Vladimir Zheleznikov

Vladimir Karpovich Zheleznikov is a well-known children’s writer and screenwriter. He was born in 1925. He spent the first part of his life, the shortest one — that is, childhood — traveling a great deal. His father was a career military officer, and so the family often changed places of residence. Cities in Russia, Belarus, and the Baltics flashed by... How did the writer’s creative destiny unfold? How did he realize that he wanted to be precisely a children’s writer? He began writing very early. At the age of nine he was already keeping some diaries. “Just before the war, when I was fifteen, I wrote a short novel. I did not choose the professional path of a writer immediately. During the war I studied at a special school of the Air Force and at an artillery college. After the war I came to Moscow and graduated here from the law institute. At the same time, my writing work was developing.” Once, with his novella, the beginning writer came to Novy Mir. After reading the work, they began to speak about its shortcomings. As a beginner, Vladimir Karpovich was concerned with the question: “Will I even be able to write?” “When I asked the consultant that question, he said, ‘Well, you know, young man, even a cow can be taught to write.’ I was so stunned that I did not write for some time afterward.” Nevertheless, after graduating from law school, Vladimir Karpovich entered the Literary Institute. He combined his studies for the new profession with work at Murzilka magazine, where his first publication appeared. Thus, the fact that Vladimir Karpovich began working and publishing in a children’s magazine was, as he himself says, an accident. “But this accident determined the fact that I became a children’s writer.” His love for children helped him become a children’s writer. And curiosity. “Whenever I saw two or three teenagers talking, I always tried to join them and listen to what they were saying. I heard snatches of conversation, but that was enough for me.” His first book, the short-story collection A Multicolored Story, was published in 1957, just after Zheleznikov had graduated from the Maxim Gorky Literary Institute. By then the writer was already 32, and having experienced a difficult life, scorched by the flames of war, he vividly and poignantly recreated in