A long time ago I worked in the Far Eastern whaling firm, which was headed by Andrei Vassilievich Vronsky, a quite remarkable person in many ways.
   When a young man, Vronsky and his school-mate and friend Ivan Alexandrovich Mann conceived the idea of performing a global cruise on a sailing yacht. The two friends found an old yacht, mapped out their route, studied the sailing directions, in fact, planned their voyage down to the smallest detail. However, for a number of reasons, the cruise did not materialise. The yacht was never launched and rotted on shore, the maps and sailing directions were eventually lost, but Vronsky, now a mature sailor, would not relinquish his dreams about adventures which had never come to pass.
   Sometimes of an evening, Andrei Vronsky would share those dreams with his friends presenting them as amusing yarns, in which accurate knowledge of seamanship rubbed shoulders with outrageous invention.
   Vronsky would tell his cock-and-bull stories with a perfectly straight face, speaking ponderously, his voice and gestures full of importance. His speech was liberally garnished with nautical terms, and interspersed with phrases like "Let me tell you" and "Though I say it myself. He invariably addressed his listeners as "young man".
   During the telling of his fibs, Vronsky changed amazingly in manner, voice timbre and even outer appearance. Before us was an old salt, a seasoned captain sharing his rich sailing experiences with trustful young listeners and unable to resist the temptation to occasionally embroider the truth.
   Several years later, when I was already in Moscow and working with the wonderful writer Boris Zhitkov on a very tricky book, I remembered those yarns of Vronsky's. One night, during a short rest from our labours, I told him a few of them. Boris Stepanovich was greatly amused. Then his face grew serious.
   "I say, why don't you write a story about an old sea captain who adorns his accounts of his seafaring adventures with an occasional fib?"
   The word of Zhitkov, my mentor in literature, carried a lot of weight. I began to ponder the idea. It was then, on December 22, 1934, at four o'clock in the morning (we had been working through the night) that sea captain Christopher Wrungel was born.
   To be sure, on that day I did not yet know the name of my future hero, nor how he would look, in what ship he would sail and what crew would be under his command. All I knew was that the story would be based on Vronsky's yarns about his imaginary global cruise.
   When I left Zhitkov's place in the morning, my mind was already hard at work on my future story. I was trying to visualize my captain, to conceive a life-like portrait of him.
   I began with the name. Now, the name Vronsky begins with the same letters as the Russian verb meaning "to lie". Naturally I could not give my hero the name of a well-known and respected person. But it would be a good idea to find a name containing the same root.
   I thought of other famous liars in literature and of course remembered Munchausen. The name itself was of no help whatever, but Munchausen's title-baron-reminded me of yet another baron-Ferdinand Wrangel, a distinguished sailor whose name was given to a large island in Eastern Arctic. His name easily rendered itself to a certain manipulation, which was very effective in Russian indeed. By substituting the letter "a" for "u" in his name I obtained Wrungel, wrun meaning "liar" in Russian. Now my hero had a family name, and to call him Christopher, after one of the world's most famous explorers, was the most natural thing to do.
   I fashioned the second character of the story, WrungeFs first mate, after Vronsky's friend Mann, as he portrayed him in his yarns-a hulking big chap of kindly disposition, painstakingly diligent but rather dull-witted. I wasted no time on inventing a name for him, but merely translated his name Mann, meaning "man", from German into French-1'homme. Of course I simplified the spelling to Lom. When I needed a third member of the crew, I copied him from a sailor I had known who was actually called Fooks. He had been with the Soviet Union's first whaling flotilla on its passage from Leningrad to the Far East. He was little in stature, wore a beard, was something of a cheat and was eternally landing in various fixes. His mates loved to poke fun at him.
   So the crew had been picked. It was time to launch the yacht on its voyage. I sat down at my desk, pen in hand. The work proceeded at a good pace, and six months later I had roughly about a quarter of the book ready. But I had run out of Vronsky's yarns. This did not dismay me however. Ever since that day when I stepped on the deck of a fishing trawler, a young landlubber, I had kept a diary. It contained records of quite a few funny incidents I witnessed, as well as amusing yarns I heard from my comrades. More important, as I re-read my diaries, I lived anew, as it were, through my experiences on various ships and at various longitudes and latitudes. Details came to my mind which one simply cannot invent without having seen them with one's own eyes. These details gave my fibs the ring of truth and this is very important for a book consisting of a pack of lies. One must lie persuasively.
