Nosov Nikolay Nikolaevich
Nikolai Nosov was born in 1908 in Kyiv, into the family of a variety performer. As a child he too dreamed of becoming a performer, then a musician, then a chemist, but in reality he had to start earning a living at 14 doing entirely different things: mowing grass, selling newspapers, working in a factory.
Even so, his many passions and interests eventually led Nikolai Nikolaevich onto a creative path: he received his higher education at the film institute and began making animated films, as well as science and educational films. During the war he made training films: on equipment for the military, and on field surgery for doctors. Later he made animated and feature films based on his own works.
Nikolai Nosov had an only son, Pyotr, and it was for him that he began writing his first stories. Dunno came later; it all started with short stories for the magazine Murzilka, where "The Entertainers", "The Living Hat", "Mishka's Porridge" and other cheerful stories about children, now known to every preschooler, were first published. Everyone loved them right away, and soon they were being published as whole collections. These books were followed by "The Jolly Family", and then by the hugely successful novella "Vitya Maleev at School and at Home" (the film "Two Friends" is based on it). These works carried no ideology; they simply described the lives of Soviet schoolchildren and were meant to entertain rather than to preach.
Dunno was not originally Nosov's character: he was created at the end of the 19th century by the Canadian artist and illustrator Palmer Cox, who featured him in his comics. He came to Russia thanks to the children's writer and translator Anna Khvolson, who gave the foreign little people the names Murzilka and Dunno, and Nosov then reworked the figure into the famous little shorty about whom he wrote three thick books.
Repression and any other trouble with the authorities happily passed Nosov by. But he enjoyed no special privileges either: he had no writers' dacha, his anniversaries were not celebrated on a grand scale, and he lived in a perfectly ordinary forty-square-metre apartment.
Nikolai Nikolaevich was overjoyed at the birth of his only grandson, Igor; he loved him and spent a lot of time with him, and wrote a book about him, "The Story of My Friend Igor". Igor Petrovich followed in the footsteps both of his father, becoming a professional photographer, and of his famous grandfather, writing several books for children, including a continuation of Dunno's adventures. Igor Petrovich Nosov is the father of four children: the writer's line lives on!
