Milna's heroes. Alan Alexander Milne biography

Alan Alexander Milne was born in London on January 18, 1882. The boy was lucky with his parents; they were well-educated and well-mannered people.

Alan's father had his own private school, and it was there that the future writer went. What is noteworthy is that one of the teachers there was Herbert Wells, a world famous writer.

The family was very fond of creativity and art and strongly encouraged the development of children in this area. From an early age Milne wrote poetry, and during his student years he and his brother wrote articles for the university newspaper Grant.

After leaving school, Alan entered Westminster School, and then to Cambridge to study mathematics. Despite his creative inclinations, the young man had quite good success in the exact sciences.

After writing notes and newspaper articles for a student publication, Milne was noticed and invited to London to work for the famous humor magazine Punch. It was a real success, especially for such a young journalist.

Personal life

Milne's future wife noticed the young man during his student years. In 1913, Alan Milne and Dorothy de Selincourt were married. The newlyweds were forced to separate a year after the wedding. The First World War began and Milne volunteered to go to the front as an officer in the British Army. He took little part in the war effort; for the most part Milne worked in the propaganda department.

After some time, he wrote the book “Peace with Honor,” where he directly condemned the war and everything connected with it.

In 1920, the couple had a son, Christopher Robin. And in 1925, Milne bought a house in Hartfield and moved his family there.

Alan Milne lived a fairly long and successful life. The writer died in 1956 from a serious brain disease.

Literary activity

Milne's first serious literary success was the stories he wrote during the war. The author gained popularity and began to be called one of the most successful playwrights in England.

But, undoubtedly, the cheerful klutz bear nicknamed Winnie the Pooh brought worldwide fame to the writer. As Milne later stated, he did not specifically conceive the fairy tale, but simply transferred funny stories about his son’s toys to paper.

Christopher was given toys, and his father, a writer, before bed, instead of reading fairy tales, invented and told his son stories about the funny adventures of his toy friends.

In addition, the family often staged children's plays featuring Christopher's toys. This is how a good fairy tale about the adventures of Winnie was born, which children all over the world came to know and love.

What is noteworthy is that fairy-tale characters appeared in the book exactly in the order in which their prototype toys appeared in the life of Milne’s son. And the forest in which the heroes lived was very reminiscent of the forest in which the Milne family loved to walk.

The first chapters of the book about the adventures of a funny little bear were published in a newspaper in 1924. Readers were delighted with the tale and began to ask for a continuation of the story. And in 1926, the first book about Winnie the Pooh and his friends was published.

After the book was published, Alan Milne fell into crazy fame. The fairy tale was translated into many languages, it was constantly republished and filmed.

Walt Disney made a full-length cartoon about the cheerful bear Winnie.

In Russia, Soyuzmultfilm also released its own version of this tale. The audience loved the cartoon, and it became a classic of the children's genre.

However, Alan Milne himself suffered greatly from this work. The fairy tale story literally closed the writer’s path to the world of serious literature, and all his subsequent works had neither success nor recognition from literary critics.

Almost all of Milne's stories, poems and plays were forgotten, unable to withstand competition with children's fairy tales. Although the author himself did not consider himself a children's writer.

What is noteworthy is that Milne’s son also suffered from this beloved fairy tale. As a child, the boy was fairly bullied by his peers and did not allow him to live in peace.

Despite this, Alan Milne has forever entered the golden fund of literature and to this day, parents read stories to their children about a funny little bear and his friends.

