Book title: Wizards come to people. Reviews of the book "" Alexander Sharov Lev Acceleration. Storyteller about fairy tales

We called the exhibition based on the fairy tales of Alexander Sharov “Wizards Come to People” - exactly the same as the name of his book dedicated to the great storytellers of past times. Unlike Bazhov's tales, which were the subject of our first exhibition, A. Sharov's works are much less known. For different reasons. But the Meshcheryakov Publishing House recently republished two of Sharov’s books - “The Adventures of Ezhenka” and “The Simpleton Man”. And one of our museum employees, seeing “Ezhenka,” exclaimed: “I had exactly the same one as a child!”

Many children discover this or that writer here, in the museum, and begin reading his books after the exhibition. Therefore, we try to structure our classes taking into account both those who are already familiar with fairy tales and those who are hearing about them for the first time.

I must admit that, thanks to the exhibition, I discovered the writer Sharov - both a storyteller and literary essayist. As a child - it happened - I did not come across his books. But now I have read them all. It is such a joy when reading wonderful children's books is part of your professional duties.
In Alexander Sharov’s book “Wizards Come to People” there are essays about Sergei Aksakov, Ershov and Pushkin, Odoevsky. And the book ends with a story about Janusz Korczak. We could not pass by this figure - we highlighted it separately, “close-up”. Sharov himself idolized Korczak. It seems to me that they had a similar understanding of the world: on the one hand, so terrible and cruel, and on the other, fragile and tremulous.

The fragility of the world, its vulnerability - this is one of my main feelings from Sharov’s fairy tales. And although these fairy tales, as it should be according to the laws of the genre, seem to have a good ending, it is somehow not unconditional. This ending does not guarantee that nothing bad can happen again.

A good ending, but still not without sadness.

We are trying to talk about this with children, trying to understand why Alexander Sharov’s fairy tales are the way they are.
And we talk about the fate of the writer. Of course, you can’t explain a lot to five-year-olds. But something can be told, some individual bright episodes. Seven or eight year olds are able to understand more, but we already tell younger teenagers, children ten or eleven years old, everything. About all the difficult, tragic sides of Sharov’s life. For example, we say that “Sharov” is a pseudonym. The writer's real name and surname were Sharon Izrailevich Nuremberg.

In 1937, a graduate of the Faculty of Biology of Moscow State University, Sharon Nuremberg, was supposed to go as a special correspondent for the Pravda newspaper on a trans-Arctic journey to America, to a large scientific and industrial exhibition. He was facing a long-distance flight from Moscow to Portland in the team of a polar pilot. At that time, such flights were rare and were considered a real feat. But Nuremberg was told that it was better for him to change his last name. After all, it seems like he should do something out of the ordinary, become famous throughout the country, but he has such an inappropriate surname. Let it be more understandable and familiar.

This is how journalist Shera Nuremberg became a journalist, and then a writer, Alexander Sharov.

In general, fate protected the writer in a strange way. Nuremberg studied at the Faculty of Biology and specialized as a geneticist. And genetics was soon officially declared a pseudoscience, and many biological scientists were subjected to repression. But Nuremberg, while still in his final years, became interested in journalism, began publishing popular science articles, and as a result he was offered to take part in a trans-Arctic flight. During the flight, the plane suffered a breakdown and was forced to land without reaching America. While the engine was being repaired, the exhibition ended. The reason to rush to Portland was no longer there, and the plane headed back. Subsequently, this saved Sharov from accusations of espionage: everyone who was abroad at that time was considered a spy.

He himself, thanks to a number of accidents, survived the years of terror, but lost his parents. In 1937, his mother was shot. And in 1949, my father died in prison. Both were "Old Bolsheviks". When we studied the family archive, it turned out that there were no documents about the writer’s childhood, no photographs or letters - nothing, nothing remained. The earliest photograph dates back to 1943: during the war, Alexander Sharov served in the tank forces.

He had such a hard life. And suddenly fairy tales appear in this life. When we tell children about Sharov’s life, we try to present only the facts - so as not to put too much pressure on them. But some children discover traces of what the writer experienced, traces of real time in fairy-tale circumstances. For example, in the fairy tale “The Pea Man and the Simpleton.” It tells about the evil wizard Turroputo and his accomplice Scissors, who wanted to make the whole world equally gray: gray people, gray houses made of paper. The desire for endless power over identical people. Children, it seems to me, understand what we are talking about. And we explain to them why Sharov chose the fairy tale genre.

