Vladimir Varankin

Vladimir Valentinovich Varankin (12 November 1902 – 3 October 1938) was a Russian writer of literature in Esperanto, an instructor of western European history, and director of the Moscow Ped. Instituto for foreign languages. He wrote the novel Metropoliteno.

Varankin was born in Nizhny Novgorod, in an office worker's family. He was of Russian ethnicity. His father Valentin Jegorovich Varankin (died 1921), managed a savings bank until he was recruited into the Red Army. Varankin's mother, Nina Aleksejevna (died 1953), was a librarian. Besides Vladimir, the family had two other sons: Jurij (born 1906, died 1988) and Vjacheslav (born 1916), who was still alive several years ago.

During his last year of study at the city high school (1919), he began learning Esperanto with several friends, boys and girls. Together with his equally young friends, he soon founded a little city circle of young Esperantists, which later transformed into the provincial (gubernia) circle. Both in the city and in the gubernia that union carried out an active program: in less than a year the union managed to organize six courses of Esperanto in the city itself, forty cells and little circles in the whole gubernia, and in addition, in several places, (with the help of local Esperanto instructors) even to teach the international language in the schools.

For one or two years he and his friends vastly developed their Esperanto activity. Starting then he began active, energetic, impetuous activity. Besides little circles, courses, and cells, he organized promotional spectaculars and put on sketches, whose text he wrote himself, or translated, or took from pre-revolutionary Esperanto reviews (for example, from La Ondo de Esperanto ~The Esperanto Wave). He himself began to publish a newspaper Ruĝa Esperantisto ~Red Esperantist. In this newspaper (under the pseudonym Vol-Volanto ~Want-Wanter) the twenty-year-old Varankin published his verses and the verses of his friends, articles, translations, announcements, survey results, and also calls to the national and foreign Esperanto community to help the hungry in the young soviet republic. However, at that time he wrote in an Esperanto that was full of errors and very russesque.

In 1920 with several friends he even attempted to organize in Nizhny Novgorod the third PanRussian Esperantist Convention, but that failed because chaos and the difficult economic situation in the country did not yet permit organizing the arrangements. The convention came about one year later in Petrograd, and at the convention they founded Sovetlanda (later, sovetrespublikara) Esperantista Unio; young Vladimir Varankin was elected as a member of its central committee.

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