Biography
Mikhail Volpin was a Soviet playwright, artist, poet, and screenwriter. He was born to David Samuilovich Volpin, a lawyer, and Anna Borisovna Volpina, a music teacher. Raised in Moscow, he developed an early interest in art and took drawing lessons from the artist Vasiliy Surikov. Volpin participated in the Civil War on the side of the Soviet forces. Between 1920 and 1921, he worked as an artist and satirical writer for 'Okna ROSTA' under Vladimir Mayakovsky's leadership. From 1921 to 1927, he studied at the Higher Artistic and Technical Workshop, writing satirical poems and comic plays, often collaborating with Viktor Ardov, Ilya Ilf, Yevgeni Petrov, Valentin Kataev, Vladimir Mass, and Nikolay Erdman. As a poet, he contributed to satirical magazines and was a staff member of the magazine "Crocodile" in the early 1930s. After World War II, Volpin joined the Soyuzmultfilm studio, where his first script was adapted into the film Fedya Zaitsev (1948). Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, he worked on various projects, including the 1955 film The Bewitched Boy, based on Selma Lagerlöf's fairy tale "The Wonderful Adventures of Nils." Starting in the 1960s, several feature-length fairy tale films based on world classics were produced from Volpin’s scripts, some co-written with Erdman, with Frosty (1965) being among the most notable. His final screenplay was for the 1987 film Skazka pro vlyublyonnogo malyara.
