Nikon Ignatiev was born on March 19, 1895, in the village of Chalomkino, which is now located in the Gornomariysky District of Mari El, into the family of a laborer. Before the revolution, he worked as a laborer and a burlak on the Volga and served in the army. He studied at the school of the Mikhailo-Arkhangelsky Monastery.

Ignatiev participated in World War I and in 1917 was on the Turkish front in non-combat service. In 1918, he found himself on the Southern front, worked in Tsaritsyn and Astrakhan, embraced Bolshevik ideas, and joined the VKP. In 1919, he began working for the first Gornomari newspaper "Nezeryn Shamakshy."

From 1920, Ignatiev lived in Kozmodemyansk, where he was the editor of the newspapers "Tor" and "Krasny Trud." He headed the district department of ROSTA and managed the Mari section of the UIC. In January 1922, he was accused of nationalist tendencies in his articles and expelled from the party. From 1924, he worked for the newspapers "Mariyskaya Derevnya," "Kyralshy," and later "Lenin Korney." Ignatiev worked at the Gornomari branch of the Mari Publishing House, and from 1930 edited the magazines "U Sem" and "Yakshar Znamya."

In 1937, Ignatiev was arrested as a participant in a counter-revolutionary bourgeois-nationalist organization, and on October 20 of the same year, he was sentenced to 10 years in camps. He died in custody in the Birobidzhan camp on March 4, 1941, and was subsequently rehabilitated.

Ignatiev began writing his works in 1919, creating poems, poems, and plays. The main theme of his work was the life of the Mari people. His novels "Vurs Mardezh," "Stalnoy Veter," "Savik," "Tuan Sӓndalyk," "Strana Rodnaya," as well as the stories "Komsomol Ydyr," "Komsomolka," and "Toshty Kola," "Staroye Umiraet" are dedicated to this theme. Ignatiev was the first to translate the works of A. S. Pushkin, L. N. Tolstoy, and M. Gorky into the Gornomari language.

A street in Kozmodemyansk and the Gornomari District Library are named in honor of Ignatiev. His house-museum has been opened in the village of Chalomkino, and since 1995, annual Ignatiev literary readings have been held in the district.