Arkadiy Gaydar Children's writer, one of the youngest commanders of the Civil War (at the age of 16 he commanded a regiment). Participant of the Great Patriotic War. Date of Birth: 22.01.1904 Country: Russia

Biography of Arkady Gaidar

Arkady Gaidar, whose real surname was Golikov, was a children's writer and one of the youngest commanders of the Civil War in Russia. He was born on January 9, 1904 (January 22, according to the new style calendar) in the city of Lgov, Kursk Province, in a family of teachers. His early years were spent in Arzamas, where he attended a technical school. However, when the First World War broke out and his father was conscripted into the army, Arkady fled from home to join his father on the front. He was captured and returned home, located ninety kilometers away from Arzamas. As a teenager of fourteen and a half years old, he encountered "good people - Bolsheviks" and in 1918, he joined the fight for the bright kingdom of socialism. Despite his young age, Gaidar was physically strong and tall, which led to him being accepted into the Red Commanders' courses after some hesitation. At the age of fourteen and a half, he commanded a company of cadets on the Petlyura Front, and at seventeen, he became the commander of a separate regiment fighting against banditry in the Antonovshchina region. In December 1924, Gaidar left the army due to illness, after being wounded and suffering a concussion. He began writing and was mentored by K. Fedin, M. Slonimsky, and S. Semenov, who carefully reviewed and criticized each line, explaining the techniques of literary craftsmanship to him.
Gaidar considered his best works to be the novellas "P.B.C." (1925), "Distant Lands," "The Fourth Armored Train," and "The School" (1930), as well as "Timur and His Squad" (1940). He traveled extensively throughout the country, meeting different people and eagerly absorbing life. He did not know how to write by locking himself in a comfortable office. Instead, he composed on the go, carefully considering his books while traveling, reciting entire pages from memory, and then writing them down in simple notebooks. "The birthplace of his books is various cities, villages, even trains." When the Second World War began, the writer once again joined the ranks of the army, serving as a war correspondent on the front lines. His unit became surrounded, and there were plans to evacuate him by plane, but he refused to leave his comrades and stayed with a partisan unit as an ordinary machine gunner. On October 26, 1941, in the village of Lyaplyavo in Ukraine, Gaidar died in a battle with the fascists.