Zoologist, naturalist writer and just an amazing person - Maxim Dmitrievich Zverev. He was born back in the 19th century in tsarist Russia, survived the October Revolution, the formation of the USSR and the Great Patriotic War, and then the post-war heyday, the extinction and collapse of the Soviet Union. Zverev lived most of his life in Kazakhstan, which at the time of the death of Maxim Dmitrievich at the age of 99 became an independent state.
Childhood, youth and military service
Maxim Dmitrievich Zverev was born in Altai, near the city of Barnaul on October 29, 1896. His father, Dmitry Ivanovich Zverev, was a rather famous statistician who was exiled to the Altai Territory for participating in the assassination attempt against Emperor Alexander III. Mother Zvereva Maria Fedorovna worked as a medical assistant. Dmitry Ivanovich was friends with the famous writer Maxim Gorky, in whose honor his parents named their only son. Father devoted a lot of time to classes with little Maxim: he walked with him through the surrounding fields and forests, took fishing or hunting with him, went camping with nightly gatherings around the fire and told his son a lot of interesting things.
In Barnaul, Zverev studied at a real school, which he graduated in 1916, and the next year he left for Moscow to continue his education at the Polytechnic Institute. It was a turbulent time in the life of our country - war, revolution, the demolition of the old and the formation of a new way of life. Many students were mobilized to expedite military affairs and further send to the front. So Maxim Zverev ended up at the Alekseevsky Military School, from which he graduated in late 1917 with the rank of ensign. And immediately he was appointed to the post of commandant of the railway station of the city of Barnaul, and then to the city of Tomsk as an assistant commandant of the station.
In 1919, Zverev made a decisive choice in favor of the Red Army, and he was immediately appointed to the post of military dispatcher of the entire Tomsk railway junction. It was a very difficult and responsible work: a mass of people rode along the railway - soldiers from the front, wounded, refugees, very often without tickets and documents. There were catastrophically shortage of wagons and steam locomotives, and Zverev had to stay awake for days to cope with the reception and sending of crowded trains.
Education and career
In the fall of 1920, Zverev was demobilized, and on September 1, he, along with a group of other soldiers, was enrolled in the first year of Tomsk University. The young man studied at the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics, but the department was called "natural", so in 1924 he completed higher education and received the profession of a zoologist. Even in the years of study - at the 3rd year - Zverev published his first scientific work, "Key to Siberian birds of prey." And in his last year at the university, Maxim Dmitrievich married his classmate Olga.
After graduation, Zverev came to work at the Siberian Institute for Plant Protection as head of the department of vertebrate animals. He became the founder of such sciences as agricultural zoology and theriology - the science of mammals that damage agriculture. In Novosibirsk, Zverev created a zoo based on the urban agrobiostation and led his scientific work. Here he organized the first station for young naturalists, which later - in 1937 - will be transformed into the West Siberian regional children's technical and agricultural station. Many youngsters trained by Zverev later became prominent biologists.
In the early 1930s, a wave of repression began, and the former ensign of the tsarist army Maxim Zverev inevitably awaited arrest. But there was a kind person - the head of Zverev Altaytsev, who for a long time convinced the OGPU leadership of the need for Maxim Dmitrievich to continue his scientific and practical work, since he is a unique specialist in this field of zoology, and all the activities of the zoo will stop without him. The OGPU made concessions: on January 20, 1933, Zverev was arrested, convicted and sentenced to 10 years of the Gulag, but he was allowed to live at home with his family and continue to work in the zoo; the convict had to give his salary to the state. On January 29, 1936 Zverev was released ahead of schedule, and in 1958 he was completely rehabilitated due to the lack of corpus delicti.
Relocation to Kazakhstan
In 1937, a new threat of arrest loomed over Zverev, and then he urgently left for Moscow, and from there he received a referral to Kazakhstan to build and organize the work of the Alma-Ata Zoo. Murzakhan Tolebaev, the first director of this zoo, became Zverev’s colleague and ally. Maxim Dmitrievich developed the layout of the territory and the placement of enclosures. The zoo opened on November 7, 1937 for the holiday of the October Revolution.
In Alma-Ata, the scientist settled directly on the territory of the zoo, in a house on the shore of a bird's pond.
Zverev was so fascinated by the beauty of the local nature that he decided to stay in Kazakhstan for life. Soon his wife and mother moved to him from Novosibirsk, later children were born. In 1944, the family moved to a new house - on Grushevaya street. This "family nest" Zverev exists to this day - his descendants live there. After the death of a scientist in 1996, Grushevaya Street was renamed Maxim Zverev Street. And in the house in the zoo on the banks of the pond, where Zverev lived for 7 years, a vivarium was created.
During the Great Patriotic War, Maxim Dmitrievich was mobilized as a military dispatcher of the East Siberian Railway, then sent to the commandant of the Nizhne-Udinsk station. But Zverev did not serve long: at the end of 1942 he, as a leading specialist in zoology, was called from the front back to Alma-Ata, where serious problems began in the zoo due to lack of food and lack of personnel.
In the biography of the scientist and writer, the heyday began. He headed the zoo, as well as the Alma-Ata Nature Reserve, became a teacher at the Kazakh State University, and continued to do science. One of the main activities of Zverev was the protection of nature and the environment. He devoted a huge number of articles, scientific papers, articles in newspapers and magazines, literary stories to this topic, and headed the commission for the protection of nature under the Union of Writers of Kazakhstan. Over 10 years, under the guidance of Zverev, an almanac "Face of the Earth" was published. Maxim Dmitriyevich stopped cutting down the Tien Shan spruce, halted the construction of a dam on Lake Balkhash, which would lead to the transformation of its eastern part into a salty desert.
The main emphasis Zverev did on work with children. He believed that the love of nature should be brought up from infancy. To this end, he created the school of young naturalists (in Almaty opened a small Yunnat Academy in 1943), and also wrote a large number of children's stories about nature. In 1952, Maxim Dmitrievich Zverev completed his scientific career and completely devoted himself to literary creation.
Literary work
The first story of Zverev, “Hunting the Wolves, ” was published in the newspaper Altai Krai back in 1917, when the author graduated from a military school. It narrated about hunting trips with his father. Further, more and more new stories regularly appeared from under Zverev’s pen - as a writer he was incredibly prolific. In 1922 he wrote the story "White Maral", which in 1929 was published in Leningrad and approved by the famous naturalist writer Vitaly Bianchi.
Over the years of his literary work, Maxim Zverev has written over 150 children's stories, short stories, and fairy tales. He was a very organized and able-bodied person. In his office, a huge file cabinet was collected, containing more than ten thousand cards with stories recorded from oral stories of hunters, foresters, livestock specialists during Zverev’s numerous trips around the country. Many of these records became the basis of the plot of the writer's works. Zverev’s children's books, like his scientific works, were published throughout the Soviet Union (CIS), as well as abroad - in Germany, France, Spain, Great Britain, Cuba, etc.
