Nikolai Erdman
Playwright
Remembered for his 1928 play The Suicide, this Soviet writer also penned a 1924 dramatic work titled The Mandate, as well as the screenplay for the 1928 silent movie The House on Trubnaya. Also a poet, he published a 1922 verse collection titled Self-Portrait.
He published his first poem at the age of nineteen. Five years later, he began his long-term collaboration with stage director, producer, and actor Vsevolod Meyerhold.
Much of his work was censored and banned by the Soviet government.
Natives of Moscow, Russia (then the Soviet Union), he and his theatrical set designer brother, Boris Erdman, were of Baltic German descent.
Erdman's work was influenced by the satirical plays of Nikolai Gogol and in turn influenced the post-war absurdist movement in Russian dramatic literature.