Alexander Timofeevsky

Alexander Pavlovich Timofeevsky was a poet and playwright; more than 30 animated films were made to his scripts, and he was the author of the famous “Song of the Crocodile Gena.” He was born in Moscow in 1933. He was the grandson of the medical professor Pavel Timofeevsky, who had been “in charge of a sanitary train at the Supreme Headquarters when the tsar abdicated,” and an active member of the St. Petersburg Theosophical Society. Both grandfathers, who were second cousins to each other, were repressed during the Soviet era. During the Great Patriotic War, he lived in besieged Leningrad, then in evacuation in Chelyabinsk. After the war he returned to Moscow. In 1958 he graduated from the screenwriting faculty of the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography. He worked as an editor at the Tajikfilm studio, and in 1963–1983 as an editor at the Soyuzmultfilm studio, later at the Multtelefilm studio of the Ekran creative association. For some time he was the artistic director of the Barrikady cinema. He wrote scripts for animated films and songs for them. This is how the famous song of Crocodile Gena (“Let Them Run Clumsily...”), heard in the animated film Cheburashka, was written. He began writing poetry in the early 1950s. He was first “published” in A. Ginzburg’s samizdat anthology Syntax (1959–1960). For many years he wrote poetry “for the drawer.” His first collection of poems, To Wintering Birds, was published only in the early 1990s[8]. Not spoiled by fame, he called himself “a poet who failed to knock on Russia’s closed window.” His poems first appeared in A. Ginzburg’s samizdat anthology Syntax, after which there followed a long pause for well-known reasons. Only in 1992 did the first slim collection of poems, To Wintering Birds, appear. Six years later, the first substantial book, A Song for the Sorrowful of Heart, was published. Both books have long since become rarities. In 2003, the poetry collection Late Shooter was published by New Literary Observer. Alexander Pavlovich passed away on January 7, 2022.