Kirill Finkelshteyn grew up in Saint-Petersburg, Russia; graduated from the College of Electrical
communications, worked as an engineer and scientist in applied physics. In 1997, Kirill moved with his family to the United States, where he is currently working as an after school math teacher in Boston.
The stories of his ancestors, who lived in the famous suburb of Petersburg, Tsarskoye Selo - the residence of Russian tsars and many famous poets and writers, aroused his interest in history and literature.
Mr. Finkelshteyn first literary article was issued in 2005. Since then, he has published 4 books (in Russian) and more than 20 articles on literary and historical topics, participated in literary conferences in Russia, Poland, Ukraine and Austria.
In 2013, while working on an essay on the Portsmouth Peace Treaty, he discovered an article (1906) about the funeral of the mysterious Nicolai de Raylan. Since then, the fate of this extraordinary person has not released the author for almost eight years... As a result, in 2021, a book was published in Moscow:
This book tells the miracle true story of the adventurous fate of trans man Nicolai de Rylan, who lived at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries in Russia and the United States.
The protagonist of the book was born as a girl Anna in 1872 in a noble family in Odessa. Since childhood she'd felt herself to be a boy who, by a mistake of nature, was imprisoned in the body of a girl. In her youth Raylan escaped from parental care, moved to the United States, where she transitioned into a man Nicolai de Raylan, who became a successful businessman, husband of two wife, a brave hussar, a conqueror of women’s hearts, and left behind diary entries resembling something out of a captivating adventure novel.