Aibolit is the author who wrote it. What was the name of Doctor Aibolit's sister? The history of creation and characters of the famous fairy tale

Do children know who wrote “Aibolit” - the most popular fairy tale among younger literature lovers preschool age? How was the image of the doctor created, who was the prototype, and is it even worth reading this fairy tale to children? This is discussed in more detail below.

Who wrote "Aibolit"?

This fairy tale was written by the famous children's writer and poet in 1929; it was first presented to readers and immediately won the hearts of thousands of readers. She was loved not only by children, whose caring parents read them bedtime stories, but also by adults, who liked the plot of the work.

The author of “Aibolit” not only told the story of a dedicated medical worker who strictly observed the Hippocratic Oath, but rhymed it into living verses that easily stick in the memory and are remembered by children literally from the second reading.

Chukovsky considers the prototype of “Aibolit” to be Doctor Dolittle, the hero of an English fairy tale who heals animals and understands their language. Korney Ivanovich was translating a fairy tale for Russian-speaking children and at some point thought that it would be nice to write his own fairy tale about the same wonderful person.

“Aibolit” is a story about how a general practitioner is engaged in medical activities, curing animals from various diseases, and sometimes his methods are quite unique: chocolate, sweet eggnog, which suggests that he is not just a skilled healer of bodies, but also unfortunate souls. He receives patients while sitting under a tree, which suggests his altruism and complete dedication to his work, while he does not divide animals into classes, castes or occupations - for everyone there is a moment of attention and a method of treatment.

At some point, a messenger arrives on horseback with an urgent letter, in which the inhabitants (animals) of Africa, having learned about his abilities, pleadingly ask for help. Naturally, the compassionate Aibolit rushes to the rescue, and various animals and birds help him in this. Together, they defeat the terrible epidemic within ten days, without leaving even for a moment. As a result, the fame of the doctor’s amazing abilities spreads throughout the world.

Characteristics of the main character

“Good Doctor Aibolit...” - this is exactly what the first line of the fairy tale in verse sounds like, and it is this that defines the essence of this fairy-tale little man: his kindness and love for animals knows no bounds, because sometimes the doctor finds himself in critical situations, on the brink of life and death , and still makes a choice in favor of the sufferer, and not himself. His professional qualities do not allow one to doubt for a second the enormous amount of knowledge that Aibolit possesses. Chukovsky gave him such qualities as breadth of soul and fearlessness, gullibility, but at the same time gentleness of soul.

At the same time, the plot clearly shows that even such a wonderful and brave person experiences moments of despair and loss of strength, which makes him even more humane, closer to the common people, unlike European and American stories in which the main characters were often endowed with “divine » qualities.

What does this work teach?

The fairy tale “Aibolit” is intended to open in the hearts the knowledge that it does not matter what species, genus and family you belong to: in moments of grief, difficulties and suffering, living beings must help each other not only for payment or gratitude, but simply at the behest heart and kindness of soul. Having acquired such wisdom, a person rises to a higher level of evolution - selfless love for animals and the whole world.

The one who wrote “Aibolit” made the work easy to understand even for the youngest listeners, knowing that the seeds of goodness embedded in early childhood, will certainly germinate and bear great fruit, shaping the moral and highly moral spirit of a person.

Author about Aibolit

Korney Ivanovich spent quite a long time selecting rhymes for this fairy tale, going through hundreds of phrases and plot phrases, trying to put maximum meaning into a small number of words, knowing that an excessively long “epic” would tire a child, for whom scrupulous descriptions of nature, objects and appearance are of little interest, because he himself can figure it out thanks to the amazing imagination that is highly developed in every child.

At the same time, Chukovsky wanted the fairy tale’s rhymes not to be banal and primitive, because he was an admirer of the great poetry of Pushkin, Derzhavin and Nekrasov: he simply could not lower his creation to the level of boulevard rhymes. Therefore, the fairy tale in verse was rewritten again and again: something was added, others were categorically cut out, sometimes in large parts. The author wanted to focus the reader’s attention on the doctor’s character, on his heroic attitude towards his profession, no! - quicker life path, when his honor and conscience did not allow him to leave the sufferer in trouble.

Therefore, the fairy tale underwent several changes, was cut in half, and only then was presented to the readers.

There is a continuation of the fairy tale!

The one who wrote “Aibolit” did not stop there, because the popularity of the story was considerable: children wrote letters to Chukovsky, bombarding him with questions about what happened next, how the doctor lived, whether he had relatives and other things that are interesting specifically for children. Therefore, Korney Ivanovich decided to write a fairy tale in prose about the same doctor, but with a more detailed description of what was happening: if the fairy tale in verse was close to children under six years old, then the second version of the story was closer to children from six to 13 years old, since the plots in it more - as many as four, and each contains a separate moral that Chukovsky wanted to convey to young readers.