Alan Alexander Milne (1882-1956) - prose writer, poet and playwright, classic of twentieth-century literature, author of the famous "Winnie the Pooh".
English writer, Scottish by birth, Alan Alexander Milne spent his childhood in London. He studied at a small private school, owned by his father, John Milne. One of his teachers in 1889-1890 was Herbert Wells. Then he entered Westminster School, and then Trinity College, Cambridge, where from 1900 to 1903 he studied mathematics. As a student, he wrote notes for the student newspaper Grant. He usually wrote with his brother Kenneth, and they signed the notes with the name AKM. Milne's work was noticed, and the British humor magazine Punch began to collaborate with him, and Milne subsequently became an assistant editor there.
In 1913, Milne married Dorothy Daphne de Selincourt, goddaughter of magazine editor Owen Seaman (who was said to be the psychological prototype of Eeyore), and the marriage produced one son, Christopher.
A born pacifist, Milne was drafted into the Royal Army and served in France. He later wrote a book, Peace with Honor, in which he condemned the war.
In 1926, the first version of Little Bear with Sawdust in his Head (in English - Bear-with-very-small-brains) - "Winnie the Pooh" - appeared. The second part of the stories, "Now We Are Six," appeared in 1927, and the final part of the book, "The House on Pooh Edge," appeared in 1928. Milne never read his own Winnie the Pooh stories to his son, Christopher Robin, preferring to raise him on the works of the writer Wodehouse, beloved by Alan himself, and Christopher first read poems and stories about Pooh Bear only 60 years after their first appearance.
Before the publication of the books about Winnie the Pooh, Milne was already a fairly famous playwright, but the success of Winnie the Pooh has acquired such proportions that Milne's other works are now practically unknown. Worldwide sales of Pooh Bear books translated into 25 languages, 1924 to 1956. exceeded 7 million, and by 1996 about 20 million copies had been sold, and only by the publishing house Muffin (this figure does not include publishers in the USA, Canada and non-English-speaking countries). A 1996 poll conducted by English radio showed that the book about Winnie the Pooh took 17th place in the list of the most striking and significant works published in the twentieth century. That same year, Milne's beloved teddy bear was sold at Bonham's London auction to an unknown buyer for £4,600.
In 1952, Milne underwent brain surgery, after which he spent four years until his death at his estate in Cotchford, Sussex.

English writer, Scottish by birth, Alan Alexander Milne spent his childhood in London, where his father worked at a school.

English playwright, poet, storyteller, author of classic books of English children's literature: “When We Were Little” (1924; collection of poems), “Now We Are Six” (1927), “Winnie the Pooh” (1926) and “The House at Pooh Edge” "(1928; Russian retelling by B. Zakhoder entitled "Winnie the Pooh and all-all-all", 1960).

Milne grew up in a family where children were encouraged to be creative, wrote funny poems from a young age, showed an aptitude for the exact sciences, and entered Trinity College, Cambridge to study mathematics.

During his student years, he fulfilled his long-time dream by becoming the editor of Granta magazine, for which he wrote poems and stories. As a result, Milne completely abandoned his studies and moved to London, where he began working at Punch magazine.

In 1913 he married Dorothy de Selincourt, goddaughter of magazine editor Owen Seaman (said to be the psychological prototype of Eeyore), and his only son Christopher Robin was born in 1920. By that time, Milne had managed to visit the war and write several funny plays, one of which, “Mr. Pym Passed By” (1920), was a success.

When his son was three years old, Milne began to write poems about him and for him, devoid of sentimentality and accurately reproducing children's egocentrism, fantasies and stubbornness. The enormous success of the book of poetry, illustrated by Ernest Shepard, prompted Milne to write the fairy tales Prince Rabbit (1924), The Princess Who Couldn't Laugh and The Green Door (both 1925), and in 1926 Winnie the Pooh was written. All the characters in the book (Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore, Tigger, Kanga and Roo) except Rabbit and Owl were found in the nursery (now the toys that served as prototypes are kept in the Teddy Bear Museum in the UK), and the topography of the Forest resembles the area around Cotchford, where the family Milna spent the weekend.

Each of the characters has a memorable character and charm, and the ending of the book “The House on the Edge of Pooh” is achingly lyrical. The wild success of the Winnie the Pooh books (they were translated into twelve languages ​​and sold about fifteen million copies) eclipsed everything else Milne wrote: the detective novel The Mystery of the Red House (1922), the novels Two (1931) and Chloe Marr (1946), essays, plays and autobiographical book It's Too Late (1939).

In 1966, Walt Disney released the first animated film based on Milne's book, Winnie the Pooh. This film, just under half an hour long, tells the adventures of a boy named Christopher Robin and his favorite toy bear, Winnie the Pooh, and has been seen in films and on television by millions of children. By bringing Milne's characters to life through animation, Disney and his team of artists sought to preserve the style of Ernst Shepard's original drawings, which were as beloved as the stories themselves. The film was directed by Wolfgang Reiterman, who also directed Disney's The Sword in the Stone, The Jungle Book, Robin Hood and The Aristocats.

