Faizi, Mirkhaidar

(real surname Faizullin). Born Oct. 19 (31), 1891, in the village of Kukshelovo, in what is now Orenburg Oblast; died July 9, 1928, in Baimak, Bashkir ASSR. Soviet Tatar playwright; one of the founders of Soviet Tatar literature.

Faizi studied in a madrasa. From 1918 to 1926 he took part in cultural-educational work in the Tatar and Bashkir countryside. He began writing in 1905, and his first collection, My Poems, was published in 1912. Faizi also wrote the comedies Two Khasans (1909) and Youth Will Not Let Itself Be Deceived (1911; staged 1913). His plays of social criticism included The Pitiful One (1913), On the Ural River (1917–18; published 1919), and The White Cap (1922–23).

Faizi’s most influential play was the realistic drama Galiyäbanu (1916; staged 1917; published 1922; Russian translation, 1958), which dealt with the prerevolutionary Tatar countryside. The play Red Star (1921–23) was devoted to new human relationships in the Soviet era. Faizi also studied and collected works of folklore and compiled a collection of folk songs.