This story was first published in 1936, revised by the author several times, finalized, and in 1954 it was finally established in the finished version. The fairy tale was liked by fans of Korney Ivanovich’s work, but many admitted that he was better at fairy tales in verse.

It is worth mentioning that the character of Aibolit appears in two more fairy tales in verse by the same author: “Barmaley” (1925) and “Let’s overcome Barmaley” (1942). Judging by the dates, “Barmaley” was written earlier than “Aibolit,” which means that the author first created a fleeting image, which he later fully revealed in a separate work.

Leningrad, Gosizdat, 1925. 35 p. with ill. Circulation 10,000 copies. In color publisher's lithographed cover. Extremely rare!

In 1924, the Leningrad branch of Detgiz published a book, the title page of which read: “Lofting Guy. Doctor Aibolit. For young children, retold by K. Chukovsky. Drawing by E. Belukha. L. State Publishing House, 1925.” In this imprint, it is worth paying attention to four points at once: the name of the author, the title, the wording “retold for small children” and the release date. The simplest problem is with the date. The year 1925, stamped on the title page, is a common trick in publishing practice when a book published in late November or December is marked with the following year to preserve the novelty of the publication. The author's name, incorrectly indicated in both first Russian editions of Lofting (in Chukovsky's retelling and Khavkina's translation), is a publishing error. The author's name (the initial "N." on the cover of the original edition) was misinterpreted by employees of the State Publishing House, perhaps (if the name was known at all) as an abbreviated form. Indirectly, this error indicates, by the way, one important circumstance. Russian Lofting began as a publishing project. Moreover, the project is “multi-age” - Khavkina translated the material provided by the publishing house for middle ages, Chukovsky retold it for younger ones. Probably, it was planned to publish a series of books (in any case, in the afterword to Lyubov Khavkina’s translation, Lofting’s second book in the series, “The Travels of Doctor Dolittle,” was announced, and it was promised that “this book will also be published in Russian translation in the Gosizdat publication”). For obvious reasons, there was no continuation. Neither the second nor the third books were published in the twenties.

One of the features of Chukovsky’s creative style is the presence of the so-called. “through” characters who move from fairy tale to fairy tale. At the same time, they do not unite the works into some kind of sequential “series”, but, as it were, exist in parallel in several worlds in different variations. For example, Moidodyr can be found in “Telephone” and “Bibigon”, and Crocodile Krokodilovich - in “Telephone”, “Moidodyr” and “Barmalei”. No wonder Chukovsky ironically called his fairy tales “crocodiles.” Another favorite character - Hippopotamus - exists in Chukovsky’s “mythology” in two guises - Hippopotamus itself and Hippopotamus, which the author asks not to confuse (“Hippopotamus is a pharmacist, and Hippopotamus is a king”). But, probably, the most diverse characters of the writer were the good doctor Aibolit and the evil cannibal pirate Barmaley. So in the prose “Doctor Aibolit” (“retelling according to Hugh Lofting”) the doctor comes from the foreign city of Pindemonte, in “Barmaley” - from Soviet Leningrad, and in the poem “Let's Defeat Barmaley” - from the fairy-tale country of Aibolitia. It’s the same with Barmaley. If in the fairy tale of the same name he reforms and goes to Leningrad, then in the prosaic version he is devoured by sharks, and in “Let's Defeat Barmaley” he is completely shot from a machine gun. Tales about Aibolit are a constant source of controversy about plagiarism. Some believe that Korney Ivanovich shamelessly stole the plot from Hugh Lofting and his tales about Doctor Dolittle, while others believe that Aibolit originated with Chukovsky earlier and only later was used in Lofting’s retelling. And before we begin to restore the “dark” past of Aibolit, it is necessary to say a few words about the author of “Doctor Dolittle”.

So, Hugh Lofting was born in England in 1886 inMaidenhead (Berkshire) in a mixed Anglo-Irish familyand, although he adored animals since childhood (he loved to tinker with them on his mother’s farm and even organized a home zoo), he did not study to be a zoologist or veterinarian, but to become a railway engineer. However, his profession allowed him to visit exotic countries in Africa and South America.After graduating from a private school in Chesterfield in 1904, he decided to devote himself to a career as a civil engineer. He went to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in America. A year later he returned to England, where he continued his studies at the London Polytechnic Institute. In 1908, after short attempts to find decent work in England, he moved to Canada. In 1910 he worked as an engineer at railway in West Africa, then again on the railway, in Havana. But by 1912, the romance of changing places and the hardships of this kind of camping life began to become boring, and Lofting decided to change his life: he moved to New York, got married and became a writer, started a family and even began writing various specialized articles in magazines. Many articles devoted to Lofting’s life note a curious fact: the first story of the former engineer, who had traveled extensively around the world and gained a wide variety of impressions, was not at all about African or Cuban exoticism, but about drainage pipes and bridges. To people who know Lofting only from the epic about the adventures of Doctor Dolittle, it seems strange that he began as a completely “adult” writer and that “The Story of Doctor Dolittle,” so noticeably different from other books in tone and naivety of presentation, is not “ the first experience of a beginning writer." By 1913, Lofting the writer already had a fairly strong reputation among the publishers of New York magazines, in which he published his short stories and essays with avid regularity. Life is gradually getting better. Children born: Elizabeth in 1913 and Colin in 1915. By the outbreak of the First World War, Lofting was still a British subject. In 1915, he joined the British Ministry of Information, and in 1916 he was drafted into the army with the rank of lieutenant in the Irish Guards regiment (Lofting's mother is Irish).His children really missed their dad, and he promised to constantly write them letters. But would you really write to kids about the surrounding carnage? And so, impressed by the picture of horses dying in the war, Lofting began to compose a fairy tale about a good doctor who learned animal language and helped various animals in every possible way. The doctor received a very telling name “Do-Little” (“Do little”), making one remember Chekhov and his principle of “small things”.

