Victor Vladimirovich Golyavkin was born on August, 31st, 1929 in Baku. His father Vladimir Sergeyevich worked as a music teacher, so there was always piano music in the house, and Victor and his two younger brothers learned to play music.

But once Victor drew caricatures of guests, who used to come to play music with the family. Then the father presented the son with a book on painting and artists. Victor read all the books on fine arts, whichever he managed to find and was all the time drawing.

Victor was only 12 years old when the Great Patriotic War broke out. His father at once left to the front-line and Victor became the senior man in the family. He drew caricatures on Hitler and fascists.

Later Victor left for Samarkand and entered an art school, which was later moved to Tashkent and then to Dushanbe (at that time named Stalinabad). The future artist got to know life and art of the East, which enriched him greatly. After the bright sunny cities of Asia he moved to Leningrad (Saint Petersburg), where he entered the Academy of Arts. Leningrad attracted him with its numerous museums and monuments of art. The entire city was constructed in the West European style. This style appealed to the artist due to its responsiveness to events of human life.

Along with creating paintings and drawings Golyavkin was into writing short stories. It was impossible to publish his works, which did not fit into the official Soviet aesthetics, and so at first his children’s short came out in children’s magazines Koster and Murzilka. In 1959, when Golyavkin was thirty years old he had his first book of children's stories “Notebooks in the rain” published. Short stories for grown-ups first time appeared in samizdat (underground press), in Alexander Ginsburg’s magazine "Syntax" in 1960. Official publications saw the light much later. Some of his early short stories were published in 1999-2000.

Victor Golyavkin died in Saint Petersburg on July, 21st, 2001.