In his autobiography, the Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa tells of an enormous influence that books by Alexandre Dumas had on him as an adolescent and a budding writer. As typical Soviet kids from families of intelligentsia, N and I also adored these books as kids. It is strange and beautiful to imagine that they were so crucial both to Llosa in the 1950s Peru and to me in the 1980s USSR. Of course, I didn’t become one of the world’s greatest writers like Llosa but my life was enriched by Dumas’s books nonetheless.
Long before the Internet or even cinema, kids all over the world shared the experience of traveling to the adventure-filled world of these books. And nobody considered them to be “young adult” or any crap like that. They were simply great books.
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