Selected stories about the life of A. L. Onishchik, and a review of his contribution to the classification of non-split supermanifolds, in particular, supercurves a.k.a. superstrings; his editorial and educational work. A brief overview of his and his students' results in supersymmetry, and their impact on other researchers.
Several open problems growing out of Onishchik's research are presented, some of them are related with odd parameters of deformations and non-holonomic structures of supermanifolds important in physical models, such as Minkowski superspaces and certain superstrings.

Comment: 24pp

• 01A70 - Biographies, obituaries, personalia, bibliographies
• 32C11 - Complex supergeometry
• 58C50 - Analysis on supermanifolds or graded manifolds
• 81T30 - String and superstring theories; other extended objects (e.g., branes) in quantum field theory