French Lessons

The touching autobiographical story by Valentin Rasputin "French Lessons" is written from the perspective of an eleven-year-old boy. At the same age, in the same year of 1948, the future writer left his village, the only one from there, to continue his studies in the district center, also starving among strangers, but he studied well, as he was both clever and diligent. The French language teacher, both in the story and in the writer's life, had the same name — Lydia Mikhailovna…

"I needed to return to people the kindness they once showed me," Valentin Rasputin explained the emergence of "French Lessons." — "I wrote this story in the hope that the lessons I was taught at the time would resonate with both young and adult readers."

And so it happened. First published in 1973 in the Irkutsk youth newspaper, in an issue dedicated to the memory of Alexander Vampilov, the story "French Lessons" has been read by millions of children and adults, and it has become part of the golden fund of Russian literature. In 1981, artist Vladimir Galdiaev created incredibly resonant illustrations for the text, which are reproduced in this edition.