Zoologist, naturalist writer and just an amazing person - Maxim Dmitrievich Zverev. He was born in the 19th century in Tsarist Russia, survived the October Revolution, the formation of the USSR and the Great Patriotic War, and then the post-war heyday, extinction and collapse of the Soviet Union. Zverev lived most of his life in Kazakhstan, which at the time of the death of Maksim Dmitrievich at the age of 99 had already become an independent state.
Childhood, adolescence and military service
Maxim Dmitrievich Zverev was born in Altai, not far from the city of Barnaul on October 29, 1896. His father, Dmitry Ivanovich Zverev, was a fairly well-known statistician who was exiled to the Altai Territory for participating in the assassination attempt on Emperor Alexander III. Zverev's mother Maria Fedorovna worked as a medical assistant. Dmitry Ivanovich was friends with the famous writer Maxim Gorky, after whom the parents named their only son. Father devoted a lot of time to studying with little Maxim: he walked with him through the surrounding fields and forests, took him fishing or hunting, went on hikes with night gatherings around the fire and told his son a lot of interesting things.
In Barnaul, Zverev studied at a real school, which he graduated in 1916, and the next year he left for Moscow to continue his education at the Polytechnic Institute. It was a turbulent time in the life of our country - wars, revolutions, the demolition of the old and the formation of a new way of life. Many students were mobilized for accelerated passage of military affairs and further sending to the front. So Maxim Zverev ended up at the Alekseevsk military school, from which he graduated at the end of 1917 with the rank of ensign. And immediately he was appointed to the post of commandant of the railway station in the city of Barnaul, and then to the city of Tomsk as an assistant to the commandant of the station.
In 1919, Zverev made a decisive choice in favor of the Red Army, and he was immediately appointed to the post of military dispatcher of the entire Tomsk railway junction. It was very hard and responsible work: a lot of people were traveling on the railway - soldiers from the front, wounded, refugees, very often without tickets and documents. There was a catastrophic shortage of carriages and steam locomotives, and Zverev had to stay awake for days to cope with the reception and dispatch of overcrowded trains.
Education and career
In the fall of 1920, Zverev was demobilized, and on September 1, he, along with a group of other soldiers, was enrolled in the first year of Tomsk University. The young man studied at the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics, but the department was called "natural", so in 1924 he completed his higher education and received the profession of a zoologist. Back in the years of study - in the third year - Zverev published his first scientific work "Identifier of the birds of prey of Siberia." And in his last year of university, Maxim Dmitrievich married his classmate Olga.
After graduation, Zverev went to work at the Siberian Institute of Plant Protection as head of the department of vertebrates. He became the founder of such sciences as agricultural zoology and theriology - the science of mammals that harm agriculture. In Novosibirsk, Zverev created a zoo on the basis of a city agrobiological station and headed its scientific work. Here he organized the first station for young naturalists, which later, in 1937, would be transformed into the West Siberian Regional Children's Technical and Agricultural Station. Many young scientists who were trained by Zverev later became prominent biologists.
In the early 1930s, a wave of repressions began, and the former warrant officer of the tsarist army, Maxim Zverev, was inevitably awaiting arrest. But a kind person was found - the head of Zverev Altaitsev, who for a long time convinced the OGPU leadership of the need for Maksim Dmitrievich to continue scientific and practical work, since he is a unique specialist in this field of zoology, and all the activities of the zoo will stop without him. The OGPU made concessions: on January 20, 1933, Zverev was arrested, convicted and sentenced to 10 years in the Gulag, but he was allowed to live at home with his family and continue to work in the zoo; the convict had to give his salary to the state. On January 29, 1936, Zverev was released early, and in 1958 he was fully rehabilitated due to the lack of corpus delicti.
Moving to Kazakhstan
In 1937, a new threat of arrest hung over Zverev, and then he urgently left for Moscow, and from there he received a referral to Kazakhstan - to build and organize the work of the Alma-Ata Zoo. Murzakhan Tolebaev, the first director of this zoo, became Zverev's colleague and ally. Maxim Dmitrievich developed the layout of the territory and the placement of enclosures. The zoo was opened on November 7, 1937 for the holiday of the October Revolution.
