Felix Krivin: writing skills

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

Felix Krivin is a living classic of Russian literature. The peak of its popularity falls on the 70-80s of the XX century. Today, he is rarely published, but everything he wrote is still relevant, lively and exciting.

Creative portrait of the writer

Trying to unambiguously define the creative profile of the writer Felix Krivin is a meaningless task. He is inimitable in many genres, although all of them are related to humor in one way or another. He writes fables, fairy tales, aphorisms, poems, parodies, instructive books for children.

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

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

The author teaches you to see the funny in the most ordinary objects, starting with household items, thermometers, cabinets, nails and ending with distant stars and planets. He brings things to life in the real world, turns to serious sciences, mathematics, grammar, zoology, making them entertaining, and everywhere he finds a reason for sincere and kind laughter.

How the author works

Krivin's miniatures and poems are written in an easy and lively language, so it may seem that the writer's work itself is not difficult for the author. It can be assumed that Felix Krivin is a brilliant improviser and creates his works in one breath. They fly from his mouth like spray from a fountain, and his only task is to write it down.

But this is only partly true. Of course, ideas and images are born at lightning speed, but to achieve maximum expressiveness, it takes hours, days and weeks. Felix Krivina's wife, Natalya, said in an interview that her husband always and everywhere carries a notepad with him. Even at night, he can jump up and write down the thought or word that came to him. And only then, sitting down at a typewriter, he turns them into poems, fairy tales or stories.

Felix Krivin: biography

Children are the most difficult to write, it's a well-known fact. In order to be understandable and interesting for this audience, one must also be able to remain a child, continue to look at the world with curiosity and interest. Felix Krivin breaks stereotypes here as well.

The fact is that he himselfI had to grow up pretty early. The writer was born into a military family in 1928. He himself calls this year happy, because the sum of the first two digits of the year of his birth is equal to the sum of the last two. At the age of five, he lost his father, and when he was 13, the Great Patriotic War began. Felix Krivin had to learn working speci alties early, he was a mechanic, after that he worked as a minder on a barge. He also realized early on his true calling. Already at the age of 18, in the next "happy" year according to Krivin's theory, 1946, he knew for sure that the main business of his life was literature. This year, his first publication took place in the literary section of the newspaper "Danube Pravda".

Life did not spoil the writer further. Jewish origin closed many doors to him. Where another could go straight through, Krivin needed to look for detours. Who knows, maybe it was thanks to these trials that Russian literature was replenished with the name “Felix Krivin”. His biography is very prosaic, if not tragic, but he knows how to tell it with his usual irony.

The path to the reader

Felix Krivin began his career by writing fables. However, he quickly realized that he was cramped in this genre. Strict structure and ready-made, presented to the reader on a silver platter, morality reduce the value of such works. Then he began to write poetry and fairy tales. Since the mid-50s, his miniatures have been constantly published in the well-known magazines Ogonyok, Krokodil, Smena, etc. And in the early 60s, the first books began to appear.

Time of the sixties, poets whorecited their poems in stadiums and gathered full concert halls, did not push Krivin into the background. Yes, they did not know him by sight, but he had his own reader, who once and for all fell in love with the incomparable style and humor of this author. There were famous people among Krivin's fans. He was friends with G. Gorin and N. Bogoslovsky, knew S. Marshak, read his miniatures to A. Raikin and L. Utesov with great success.

Through the pages of books

The writer's first book was published in 1961, it was called "Around the Cabbage" and contained comic poems and fables.

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

The author was also interested in social topics. In 1963 he finished the story "Bird City". This vivid satirical work was first published only in 1989, and a separate edition with a slightly changed title (“Walking City”) was published in 2000.

The author is also interested in fantastic topics (Collection "I Stole a Time Machine", 1992), and questions of nationalities ("Weep for King Herod", 1994), and history ("World History in Jokes", 1993).

His miniatures, stories, poems can capture moments of time, as photos do. Krivin Felix Davidovich at the same time entered his name in the history of Russian and world literature not for a moment, but for centuries.