   When I had exhausted my diaries, I made a mental trip into my childhood. There too, I found a lot of amusing incidents. I remembered my old friends, myself, and this helped me to look at the events in my books through the eyes of a child, so to speak.
   I also found the idea for the boat's name in my childhood recollections. One day my father took me for a jaunt on a pleasure boat called Daryal. This is the name of a famous canyon in North Caucasus. During the mooring the ship struck its stem against the landing stage, and the last letter was knocked off its name making it "Darya", a very common woman's name in Russia. This caused a lot of hilarity on the landing stage, and I decided to borrow this single device for my book. So my yacht is originally christened Courage and then becomes Rage.
   Finally the manuscript was completed and I offered it to the editors of a children's magazine Pioneer. The manuscript was accepted but on a condition which was very disappointing for me. They decided to print the story in the shape of captions to large pictures, each almost the size of an entire page.
   I could not imagine how I was going to reduce an episode to 15 lines of print and also fit in the description of characters and their relationships, the attending circumstances, and, moreover, to tie up one episode with the next. But I was so eager to see my story in print that I agreed to try and abridge the manuscript.
   Today, when I re-read The Adventures of Captain Wrungel it seems to me that it would not be all that hard to select the most necessary words and phrases. But then, when I sat down to the job of abridging the book, it was an unending battle for every word, sometimes for a single letter. Seeking out the tersest phrases, I would sweat for hours crossing out words, writing in others, then crossing out these as well. Words put up a desperate resistance, and I was in a state bordering on despair. I thought I would never cope with this task, and if, at the end of the day, I had succeeded in getting rid of two or three lines without detriment to the story, I thought I had achieved a lot.
   When, as the result of this back-breaking toil, I reduced the first twenty-five pages to five, I showed my work to Zhitkov. He approved the result, and I then believed in myself and managed to convince the editors that I would be able to do the job. So The Adventures of Captain Wrungel was included in the magazine's plan for 1937. Now was the time to select the artist and commission the illustrations.
   Both the editors and myself were eager to have the story illustrated by the artist Konstantin Rotov, who was then at the peak of his fame, painting posters, illustrating books and working on an illustrated magazine. He accepted the commission in principle, but, being swamped with work, just could not find half an hour for a short meeting, to say nothing of a thorough discussion of the future book. Both my editor and myself phoned him times without number, and every time Rotov said: "Call me in a couple of weeks. Perhaps I'll be less busy then." Two weeks would pass, and it would be the same story all over again. Time passed, deadlines were within sight. Then I employed a stratagem. I cornered Rotov in the canteen of the publishing house, sat down at his desk, and in between sausages and coffee told him the plot of the story.
   At first he refused to listen, then became interested, but it all ended with the same words about "calling in a couple of weeks". However, taking leave of me, he wrote down my telephone number. I came home in a foul mood. It looked as though Rotov was not to be counted on, and it was too late to seek another artist. Suddenly the telephone rang. It was Rotov inviting me to come over to discuss the illustrations.
   I still remember that meeting down to the minutest detail. There was a very good radio set in Rotov's little studio, heaped with studies and ready work, which Rotov kept on all the time. He liked to have music playing while he worked, and our entire conversation was conducted against the background of subdued music.
   Rotov sat, pencil in hand, asking me searchingly about the design of a yacht and its handling. I told him all I could think of about my characters, their appearance, age, background, habits, preferences, etc. Rotov drew on small sheets of vellum, erasing and drawing again, and gradually I saw my heroes emerging on those sheets, with faces, arms, legs, clothes, characteristic postures.
   Towards the end of that session, which lasted several hours, I saw my yacht Rage and her crew such as they were seen, two months later, by thousands of young readers. I also saw that I had been quite right having set my heart on Rotov as the illustrator.
Since his time many artists in the Soviet Union and abroad illustrated the book, but some of Rotov's initial ideas survived in all of them. For this edition the artist Georgy Yudin made new coloured illustrations, executed in a very different manner, and yet some of Rotov's graphic finds are to be found here. For example, the scene depicting the "penguin lift" is almost a replica of Rotov's composition. "Wrungel" was published by the magazine serially, six episodes in every issue. Rotov and I worked together for a whole year and became good friends. A brilliant and knowledgeable man, Rotov was endowed with infectious good spirits and a sharp eye for the comical. He had a knack for finding small, apparently insignificant details, which enhanced not only the comical effect of his pictures but also their veracity.
