Kamal, Sharif

(pseudonym of Sharif Baigil’diev). Born Feb. 16 (28), 1884, in the village of Pishlia, present-day Mordovian ASSR; died Dec. 22, 1942, in Kazan. Soviet Tatar writer and dramatist; Honored Art Worker of the Tatar ASSR (1940). Became a member of the CPSU in 1919. Son of a minister. He was an unskilled worker and miner. In St. Petersburg (1905), he was a contributor to the newspaper Nur (Ray), in which his articles and poems were published. His first collection of poems, Voice, appeared in 1906.

Kamal realistically showed the life of seasonal workers, fishermen, and miners in his short stories of 1909–12 (“Awakening,” “In Search of Happiness,” and “In a Strange Land”), as well as in his novella Seagulls (1915). His comedy Khadzhi Efendi Is Getting Married (1915) became a Tatar classic. Kamal was also the author of the realistic novels At Dawn (1927) and When the Beautiful Is Born (1937, Russian translation 1957). In his dramatic works Fire (1928), Mountains (1932), and In the Fog (1934), Kamal described the construction of socialism in the city and the countryside. He was awarded the Order of Lenin.