Nicolai Valentinovitch Riasanovskiy was born in China on 21 December 1923 in Harbin (then in the Republic of China), the son of lawyer Valentin A. Riasanovsky and Antonina Riasanovsky, a novelist.
[2] His mother, Antonia, was a teacher and novelist who wrote under the pen name Nina Fedorova.
In 1938 the family moved to the United States of America, where his father taught at the University of Oregon, and his mother's work The Family, about the life of a Russian community in a Chinese city, received The Atlantic Monthly Prize for fiction in 1940.
During this time he published Russia in the West in the Teaching of the Slavophiles (1952), and spent a year in Finland as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Helsinki (1954–1955).
The latter was in its eighth edition in 2010 (now co-authored with Mark D. Steinberg, a former student of Riasanovsky's) and has been acclaimed for its continued comprehensiveness.