About the book: 1959 / "The First Year" is the first book of the young Rostov prose writer Boris Ignatievich Zaitsev. He was born in 1921 in Rostov-on-Don in the family of a postal worker employee. He has been interested in fiction since childhood, and as a seventeen-year-old boy he timidly took up the pen. School literature teacher S. E. Kazakov, a lover and connoisseur of the literary word, had long been eyeing the “mustacheless writer,” as he jokingly called Boris Zaitsev, and quietly drew him in to the work of the handwritten literary magazine “Our Creativity.” After graduating from school in the terrible year of 1941, Komsomol member Zaitsev strove to go to the front. An attempt to get into the active army ended in failure: he was diagnosed with an eye disease. However, B. Zaitsev found a way to participate in the struggle of the Soviet people against the Nazi invaders. He writes and publishes poems in newspapers glorifying the exploits of the heroic defenders of the Motherland at the front and in the rear. After graduating from Rostov State University in 1946, B. Zaitsev taught literature and Russian language in secondary schools in the village of Pavlovka and the city of Novoshakhtinsk, Rostov region. The author reproduced this period of life in the story “The First Year».