Beautiful children's writer Alexander Volkov was born in 1891 in the family of a feldfebel and a seamstress and grew up in the barracks of the old fortress of Ust-Kamenogorsk. He learned to read very early, but there was nothing to read in his parents’ house, and at the age of eight, Sasha began to help in the binding workshop. At the same time, I read Mein Reed. Dickens, Jules Verne, Pushkin. Alexander graduated from the city school and Tomsk Teachers Institute, then taught. At some point he began
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Beautiful children's writer Alexander Volkov was born in 1891 in the family of a feldfebel and a seamstress and grew up in the barracks of the old fortress of Ust-Kamenogorsk. He learned to read very early, but there was nothing to read in his parents’ house, and at the age of eight, Sasha began to help in the binding workshop. At the same time, I read Mein Reed. Dickens, Jules Verne, Pushkin.
Alexander graduated from the city school and Tomsk Teachers Institute, then taught. At some point he began to write poems and plays for children's theater. He worked as a school director in Yaroslavl and studied again. He entered the Moscow University Physics and Mathematics Department, being already forty years old and having a wife and two children, and overcame a five-year course in less than a year. He studied German and French independently in Ust-Kamenogorsk.
As a teacher of the Institute of Nonferrous Metals in Moscow, he began to study English. That's where he got his hands on Frank Baum's book The Wizard of Oz. Translating the book into Russian, Volkov retold it to his sons and their friends. As often happens in such cases, in each retelling, something new was added, invented just to make it more interesting. In general, when the translation was ready for publication, it was already an independent book, only partially resembling the original. Volkov sent it to Samuel Marshak. The famous children's writer liked the book. It was published under the title “The Wizard of the Emerald City” with the subtitle “Reworking the Fairy Tale of Frank Baum”.
The first black white illustrations for the book were made by Nikolai Ruddlov. And already in the postwar years, Leonid Vladimirsky painted new ones, which were recognized as classic. All the sequels of “The Wizard...” were already published with illustrations of Vladimirsky, “the court artist of the Emerald family.”
If the first book was still largely a retelling of Baum, then the next five in the series about the Emerald City were pure fantasy by Volkov. The children wrote to Volkov and asked for “something more about Ellie.” But Ellie had to grow up and Annie had already gone to Magic Country. In parallel, wooden soldiers of Urfin Jus marched along the roads of the Magic Country. In addition to fairy tales, Alexander Volkov wrote scientific and educational books for children and adults, translated English and American writers, in particular, Jules Verne. The writer died in 1977. /