Khairi, Gainan

(pen name of G. B. Khairetdinov). Born June 2 (15), 1903, in the village of Starokulevo, in what is now Nurimanov Raion, Bashkir ASSR; died Oct. 16, 1938, in Ufa. Soviet Bashkir writer.

Khairi studied at the Orenburg Bashkir Pedagogical Technicum. He undertook journalistic and Komsomol work in 1924. He was first published in 1922. In the novellas The Cooperators (1926) and The Wife (1931) and the collections of sketches In a Bashkir Village (1927), Forgotten Tale (1927), and Bast Shoes (1928), Khairi portrays the new man of the village and depicts the struggle against the kulak class. In his verse, including narrative poems, in the collection Our Spring (1927), he sought to achieve a conversational tone and attempted to create a form that was new to Bashkir poetry. Khairi’s most important work is The Turn (published 1967), which was the first novel in Bashkir literature.