The Wanderers (Russian: Странники, romanized: Stranniki) is a 1931 novel by Vyacheslav Shishkov, telling the story of the two homeless boys in the Soviet Union of the 1920s.
[1] Part one of the novel, Filka and Amelka (Russian: Филька и Амелька) was first published in 1930 by Krasnaya Nov (issues 4-6), originally as a finished novella.
Complete with parts two and three, "The Darkness Gives Way" (Мрак дрогнул) and "Labour" (Труд), respectively, the novel came out as a separate edition in 1931 via the Leningrad Writers' Publishers.
Shishkov started working on The Wanderers in 1928, inspired by a letter he'd received from a young man from Simferopol, telling him about his life as a teenage tramp.
Shishkov did a lot of research and spent himself a long time on the road, meeting groups and communities of homeless people all over the country.