Galina Shcherbakova

Galina Nikolayevna Shcherbakova (birth surname Rezhabek) (May 10, 1932, Dzerzhinsk — March 23, 2010, Moscow) was a Soviet and Russian writer and screenwriter.

She was born in 1932 in Dzerzhinsk, Donetsk Oblast (Ukrainian SSR). Shcherbakova’s school years were spent under German occupation.

After graduating from school, she entered the Chelyabinsk Pedagogical Institute; after graduating from it, she worked at a school as a teacher of Russian language and literature. She also worked for some time as a journalist at a newspaper, but gave up this job because she wanted to become a writer, and journalism, as Shcherbakova believed, “draws one in and leads one astray.”

Until the end of the 1970s, Galina Shcherbakova wrote, in her own words, “serious things — major prose on philosophical themes. But no one wanted to publish these works.” And one day she decided to write a novel about love. Thus the novella It Wasn’t in the Dream was born, published by the magazine Yunost in autumn 1979. Unexpectedly even for the writer herself, the novella was a stunning success, and Shcherbakova began receiving many enthusiastic letters.

Soon after its publication, in 1980, the novella was adapted for the screen by Ilya Frez. The ending was changed with Shcherbakova’s blessing — she was afraid that if the main character also died in the film, hundreds of boys would follow his example. The episode with the hero’s fall did not come to her by chance — her own teenage son, “while climbing up a drainpipe toward his first love,” slipped and fell, escaping with bruises.

In her last years the writer was seriously ill and underwent abdominal surgery, but she never recovered. Her last interview is dated January 2010, when 30 years had passed since the beginning of work on the film It Wasn’t in the Dream...

Galina Shcherbakova died in Moscow on March 23, 2010. She was