(b Ulaan Baatar, Mongolia, 31 Jan 1952; d Moscow, 6 March 1969). Russian illustrator and graphic designer. The phenomenon of Nadya Rusheva arose as the result of the exploitation of a child talent and the demand for positive achievements that accorded with the Soviet myth. Her death at the age of 17 from a brain haemorrhage acted as a final sad chord in her cultural role. Her first drawings became known in 1964 when the Moscow intellectual elite was seeking an embodiment of Nikita Khrushchov’s political thaw. She exhibited in the offices of the famous opposition periodical Yunost’ (‘Youth’). She produced over 10,000 works in a number of series, most of which were essentially the line illustrations of a gifted, developing child for the classics from world literature. This work, created mostly in ink, felt-tip pen and crayon, was inspired by the amateur illustrations of 19th- and 20th-century writers, most notably Aleksandr Pushkin and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Typical of her most mature work was her illustration of Apollo and Daphne, reproduced in Yunost’ (no. 9, 1969, p. 112), and her Pushkin studies, comprising 400 sheets (1964–8; St Petersburg, Inst. Rus. Lit.), in which form is delicately delineated by bold, flowing and sparse strokes. Her best-known work was for Lev Tolstoy’s War and Peace (Voina i mir, late 1960s; Moscow, Tolstoy Mus.) and Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita (Master i Margarita, 1968; Moscow, Rus. Cult. Fund). As with the Pushkin drawings, the Master and Margarita illustrations led to philosophical interpretations of Rusheva’s art. This created the enigma of how a child could create such ‘adult work’. For the Moscow opposition, Rusheva’s art was an impenetrable domain, safe from the all-pervasive aspirations of the proletarian dictatorship. The state, however, chose to use her as a symbol of the Soviet nurturing of young artistic talent, and it furthered this role after her death with a highly prestigious exhibition (1970) in the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, and an unprecedented exhibition tour throughout the Soviet Union from 1970 to 1974.