Alexander Volkov - Definition and Overview

This article is about the Russian novelist. See also Alexander A. Volkov for the Russian cosmonaut.

Alexander Melentyevich Volkov (1891 – 1977) was a Russian novelist and mathematician.

He wrote several historical novels, but is mostly remembered for a series of children's books based on L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

The first of these books is a loose translation of the first Oz book, with names changed and chapters added or omitted. First published in 1939 in the Soviet Union, the book became quite popular and in the 1960s, Volkov began writing his own sequels to the story. From 1963 to 1970 four more books in the series were published, with the sixth and final story published posthumously in 1982. Other authors such as Yuri Kuznitchov, Peter Sukhinov and Leonid Vladimirsky (Volkov's original illustrator) have more recently written additional sequels in Russian, creating in effect an alternative series of Oz books.

Volkov's Magic Land series, as it was called, was translated into many languages and was popular with children all over the Eastern bloc. Volkov's version of Oz seems to be better known than Baum's in some countries, for example in China, in Germany (formerly East Germany), and possibly in Arabic-speaking countries such as Syria. In Germany, one author has written his own set of sequels to Volkov's books. The first four books in the series have been translated into English — or retranslated, in the case of the first book — by Peter L. Blystone, and were published by Red Branch press in two volumes (two books a volume) in 1991 and 1993.

Volkov's Magic-Land Books

• The Wizard of the Emerald City (first published in Russian in 1939, revised in 1959)
• Urfin Jus and his Wooden Soldiers (1963)
• The Seven Underground Kings (1969)
• The Fiery God of the Marrans (1972)
• The Yellow Fog
• The Secret of the Abandoned Castle