Nikolai Uspensky
Nikolai Vasilyevich Uspensky was a Russian writer, and a cousin of fellow writer Gleb Uspensky.
Nikolai Uspensky was born in Stupino, a small village in Tula Governorate, one of eight children in a poor family of a local clergyman. Four boys and four girls lived in poverty, and drunken raws in the household were commonplace. Their house stood close to that of their landlords servants , and, according to biographer Korney Chukovsky, it was this morally corrupt crowd prone to every imaginable vice that young Nikolay kept company with. Heavy drinking there was the order of the day and, as one of his relatives later remembered, from his early years Nikolay used to ask his mother for some vodka, and she never refused, for drunk children there were business as usual. Scenes Nikolai Uspensky witnessed in Stupino later formed the basis of his early stories, but the degrading influence of people around him was obvious and later biographers regarded this experience to be the major reason for his subsequent downfall. There was one thing, though, that set the boy apart from his peers unlik
Source: Wikipedia