Tatyana Mikhailovna (Moiseyevna) Lioznova was born on 20 July, 1924 in Moscow. Her father, an engineer and economist, volunteered to the army in the very beginning of the war and was killed in the same horrible year of 1941. Her mother, a representative of intelligentsia in the highest sense of the word, with whom Tatyana lived all her life, undoubtedly, had a great impact on her daughter and her creative interests. After school Tanya entered the Moscow Aviation Institute but soon left it. In the thick of the war, in 1945, she entered VGIK (The All-Russian State Institute for Cinematography) but after a trial semester was sent down. Her teachers decided her life experience was not rich enough for such an all-embracing profession as film-director. But Tanya did not give in: she stepped in the doorway of the institute in the way of her teachers and begged them into watching her study films. Thus she was allowed to continue studying. In VGIK Tatyana studied at the workshop of Sergei Gerasimov and Tamara Makarova. For some years she worked as assistant of film-director in the filming of ‘Molodaya gvardiya / The Young Guard’ by Sergei Gerasimov (1948), ‘Tainstvennaya nahodka’/Mysterious Finding (1953) by Boris Buneyev, and ‘Zemlya i lyudi’/The Land and the People by Stanislav Rostotsky (1955). The first independent work of Lioznova was released in 1958: it was ‘Pamyat serdtsa’ / ‘The Memory of the Heart’ after the script by Sergei Gerasimov and Tamara Makarova.
