Nikolai Khardzhiev was born in 1903 in
Kakhovka, in present-day
Ukraine, into a white-collar family; the surname, and Khardzhiev's features, bespeak Caucasian origins, but he was seemingly loath to discuss his own biography, of which few details are available. After graduating from school in Kakhovka in 1920, he briefly worked for his local section of the
Commissariat of Enlightenment before studying law in
Odesa from 1922 to 1925. Literature, however, was his true vocation, and it was on this subject that he lectured in Odesa workers' clubs and the city's State Institute of Cinema. Living in the garrulous, cosmopolitan city of
Babel's tales, Khardzhiev befriended the poet
Eduard Bagritsky, who was instrumental in his move to Moscow in the autumn of 1928. Bagritskii was linked to the Constructivist artists, writers and critics of
Novyi lef, and it was through him that Khardzhiev met
Osip Brik,
Viktor Shklovsky and
Boris Eikhenbaum. Shklovsky — for whom Khardzhiev briefly worked as an assistant — and Brik were the two sponsors of Khardzhiev's application to join the
Union of Writers in 1940.
Anna Akhmatova, the most famous Russian poet of the Soviet period, was a close friend during the war. In 1953 he married for the second time, to a sculptor, Lidia Chaga. ==Suprematist movement==