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 he wrote is still relevant, lively and exciting.
Creative portrait of a writer
Trying to uniquely identify the creative profile of the writer Felix Krivin is a meaningless task. It is inimitable in many genres, although all of them are somehow related to 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, an extraordinary author's look and laconicism. In his books you will not find long descriptions, detailed characteristics of the characters and lyrical digressions from the main topic. He knows how to convey his thoughts to the reader through one or two phrases.
Felix Crivine invented a new version of the tale. Firstly, they are intended not only for children, but also for adults. Secondly, they are maximally compressed and dynamic. Thirdly, everything in them is based on a pun. 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 objects, starting with household items, thermometers, cabinets, nails and ending with distant stars and planets. He enlivens the objects of the real world, turns to the serious sciences, mathematics, grammar, zoology, making them entertaining, and everywhere he finds a reason for sincere and good laugh.
How the author works
Krivin's miniatures and poems are written in an easy and lively language, so it may seem that the writing itself does not constitute work for the author. It can be assumed that Felix Krivin is a brilliant improviser and creates his works in one breath. They fly off his mouth like splashes from a fountain, and his task is only to have time to record.
But this is only partially true. Of course, ideas and images are born with lightning speed, but to achieve maximum expressiveness, hours, days and weeks are required. Felix’s wife Krivina Natalya said in one interview that her husband always and everywhere carries a notebook for notes. Even at night, he can jump up and write down a thought or word that came to him. And only then, sitting down at a typewriter, he turns them into poems, tales or stories.
Felix Crivine: biography
For children, writing is the hardest thing; this is a well-known fact. To be understandable and interesting for this audience, you yourself must be able to remain a child, continue to look at the world with curiosity and interest. Felix Krivin breaks stereotypes here too.
The fact is that he himself had to grow up quite early. The writer was born in 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 five, 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 locksmith, after which 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 Pridunayskaya Pravda.
Life did not spoil the writer further. Jewish descent closed many doors in front of him. Where another could have walked right through, 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 can tell her with his inherent irony.
Reader path
Felix Krivin began his career with writing fables. However, he quickly realized that he was cramped in this genre. The strict structure and the finished, presented to the reader on a silver platter, morality reduce the value of such works. Then he began to write poetry and fairy tales. From the mid-1950s, his miniatures were constantly published in the famous magazines Ogonyok, Krokodil, Smena, etc. And in the early 60s, the first books began to appear .
The time of the sixties, poets who recited their poems in stadiums and collected 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 author’s incomparable style and humor. Among the admirers of Krivin were famous people. He was friends with G. Gorin and N. Bogoslovsky, was familiar with S. Marshak, and with great success read his miniatures to A. Raikin and L. Utesov.
On the pages of books
The first book of the writer was published in 1961, it was called "Around the Cabbage" and contained comic poems and fables.
Krivin was further 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 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 ground” (1981) and others.
The author was also interested in social topics. 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 changed name (“Walking City”) was released in 2000.
The author is also interested in fantastic topics (Collection “I Hijacked a Time Machine, 1992), and questions of nationalities (“ Cry for King Herod ”, 1994), and history (“ World History in Jokes ”, 1993).
His miniatures, stories, poems are able to capture the moments of time, as photos do. Krivin Felix Davidovich at the same time inscribed his name in the history of Russian and world literature not for an instant, but for centuries.