H. Lofting:

“My children were waiting at home for letters from me - better with pictures than without. It was hardly interesting to write reports from the front to the younger generation: the news was either too terrible or too boring. Moreover, they were all censored. One thing, however, that increasingly caught my attention was the significant role that animals played in the World War, and as time went on they seemed to become no less fatalistic than humans. They took risks just like the rest of us. But their fate was very different from that of humans. No matter how seriously the soldier was wounded, they fought for his life, all the means of surgery, which had perfectly developed during the war, were aimed at helping him. A seriously wounded horse was shot with a well-timed bullet. Not very fair, in my opinion. If we exposed animals to the same dangers that we faced ourselves, then why didn't we give them the same attention when they were injured? But, obviously, to operate on horses at our evacuation points, knowledge of horse language would be required. That’s how this idea came to me...”

Lofting illustrated all of his books himself.

In total, Lofting wrote 14 books about Doctor Dolittle.

V. Konashevich, Soviet edition

prose retelling of "Doctor Aibolit".

Good Doctor Aibolit!

He is sitting under a tree.

Come to him for treatment

And the cow and the she-wolf...

V. Suteev, Book “Aibolit” (M: Children's literature, 1972)

A number of articles in Russian publications set forth, probably at some point, a legend invented by Lofting himself that the writer’s children allegedly independently handed over their father’s letters to one of the publishing houses, and by the time the latter returned from the front, the book had already been published. The reality is a little more prosaic. In 1918, Lofting was seriously wounded and discharged from the army due to disability. His family met him in England, and in 1919 they decided to return to New York. Even before returning home, Lofting decided to rework the stories about the animal doctor into a book. By a happy coincidence, on the ship on which the family was returning to America, the writer met Cecil Roberts, a famous British poet and short story writer, and she, having familiarized herself with the manuscript during the voyage, recommended that he contact her publisher, Mr. Stokes. In 1920, the first book was published by Stokes. In 1922 - the first sequel. From that moment on, until 1930, Stokes began producing one Dolittle per year. The success of the series was not phenomenal, but sustainable. By 1925, the year of the release of the Russian translation and arrangement, Lofting was already a well-known author in America and Europe. Winner of several literary prizes. Several translations of his books are being published and are being prepared for publication. To some extent, one can even say that his Doctor Dolittle became a symbol - a symbol of the new “post-war humanism.” What is this symbolism? In 1923, at the American Library Association's Newbery Award ceremony, Lofting "admitted" that the idea for "The Story of Doctor Dolittle" came to him from seeing horses killed and wounded in battle, and that he was so impressed by the courageous behavior of horses and mules under fire, that he invented a little doctor for them in order to do for them what was not done in reality - to do little (in fact, this principle is illustrated by the speaking surname doctor - do-little). But “doing little” also means going back to the past and replaying, making impossible what is happening today.
In this sense, Doctor Dolittle is not just a fairy tale or an adventure series for children and teenagers, but one of the first developed alternative history projects. No wonder the epic takes place in the 30s - mid-40s. XIX century - “almost a hundred years ago,” and almost no detailed review can do without mentioning the “values” of Victorian England. In total, Lofting's Doolittle cycle consists of fourteen books. Ten of them are novels written and published during the author’s lifetime:

The Story of Doctor Dolittle. 1920;
The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle (1922);
Doctor Dolittle's Post Office. 1923);
Doctor Dolittle's Circus. 1924);
Doctor Dolittle's Zoo. 1925);
Doctor Dolittle's Caravan. 1926);
Doctor Dolittle's Garden. 1927);
Doctor Dolittle in the Moon (1928);
Doctor Dolittle's Return. 1933);
Doctor Dolittle and the Secret Lake (1948).

