Adam Ogurlievich Shogentsukov

Born Aug. 31 (Sept. 13), 1916, in the village of Kuchmazukino, in what is now Baksan Raion, Kabarda-Balkar ASSR. Soviet Kabardin writer. People’s Poet of the Kabarda-Balkar ASSR (1969). Member of the CPSU since 1944.

Shogentsukov graduated from the Kabarda-Balkar Pedagogical Institute in 1940. He worked as a schoolteacher and an instructor at a higher educational institution. He served in the Great Patriotic War (1941–45). Shogentsukov’s first published works appeared in 1938. His poetry affirms friendship among peoples and reflects the history of the Kabardin people and their struggle for freedom. Focusing on man’s complex inner world, Shogentsukov wrote the first Kabardin sonnets. He is the author of the verse collections We Are Flourishing (1940), Songs of the Heart (1951), The Restless Heart (1958), and Roads of Friendship (1961). His novella The Spring of Sofiiat (1956; Russian translation, 1956), which deals with the life of a mountain girl in the Soviet period, has received wide recognition and has been translated into many languages. Shogentsukov has also written the plays Madina (staged 1961) and The Sweethearts (staged 1966).

Shogentsukov has been chairman of the administrative board of the Writers’ Union of the Kabarda-Balkar ASSR from 1951 to 1954, from 1956 to 1958, and from 1970. He has been awarded four orders as well as medals.