Nikolay Aleksandrovich Asanov was born on December 15, 1906 in the small village of Bigichi in the Northern Urals. He was the eldest of three children, and when his father died at the front in 1915, he took charge of the family. Having become a workers' correspondent for the Perm newspaper "Zvezda", he met Arkady Gaidar, under whose influence the main features of N. Asanov's prose were formed: a dynamic plot, a thorough knowledge of the situation, courageous images of heroes opposing the hostile forces of nature. The novel “The Magic Stone” is based on the labor feat of geologists who, in the depths of the forest, are looking for the most important strategic raw material - diamonds.