Two are compilations, published by Olga Fricker (sister of Lofting's third wife, Josephine) after his death. Two more are “additional” ones, compiled by Lofting in between: a collection of stories “Gab-Gab's Book, An Encyclopedia of Food. 1932” and “Doctor Dolittle's Birthday” Book. 1936) - illustrated diary with quotes. Without exception, all books are equipped with the author's illustrations, heirs of the pictures with which Lofting accompanied his letters home. The order in which the books were published differs from their “internal chronology.” Starting from the second volume, the figure of the narrator appears in the text - Tommy Stubbins, the son of a shoemaker who works as an assistant for the doctor, and other permanent characters appear quite vividly, depicted in a psychological manner. The action begins to be built as a memory (in hindsight, what happens in the first book turns out to be not just backstory, but, as it were, also a memory, albeit retold from other people’s words). In general, the style of storytelling changes noticeably. These are adventure stories for middle-aged children, full of events, numerous inserted episodes, on the alternation of which the internal logic of the story is built. It is from the second book that Lofting’s animals begin to acquire “human traits” (and these human traits are not idealized, they are given “unvarnished”, the animals seek benefits, are lazy, capricious, the motivations for their actions are largely dictated by selfishness, etc.). It is from the second book that we begin to learn some details from the life of the doctor himself, his family (the life story of his sister Sarah), and the people around him (Tommy Stubbins, Matthew Mugg).

In 1924, Dolittle was noticed in Soviet Russia. The publishing house ordered two translations of the fairy tale. The first was designed for middle-aged children, and it was performed by E. Khavkina. Subsequently, it was forgotten and was never republished in the USSR. But the second option, which bore the title “Guy Lofting. Doctor Aibolit. For small children, retold by K. Chukovsky,” had a long and rich history. It was the target audience that became the reason why the language of the fairy tale is very simplified. In addition, Chukovsky wrote that he “introduced dozens of realities into his revision that are not in the original.” And indeed, in new editions the “retelling” was constantly revised. So Dolittle turned into Aibolit, the dog Jip - into Ava, the pig Jab-Jab - into Oink-Oink, the boring puritanical prude and the doctor's sister Sarah - into a very evil Barbara, and the native king Jolinginki and the pirate Ben-Ali completely merged into one in the image of the cannibal pirate Barmaley. And although the retelling of “Doctor Aibolit” was constantly accompanied by the subtitle “according to Hugh Lofting,” a mysterious editorial afterword appeared in the 1936 edition:

“A few years ago a very strange thing happened: two writers on two ends of the world composed the same fairy tale about the same person. One writer lived overseas, in America, and the other lived here in the USSR, in Leningrad. One was named Gyu Lofting, and the other was Korney Chukovsky. They had never seen each other or even heard of each other. One wrote in Russian, and the other in English, one in poetry, and the other in prose. But their fairy tales turned out to be very similar, because both fairy tales have the same hero: a good doctor who treats animals...”

So after all: who invented Aibolit? If you don’t know that the first retelling of Lofting came out back in 1924, then it seems that Chukovsky simply took Aibolit from his poetic fairy tales and simply placed it in the retelling. But taking into account this fact, everything does not look so clear, because “Barmaley” was written in the same year as the retelling, and the first version of the poetic “Aibolit” was written 4 years later. Here, probably, one of the paradoxes arises that manifests itself in the minds of people comparing the worlds of Doctor Dolittle and Doctor Aibolit. If we start not just from Lofting’s first tale, but from at least three or four stories in the cycle, we begin to consider it as part of the whole, as a kind of preliminary approach that only designates and outlines the system of relationships between the characters, but does not yet convey all its complexity and completeness (even though the core still remains there, in the first book). The characters change, the narrator (Tommy Stubbins) grows up, potential readers grow up (all this, of course, is not a certain " distinguishing feature "of the Lofting cycle, the same thing happens with the heroes of Milne, Tove Janson, Rowling, etc.). When we begin to compare the Lofting cycle with the Chukovsky cycle, it turns out that (with almost equal volumes) the heroes of Chukovsky's fairy tales remain, as it were, unchanged. It’s not even a matter of the absence of a “continuous chronology.” Each of Chukovsky’s fairy tales is a separate world, and these worlds are not just parallel, they influence each other, they are mutually permeable (albeit to a certain extent). In fact, we cannot even say. nothing definite about the identity of the heroes. Indeed, Aibolit "Barmaleya", Aibolit "Limpopo", Aibolit of different versions of Lofting's "Doctor Aibolit", Aibolit of the "war tale", etc., etc. - these are literally the same hero. ? If so, then why does one live somewhere abroad, the other in Leningrad, the third in the African country of Aibolitiya? And why, if Barmaley was eaten by sharks, does he attack Aibolit and Tanya-Vanya again? if this was before, then he has already corrected himself, why does he behave so badly again that in the end he is eaten by sharks? Or even not sharks at all, but the valiant Vanya Vasilchikov cuts off his head? We are dealing with certain “invariants”: invariants of the heroes, what happens to them, and our assessments. That is, Lofting’s first book (retold by Chukovsky and becoming, if not the center of this world, then the first step into it) in this system of relationships does not receive the development that it received in the system of Lofting’s books. Development here is going in a completely different direction. At the same time, it is also worth especially noting that here the texts not only do not have a direct chronology, there is not even a mandatory set of the texts themselves. The potential reader will always have a certain truncated version at his disposal, and will have a deliberately fragmentary idea not even of the whole, but of the relationship of the parts at his disposal. The number of versions and editions of fairy tales that we have at the moment (only Lofting’s “Doctor Aibolit” has four main versions, different from each other not only in volume, but also in characters, plot structure, general direction of action), gigantic editions of books (not allowing one or another rejected or corrected edition to disappear without a trace), the absence of clear author's instructions, coupled with the arbitrariness or incompetence of publishing houses in the selection of materials, create a situation in which the reader himself (but unconsciously, by chance) draws up for himself some kind of individual map reading. If possible, we will try to work with the entire main body of texts, trying to trace the main movements within this special space. But even in the present study it is possible to consider only the main variants containing fundamental plot and semantic differences (while Chukovsky made edits to almost all publications of the 1920-1950s).

