Yuri Aleksandrovich Nikitin (), born November 30, 1939, in Kharkov, USSR, is a Russian science fiction and fantasy writer. Although he was active in science fiction before perestroika, the recognition came when he wrote a Slavic fantasy novel, The Three from the Forest (Russian: Трое из Леса). One of the protagonists is a character based on the Russian Rurikid Prince Oleg of Novgorod, who is a mainstay of many sequels. Nikitin also wrote a couple of novels about Vladimir I of Kiev. Nikitin created a website called Inn (Russian: Корчма) as a community portal to help young writers. Nikitin's books have a distinct, free, and often intentionally primitive and repetitive style with many jokes, reflecting his intent to keep the reader on topic and carry his ideas through. His later books develop the ideas of becoming a Transhuman through self-development and survival of the spiritually fittest. Biography Yuri Nikitin was born November 30, 1939, in Kharkiv, Ukraine, an only child in a poor family. His father was drafted into the Soviet army soon after and died in World War II, and his mother never married again. A weaver in a local factory, she raised her son on her own, with the only help of her elderly parents. The four of them lived in a small rustic house in Zhuravlevka, a half-rural suburb of Kharkiv. Nikitin's grandfather was known as the best carpenter, joiner, and shoemaker in the local area. However, the family could barely make both ends meet: as Nikitin recalled later, in the post-war time they had to eat soup of the potato peelings disposed by their neighbors. Living in poverty and starvation affected the young Nikitin's health badly. Born with a heart disease, he also got rickets, rheumatism, and chronic tonsillitis. At the age of 15, Nikitin was told by doctors that he would not live for more than six months, but in the next year he overcame illnesses and improved his health greatly by means of yoga, hard physical exercise, and strict diet. From his earliest years, Nikitin was bilingual in Ukrainian and Russian, which is rather common for people in Eastern Ukraine. Later, he also learned English and Polish on his own, in order to be able to read the books by foreign SF writers that were not translated in the USSR. At the age of 16, Nikitin was expelled from school for scuffling and hooliganism