So the children who come to us really get the opportunity to “meet” the writer, who from this meeting enters their lives. They enjoy reading his books. They come up with performances, draw illustrations for their favorite books, and play fairy tales.
This is something we are especially proud of. This is what allows us to live and experience what we read again.

Prepared by Maria Gulbekyan and Marina Aromshtam

The design used materials from the exhibition at the State Literary Museum - documents, photographs and books from the archives of the Sharov family, illustrations from the collection of Nika Golts.

Just as not every writer can become a storyteller, but only “a person with a child’s heart,” so Alexander Sharov’s book will be of interest primarily to a thoughtful and inquisitive reader, capable of feeling a special, truly magical charm in this book. The charm of both the text, in which the real is closely intertwined with the fabulous, and the amazing illustrations of Nika Golts, who are bright, figurative and at the same time delicately weaving her artist’s voice into this unusual narrative.

Chapter first. Secrets of the fairy tale
Why does a fairy tale have a happy ending?

Chapter two. Sergey Timofeevich Aksakov
"The Scarlet Flower"
Early years
Torment of words
Torment of the word (continued). Vladimir Dal
Meeting with Gogol
To childhood, to a fairy tale

Chapter three. Secrets of the fairy tale
Dreamland
Fairyland (continued).
little people
Secrets and grievances of little people

Chapter Four. Anthony Pogorelsky
Friend of the people
Underground inhabitants
"Sveta... Sveta..."

Chapter five. Secrets of the fairy tale
Fairy tale and paper
Storytellers' clock
The Great Migration of the Dwarves

Chapter six. Pyotr Pavlovich Ershov
Bitter line
"Monument" and fairy tale
Behind the Little Humpbacked Horse
Behind the Little Humpbacked Horse (continued)
Firebird Feather
University years. Firebird
Ivan the Fool
To the exploits
Fate of a fairy tale
Farewell to the storyteller

Chapter seven. Secrets of the fairy tale
The Mystery of Transformations
The mystery of letters

Chapter eight. Pushkin and the fairy tale
About fabulous
"The Poet's Proud Participation"
“The dark steppe is behind us”
Fairy tale and history
"Through the magic crystal..."
Childhood. Loneliness
Childhood. Maria Alekseevna
Arina Rodionovna
People and mob
Pushkin's fairy tale

Chapter Nine. Secrets of the fairy tale
Prophetic fairy tale
Conspiracy of children
Marya Morevna

Chapter ten. Vladimir Fedorovich Odoevsky
“Everything in life is a means to greatness”
Brothers
The beginning of the way
Friends, friends. Griboyedov
Friends, friends (continued). Pushkin
Friends, friends (end). Gogol
Grandfather Irenaeus. Town in a snuffbox
Yuri Karlovich Olesha
Dead Souls
Bentamites
Fairy tale of the future
"All our best..."

Chapter Eleven. Secrets of the fairy tale
"Hungry Imagination"
The truth of the fairy tale - slandered and triumphant

Chapter twelve. The beautiful and tragic world of Perrault
Father and son
Fairy tale world
Mystery game
Rike with a tuft and the secret of beauty
"Little Red Riding Hood"

Chapter thirteen. Secrets of the fairy tale
How fear is born and how it dies
About wisdom

Chapter fourteen. Antoine de Saint-Exupery
From the land of childhood
The wisdom of escape
Nice craft
In the sky. A little prince
Last flight

Chapter fifteen. Secrets of the fairy tale
Wizards come to people
Sorceresses
The fairy tale conquers new possessions

Chapter sixteen. Janusz Korczak
Room in the attic
Adults and children
Matt becomes king
Utopia arises and dies
From a fairy tale - home
The strong and the weak
The sun can't be stopped

Chapter seventeen. Life in a fairy tale
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra.
Hans Christian Andersen

It is impossible not to dwell on one of his works. This is a book about storytellers "WIZARDS COMING TO PEOPLE."

The book is dedicated to the history of the creation of many interesting and beloved literary fairy tales by children (“The Scarlet Flower”, “The Little Humpbacked Horse”, “Ivan the Fool”, “Little Red Riding Hood” and others) and includes short stories about the lives of the authors of these fairy tales: Aksakov, Pushkin, Ershov, Pogorelsky, Odoevsky, Perrault, Andersen, Cervantes, Korczak and others.