Chukovsky himself claimed that the doctor appeared in the first improvised version of “Crocodile”, which he composed for his sick son. K. Chukovsky, from the diary, 10/20/1955:

“... and there was “Doctor Aibolit” as one of the characters; only it was called then: “Oybolit.” I brought this doctor there in order to soften the difficult impression Kolya had from the Finnish surgeon.”

Chukovsky also wrote that the prototype of a good doctor for him was a Jewish doctor from Vilna, Timofey Osipovich Shabad, whom he met in 1912. He was so kind that he agreed to treat the poor, and sometimes animals, for free.

K. Chukovsky:

"Doctor Shabad was the most kind person, whom I knew in life. Sometimes a thin girl would come to him, and he would say to her: “Do you want me to write you a prescription? No, milk will help you. Come to me every morning and you will get two glasses of milk.”

Whether the idea of ​​writing a fairy tale about an animal doctor really swarmed in Chukovsky’s head or not, one thing is clear: the impetus for its appearance was clearly his acquaintance with Lofting. And then almost original creativity began.

Belukha, Evgeniy Dmitrievich(1889, Simferopol - 1943, Leningrad) - graphic artist, artist of decorative and applied arts, book illustrator. Studied in St. Petersburg in the engraving workshop of V.V. Mate (1911), Higher Art School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture at the Imperial Academy of Arts (1912–1913), took lessons from V.I. Shukhaeva (1918). Lived in Leningrad. In his early career he worked under the pseudonym E. Nimich. He worked in the field of easel, book, magazine, and applied graphics; He was engaged in etching and lithography. He performed portraits, landscapes, animal studies and sketches; in 1921–1922 he created several miniature portraits (of his wife, E.K. Spadikov). He illustrated the magazines “The Whole World”, “Ogonyok” (1911–1912), “Sun of Russia” (1913–1914); painted for Krasnaya Gazeta (1918), Petrogradskaya Pravda (1919–1920; he also created the newspaper’s headline). Created designs for bookplates. He was engaged in painting porcelain products at the State Porcelain Factory (1920s). In the 1920s and 30s, he mainly illustrated books for publishing houses: Gosizdat, Priboi, Academia, Lenizdat and others. Designed the books: “Fairy Tales” by R. Kipling (1923), “Tales of the Southern Slavs” (1923), “Doctor Aibolit” by K. I. Chukovsky (1924), “Passionate Friendship” by H. Wells (1924), “Student Stories” L. N. Rakhmanova (1931), “In People” by A. M. Gorky (1933), “A Mule without a Bridle” by Payen from Mézières (1934), “The Stars Look Down” by A. Cronin (1937), “The Course of Life” E. Dabi (1939) and others. During the Great Patriotic War was in besieged Leningrad. Made posters: “Fighter, take revenge on the German bandits for suffering Soviet people"and others, the series "Leningrad in the days of war" (1942–1943). Since 1918 - participant of exhibitions.

Exhibited at exhibitions: Communities of Artists (1921, 1922), Petrograd artists of all directions, original drawings of Petrograd book signs (both 1923), Russian book signs (1926), “Graphic art in the USSR. 1917–1928", anniversary exhibition fine arts(both 1927), “Artistic bookplate” (1928), “Woman before and after the revolution” (1930) in Petrograd (Leningrad), “Russian book sign” in Kazan (1923), “Artists of the RSFSR for XV years” (1933 ), “Heroic Front and Rear” (1943) in Moscow and others.

Participant of many international exhibitions, including book exhibition in Florence (1922), an exhibition of artistic and decorative arts in Paris (1925), “The Art of the Book” in Leipzig and Nuremberg (1927), “Modern Book Art at the International Press Exhibition” in Cologne (1928). Personal exhibition artist was held in Leningrad (1951). The works are in the largest museum collections, among them the State Tretyakov Gallery, Pushkin Museum im. A. S. Pushkin, State literary museum, State Russian Museum and others.

