Anatoliy Aleksin

Aleksin Anatoly Georgievich (real surname Goberman), Russian prose writer and playwright.

He was born on 3 August 1924 in Moscow into the family of an active participant in the Civil War, who was repressed in 1937. In childhood he published poems in the Pioneers’ press (collected in the book The Trumpet, 1951; together with S. Baruzdin). During the Great Patriotic War he worked on a construction site; in 1950 he graduated from the Indian Department of the Moscow Institute of Oriental Studies. That same year he published the collection of novellas Thirty-One Days, approved by K. G. Paustovsky and immediately establishing Aleksin as the creator of the so-called “youth novella.”

Aleksin’s numerous works (the novellas Sasha and Shura, 1956; The Unusual Adventures of Seva Kotlov, 1958; The Seventh Floor Is Speaking, 1959; Kolya Writes to Olya, Olya Writes to Kolya, 1965; The Late Child, 1968, and others) are immediate and life-like narratives about the collision of children and adolescents with the adult world, not devoid of melodrama and sentimentality, and usually told in the first person.

Aleksin’s works enjoy popularity because of the dramatic swiftness of their structure, the sharpness of their conflicts, their psychological and everyday-observational acuity, their kind humor, topical plots, and recognizable characters and circumstances (family, school, Pioneer camp, a war game, first love, a children’s choir — the novella The Day Before Yesterday and the Day After Tomorrow, 1974; a youth theater troupe — the novella The Cast and the Crew, 1975; memories of the years of Stalinist repression — the novella The Toy, 1988; the literary and life “trial” of a teenager — Very Scary Stories: Detective Novellas Written by Alik Detkin, 1969–1992).

The collective portrait of the young generations of the 1950s–1980s proposed by Aleksin is not devoid of idealization — and at the same time of an objective moral diagnosis delivered from the standpoint of moral maximalism, which rejected (in the spirit of the “rom