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.

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.

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.

Originally titled Ilyich's Gate, the movie was dedicated to the Khrushchev Thaw and the new generation of the Sixtiers, being inspired by the French New Wave.

[9][10] It was suggested to rewrite the screenplay and cut down the movie, although Shpalikov protested and tried to avoid changing his script at every possibility, so the final reedited version of the film was released only in 1965 under the name of I Am Twenty, also to poor reviews.

[11] Only in 1988 the restored version was released under its original title, called a crucial big screen work of art of the early 1960s by the commission under the Union of Cinematographers of the USSR.

But after Daneliya assured one of the head officials at the State Committee for Cinematography that they had nothing tricky on their minds, the work became easy, fast and fun.

The movie was given a green light and released to a big success, turning into one of the cult films for the Soviet youth, along with the title song composed by Shpalikov as an improvisation during the shooting of the required episode.

1966 saw the release of two movies based on his screenplays: I'm from Childhood by Viktor Turov and A Long Happy Life — the only film Shpalikov both wrote and directed.

[14] Same happened to the 1971 drama You and Me by Larisa Shepitko: it was well received at the 32nd Venice International Film Festival, but failed miserably at the Soviet box office.

[18] By the start of the 1970s he had almost completely lost hope of finding a job, despite much unpublished material on his hands, including screenplays, poems and a big unfinished novel.