Abulkasim Akhmedzade Lakhuti

Born Dec. 4, 1887, in Kermanshah, Western Iran; died Mar. 16, 1957, in Moscow. Soviet Tadzhik poet. Member of the CPSU from 1924. Son of an artisan in Iran.

First known for his paeans to the Iranian revolution, Lakhuti became a pioneer of Soviet Tadzhik poetry when he moved to the USSR. He took part in the Revolution of 1905–11 in Iran. In 1916 he was the publisher of the revolutionary-democratic newspaper Bisotun in Kermanshah. The following year he emigrated to Istanbul, where in 1921 he published the journal Pars in Persian and French. Returning to his native country in 1922, Lakhuti headed an anti-imperialist democratic uprising in Tabriz (“the uprising of Lakhuti-khan”). After its suppression, he emigrated to Soviet Russia. He served as deputy people’s commissar of education of the Tadzhik SSR (1925–30) and as secretary of the Writers’ Union of the USSR (from 1934).

Lakhuti first appeared in print in 1907. He is one of the creators of the political ghazal in Persian. His major works of the 1920’s include the narrative poems Kremlin (1923) and Lenin Is Alive (1924) and a cycle of verses on the establishment of kolkhozes. During the 1930’s and the Great Patriotic War (1941–45) he created a number of poems in the conventional allegorical manner by developing the traditions of the Persian and Tadzhik parable-allegories (the masal). The poems were devoted to the heroic spirit of the labor of the Soviet people (To the Class—the Creator, 1933; Native Land of Joy, 1935), the Soviet soldiers and partisans (Mardistan, 1941; Knight of Peace, 1942; Tania’s Victory, 1942), and to the friendship of the peoples of the USSR (Companions, 1943). His dramatic poem The Blacksmith Kava, on a theme borrowed from Firdausi’s Shah-nama, served as the libretto for the opera of the same name by A. Balasanian. In the postwar period, Lakhuti published three books of collected verse.

Lakhuti translated such writers as Pushkin, Griboedov, Mayakovsky, Shakespeare, and Lope de Vega into Tadzhik. Firmly grounded in the traditions of classical Persian and Tadzhik literature, Lakhuti boldly introduced new strophe forms and meters, based on folk elements, into his poetry. His works have frequently been published in translation in Russian and in the languages of the other peoples of the USSR, of Europe, and of Asia. Lakhuti was awarded the Order of Lenin and two other orders.