Lazar Lagin

Soviet writer and poet, a leading representative of Soviet satirical and children’s literature. L. I. Ginzburg was born on November 21 (December 4), 1903, in Vitebsk, into a poor Jewish family. He was the first of five children of Iosif Faivelevich Ginzburg and Khana Lazarevna. His father worked as a raftman. The following year, after saving some money, the family moved to Minsk, where his father opened a hardware shop. Lazar was 10 years old when World War I began in 1914. Three years later came the October Revolution of 1917. In 1919, 15-year-old Lazar graduated from secondary school in Minsk and received his school-leaving certificate. After graduating that same year, he volunteered for the Civil War. He was involved in organizing the Komsomol in Belarus and was one of its leaders. In 1922 he began publishing poems and notes in newspapers. About those first poetic attempts, Lazar Iosifovich wrote ironically in the preface to one of his books: “To be frank, I have a considerable merit before our national literature: I stopped writing poetry in time and forever.” That same year he met V. V. Mayakovsky in Rostov-on-Don and showed him his poems. Mayakovsky praised the poems and later, when in Moscow, would ask during their meetings why Lazar was not bringing him any new poems. In 1923 he studied in the vocal department of the Minsk Conservatory, but left because he had no interest in music theory. After moving to Moscow in 1924, he attended the literary studio of V. Ya. Bryusov. He began the cycle “Offensive Fairy Tales.” In 1925 he graduated from the Department of Political Economy of the K. Marx Institute of National Economy in Moscow. After that he served in the Red Army. Then he was again in Moscow. In 1930 Lazar worked for the newspaper For Industrialization, and his father became the most literate typesetter at Izvestia. In 1930–1933 he studied at the Communist Institute of Education. In graduate school he prepared his dissertation for defense. Lagin was recalled from the institute to work for Pravda. He worked for the magazine Krokodil, which was published by the Pravda publishing house from 1932