Saifi Fattakhovich Kudashev

(pseudonym, Saifi Kudash). Born Sept. 21 (Oct. 3), 1894, in the village of Kliashevo, in present-day Chishmy Raion, Bashkir ASSR. Soviet Bashkir poet. People’s Poet of the Bashkir ASSR (1964). Member of the CPSU since 1939.

A teacher by profession, Kudashev turned to writing in 1913. His first collections of verses, Songs of Freedom (1917) and Those Unfit for Military Service (1917), describing the sufferings of the people, were a call to freedom and a protest against war and autocracy. Kudashev welcomed the Great October Socialist Revolution, and during the Civil War (1918–20) he appealed to the people to defend the achievements of October. The revolution and the first years of peaceful labor in the Soviet period were the subject of his collections Plow Songs (1926) and Hero of the Struggle (1928) and of the narrative poems On the Meadow, October, and In the Smithy (all 1920). Kudashev’s long poem Letter (1930) and his novel in verse Kushkaen (1936) depict the collectivization of the countryside.

Kudashev’s poetry reflects important stages in the life and struggle of the Bashkir people. Socialist construction is depicted in the narrative poem The Law of Happiness (1937) and in the collection of poems The Republic Sings (1940). The heroic deeds during the Great Patriotic War (1941–45) are the theme of the narrative poem Lenin and the Fighting Man (1943) and the collection From the Bottom of My Heart (1944); creative postwar labor and friendship among peoples are the dominant motifs in the collections My Love (1956), Falling Leaves (1960), and In My Garden (1964). Among Kudashev’s popular prose works are his novella To Meet the Spring (1954) about the poets G. Tukai and M. Gafuri and his memoirs Unforgettable Moments (1957; Russian translation, 1964) and Treading the Path of Youth (1964), describing the cultural cooperation of the peoples of Bashkiria, Tataria, and Kazakhstan. His works on literary criticism are also significant. Kudashev was a deputy to the Supreme Soviet of the Bashkir ASSR from 1947 to 1963. He has been awarded the Order of Lenin and four other orders.