Nikolai Denisovich Neustroev

Born Dec. 3 (15), 1895, in the Fourth Baiagantai nasleg (a small administrative unit) of the Baiagantai ulus (Tatar settlement), Yakutsk Oblast; died July 27, 1929, in Yakutsk. Soviet Yakut writer; one of the founders of Soviet Yakut literature.

From 1922 to 1926, Neustroev worked as a teacher. He published short stories in Russian and Yakut, in which he revealed the stagnation of the feudal-patriarchal world (“Savage Life,” 1917; “The Fisherman,” 1926). Neustroev’s comedy The Evil Spirit—about a miserly rich man and clever, money-grubbing merchants—was selected to open in 1925 the first season of the Yakut group of the State People’s Amateur Theater. The comedy Jay Boss (1920–25) is a satire on tsarist officials. In the comedy Clabber (1921–25) the author calls for affirmation of the new life and for struggle against vestiges of the old.