Petr Khuzangai

Born Jan. 9 (22), 1907, in the village of Sikterma, in what is now Al’keevskii Raion, Tatar ASSR; died Mar. 4, 1970, in Cheboksary. Soviet Chuvash poet. People’s Poet of the Chuvash ASSR (1950). Member of the CPSU from 1943.

Khuzangai was born into a peasant family. He studied at the Eastern Pedagogical Institute in Kazan from 1927 to 1929 but did not graduate. He served in the Great Patriotic War (1941–45). Khuzangai first published his works in 1924. In 1928 he published the poetry collection After the Storm. This was followed by the narrative poems The Magnet Mountain (1933) and Tania (1942), the collection Song of the Heart (1952), and the novel in verse Aptraman’s Family (1954).

The main themes in Khuzangai’s work are the revolutionary history of the Chuvash people and their struggle for socialism, the heroism of the Soviet people during the war years, and friendship among peoples. Khuzangai wrote two narrative poems about V. I. Lenin: The House in Gorki (1952) and Great Heart (1960). He wrote some works in Russian. Khuzangai’s poetry is distinguished for its close links with folkloric tradition and its masterful use of the Chuvash language. Khuzangai was the author of translations into Chuvash of A. S. Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin and Poltava, A. S. Griboedov’s Woe From Wit, V. V. Mayakovsky’s epic Vladimir Il’ich Lenin, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and various works by poets of the Soviet Union and fraternal socialist countries. Khuzangai’s works have been translated into the languages of the peoples of the USSR and foreign languages.

Khuzangai was awarded three orders and several medals.