Kind cartoons about the charming and mischievous brownie Kuzka have become favorite among several generations of children. And the character was created by the Soviet writer and artist Tatyana Ivanovna Aleksandrova.
What child does not like to listen to fairy tales. And if a friend of the same age tells these tales in a quiet corner of a summer park, then the world around us ceases to exist. This is exactly what happened in Tatyana Ivanovna's childhood.
Childhood
Tatiana Aleksandrova comes from Kazan, together with her twin sister Natasha, she was born on January 10, 1929. But it so happened that her childhood was spent in Moscow. The girls' parents, and they also had an older sister, were always busy: my mother was a doctor, she often had to be on duty at night, my father, a participant in the civil war, spent a lot of time on business trips, he was an engineer in forestry, supervising timber industry enterprises and felling.
The girls often stayed at home with a nanny, a Volga peasant woman, Matryona Fedotovna Tsareva, Matreshenka. Together they did all the housework, did needlework, and in the evenings listened to long and interesting stories about village life, about brownies, goblin, kikimors. She also knew many fairy tales, sayings, sayings.
Tanya and Natasha began to paint early, and when they grew up, they began to attend an art studio, headed by T. A. Lugovskaya, a talented theater artist.
With the outbreak of the war, I had to leave for evacuation, where a 13-year-old girl replaces a kindergarten teacher, adult hands were needed for more difficult jobs. It is there, taking the kids, Tatiana begins to invent and tell fairy tales.
They helped the girl, and when she drew her charges, to keep the children in place. The young teacher also taught the children to draw.
After returning to Moscow and graduating from school, both sisters enter institutes that require knowledge of drawing, Natasha chose architecture, and Tanya became a student at VGIK, the animation department.
Story
After graduating, Tatiana is assigned to work as an animator at the Soyuzmultfilm studio. Then there was teaching at the Pedagogical Institute, heading the studio of the Palace of Pioneers.
But wherever she worked, she was accompanied by a fairy tale. Artistic images gradually acquired literary design.
One of the first works of the storyteller, "The Box of Books" contains eight books. The next was a cycle of puppet textbooks, united under the general name "Toy School". In 77, her famous "Kuzka" was published. The writer created the drawings for her works herself. Only they were not accepted for the design of books - she was not a member of the Union of Artists.
Family and creative union
Tatyana Aleksandrova met her future husband, mentor and co-author Valentin Berestov when she brought her fairy tales to him for acquaintance.
By that time, Valentin Dmitrievich was already an eminent person and helped a lot of novice writers. And the young woman hooked him with a brownie, kind and in bast shoes. Family relations were tender and touching. Their apartment became a kind of "club of interests", where many creative intelligentsia of those years gathered.
In the joint work, Tatyana Ivanovna, at first, simply helped her husband, illustrating his works. Subsequently, books began to be published, written together.
Having passed away in the 83rd year, Tatyana Ivanovna Aleksandrova left behind a huge amount of unfinished material.
Paradoxically, the news of the upcoming filming of the cartoon about Kuzka came three days after the storyteller's funeral. And only in 1986 the full version of the tale came out.
In 1989 and 92, two more books were published: fairy tales and short stories, and in 2001 a three-volume edition of joint works was published, also "The Mysterious Notebook", a fantasy finished just before his death.