Edition 1974 Edition 1979 (I have such a book!)

When you read the book “Wizards Come to People,” you involuntarily catch yourself reading this story about real people who went down in the history of world literature; you read it like a fairy tale.

What its author considers to be the main signs of a fairy tale permeates every page of the book. There is one feature in the biographies of many fairy tale writers described in the book “Wizards Come to People”: they began to write fairy tales not at the beginning of their literary life, but many years later. Andersen was an actor, wrote poetry and novels, and only then began to compose his famous fairy tales; and Aksakov wrote his only fairy tale “The Scarlet Flower” when he was already a famous writer and an old man; lived the life of the pilot and writer Saint-Exupéry before penning the tale of the Little Prince. So, writing a fairy tale is not so easy...

This book is not a study or a collection of biographies. This is a writer's story about the place of fairy tales in the life of man and humanity. Precisely a person and humanity, and not just a child, not just children. People always need a fairy tale. Korney Ivanovich Chukovsky wrote that “The goal of storytellers... is to cultivate humanity in a person - this marvelous ability of a person to worry about other people’s misfortunes, to rejoice at the joys of another, to experience someone else’s fate as if it were his own.” A person always educates himself, all his life. But the most important time for him is when he first encounters a fairy tale. Sharov writes about this: “Behind the shoulders of an eight-year-old child is the most significant event in his life - he became a man.”

“Wizards come to people” - that’s what A. Sharov called his book. He considers storytellers to be wizards - out of deep conviction that they create the magic of good: they help a little person to internalize faith in truth, love, justice, hope. This is the “mystery of the fairy tale” - this is what the writer called his reflections on the meaning of the fairy tale. And Alexander Sharov chose a variety of storytellers for the book: those who lived four hundred years ago, like Cervantes; and someone like Janusz Korczak, whose remarkable life and heroic death passed before the eyes of the author of the book and his contemporaries. Among the writers to whom Sharov dedicated the pages of his book, there are such giants as Pushkin, and there are writers who remained in literature with only one work, one fairy tale. But each of them, with his fairy tale, forever remained for children a sorcerer of goodness and beauty. And that is why the life of each of them is so precious. “There are enough judges in the world, but there are few sorcerers, and they soon die at the hands of the executioner or die an early death,” Sharov writes bitterly.

Alexander Sharov's fairy tales are filled with kindness towards people, love for nature, endless joyful surprise at the beauty and purposefulness of the world, and a firm belief in man's ability to live wisely, beautifully and humanely. These properties of a storyteller are not only inherent in the very nature of the writer, they also reflect his own life experience. A fairy tale should not be just a fiction; it must be based on real life. A life that I learned about firsthand, but saw with my own eyes. In one of his essays, A. Sharov wrote: “The storyteller, just like the researcher, describes only what he personally observed.” Moreover: “Storytellers need to verify the ideas of goodness and justice with the real creation of justice.” It is impossible to imagine that a person who in life would be cruel, unjust, who stood on the side of an unjust cause, could write fairy tales in which ideas of goodness and justice are instilled in children!

Alexander Sharov is convinced that good is a huge, all-conquering force. He has a little fairy tale “Old Man Marble and Grandfather Pooh.” In it, some foolish people laugh at old Pooh, who makes such fragile, quickly disappearing things, like pollen that flies in the forest in spring, or clouds that rain... But in reality, in life they turn out to be the strongest, most durable, the most eternal. There is nothing more eternal than spring!

To tell children about magic, Sharov does not turn to something unusual or supernatural. For him, everything around a person is magical: Stream, Squirrel, Finch, Bear. The forest is magical and kind, the river is magical; and Granny Turtle teaches her beloved Dandelion Boy to be a wizard. And this is not so difficult: you need to turn to people, to all living things, with all the best that every person has. All the miracles in Sharov’s fairy tales do not happen far away, in an unknown kingdom-state, but in our time, among us, with you. “The Tale of Three Mirrors” begins with the fact that the most ordinary guy Dimov, twenty-three years old, gets an ordinary one-room apartment in an ordinary house. True, it later turns out that the House Manager who gave him the key to the apartment is a gnome, and the mirrors in the apartment have incredible properties, but a fairy tale is a fairy tale...

