerbread to a four-year old, but getting a kitten from him as a reward, and near-drowning in a marsh.

They return home at dusk, find Marusya worried and happy to see them and spend a lovely evening, with Svetlana (who initially expressed pessimism on that point) admitting that "life's a good thing, after all".