Leonid Vaksman Bard Date of Birth: 05.03.1960 Country: Israel

Biography of Leonid Vaksman

Leonid Vaksman was born on March 5, 1960, in Tiraspol, Moldavian SSR. He currently resides in Kiryat Gat, Israel. Vaksman graduated from the medical faculty of the Sverdlovsk State Medical Institute in 1982.
During his college years, Vaksman became acquainted with the KSP movement at a city club in the DK Verkh-Isetsky plant in Sverdlovsk. Together with Sergey Molebnov, Sergey Salovarov, Alexander Kuvaldin, and Dmitry Mironov (now deceased), he organized the ensemble "Zerkalo" which later became a laureate of the largest bard festivals, although without Vaksman. He wrote his first song lyrics for this ensemble ("Listen, people, to the songs of fools...").
It was after meeting Dmitry Voronkov, a graduate of the Philosophy Faculty of the Ural University and a professional screenwriter living in Moscow, that Vaksman truly started writing songs. Together, they wrote about thirty songs, with the most famous being "Ptentsy" (Like young birds falling out of the nest, don't be afraid of the evening...). In most of their collaborations, Vaksman composed the music and Voronkov wrote the lyrics, but there are exceptions, such as "Obizhaetsya Vanya," where Vaksman wrote the lyrics and Voronkov composed the music.
After college, Vaksman accidentally became a doctor in the construction brigade "Dedal" at the construction faculty of UPI, where he wrote a song that became a laureate of the regional construction brigade festival "Znamenka" (We recognize each other not by badges...). At the "Znamenka" festival, which is still ongoing (for example, in 1998, there were about 12,000 fans of construction brigade student songs), he was first a laureate, then the chairman of the jury, and many of his songs became part of the "classics" of the so-called "steppe" song. A significant part of these songs was recorded on the album "Znamenka" and its laser double "Znamenka 20 years."
It should be noted that the fame of the "steppe" songs is also due to their best performer, the singer Sergey Olkhovsky (Smirnov), who died young.
Vaksman was greatly influenced by the poet Maya Nikulina from Sverdlovsk, and many of his songs, including "Ah, what is this music at the entrance?", were written to her lyrics. After college, he worked as a traumatologist at the hospital of the Uralmash plant and then at the Medical and Physical Culture Dispensary.
He studied remotely at the Moscow Literary Institute in the prose seminar led by Felix Kuznetsov. He did not graduate, as he enrolled in the screenwriting faculty of the VGIK in the workshop of Kira Paramonova and Isaya Kuznetsov. In the theater "Sadovoe Koltso," under the direction of Vladimir Arshansky, the play "Otrichenie, ili ne pluyte v Stalina" was staged, written by Vaksman based on a film story in collaboration with Sergey Nekipelov, who currently lives in France. Vaksman has been a resident of Israel since 1992.
He is a laureate of the First Israeli Contest of Author's Songs in Jerusalem and a member of the Writers' Union of Israel.