Eduard Uspenskiy

Eduard Nikolayevich Uspensky, poet, children’s prose writer, playwright, and screenwriter, was born on December 22, 1937, in Yegoryevsk, Moscow Region, into a family of office workers. Even at school, while still in the upper grades, he was appointed leader for the younger children. Since then, he remained attached to these children for his entire life. He was always an instigator, organizer, and leader. He entered the Moscow Aviation Institute, where he spent more time organizing student variety shows and KVN competitions than studying rocketry. He wrote humorous sketches and comic verses. He worked for three years in a design bureau, then turned to literature. Publication of his children’s poems was difficult; his short stories were more often printed in the humor and satire section, but Uspensky did not want to be merely a humorist. Fortunately, animators became interested in his children’s works, and it was they who made Cheburashka and Crocodile Gena, the inhabitants of Prostokvashino, and the plasticine crow famous. Uspensky was one of the organizers and authors of Radio Nanny, ABC for Children, and other highly popular children’s radio programs. He wrote plays for puppet theaters. For a long time he dreamed of creating his own children’s magazine, but he was never supported by the authorities. He also failed to create his own magazine during the years of perestroika. Eduard Uspensky’s case is a complicated one, to be sure. Full of deprivations and expulsions, like Matroskin the cat. Children love Uspensky, and his superiors have always disliked him. For a long time Uspensky himself believed that this dislike was due to Soviet власти, and so during the years of perestroika he readily criticized it. Later, with its fall, he noticed that the deprivations and expulsions had not diminished, and that the authorities—quite different authorities—still disliked him, or perhaps disliked him in a new way. Unexpectedly for himself, Eduard Uspensky, who considered himself a staunch Westerner, having plunged headfirst into that very West, began to criticize much of what came to Russia from the so-called civilized world. Eduard Uspensky died on the evening of August 14, 2018, at the age of 80, in a private house in