Viktor Dragunskiy

Viktor Yuzefovich Dragunsky was a Russian Soviet writer, the author of novellas and short stories, among which the series The Deniska Stories gained the greatest popularity and became a classic of Soviet children's literature.

Viktor Dragunsky was born on 1 December 1913 in New York City, into a Jewish family. His parents, emigrants from Gomel, arrived in the United States and settled in the Bronx shortly before their son's birth. His father, Yuda Falkovich Pertsovsky (1894–1918), and his mother, Rita Leibovna Dragunskaya (1895–1967, originally from the county town of Starobykhov in the Mogilev Governorate), were married on 26 February 1913 in Gomel. Unable to adapt to life in America, the family returned to Gomel in July 1914.

In 1918, Viktor's father died of typhus (according to other sources, he died in unexplained circumstances). His stepfather became Ippolit Ivanovich Voytsekhovich, chairman of the city revolutionary committee and a Red commissar, who died in 1920. In 1922, another stepfather appeared on the scene — Menakhem-Mendl Khaymovich Rubin (1894–1962), an actor in a vaudeville Jewish theater (the Clara Jung troupe), with whom the family traveled on touring engagements throughout the country. In 1925 they moved to Moscow, where Rubin and Ilya Trilling (1895–1947) organized their own troupe. Later Menakhem Rubin left the family and became a director of a Jewish theater in America.

Viktor began working at an early age. In 1930, already employed, he began attending A. Dikiy's "Literary and Theater Workshops." In 1935 he began performing as an actor at the Transport Theater (now the N. V. Gogol Theater).

At the same time, Dragunsky was engaged in literary work: he wrote feuilletons and humorous sketches, invented interludes, comic scenes, variety monologues, and circus clown acts. He grew close to circus performers and even worked in the circus for a time. Gradually, acting roles came his way. He