Margarita Vladimirovna Rokotova writing as Al Altaev was a Russian children's writer and memoirist. All her life she was engaged only in literary and editorial activity.
Background
Margarita Vladimirovna Rokotova was born on November 22, 1872 in Kiev, Ukraine. She was the daughter of V.D. Rokotov (descendant of the painter F.S. Rokotov) – founder of the 1st Kiev National Theater, publisher of the newspaper "Kievsky Vestnik" ("Kiev Bulletin"), and A.N. Tolstaya; a close friend of the family is the artist A. A. Agin (godfather of Margarita Vladimirovna).
Actors, artists, musicians visited parents’ houses in Kiev (early 70s) and Novocherkassk (1875-1885). Father and family wandered around Russia, lived in Tsaritsyn (modern Volgograd), Saint Petersburg and Pskov.
Education
Margarita Vladimirovna graduated from gymnasium in Novocherkassk (1885), after that she studied in Saint Petersburg at the Drawing School and at the Frebel Teacher Training Courses.
Career
In 1889 Margarita Vladimirovna began a writing career after initially training as an artist. In the 90s through students of the Mining Institute, she established a connection with the revolutionary underground, participated in demonstrations; witnessing the bloody events of January 9, 1905, compiled their chronicle and sent it to foreign newspapers. Rokotova's flat in St. Petersburg was the publishing house of the left wing student newspaper Young Russia. She was drafted in to help with two Bolshevik newspapers after the October revolution at the Smolny Institute. As a result, she met many of the leading revolutionists like Lenin.
First appeared in print in 1889 in the journal "Vsemirnaya Illyustratsiya" ("World Illustration") with the story "New Year’s Eve" (Early advice was from the poet Yakov Polonsky and she quickly adopted a male sounding name, Al Altaev. The name was taken from one of Polonsky's short stories). She devoted first books to children. The genre of fictionalized biography brought her success.
Margarita Vladimirovna is the author of about 50 biographies of cultural and art workers, religious teachers, revolutionaries. Many of the biographies were included in the Altayev collection "Lights of Truth. Essays and pictures from the life of great people" (1909). Subsequently, co-authored with her daughter, they published two collections: "The childhood of famous people" (part 1, Writers, artists, musicians and artists (1919); part 2, "Friends of freedom. Scientists. Religious teachers", (1918)).
After the October Revolution, Margarita Vladimirovna combined literary activity with editorial work in newspapers and magazines, in the "ZIF" ("Zemlya i Fabrika" – "Ground and Factory") publishing house.
Margarita Vladimirovna died in 1959 in Moscow, ending a 70-year literary career. She had written about 200 books but many were forgotten. Many of her books were biographies of famous people of history or historical novels for children. She had also written a good number of stories that she was able to compile into books.
Margarita Vladimirovna married a forestry worker named Iamshchikov, who burnt her stories intended for magazines. Rokotova left her husband with her passport but she took their daughter. She supported herself for six years by copying documents whilst she attended police stations to explain her lack of documentation.
