Stikhvan Shavly

(Stepan Antonovich Shumkov). Born Sept. 2 (15), 1910, in the village of Kamenka, in what is now Shentala Raion, Kuibyshev Oblast; died Feb. 15, 1976, in Cheboksary. Soviet Chuvash poet. People’s Poet of the Chuvash ASSR (1974). Member of the CPSU from 1943.

Shavly, the son of poor peasants, graduated from the language and literature department of the Pedagogical Institute in Kazan (1939). Major themes in his works included V. I. Lenin (the narrative poem The Green Statue, 1957), the October Revolution, the struggle for the consolidation of Soviet power in Chuvashia (October Poem, 1953), and the courage and heroism of the Soviet people during the Great Patriotic War of 1941–45 (the narrative poems The Pioneer From Kiev, 1944; Egor Madurov, 1945; and Zoia, 1945). The narrative poem Celestial Man (1963) is a tribute to cosmonaut A. G. Nikolaev. Shavly wrote the collections of satirical verse Pointing the Finger (1958) and Thorns (1965) and the short-story collection I Took the Sonorous Gusli in Hand (1968).

Shavly translated into Chuvash the works of P. P. Ershov, M. Iu. Lermontov, I. A. Krylov, and J. Rainis. Shavly’s works have been translated into the languages of the peoples of the USSR and into foreign languages.