Mikhail Volpin
| Mikhail Volpin | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Mikhail Davydovich Volpin 28 December 1902 Mogilev, Mogilev Governorate, Russian Empire |
| Died | 21 July 1988 (aged 85) Moscow, Soviet Union |
| Occupation | Screenwriter |
| Years active | 1938 - 1986 |
Mikhail Davydovich Volpin (Russian: Михаи́л Давы́дович Во́льпин) (28 December 1902 - 21 July 1988) was a Soviet screenwriter. He is known for his professional partnership with Nikolai Erdman, with whom he was awarded the Stalin Prize in 1950.
Volpin was born into an intellectual family: his father, David Samuilovich, was a lawyer; his mother, Anna Borisovna (née Zhislin) was a schoolteacher. He grew up in Moscow, where he was an artistic child. He took drawing lessons from Vasily Surikov. As a young man he was a supporter of the October Revolution and fought in the Russian Civil War for the Red Army.
From 1920 to 1921 he worked at the Russian Telegraph Agency as a writer and designer of satirical propaganda posters (so-called Rosta Windows), under the direction of Vladimir Mayakovsky.
From 1921 to 1927 he was a student at Vkhutemas, where he wrote satirical poems and comic plays, including collaborations with Viktor Ardov, Ilya Ilf, Yevgeny Petrov, Valentin Kataev, Vladimir Mass, and Nikolai Erdman.
In 1933, he was arrested by the OGPU, along with Erdman and Mass, and charged with writing "anti-Soviet fables". He spent the next four years in a prison camp in the arctic. After his release in 1937, he reunited with Erdman and they began a screenwriting partnership that would last until Erdman's death in 1970. Their professional collaboration was based on an enduring but asymmetrical friendship, in which Erdman always treated Volpin as an inferior. The two men shared an interest in horse racing and equestrianism, and several of their scripts involve horses and horsemanship as plot devices.
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