Alexander Grin (real name Alexander Stepanovich Grinevsky) was a Russian writer, prose writer, and poet, a representative of neoromanticism, and the author of philosophical and psychological works with elements of symbolic fantasy.

He was born on August 23, 1880, in Slobodskoy, a county town in Vyatka Governorate. The future writer spent his childhood and youth in Vyatka. The first word that little Sasha Grinevsky, the eldest child, put together from letters while sitting on his father’s lap was the word “sea”... Sasha was the son of a participant in the Polish uprising of 1863, exiled to provincial Vyatka. A bookkeeper at a zemstvo hospital, his father barely made ends meet — without joy, hope, or dreams. His wife, exhausted and ill, comforted herself by humming songs — mostly bawdy or thieving ones. She died at the age of thirty-seven... The widower, Stepan Grinevsky, was left with four half-orphans: 13-year-old Sasha (the eldest) had a brother and two sisters. Over time the future writer’s father remarried, and his stepmother brought her own son into the house. And to complete the happiness, a common child was born in due course.

...What the family of the Polish exile was fortunate in was books. In 1888 Lieutenant Colonel Grinevsky, Sasha’s uncle, was killed in service. From the funeral they brought an inheritance: three large chests stuffed with volumes. They were in Polish, French, and Russian.

It was then that eight-year-old Alexander first escaped reality — into the alluring world of Jules Verne and Mayne Reid. This fictional life proved far more interesting: the boundless expanse of the sea, the impenetrable jungles, the righteous strength of heroes conquered the boy forever. He did not want to return to reality at all...

When Sasha turned nine, his father bought him a gun — an old muzzle-loader for one ruble. The gift kept the teenager away from food and drink and took him into the forest for whole days. But it was not only the hunt that attracted the boy. He came to love the whisper of the trees, the smell of grass, the twilight