Lev Abramovich Kassil

Lev Kassil ( Russian Лев Абрамович Кассиль . Scientific transliteration Lev Abramovich Kassil' * June 27 ^{. Jul} / 10. July  1905 ^{. Greg} in Pokrovskaya Sloboda , †  21st June 1970 in Moscow ) was a Russian - Soviet author who primarily Wrote books for children and young people.

Life

Kassil was the son of a gynecologist and a music teacher. He grew up in his native Pokrovskaya Sloboda across from the city of Saratov on the Volga . There he went to a high school. After the October Revolution in 1917, the latter was converted into a workers' school. As a teenager, Kassil participated as a draftsman in the design of a hand-made school magazine that was published by some of the children of this school. In 1923 he graduated from school and received a place at Moscow University as an award for his voluntary work for the magazine . There he studied until 1926 (without a degree) at the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics. However, he already dealt with literature during his studies and was already writing his own works. His first short story appeared in the Novosti Radio newspaper in 1925 .

In 1927 Kassil met Mayakovsky , a poet he admired . On his initiative, he switched to the editorial team of a new youth magazine called Nowy Lef in the same year . In 1929 Kassil published his first larger children's book, Konduit , which later, after the publication of a follow-up novel, became the first part of Schwambranien , one of Kassil's most famous works.

In the 1930s Lev Kassil worked as a journalist for the Izvestia newspaper . At that time he was personally acquainted with several other prominent children's book authors (including Samuil Marschak , Michail Prischwin , Arkadi Gaidar ) and published other children's and youth books that were also made into films (for the first time in 1936 with the story Torwart der Republik ). In addition to children's literature, Kassil wrote several biographies about his famous contemporaries (including Mayakovsky, Gaidar, Konstantin Ziolkowski and Otto Schmidt ).

During the Second World War , Kassil worked as a military journalist. This later found its way into the plot of several of his books, including the novella The Street of the Youngest Son , for which Kassil was awarded the 3rd degree Stalin Prize in 1951 . Kassil was a lecturer at the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow and, since 1965, a corresponding member of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of the Soviet Union.

Kassil was married to the actress Svetlana Sobinova (1920–2002), a daughter of the famous opera singer Leonid Sobinow (1872–1934).

He died in Moscow in 1970 and was buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery. The asteroid (2149) Schwambraniya was named after the wonderland built by the characters in his children's novel Conduite and Schwambraniya .

Works (selection)

• Swambrania or the unheard of adventures of two brave knights who discovered the great kingdom of Swambrania in search of justice on the continent of the Great Tooth (Russian Кондуит и Швамбрания , 1929–35, German 1960)
• His big brother ( Черемыш, брат героя , 1938, German 1949)
• The girl Ustja ( Великое противостояние , 1941–47, German 1949, volume 2 as The girl Sima )
• The street of the youngest son ( Улица младшего сына , 1949; together with Max Poljanowski (1901–1977); German 1956)
• An early rise ( Ранний восход , 1953, German 1956)
• The trail leads to Cortina ( Ход белой королевы , 1956, Ger . 1958)
• What is luck? ( Про жизнь совсем хорошую , 1959, German 1964)
• Mayakovsky - himself ( Маяковский - сам , 1963)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ sobinov.yar.ru

Web links

• Literature by and about Lew Abramowitsch Kassil in the catalog of the German National Library
• Detailed biography on the page culture Saratov (Russian)
• hrono.ru (Russian)
• Text collection (Russian)