Nikolay Nosov

Nikolai Nikolayevich Nosov was born on 10 (23 November) 1908 in Kyiv, into the family of a variety performer who, depending on circumstances, also worked as a railwayman. He spent his childhood in the small town of Irpin, near Kyiv, where the boy began attending gymnasium.

Nikolai was the second son in the family. In addition to him, there was an older brother, Pyotr, and a younger brother and sister. Little Nikolai loved attending his father’s performances and watching concerts and plays. His parents even thought that the boy also wanted to become an actor. During his school years he wanted to become a musician and long dreamed of being bought a violin. After the violin was purchased, Nikolai realized that learning music was not easy, and the violin was abandoned. Nikolai Nosov’s childhood and school years fell during the hardest period in Russian history: the First World War and the Civil War. Lack of food, absence of heat and electricity in the cold winter, and disease were commonplace at the time. The whole family contracted typhus. Fortunately, no one died. Nikolai recalled that when he recovered (he was ill the longest), his mother cried with joy because everyone had survived. “That is how I learned that one can cry not only from grief.” Since gymnasium years, Nosov was interested in music, theater, chess, photography, electrical engineering, and even radio hobbyism. To support the family, which had lost a stable income because of the Great October Revolution, Nikolai was forced to work from the age of 14: he was a newspaper vendor, a ditch digger, a mower, etc. After 1917, the gymnasium was reorganized into a seven-year school. After graduating from it in 1924, he worked as a laborer at a concrete plant in Irpin, then at a private brick factory in the town of Bucha.

After the Civil War, Nikolai became interested in chemistry. Together with a school friend, he organized a chemical laboratory in the attic of his house, where the friends carried out various experiments. Nosov recalled: “When I finished school, I was certain that I had to become a chemist and nothing else! Chemistry seemed to me the science of sciences.” Nikolai wanted to enter the chemistry faculty of the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute, but was unable to,