Aleksandr Volkov

Alexander Melentjewitsch Volkov’s story is kind of wild, honestly. Born in what’s now Kazakhstan, he got a head start thanks to his dad, a former Russian sergeant, who taught him to read before most kids even learn to tie their shoes. By twelve, Volkov was already topping his class and on his way to study math in Tomsk, which is pretty hardcore. After college, he bounced around teaching gigs, landing back at his old school in Ust-Kamenogorsk and then ended up running a school in Yaroslavl before becoming a big deal at the Workers’ Faculty in Moscow. But Volkov wasn’t just crunching numbers. The guy had a serious thing for literature, and from 1917 he started publishing his own stuff. In the ‘30s, he picked up English and dove into translating—Jules Verne, French authors, the whole lot. Then he went and took on “The Wizard of Oz” by L. Frank Baum, except he didn’t just translate it. He rewrote it, changed characters, invented new ones, tossed out some stuff, added wild bits like cannibals—he totally made it his own. The original came out in 1939, but the 1959 re-release with Leonid Wladimirsky’s illustrations just blew up. People wanted more, so Volkov started crafting sequels—not just more retellings, but his own stories, mixing in some of Baum’s ideas but mostly just running wild. He introduced villains like Urfin, who’s basically a legend in Russian children’s books now. Over time, the series just grew, and honestly, it’s a phenomenon. Even today, in places like China or the Middle East, Volkov’s “Magic Land” is more famous than Baum’s original Oz.