The Wizard of the Emerald City and it’s series from Alexander Melentyevich Volkov. The first story was a nearly 100 % ripoff of The Wizard of Oz and later books also contain some ideas from the original stories from Baum, but Volkov also created a lot on his own in the sequels. And I love the world he created. I especially like that villains were portrayed in a manner that made sense. While there also were some archetypical “I’m capital E Evil” the character of Urfin was fascinating to me as a child, as it was one of the first instances of a multidimensional charactersi experienced as child. He was an overly ambitious but smart person in a fairy tale village where everybody else was content with their simple life. And that discrepancy was the start of his road to villainhood.