Nadzhmi, Kavi

(pen name of K. G. Nezhmetdinov). Born Dec. 2 (15), 1901, in the village of Krasnyi Ostrov, in present-day Sechenovo Raion, Gorky Oblast; died Mar. 24, 1957, in Kazan. Soviet Tatar writer and public figure. Member of the CPSU from 1919.

Nadzhmi volunteered for the Red Army in 1919. In 1922 he graduated from the Moscow Higher Military Pedagogical School. He was the first chairman of the Writers’ Union of the Tatar ASSR (until 1937). Nadzhmi’s works were first published in 1919. His literary activity is closely linked with the development of Soviet Tatar literature and the introduction of socialist realism into the literature. Nadzhmi’s poems and short stories and the novella Shore Fires (1929) reflect the heroism of the Civil War of 1918–20. His novellas The Bright Path and The First Spring (both 1930) are among the first Tatar prose works about collectivization. Nadzhmi’s revolutionary historical novel Spring Winds is widely known (1948; State Prize of the USSR, 1951). The novel depicts the struggle of the Tatar proletariat and Russian working class against tsarism and for the establishment of Soviet power in Tataria.