The translation by K. Chukovsky is known to our reader much better than the translation by L. Khavkina:

Lofting, Hugh John. The Adventures of Doctor Dolittle. Drawings by the author. Translated into Russian by Lyubov Khavkina. Moscow, Gosizdat, 1924. 112 p. with ill. Circulation 7000 copies. In publisher's paperback. Extremely rare!

Gosizdat used illustrations by the author himself - they are funny:

Khavkina, Lyubov Borisovna(1871, Kharkov - 1949, Moscow) - Russian theorist and organizer of library science, a major librarian and bibliographer. Honored Scientist of the RSFSR (1945), Doctor of Pedagogical Sciences (1949). Born into a family of Kharkov doctors. After graduating from the women's gymnasium in 1888-1890. taught at a Sunday school founded by Khristina Alchevskaya. In 1891 he was one of the organizers of the first Kharkov free library. In the same year he went to work at the Kharkov Public Library, where he worked, intermittently, until 1918. In 1898-1901. Khavkina studied library science at the University of Berlin and attended the 1900 World's Fair in Paris, where she became acquainted with the methods of the American Library Association and the ideas of its founder Melville Dewey, which greatly influenced her. In addition, Khavkina, in parallel with her work in the library, graduated from the Kharkov Music College with a degree in Music Theory, which allowed her in 1903 to organize and head the first music department in Russian public libraries with a subscription in the Kharkov Public Library; Khavkina also published in Kharkov newspapers music reviews and reviews. Khavkina’s library science works begin with the book “Libraries, their organization and technology” (St. Petersburg: Publishing House of A. S. Suvorin, 1904), which received wide recognition in Russia and was awarded a gold medal at the 1905 World Exhibition in Liege. Throughout the 1900-1910s. Khavkina collaborates with the magazines “Russian School”, “Enlightenment”, “Bulletin of Education”, “For the People's Teacher”, and writes several articles for the “People's Encyclopedia”. In 1911, Khavkina’s “Guide for Small Libraries” was published (M.: Publication of the I. D. Sytin Partnership), which went through six editions (until 1930); For this book, Khavkina was elected an honorary member of the Russian Bibliographic Society. During the same period, Khavkina published the popular science books “India: A Popular Essay” and “How People Learned to Write and Print Books” (both - M.: Publishing House of the I. D. Sytin Partnership, 1907). Since 1912, Lyubov Khavkina divides her life between Kharkov and Moscow, where in 1913, at the Shanyavsky People's University, based on the project she compiled, the first librarian courses in Russia were opened, the need for which Khavkina spoke about back in 1904 in her report at the Third Congress of Russian figures of technical and vocational education. Khavkina combines teaching courses in a number of disciplines with work for the Kharkov Public Library (in 1914 she was elected to the library board) and foreign trips - in 1914, in particular, Khavkina became acquainted with the experience of organizing librarianship in the USA (New York , Chicago, California, Honolulu) and Japan, describing this experience in the book "The New York Public Library" and in various reports. Khavkina’s work “Ketter’s Author’s Tables, revised for Russian libraries” (1916) is also based on American experience - rules for arranging books on library shelves and in library catalogs based on the principles developed by C. E. Cutter; these tables are used in Russian libraries to this day and are colloquially referred to as “Havkina tables” (tables of the author’s mark). In 1916, Lyubov Khavkina took part in the preparation and holding of the founding congress of the Russian Library Society and was elected chairman of its board, remaining in this post until 1921. In 1918, Khavkina published the work “Book and Library”, in which she formulated her attitude towards ideological trends of the new era:

“The library lays the foundation of universal human culture, therefore the influence of state policy diminishes its task, narrows its work, gives its activities a tendentious and one-sided character, turns it into an instrument of party struggle, to which the public library, by its very essence, should be alien.”

After October Revolution Shanyavsky University was reorganized (and essentially closed), but the department of library science, headed by Khavkina, was preserved in the form of the Research Office of Library Science (since 1920), which later became the basis for the Moscow Library Institute (now the Moscow state university culture and arts). In 1928, Lyubov Khavkina retired. Throughout the 1930s and 40s. she advised various Soviet organizations (not so much as a librarian, but through foreign languages: Khavkina was fluent in ten languages). At the same time, she did not stop working on methodological works on library science, publishing the books “Compiling Indexes to the Contents of Books and Periodicals” (1930), “Union Catalogs (Historical and Theoretical Practice)” (1943), etc. After the Great Patriotic War they remembered Khavkina. She was awarded the Order of the Badge of Honor (1945), she was awarded the title of Honored Scientist of the RSFSR (1945), and in 1949, shortly before her death, she was awarded the degree of Doctor of Pedagogical Sciences (for the book “Unified Catalogues”). Lyubov Borisovna was buried at the Miusskoye cemetery in Moscow.

It is a pleasure to be treated by the animal doctor Aibolit - instead of injections and pills, the doctor prescribes eggnog and chocolate. And the patient will also receive a dose of warmth and kindness. The character gets involved in exciting adventures, which for some reason mostly take place in distant Africa, where it is very dangerous for children to walk.