The reality of every fairy tale is so obvious to Sharov that in this book he will never put a single fairy-tale hero in quotation marks: not Sivka the Burka, not the Horse's Head, not Ivanushka the Fool, no one! However, in other cases he generally hates quotation marks; first of all, when they contain words such as truth, goodness, justice. He writes: “The quotation marks look like an accusation brought without the right to justify oneself.”

So in his fairy tales, the writer inspires children that in the world, in nature, one must see not only the forest and not only the meadow, but every tree, every blade of grass, and be able to discern in them all the complexity and beauty of living things.

In the fairy tale “Volodya and Uncle Alyosha,” an adult, smart and kind man says to a boy:

“Your name is not just a boy.

- No, my name is Volodya...

“And the tree must also be called by name: willow, poplar, birch, aspen.”

There are many copies of the book on Aliba (you can buy them)

And this poem, it seems to me, is very

Alexander Sharov (Sher Izrailevich Nyurenberg) is a Russian and Soviet science fiction writer and children's writer. Born in Kyiv, into a family of professional revolutionaries. He was educated at the Moscow Experimental Communal School named after. Lepeshinsky. In 1932 he graduated from the Faculty of Biology of Moscow State University with a degree in genetics. Participant of the Great Patriotic War. He began publishing in 1928. Member of the Writers' Union. Awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Battle and the Order of the Patriotic War, II degree, and medals.
Alexander Sharov died in 1984, in Moscow.
Alexander Sharov's fairy tales are filled with kindness towards people, love for nature, endless joyful surprise at the beauty and purposefulness of the world, and a firm belief in man's ability to live wisely, beautifully and humanely. These properties of a storyteller are not only inherent in the very nature of the writer, they also reflect his own life experience.
“Wizards come to people” - that’s what A. Sharov called his book. He considers storytellers to be wizards - out of deep conviction that they create the magic of good: they help a little person to internalize faith in truth, love, justice, hope. This is the “mystery of the fairy tale” - this is how the writer called his reflections on the meaning of the fairy tale. And Alexander Sharov chose a variety of storytellers for the book: those who lived four hundred years ago, like Cervantes; and someone like Janusz Korczak, whose remarkable life and heroic death passed before the eyes of the author of the book and his contemporaries. Among the writers to whom Sharov dedicated the pages of his book, there are such giants as Pushkin, and there are writers who remained in literature with only one work, one fairy tale. But each of them, with his fairy tale, forever remained for children a sorcerer of goodness and beauty. And that is why the life of each of them is so precious.

Book author:

23 Pages

7-8 Hours to read

103 thousand Total words

Description of the book

Alexander Sharov (Sher Izrailevich Nyurenberg) is a Russian and Soviet science fiction writer and children's writer. Born in Kyiv, into a family of professional revolutionaries. He was educated at the Moscow Experimental Communal School named after. Lepeshinsky. In 1932 he graduated from the Faculty of Biology of Moscow State University with a degree in genetics. Participant of the Great Patriotic War. Began publishing in 1928. Member of the Writers' Union. Awarded the Order of the Red Banner and the Patriotic War, II degree, medals. Alexander Sharov died in 1984 in Moscow. Alexander Sharov's fairy tales are filled with kindness to people, love of nature, endless joyful surprise at beauty and the expediency of the world, a firm belief in man’s ability to live wisely, beautifully and humanely. These properties of a storyteller are not only inherent in the writer’s very nature, they also reflect his own life experience. “Wizards come to people” - that’s what A. Sharov called his book. He considers storytellers to be wizards - out of deep conviction that they create the magic of good: they help a little person to internalize faith in truth, love, justice, hope. This is the “mystery of the fairy tale” - this is how the writer called his reflections on the meaning of the fairy tale. And Alexander Sharov chose a variety of storytellers for the book: those who lived four hundred years ago, like Cervantes; and someone like Janusz Korczak, whose remarkable life and heroic death passed before the eyes of the author of the book and his contemporaries. Among the writers to whom Sharov dedicated the pages of his book, there are such giants as Pushkin, and there are writers who remained in literature with only one work, one fairy tale. But each of them, with his fairy tale, forever remained for children a sorcerer of goodness and beauty. And that is why the life of each of them is so precious.