Viktor Ardov

Born Oct. 8 (21), 1900, in Voronezh. Soviet Russian writer.

Ardov graduated from the G. V. Plekhanov Institute. His works were printed for the first time in 1921. He wrote humorous stories, short plays, and feuilletons: the collections A Close-up (1926), The Cream of Society (1930) Funny and Sad (1935), Your Acquaintances (1956), True to the Original (1961), On the Stage and Next to It. . . (1962), Variety Show (1963), Flowers, Berries, and Other Things (1969), and others, as well as the comedies The Big Dump (staged in 1927) and Minor Trumps (1937). He wrote, with L. V. Nikulin, the comedies Article 114 of the Criminal Code (1926), The Squabble (1926), and Reign of the Cockroaches (1929). He also wrote the scripts for such motion pictures as The Bright Path (1940) and Machine 22–12 (The Happy Run, 1946), as well as the book Conversational Genres of the Variety Show and the Circus (1968).