   My association with him taught me to pay attention to details, and sometimes I actually borrowed Rotov's finds and incorporated them into the story.
   Here is one instance:
   After discussing the "English" chapter and agreeing about everything, we went our different ways: he - to a holiday home to draw the illustrations, and I - to the North on business.
  When I came back, the issue had already been signed for the press. As I looked through the signed sheets, my attention was drawn to a picture in which Wrungel and his crew were knocking out corks from soda-water bottles. I was struck by a new detail Rotov had found since: seagulls hit by the corks dropping into the sea. The excellent detail simply asked to be included in the text, but it was too late. Anyway, there was no space for an extra sentence. But when, two years later, the story was brought out in book form, the sentence about seagulls was included in the chapter. There were many more instances like this.
   That year was a happy one for me. We laughed a lot together, Rotov and I, rejoicing in our finds and resenting the strict deadlines. We never seemed to have enough time.
   The reaction of the reading public was fervent and contradictory. The magazine was inundated with letters from the young readers, not always free of spelling mistakes, but invariably sincere and enthusiastic. As often as not the letters were actually addressed to Captain Wrungel.
However, there were a different sort of letters, too, usually from adults. Their authors would protest, for example, against Wrungel's eternal pipe, which was a bad example for the children, against Lom's love of drink, and against the erroneous information in geography, physic's and other subjects which the author dished out to the children.
   These attacks could not but affect the editors. On their insistence, Fooks was transformed from a cardsharp into a master of card tricks, which, however, had little effect on his character and behaviour. There were more telling losses as well. The Japanese chapter caused such misgivings to the editors that they decided to discontinue the publication of the story. The November issue of the magazine came out minus "Wrungel". But the stream of indignant letters from children, who demanded to be told about the fates of the intrepid captain, made the editors change their minds and publish the end of the story in the December issue.
   Be it as it may, lopped up and abridged but "Wrungel" saw the light of day. Now I got the commission of preparing the story for publication in book form.
   I imagined the restoration of the text which had remained outside the captions would be easy pie. I could not be more wrong. Extreme brevity had become a characteristic feature of the book's style, and any attempt to mechanically restore the omitted comments, dialogues, nature descriptions, etc., as they were in the initial variant resulted in patchwork effect. Insertions stuck out a mile and seemed to belong to the pen of a different author.
   So I had to rewrite the story practically all but anew. This work took up a whole year. Rotov meantime designed a beautiful cover, a coloured inset and a head-piece. The book was going to be very attractive indeed.
   The editor of the first book publication gave me a free hand. We restored the chapter which had been omitted in the magazine variant, and corrected all the changes in the text which I considered undesirable. The book came out in the spring of 1939 in the printing of 25 thousand copies.
   Rotov and I, as well as all of WrungeFs friends, and he had made quite a few friends by that time, awaited the verdict of the critics. We did not have to wait long. The July issue of an influential magazine carried two critical reviews of The Adventures of Captain Wrungel at once. The author of one of them promised the book a long and happy life, the author of the other denied it the right to existence in book form, classified its publication as a major calamity and predicted Wrungel an inglorious demise and speedy oblivion.
   In the years that followed many came to think that the second reviewer was more clairvoyant. The book, though not forgotten, was not reprinted. It seemed Wrungel was really dead for the readers. But no, he lived on in the hopes of his faithful friends, who believed that he would yet set sail and reach the harbour of library shelves.
   And their faith was justified. Exactly twenty years after the first publication Konstantin Rotov designed a new cover for The Adventures of Captain Wrungel, and another six months later 200 thousand copies of the book appeared in bookshops.
   The short foreword to the 1958 edition said the book had been considerably altered. It is not true. The story remained essentially as it was, with only the addition of Wrungel's dissertations on time and seafaring and several minor alterations necessitated by the enormous changes which had occurred in the world in the intervening twenty years.
   So, having weathered all vicissitudes, both predicted and unpredicted, Captain Wrungel sailed on with fair wind. The book's printing in Russian has topped the one millionth mark. It came out in translation in many of the Soviet Union's national republics and abroad - in Bulgaria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, India, Japan and many other countries. Now it is being issued in English. I hope that English children, too, will be delighted with the preposterous fibs of the kindly old captain, and that I will have not laboured on the book in vain.