Maksim Tsagaraev

Born Apr. 22 (May 5), 1916, in the city of Alagir, in what is now the Severnaia Osetiia ASSR. Soviet Ossetic writer. Member of the CPSU since 1949.

Tsagaraev graduated from the Severnaia Osetiia Pedagogical Institute in 1941 and fought in the Great Patriotic War of 1941–45. He was minister of culture of the Severnaia Osetiia ASSR from 1958 to 1960 and editor of the journal Makh dug (Our Epoch) from 1960 to 1963. In 1947, Tsagaraev published the novella On the Road of Happiness (Russian translation under the title The Story of the Kolkhoz Carpenter Sago, 1952) and the book of wartime sketches In the West. Since the war his principal subject has been ordinary life in a kolkhoz village; this theme appears in such novellas as The Shepherd of Black Mountain (1961), Campaign Song (1965), and When the Rocks Awake (1970; Russian translation, 1972). He served as chairman of the administrative board of the Writer’s Union of the Severnaia Osetiia ASSR from 1954 to 1958 and from 1963 to 1970. Tsagaraev has been awarded four orders and various medals.