Pavel Zaltsman

Pavel Zaltsman was born in Chișinău, the youngest (third) child in the family of a career officer in the tsarist army. Soon the family moved to Odessa, and from 1917 wandered across southern Ukraine, staying longest in Rybnitsa and Odessa; finally, at the end of August 1925, they arrived in Leningrad. After completing the last three grades of Leningrad’s First Soviet Secondary School in 1929, he worked as an illustrator for the Leningrad journals Rezets, Perelom, Stroyka, and Yunyi proletarii (1931–1932). From 1928 he was an intern at the Belgoskino film studio under the artists A. A. Arapov and V. Egorov. In 1929 he met P. N. Filonov, became his follower and a member of the group Masters of Analytical Art. At the same time he became a member of LOSSKh, but after the war did not renew his membership. From 1930 he worked at Lenfilm, and in 1932–1940 took part in film expeditions to the Urals, the Pamirs, Karelia, Transbaikalia, Central Asia, and Crimea. In 1935 he married his former classmate Roza Zalmanovna Magid. During the first year of the siege he worked as a designer of camouflage operations for the defense of Leningrad. His parents died of starvation in besieged Leningrad in the winter of 1941–1942. On 27 July 1942 he was evacuated from the city with Lenfilm and on 20 August arrived in Alma-Ata. In Kazakhstan he was assigned to work at the Central United Film Studio (TsOKS), which was located there during the war. In 1944, when the film studios Lenfilm and Mosfilm returned from evacuation, he was deprived of the opportunity to leave Alma-Ata—because, as a German by passport, he had been assigned the status of a special settler. He worked as a production designer at the Kazakhfilm studio. From 1948 he taught art history at an art school, the Academy of Architecture, a pedagogical institute, the philological faculty of Kazakh University, and at screenwriting courses at the Kazakhfilm studio. He began writing poems and diaries in childhood, and the novels Puppies