Gennady Fyodorovich Shpalikov (6 September 1937 – 1 November 1974) was a prominent Soviet Russian poet, screenwriter and film director. Born in the town of Segezha, Karelian ASSR into a Russian family of military background. His father Fyodor Grigorievich Shpalikov came from peasants of the Orenburg Governorate; he finished the Kuibyshev Military Engineering Academy in Moscow and was assigned to build a pulp and paper enterprise in Segezha. In 1939 his family returned to Moscow. With the start of the Great Patriotic War they were evacuated to the Kirghiz SSR along with the Academy and remained there until 1943. Fyodor Shpalikov was sent to the front line; he received an Order of the Red Star in 1944 and was declared missing in action in Western Poland in 1945. Gennady was raised by his mother Ludmila Nikiforovna Perevertkina, also from peasants of the Voronezh Governorate. Her brother was an acclaimed Soviet colonel general Semyon Perevertkin who led the 79th Rifle Corps of the 3rd Shock Army during the fight for Reichstag and later served as a Deputy Director of the Ministry of Internal Affairs between 1956 and 1960. In 1947 Shpalikov himself was sent to study in the Kiev's military cadet school which he finished in 1955. Same year he published his first poems. He then enrolled to the Moscow Military Commanders Training School, but was discharged after receiving a meniscusinjury during the training in 1956. Shpalikov then successfully applied to the screenwriting faculty of VGIK which he finished in 1961. During the studies he met Andrei Tarkovsky  and Andrei Konchalovsky who became his close friends. In 1959 he married Natalya Ryazantzeva, another aspiring screenwriter (Wings, Long Farewells, The Voice), but they divorced in just three years.

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