Bulychev Cyrus
Not Alisa Selezneva alone...
Kir Bulychev is a personality of enormous scale. Let's start with the fact that the series about the girl from Earth is only a small part of his artistic legacy. And the majority of Bulychev's works were written for adults, and these are wonderful examples of Soviet science fiction, undeservedly remaining in the shadow of his books for children.
Moreover, fiction is far from the only thing he has done in his life. In fact, Igor Mozheiko (this is Kir Bulychev’s real name) is a historian (and even a doctor of sciences!). His main job was research at the Institute of Oriental Studies, he specialized in the history of Burma and lived in Asia for several years. He wrote the Alice books in secret from his colleagues because he was afraid of losing his job, because at that time it could well have occurred to someone that serious scientific work and such a trifle as children's books could not coexist within the competence of one person.
Bulychev managed to maintain incognito under a pseudonym for over 20 years, and had to emerge from obscurity only in the early 80s, when the cartoon "The Mystery of the Third Planet" was awarded a state prize: the scriptwriter was forced to give his real name. From that moment on, his public life began. There are a lot of interviews and programs with Bulychev - if you like his work, watch it: he is a very nice and interesting person.
The idea to write children's stories about Alice was born from his passion for science fiction. In his childhood and youth, he read the novels of Belyaev and Efremov, he loved "The Extraordinary Adventures of Karik and Valya", and decided to write for his daughter Alice the kind of books that he himself would have liked when he was a child. By the way, he named his daughter after Carroll's Alice, and while still a student, he even translated "Alice in Wonderland" into Russian (the publisher did not accept it). He also translated Arthur Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Graham Greene and others from English; he was a correspondent for the magazine "Around the World"; and he was also one of the leading domestic experts in phaleristics, a discipline about orders and medals.
Today there is a prize named after Kir Bulychev for children's writers. It is called "Alice" and looks like a black box on a strap, and in it... of course, a myelophone!
