Mikhail Zadornov was born in Riga on July 21, 1948. His father Nikolay Zadornov (1909-1992) was a writer, the author of historical works, and the winner of the Stalin Award.

Mikhail Zadornov became fond of theater and even played a number of roles at school. He entered the Riga Civil Aviation Engineers Institute and then shifted to the Moscow Aviation Institute. Upon graduation he remained in one of the institute chairs and at the same time participated in amateur performances, which were very famous all around Moscow.

On the basis of the Moscow Aviation Institute Mikhail Zadornov founded a students’ theater that staged publicistic performances on particular subjects. Soon the theater enjoyed wide popularity and toured all around the Soviet Union. It got the prestigious Lenin Komsomol Award and was awarded the ranks of the People’s Theatre.

At that time Mikhail Zadornov had his writings actively published and then was the head of the Satire and Humour Department in the Youth magazine. However, he soon understood that he had better create himself rather than go through someone else's texts. Thus, by the early 1980s Mikhail Zadornov plunged into literary activity.

Once after performing his own satiric story at a popular comic TV broadcast he suddenly gained all-Russian fame. The Cinema Art magazine published Mikhail Zadornov's short story Open Letter to the Secretary General, which was instantly spread all over the country in photocopies. As the author was not arrested for his work, the New York Times newspaper concluded that Perestroika (Reorganization) was really taking place in the USSR.

By 1998 Mikhail Zadornov managed to achieve a number of things, such as publishing four volumes of his “incomplete collected works” (by his own definition), writing and staging several plays, star in a film written by him, and establishing a foundation for helping the Russian-speaking population in the Baltic States.