In Alma-Ata, the scientist settled directly on the territory of the zoo, in a house on the bank of a bird pond.
Zverev was so fascinated by the beauty of the local nature that he decided to stay in Kazakhstan for life. Soon his wife and mother moved from Novosibirsk to him, and later children were born. In 1944, the family moved to a new house - on Grushevaya Street. This "family nest" of the Zverevs exists to this day - his descendants live there. After the death of the scientist in 1996, Grushevaya Street was renamed into Maxim Zverev Street. And in the house in the zoo on the shore of the pond, where the Zverevs lived for 7 years, a vivarium was created.
During the Great Patriotic War, Maxim Dmitrievich was mobilized as a military dispatcher of the East Siberian Railway, then sent to the Nizhne-Udinsk station by the commandant. But Zverev did not serve for long: at the end of 1942, as a leading zoologist, he was summoned from the front back to Alma-Ata, where serious problems began at the zoo due to a shortage of food and a lack of personnel.
The heyday began in the biography of the scientist and writer. He headed the zoo, as well as the Alma-Ata nature reserve, became a teacher at the Kazakh State University, continued to engage in science. One of the main directions of Zverev's activity was the protection of nature and the environment. He devoted a huge number of articles, scientific papers, notes in newspapers and magazines, literary stories to this topic, headed the commission for nature protection under the Union of Writers of Kazakhstan. For over 10 years, under the leadership of Zverev, the almanac "Face of the Earth" was published. Maxim Dmitrievich succeeded in stopping the felling of the Tien Shan spruce, stopped the construction of a dam on Lake Balkhash, which would have led to the transformation of its eastern part into a salty desert.
Zverev's main emphasis was on working with children. He believed that love of nature should be brought up from infancy. For this purpose, he created schools for young naturalists (in Alma-Ata in 1943 he opened a small youth academy), and also wrote a large number of children's stories about nature. In 1952, Maxim Dmitrievich Zverev completed his scientific career and devoted himself entirely to literary creativity.
Literary creativity
Zverev's first story "Hunting for wolves" was published in the newspaper "Altai Krai" back in 1917, when the author graduated from a military school. It narrated about hunting trips with his father. Further, more and more stories appeared regularly from Zverev's pen - as a writer he was incredibly prolific. In 1922 he wrote the story "The White Maral", which was published in Leningrad in 1929 and approved by the famous naturalist writer Vitaly Bianki.
Over the years of his literary activity, Maxim Zverev wrote over 150 children's stories, stories, fairy tales. He was a very organized and able-bodied person. In his office, a huge card index was collected, containing more than ten thousand cards with stories recorded from the oral stories of hunters, foresters, livestock specialists during Zverev's numerous trips around the country. Many of these recordings became the basis for the plot of the writer's works. Zverev's children's books, like his scientific works, were published throughout the Soviet Union (CIS), as well as abroad - in Germany, France, Spain, Great Britain, Cuba, etc.
Personal life
Maxim Zverev married in 1924 in his last year at university. His wife Olga Nikolaevna graduated from the same faculty as her husband, but the department of geobotany. The Zverevs had two children: in 1938, a son, Vladimir, and in 1943, a daughter, Tatyana.
The spouses have lived their whole lives "in perfect harmony", were each other's support and support in everything. For example, when Zverev was called to the front, his wife took over his work at the zoo. Olga Nikolaevna read and edited all the literary and scientific works of her husband.
The Zverevs' house was always crowded - friends, colleagues came, and young schoolchildren often visited. Olga Nikolaevna was a master at various undertakings - for example, she organized a children's theater, the participants of which were children and their friends; the performances were staged right in the courtyard, the audience brought stools and benches with them. For some time, the Zverevs lived with a wolf, as well as Ryosha's tame raven, a flying squirrel and other animals.
Maxim Dmitrievich Zverev died on January 23, 1996, a little before his century. His contribution to zoological science and children's literature was so great that many children and adults in Kazakhstan knew and loved him. Letters with the inscription "Kazakhstan, Zverev" always found their addressee.
