Felix Krivin: the skill of the writer

Felix Krivin is a living classic of Russian literature. The peak of its popularity falls on the 70-80s of the XX century. Today it is printed infrequently, but everything written by him is still relevant, alive and exciting.

Creative portrait of the writer

Trying to uniquely determine the creative profile of the writer Felix Krivin - a meaningless task. He is inimitable in many genres, although they all have somehow to do with humor. He writes fables, fairy tales, aphorisms, poems, parodies, instructive books for children.

A distinctive feature of all the works of Krivin is subtle humor, extraordinary author's view and laconism. In his books you will not find long descriptions, detailed characteristics of characters and lyrical digressions from the main theme. He is able to convey his thoughts to the reader through one or two phrases.

Felix Krivin invented a new kind of fairy tale. First, they are intended not only for children, but also for adults. Secondly, they are maximally compressed and dynamic. Third, everything in them is based on the play of words. Krivin confronts the literal and figurative meaning of words, and in the place of their collision a new meaning is suddenly born.

The author teaches us to see the funny in the most ordinary subjects, starting with everyday things, thermometers, cabinets, nails and ending with distant stars and planets. He enlivens the objects of the real world, turns to serious sciences, mathematics, grammar, zoology, making them entertaining, and everywhere discovers an occasion for sincere and kind laughter.

How the author works

Miniatures and Krivin's poems are written in a light and lively language, so it may seem that the writing itself does not constitute labor for the author. We can assume that Felix Krivin is a brilliant improvisator and creates his works in one breath. They fly off his lips like a spray from a fountain, and his task is just to have time to write.

But this is only partly true. Of course, ideas and images are born instantly, but to achieve maximum expressiveness, it takes hours, days and weeks. Felix Krivin's wife Natalia in one interview told that her husband always and everywhere carries a notebook for notes. Even at night he can jump up and write down the thought or word that has come to him. And only then, sitting down at the typewriter, he turns them into verses, tales or stories.

Felix Krivin: biography

For children to write the most difficult, this is a well-known fact. To be understandable and interesting for this audience, you need to be able to remain a child yourself, to continue to look at the world with curiosity and interest. Felix Krivin also violates stereotypes here.

The fact is that he himself had to grow up quite early. The writer was born into a military family in 1928. He himself calls this year happy, since the sum of the first two digits of the year of his birth is equal to the sum of the last two. In five years he lost his father, and when he was 13, the Great Patriotic War began. Early Felix Krivin had to master working specialties, he was a mechanic, after working as a minder on a barge. Also early, he realized his true vocation. At the age of 18, the next "happy" year in Krivino theory, 1946, he firmly knew that the main thing in his life was literature. This year, his first publication in the literary heading of the newspaper "Pridunaiskaya Pravda" was held.

Life continued to not spoil the writer. The Jewish background closed many doors before him. Where the other could go straight, Krivin needed to look for workarounds. Who knows, maybe it was thanks to these tests that Russian literature was replenished with the name "Felix Krivin". His biography is very prosaic, if not tragic, but he also knows how to tell it with his irony.

The way to the reader

His creative path Felix Krivin began with writing fables. However, he quickly realized that he was cramped in this genre. A strict structure and already prepared, presented to the reader on a silver platter, reduce the value of such works. Then he began to write poetry and fairy tales. Since the mid-1950s, his miniatures have been regularly published in well-known magazines such as Ogonyok, Krokodil, Smena, and others. And in the early 60's, the first books began to appear .

The time of the sixties, poets who recited their poems at the stadiums and collected full concert halls, did not push Krivin to the background. Yes, he was not known in person, but he had his own reader, who once and for all fell in love with the incomparable style and humor of this author. Among the admirers of Krivin were famous people. He was friends with G. Gorin and N. Bogoslovsky, was familiar with S. Marshak, with great success read his miniatures A. Raikin and L. Utesov.

By pages of books

The first book of the writer was published in 1961, she was called "Around the cabbage" and contained comic poems and fables.

Further, Krivin became interested in the genre of instructive children's literature. In 1962 his "Pocket School" was published. This book is very popular today. In an entertaining form the author gives an explanation of quite complex topics from the course of mathematics, the Russian language, and physics. Later, Krivin wrote a few more books on this subject: "The Frivolous Archimedes" (1971), "The Princess of the Grammar" (1981), "The Tales Caught from the Ground" (1981) and others.

The author was interested in social issues. In 1963 he finished the story "Bird City". This bright satirical work was first published only in 1989, and a separate edition with a slightly modified name ("Hiking City") was published in 2000.

The author is interested in fantastic topics (Collection "I Hijacked the Time Machine, 1992), and questions of nationalities (" Weep for Tsar Herod ", 1994), and History (" World History in Anecdotes ", 1993).

His miniatures, stories, poems are able to capture the instants of time, like a photo. Krivin Feliks Davidovich at the same time inscribed his name in the history of Russian and world literature not for a moment, but for ages.