History of creation

A distinctive feature of Korney Chukovsky’s work is that many of the characters he created are “cross-cutting” - fairy-tale faces flash in one book or another, but at the same time do not connect the plot, but exist in separate worlds and spaces.

Such heroes include Crocodile, Hippopotamus - they can be found in different fairy tales. Aibolit crowns the galaxy of transient characters, appearing in the poetic works "" (1925), "Aibolit" (1929) and "Let's Defeat Barmaley!" (1942). The animal doctor also rules the roost in the prose story “Doctor Aibolit” (1936).

Confusion arose with the authorship of Aibolit. It is believed that the good doctor was invented by the English writer Hugh Lofting: in 1920, from the pen of the storyteller, “The Story of Doctor Dolittle” came out, the idea of ​​which originated on the fronts of the First World War - the author drew attention to the fact that animals take part in military operations, and they Just like people, they need medical care. Children loved the story so much that the book doctor became the hero of 14 more publications.

Four years after its debut, the work, adapted by Chukovsky, appeared in Soviet Russia. Korney Ivanovich simplified the language as much as possible, because the fairy tale was addressed to the youngest readers, and even dared to rename the characters - Dolittle became Aibolit, the dog Jip turned into Ava, the pig Jab-Jab proudly bore the new name Oink-oink. However, in 1936, the tale in Chukovsky’s retelling acquired an intriguing afterword:

“A few years ago a very strange thing happened: two writers on two ends of the world composed the same fairy tale about the same person. One writer lived overseas, in America, and the other in the USSR, in Leningrad. One was called Hugh Lofting, and the other was Korney Chukovsky. They had never seen each other or even heard of each other. One wrote in Russian, and the other in English, one in poetry, and the other in prose. But their fairy tales turned out to be very similar, because both fairy tales have the same hero: a good doctor who treats animals...”

Korney Chukovsky himself claimed that Aibolita was invented long before the publication of the Englishman’s work. Allegedly, the doctor inhabited the first sketches of “Crocodile,” which were created for his sick son. Only in them the animal doctor’s name was Oybolit, and the prototype was the doctor Timofey (Tsemakh) Shabad, with whom fate brought the author together in 1912. The Jewish doctor treated poor people for free, and sometimes did not hesitate to provide assistance to animals.

Biography

The first meeting of young readers with the kind Doctor Aibolit happened in Africa - little Tanya and Vanya went for a walk to this country. The evil and merciless Barmaley threw the animal doctor into the fire, but he was saved by grateful animals. Barmaley was eventually swallowed by a crocodile, but was eventually released into the wild. The children took the villain home to Leningrad, where he took the right path and even learned to bake gingerbread.

A full-fledged biography of the doctor appeared in the fairy tale “Doctor Aibolit” in four parts, where he is the main thing character. The book opens with a chapter entitled “Journey to the Land of Monkeys.” In the apartment with the doctor live his animals, as well as his evil sister Varvara, who does not like animals and is constantly angry with her brother for the menagerie established in the house.

Aibolit, out of the kindness of his heart, treats everyone who asks for help, often free of charge. Once such patronage left a man without a piece of bread. But the doctor has loyal and sympathetic friends: the owl and the pig planted a vegetable garden in the yard, the chickens treated him with eggs, and the cow with milk.

One day, a swallow flew into a doctor’s house with news - sick monkeys were waiting for help in Africa. Aibolit could not refuse help and rushed to the rescue, taking the ship from an old comrade. The ship was wrecked, but the travelers managed to escape.

In this dangerous African mission, Aibolit encountered evil in the person of the robber Barmaley and made new friends. The grateful, cured animals gave the doctor a wonderful two-headed animal – Tyanitolkaya. On the way back, Aibolit captured Barmaley's ship and returned safely to his homeland.

The adventures of Doctor Aibolit, the dog Ava and a whole scattering of animals continued with the search for the fisherman, the father of the boy Penta, who was kidnapped by pirates. In the third chapter, the doctor again confronts the pirates, ends up in a well into which the robbers threw him, and saves animals from a burning house. Bowhead whales, cranes, and frogs help the hero. Instead of the burned-out home, the beavers built a new beautiful house, where Aibolit celebrated his housewarming.

The book ends with a part called “The Adventure of the White Mouse,” where a rodent with snow-white fur named Belyanka becomes an outcast in her own home - her rat friend did her a disservice by dyeing her fur yellow. After a series of travels, the unfortunate mouse ended up with Dr. Aibolit, and he sheltered the animal in his house, giving it a new name - Fidzha (Golden Mouse).

In the fairy tale “Let’s Defeat Barmaley!” The doctor rules the country of Aibolitiya, where cranes, eagles, hares, camels and deer live. Here Korney Chukovsky becomes more cruel, “killing” negative characters. Thus, the shark Karakul died at the hands of the boy Vasya Vasilchikov, and Barmaley in the drafts died from a bayonet. However, the author later spared the robber, allowing the main characters to take him prisoner. And yet Barmaley was destroyed - he was sentenced to be shot from a machine gun.

