Muzaev, Nurdin

Born Oct. 2 (15), 1913, in the village of Belgatoi, in what is now Shali Raion, Chechen-Ingush ASSR. Soviet Chechen poet. Member of the CPSU since 1940.

Muzaev served in the Great Patriotic War of 1941–45. He graduated from the history department of the Kirghiz Pedagogical Institute in 1953.

Muzaev was first published in 1930, and his early verses reflect the influence of V. V. Mayakovsky. The establishment of kolkhozes in Chechen-Ingushetia is the theme of Muzaev’s play A Seed Sprouts in Our Epoch (1933). Muzaev is also the author of other plays, as well as of the collections of poems A Step on the Right Path (1934), Collected Verses and Narrative Poems (1956), Sweltering Daydreams (1966), and The Babble of the Brook (1968). His novel in verse Selim Speaks (1957; Russian translation, 1958) is devoted to the struggle of the Chechen people against the feudal lords and tsarist tyranny. In 1960 he published the novel The March of the Brave. The novel The Strength of a Dream, which deals with the working class of contemporary Chechen-Ingushetia, appeared in 1971.

Muzaev is the author of Chechen Literature on the Road to Socialist Realism (1963, in Russian). He has translated works of A. S. Pushkin, T. G. Shevchenko, Sh. Rustaveli, and Shakespeare.