Famous Hollywood actor Sterling Holloway voiced the role of Winnie the Pooh, and Sebastian Cabot read the text behind the scenes. The director's ten-year-old son, Bruce Reiterman, spoke for Christopher Robin. Composers Richard and Robert Sherman, who won an Oscar for their score for Mary Poppins, wrote five songs for the Pooh film. All this was done for one animated film lasting 26 minutes. Without a doubt, Winnie the Pooh and the Bee Tree has achieved widespread acclaim only because a treasure of a worldwide children's classic has been transferred with the utmost care into another form. In subsequent years, several animated sequels (including television) were released.

In 1969-1972 in the USSR, the Soyuzmultfilm film studio released three cartoons directed by Fyodor Khitruk, “Winnie the Pooh”, “Winnie the Pooh Comes to Visit” and “Winnie the Pooh and the Day of Worries”, which won the love of the children's audience of the Soviet Union.

Alan Alexander Milne is a prose writer, poet, playwright, classic of English literature of the twentieth century, author of the famous “Winnie the Pooh”.

Milne was born in the London district of Kilburn on January 18, 1882. Scots by origin, Alan Alexander Milne spent his childhood in London, where his father John Vine Milne owned a small private school. His early education was largely determined by the influence of his youth teacher H.G. Wells - much later Milne wrote about Wells as "a great writer and a great friend." He continued his education at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge. He subsequently donated the original handwritten copy of his book “Winnie the Pooh” and “The House on Pooh Edge” to the College Library. As a student at Cambridge, where he studied mathematics from 1900 to 1903, he wrote notes for the student newspaper Grant, and his first literary efforts were published in the humorous magazine Punch. At the age of 24, Milne began working for Punch as an assistant editor until the outbreak of the First World War, in which he took part.

In 1913 Alan Milne married Dorothy Daphne de Selincote and from this marriage one son was born, Christopher Robin Milne. A born pacifist, Milne was drafted into the Royal Army and served in France. The war made a strong impression on the young writer. She became the reason why Milne, who was not particularly interested in politics, thought about what was happening in the world. His famous anti-war work, An Honorable Peace, was published in 1934. The book found a huge response in the interwar times, and in 1924 Maffin published Milne's famous When We Were Young stories, some of which had previously appeared in Punch and were well known to regular readers of the magazine.

In 1926, the first version of Sawdust Bear (in English - “bear with very small brains”) “Winnie the Pooh” appeared. The idea of ​​writing this book was suggested to Milne by his wife and little Christopher. The history of the creation of the fairy tale is full of mysteries and contradictions, but the most important thing is that it has become one of the most popular children's books. The second part of the stories “Now there are six of us” appeared in 1927 and, finally, the final part of the book “The House on the Pooh Edge” was published in 1928. It seemed to Milne that he had written something like a well-selling detective story, because his book immediately earned two and a half thousand pounds. Even after the dizzying success of Winnie the Pooh, Milne remained in doubt about his literary talent. He wrote: “All I wanted was to run away from this fame, as I used to want to run away from Punch, as I always wanted to run away... However...”
In 1922, he did write a detective novel, The Mystery of the Red House, which was published only in 1939, along with 25 other plays, short stories and Milne's autobiography, Too Late. Milne always acknowledged and repeatedly gratefully emphasized the decisive role of his wife Dorothy and his son Christopher in the writing and the very fact of the appearance of Winnie the Pooh. Books about Pooh Bear have been translated into 25 languages ​​and have taken their place in the hearts and on the shelves of millions of readers.

