Mikhail Volpin(1902-1988)

Mikhail Volpin is a Soviet playwright, artist, poet and screenwriter. He was born in the family of David Samuilovich Volpin, a lawyer and music teacher Anna Borisovna Volpina. He spent his childhood in Moscow, was fond of art, took drawing lessons from the artist Vasiliy Surikov. The young man took part in the Civil War on the side of Soviet power. In 1920-1921, as an artist and author of satirical texts came to work in the 'Okna ROSTA' under the leadership of Vladimir Mayakovsky. In 1921-1927 he studied at Higher artistic and technical workshop, wrote satirical verses, and comic plays, including co-authorship with Viktor Ardov, Ilya Ilf, Yevgeni Petrov, Valentin Kataev, Vladimir Mass and Nikolay Erdman. As a poet collaborated in satirical magazines, in the early 1930s - a staff member of the magazine "Crocodile". In the postwar years, Volpin came to the film studio Soyuzmultfilm, where in 1948 the first film was shot according to his script - Fedya Zaytsev (1948), and in the 1950s and early 1960s - a number of works, including the 1955 film Zakoldovannyy malchik (1955) based on the fairy tale of Selma Lagerlöf "A wonderful journey of Nils with wild geese". From the beginning of the 1960s, according to Volpin's scripts (including those written together with Erdman), a number of feature films of fairy tales based on works belonging to the category of world classics of the genre were shot, the best of which is the film Morozko (1965). The last film of the screenwriter was filmed in 1987, Skazka pro vlyublyonnogo malyara (1987).