Karim, Khanif

(pseudonym of Khanif Karimovich Kari-mov). Born July 25 (Aug. 7), 1910, in the village of Verkhnie Kigi, in present-day Kiginskii Raion, Bashkir ASSR. Soviet Bashkir poet. Member of the CPSU since 1932; fought in the Great Patriotic War of 1941–5.

Karim graduated from the department of literature of the Bashkir Pedagogic Institute in Ufa, and published his first collection of verses, Song of the Sentry, in 1934. In the narrative poems The Girl (1935) and The Mountain Village (1940), Karim depicted the transition of the peasants to a new life. The collections Verses (1942), There Is No Death for Love (1943), and Paths of War expressed the thoughts and strivings of the Soviet liberation fighter. Intimacy and lyricism characterized many of Karim’s postwar verses (the collections Morning Thoughts, 1964, and In the Land of Youth, 1967). He has also written prose (the collections of stories Forest Path, 1965; Russian translation, 1969). He has translated into Bashkir the verses of A. S. Pushkin, M. Iu. Lermontov, T. G. Shevchenko, and V. V. Mayakovsky. Karim was awarded the Order of the Red Star and various medals.