Nikolai Nikitin was a writer whose work spanned a period of more than forty years, from the early 1920s to the early 1960s. He produced stories, novellas, novels, sketches, plays, memoirs, and newspaper articles. He was known primarily for his enthusiastic employment of ornamental prose in his early stories and his membership in a group called Serapionovy brat'ia (the Serapion Brothers). Nikitin was an avid follower of Boris Andreevich Pil'niak, whose style he emulated to a great degree; but despite this apparent lack of originality, Nikitin wrote several stories of enduring quality and interest. Nikitin was an exponent of the so-called revolutionary romanticism that was popular in the early 1920s. Eventually he turned away from the ornamental prose of his first stories to a conventional style more in line with the dictates of socialist realism. Nikitin wrote several novels, the best of which is Eto bylo v Kokande...