[2] His father had built a house for the family in the village of Yuzhny (later known as Pivdenne), but his mother decided it would be better to give birth in Kharkov, where there were doctors and hospitals.

[6] At school, he was a difficult and somewhat eccentric student, who made indifferent progress in a number of subjects and was almost expelled for poor and willful behavior.

[7] However, it became clear that he was academically bright with an inquisitive temperament; he was an accomplished violinist, wrote romantic poetry and could draw with accuracy and attention to detail.

[15] In 1944, he was unexpectedly recalled for a military service, but his father, who was a colonel in the Soviet Army, arranged for him a job as a telephone operator in an artillery unit stationed near Moscow.

[20] Knorozov is said to have taken this book back with him to Moscow at the end of the war, where its examination would form the basis for his later pioneering research into the Maya script.

Although many details of Knorozov's life during the war remained unclear, his student Galina Yershova could not find any evidence that he traveled outside of Moscow Oblast in 1943–1945.

[19][17] As he explained to the Mayanist epigrapher Harri Kettunen:[17] "Unfortunately it was a misunderstanding: I told about it [finding books in a library in Berlin] to my colleague Michael Coe, but he didn't get it right.

In the autumn of 1945 after World War II, Knorozov returned to Moscow State University to complete his undergraduate courses at the department of Ethnography.

He displayed a particular interest and aptitude for the study of ancient languages and writing systems, especially hieroglyphs, and he also read medieval Japanese and Arabic literature.

On this expedition his ostensible focus was to study the effects of Russian expansionary activities and modern developments upon nomadic ethnic groups, of what was a far-flung frontier world of the Soviet state.

The original document had disappeared, and this work was unknown until 1860s when an abridged copy was discovered in the archives of the Spanish Royal Academy by the French scholar, Charles Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg.

[24] Since de Landa's "alphabet" seemed to be contradictory and unclear (e.g., multiple variations were given for some of the letters, and some of the symbols were not known in the surviving inscriptions), previous attempts to use this as a key for deciphering the Maya writing system had not been successful.

[7] In 1952, the then 30-year-old Knorozov published a paper which was later to prove to be a seminal work in the field (Drevnyaya pis’mennost’ Tsentral’noy Ameriki, or "Ancient Writing of Central America".)

[25] By this time, this was largely known and accepted for several of these, such as Egyptian hieroglyphs (the decipherment of which was famously commenced by Jean-François Champollion in 1822 using the tri-lingual Rosetta Stone artefact); however the prevailing view was that Mayan did not have such features.

Knorozov did not actually put forward many new transcriptions based on his analysis; nevertheless, he maintained that this approach was the key to understanding the script.

The Russian-born but American-resident scholar Tatiana Proskouriakoff was foremost in this work, eventually convincing Thompson and other doubters that historical events were recorded in the script.

[18] Through the rest of the decade and into the next, Proskouriakoff and others continued to develop the theme, and using Knorozov's results and other approaches began to piece together some decipherments of the script.

Knorozov had broad interests in, and contributed to, other investigative fields such as archaeology, semiotics, human migration to the Americas, and the evolution of the mind.

[7] In his very last years, Knorozov is also known to have pointed to a place in the United States as the likely location of Chicomoztoc, the ancestral land from which—according to ancient documents and accounts considered mythical by a sizable number of scholars—indigenous peoples now living in Mexico are said to have come.