The first chapter of Pooh, "in which we first meet Winnie the Pooh and the bees", was first published in a London evening newspaper on December 24, 1925, and broadcast on BBC radio on Christmas Day by Donald Calfrop. The irony is that Milne was convinced that he wrote neither children's prose nor children's poetry. He spoke to the child inside each of us. He never read his Pooh stories to his son, preferring to raise Christopher on the works of his favorite writer, Wodehouse. Wodehouse subsequently returned the compliment to Milne, saying that "Milne is his favorite children's writer."
Wodehouse's books continued to live in Milne's house after his death. Christopher Robin read these books to his daughter Claire, whose bookshelves in her room were literally bursting with books by this writer. Christopher wrote to his friend Peter (an actor): “My father understood nothing about the specifics of the book market, knew nothing about the specifics of sales, he never wrote books for children. He knew about me, he knew about himself and about the Garrick Club - and he simply did not pay attention to everything else... Except, perhaps, life itself.” Christopher Robin first read the poems and stories about Winnie the Pooh 60 years after they first appeared, when he heard Peter's recordings on record.
The adventures of Winnie the Bear are loved by both adults and children. A 1996 sociological survey conducted by English radio showed that this book took 17th place in the list of the most striking and significant works published in the twentieth century. Worldwide sales of Winnie the Pooh from 1924 to 1956 exceeded 7 million. As you know, when sales exceed a million, publishers stop counting them.
In 1960, Winnie the Pooh was brilliantly translated into Russian by Boris Zakhoder. Anyone who speaks Russian and English can confirm that the translation was done with exquisite precision and ingenious ingenuity. In general, Vinnie has been translated into all European and almost all world languages.
In addition to the world famous Winnie the Pooh, Alan Milne is known as a playwright and short story writer. His plays were successfully performed on the professional stage in London, but are now staged mainly in amateur theaters, although they still attract full houses and arouse the interest of the public and the press.
In 1952 Milne became seriously ill. He had to undergo severe brain surgery. The operation was a success and Milne returned to his home in Sussex, where he spent the rest of his life reading. After a long illness, he died on January 31, 1956.
Shortly after the release of Winnie the Pooh, Milne wrote in The Nation: “I think that each of us secretly dreams of immortality... In the sense that his name will outlive the body and will live in this world, despite the fact that he himself a person has passed on to another world.” When Milne died, no one doubted that he had discovered the secret of immortality. And this is not 15 minutes of fame, this is real immortality, which, contrary to his own expectations, was brought to him not by plays and short stories, but by a little bear cub with sawdust in his head. In 1996, Milne's beloved teddy bear was sold in London at an auction organized by the house of Bonham to an unknown buyer for £4,600.

Note:
The third photo is the famous photograph by Howard Coster, which depicts Alan Milne with his son Christopher Robin (who became the prototype for Christopher Robin from the Pooh stories) and Edward the bear (who inspired Milne to create Winnie the Pooh). Sepia, matte print, 1926. The original is kept in the National Portrait Gallery in London.

Works

Milne was well known as Punch's feuilletonist, and collections of his essays were regularly republished. Milne's plays were popular and critical successes, according to E. Twight (English)Russian, for a short time Milne was "one of the most successful, prolific and well-known playwrights in England". However, the success of his children's books eclipsed all other achievements, and, much to Milne's own displeasure, he began to be considered a children's writer. According to P. Connolly Paula T. Connolly), Milne's works for children turned out to be similar to Frankenstein - the creation took possession of the creator: the public demanded new books in this genre, and critics considered Milne's other works in the context of his children's books. When the writer returned to novels in the 1930s and 1940s, readers ignored him, and critics used the reference to children's books to jab him. Milne himself complained that critics who begin a review with a mention of Winnie the Pooh inevitably criticize new works, which they had an attitude towards before reading. By the end of his life, Milne's children's books had sold 7 million copies, and his books for adults were no longer in print.

Winnie the Pooh

• Winnie the Pooh (English) Winnie-the-Pooh)
• House on Poohovaya Edge The House at Pooh Corner)

Translated into Russian - without two chapters of the original - under the general title “Winnie the Pooh and all-all-all” by Boris Zakhoder.

