Dashdorjiin Natsagdorj

Dashdorjiin Natsagdorj was born on 17 November 1906 in Darkhan Zasag banner (modern Bayandelger District, Töv Province) to father Dashidorji, a heavily-indebted taiji (petty noble), and mother Pagma, who died when he was seven years old.

After the 1921 revolution, he was private secretary to Damdin Sükhbaatar, and from April 1922 an assistant to the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party's Central Committee (CC).

Natsagdorj also served as head of the Ideology Department of the Central Committee, secretary of the Mongolian Revolutionary Writers' Organization (1930–1937), and the literary editor of the MRYL newspaper Zaluuchuudyn Ünen ("Youth Truth").

However, as he had neither "joined the Whites" nor "spoken or acted against the state", the special commission of the Internal Affairs Directorate sentenced him to a year's probation on 29 October 1932.

Natsagdorj married Nina Ivanovna Chistyakova, a Soviet German woman whom he had met in Leningrad; their daughter, Ananda Shiri, was born on 22 March 1934.

In 1935, Chistyakova and Ananda Shiri left Mongolia for Leningrad; some sources say that she had overstayed her visa, but others say Natsagdorj had taken to heavy drinking and secret liaisons with women.

Presented in verse strongly reminiscent of folk poetry, it has the common revolutionary theme of a young couple's love thwarted by tyrannical lords.

[1][2] Only a few works by Natsagdorj before his time in Germany survive, though a now-lost play, Monggolun ügeigüü ail-un khöbegün ("Son of a Mongolian Proletarian Family"; 1924) won an award.

The latter's widely-quoted final lines read: "From lands that geese cannot attain by wing / The child of man returns, in his bosom jewels enfolding".

His first prose sketch, "May Day in a Capitalist Country", expressed admiration of the labor movement in Germany and his shame that revolutionary Mongolia had not mustered the same spirit.