Film adaptations

In 1938, the black and white film “Doctor Aibolit” was released on Soviet screens. Director Vladimir Nemolyaev invited Maxim Strauch to play the main role. It is interesting that in the 80s of the last century this picture was shown fragmentarily in the program “ Good night, kids!

Almost 30 years later, he decided to film Chukovsky’s story. In the film of the legendary actor and director “Aibolit-66” he fights with Barmaley in the image of a disinterested doctor. A film about an animal doctor, to put it mildly, is not for everyone. For children, the picture is difficult to perceive, and for adults it is too naive. “Aibolit-66” was classified as a Soviet arthouse.

The third film adaptation, where there was a place for Aibolit, fell in 1970 - director Vitaly Ivanov pleased the children with the film “How We Searched for Tishka,” where the boy, along with his grandmother and a policeman, is looking for a bear cub. Transformed into a doctor.

Seven cartoons were created based on fairy tales about the good doctor. The multi-part cartoon “Doctor Aibolit”, which was shown to Soviet children in 1984-1985, is considered a cult animated film.

In Africa, robbers staged a performance for the animals, and then poisoned the guests. Aibolit (voiced by the character) rushes to the aid of sick animals.

• The “cruelty” shown by Korney Ivanovich in “Let’s Defeat Barmaley!” is understandable - while working on the fairy tale, the author was evacuated in Tashkent, where he was poor and often sick. News flew from Leningrad and Moscow about the deaths of friends, acquaintances, and colleagues. One of the writer’s sons went missing, and the second, being wounded, starved in the besieged northern capital.
• A monument to the possible prototype of Doctor Tsemakh Shabad was unveiled in Vilnius in 2007. The sculpture is very touching - next to an old man in a shabby hat stands a girl with a kitten in her arms.

• The name Aibolit has long become a household name. In addition, in every city there is a pharmacy or veterinary clinic named after the character Korney Chukovsky.
• The modern Doctor Aibolit is the American orthopedic doctor Derrick Campana, who made a prosthetic forelimb for the pony. The mini-horse was injured immediately after birth. Seeing the three-legged animal, the doctor could not pass by. Since then, Derrick abandoned the classical direction of his profession. Today he has artificial limbs for a kid goat and an elephant.

It is not at all difficult to guess that alarm cry sick “Ay! Hurts!" has become the most affectionate name in the world for a fairy-tale doctor, very kind, because he treats with chocolate and eggnog, rushes to the rescue through snow and hail, overcomes steep mountains and stormy seas, selflessly fights the bloodthirsty Barmaley, frees a boy from pirate captivity Penta and his fisherman father, protects the poor and sick monkey Chichi from the terrible organ grinder..., while saying only one thing:

"Oh, if I don't get there,
If I get lost on the way,
What will happen to them, to the sick,
With my forest animals?

Of course, everyone loves Aibolit: animals, fish, birds, boys and girls...

Doctor Aibolit has an English “predecessor” - Doctor Dolittle , invented by the writer Hugh Lofting .

HISTORY OF CREATION OF TALES

Each of the books has its own fascinating story.

"Doctor Aibolit" K.I. Chukovsky written based on the plot of fairy tales English writerHugh Lofting about Doctor Dolittle ("The Story of Doctor Dolittle", "The Adventures of Doctor Dolittle", "Doctor Dolittle and His Beasts" ).

PLOT OF THE TALE

To the good to the doctorAibolit come for treatment and “and a cow, and a she-wolf, and a bug, and a worm, and a bear”. But the children suddenly got sick hippopotamus, And Doctor Aibolit goes to Africa, getting there, he repeatedly risks his life: either the wave is ready to swallow him, or the mountains "go under the very clouds". And in Africa the animals are waiting for their savior - Doctor Aibolit .

Finally he is in Africa:
Ten nights Aibolit
Doesn't eat, doesn't drink and doesn't sleep,
Ten nights in a row

He heals the unfortunate beast
And he sets and sets thermometers for them.
And so he cured everyone.
Everyone is healthy, everyone is happy, everyone is laughing and dancing.

A hippotamus sings:
“Glory, glory to Aibolit!
Glory to the good doctors!

PROTOTYPE OF DOCTOR AIBOLIT

1. What animals lived with Dr. Aibolit?

(In the room there are hares, in the closet there is a squirrel, in the cupboard there is a crow, on the sofa there is a hedgehog, in the chest there are white mice, Kiki the duck, Ava the dog, Oink the pig, Korudo the parrot, Bumbo the owl.)

2. How many animal languages ​​did Aibolit know?

3. From whom and why did the monkey Chichi run away?

(From the evil organ grinder, because he dragged her everywhere on a rope and beat her. Her neck hurt.)