Nikolai Volkov was a Soviet dramatist, librettist, and theatre scholar. He studied at the Second Penza Male Gymnasium. Shortly after moving to Moscow, he enrolled in the Faculty of Law at Moscow University. As a student, he worked as a reporter for the newspaper “Russkoye Slovo” and served as an assistant director at Vera Komissarzhevskaya’s Theatre. He graduated in 1917. Starting that same year, he turned to theatre scholarship and criticism, writing extensively about the work of Konstantin Stanislavski, Evgeny Vakhtangov, Ivan Moskvin, and Alexander Tairov. In 1929, he published a two-volume monograph on Vsevolod Meyerhold. From the early 1930s, he focused on writing ballet librettos. His works include “The Flames of Paris”, “The Fountain of Bakhchisarai”, “The Prisoner of the Caucasus”, “Cinderella”, “Heart of the Mountains”, “The Young Mistress”, “The Blue Danube”, “Spartacus”, and others. In 1937, he adapted Leo Tolstoy’s novel “Anna Karenina” for the Moscow Art Theatre (staged by Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko). He was married to Darya Zerkalova, an actress of the Maly Theatre. The Bakhrushin Theatre Museum collection holds his letters and articles, as well as playbills and photographs of productions staged from his works.