The prototype of the book's hero was a girl bear named Winnipeg from Canada, bought in 1914 from a Canadian hunter for $20 and rescued by veterinarians. The animal was sent to the London Zoo, where a boy named Christopher Robin met him. He was the son of the writer Alan Alexander Milne.[[K:Wikipedia:Articles without sources (country: Lua error: callParserFunction: function "#property" was not found. )]][[K:Wikipedia:Articles without sources (country: Lua error: callParserFunction: function "#property" was not found. )]] [ ]

Fairy tales

• Prince Rabbit
• An ordinary fairy tale
• Once upon a time...
• The Ballad of the Royal Sandwich

Stories

• Truth is in wine (In vino veritas)
• Christmas story
• Amazing story
• Mr. Findlater's Dreams
• Christmas grandfather
• Before the flood
• Exactly at eleven
• Portrait of Lydia
• The Rise and Fall of Mortimer Scrivens
• Midsummer (June 24)
• A word about autumn
• I don't like blackmailers
• Stories of happy destinies

Novels

• Lovers in London Lovers in London, 1905)
• Once upon a time, a long time ago... Once on a Time, 1917)
• Mister Pym Mr. Pim, 1921)
• The Mystery of the Red House The Red House Mystery, 1922)
• Two (English) Two People, 1931)
• A very short-lived sensation Four Days" Wonder, 1933)
• Too late (English) It's Too Late Now: The Autobiography of a Writer , 1939)
• Chloe Marr (ur. Chloe Marr, 1946)

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Notes

Literature

• Connolly, Paula T. Winnie-The-Pooh and the House at Pooh Corner: Recovering Arcadia. - Twayne Publishers, 1994. - ISBN 0-8057-8810-7.

Links

• in the library of Maxim Moshkov

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A passage characterizing Milne, Alan Alexander

It was a gray cloudy day outside. Low lead clouds, swollen with water, barely dragged themselves across the sky, threatening at any moment to burst into a “waterfall” downpour. The room was stuffy, I didn’t want to do anything, just lie there, staring at “nowhere” and not think about anything... But the fact is that I never knew how not to think, even when I honestly tried to relax or rest. So I sat in my dad’s favorite chair and tried to drive away my “dreary” mood by reading one of my favorite “positive” books.
After some time, I felt someone else’s presence and mentally prepared to greet the new “guest”... But instead of the usual soft breeze, I was almost glued to the back of the chair, and my book was thrown to the floor. I was very surprised by such an unexpected violent manifestation of feelings, but decided to wait and see what would happen next. A “disheveled” man appeared in the room, who, without saying hello or identifying himself (which everyone else usually did), immediately demanded that I “immediately go with him” because he “urgently needs me”... He was so nervous and “boiling” that it almost made me laugh. There was no smell of sadness or pain, as happened with the others. I tried to pull myself together to look as serious as possible and calmly asked:
- Why do you think that I will go somewhere with you?
- Don’t you understand anything? I'm dead!!! – his voice screamed in my brain.
“Well, why I don’t understand, I know perfectly well where you’re coming from, but that doesn’t mean at all that you have the right to be rude to me,” I answered calmly. “As I understand it, it’s you who need help, not me, so it would be better if you try to be a little more polite.”
My words gave the man the impression of an exploding grenade... It seemed that he himself would immediately explode. I thought that during his life he must have been a very spoiled person by fate or simply had a completely creepy character.
– You have no right to refuse me! Nobody can hear me anymore!!! – he yelled again.
The books in the room spun like a whirlwind and fell together on the floor. It seemed as if a typhoon was raging inside this strange man. But then I also became indignant and slowly said:
“If you don’t calm down right now, I’ll leave the contact, and you can continue to rebel alone if it gives you so much pleasure.”
The man was clearly surprised, but “cooled down” a little. It seemed that he was not used to not being obeyed immediately as soon as he “expressed” any of his desires. I never liked people of this type - neither then nor when I became an adult. I have always been outraged by rudeness, even if, as in in this case, it came from the dead...
My violent guest seemed to calm down and asked in a more normal voice if I wanted to help him? I said yes, if he promises to behave normally. Then he said that he absolutely needed to talk to his wife, and that he would not leave (from the earth) until he could “get through” to her. I naively thought that this was one of those options when the husband loved his wife very much (despite how wild it looked to him) and decided to help, even if I didn’t like him very much. We agreed that he would return to me tomorrow when I was not at home and I would try to do everything I could for him.