Iurii Nagibin was a prolific fiction writer whose stories and novellas touch on such themes as childhood, war, love, history, music, Moscow life, and nature. He is also known for his scripts for many successful movies, including the Japanese-Soviet Dersu Uzala (1975), co-written and directed by Akira Kurosawa, which received the American Academy Award for best foreign-language film in 1976. Nagibin's works have been translated into many languages. He traveled extensively in the Soviet Union and abroad, and his travel stories include lively descriptions of Japan, the Middle East, the United States, Europe, and Australia. According to Marc Slonim, Nagibin is "representative of a whole group of writers who have brought genuine emotions, psychological insight, humaneness, and a careful objective rendering of reality into contemporary Soviet literature."

Iurii Markovich Nagibin was born in Moscow on 3 April 1920, the only child of Kirill Aleksandrovich Nagibin, an economist, and Kseniia Alekseevna Konevskaia. Nagibin's...