Musa Cälil

Musa Cälil (Mustafino, 1906 - Berlin, 1944) was a poet writing in Tatar, born in the Russian Empire and active in the Soviet Union, who also fought in the resistance against the Nazis during the Second World War. He is remembered mainly for the poems he wrote in prison, known as The Moabit Notebooks, which became one of the best-known works of twentieth-century Tatar literature.

The son of a scrap dealer from his village, he studied at a madrasa in Orenburg. During the Civil War he joined the Komsomol and worked with a Red Army unit fighting White bands, too young to be sent to the front. His early verses were revolutionary and followed the classical metres of Turkic poetry, but by 1924 he had turned towards the simpler Tatar folk verse, which owed more to European forms.

In 1922 he settled in Kazan, the capital of the Tatar republic, where he worked as a copyist and befriended other Tatar poets. He moved to Moscow in 1927, joined the Communist Party in 1929 and became a secretary of the Moscow association of proletarian writers. His poetry of these years is upbeat, though many of his lyrical poems went unpublished because they did not fit Stalinist expectations. He translated Russian, Ukrainian and Georgian poets into Tatar and wrote librettos for Tatar opera.

After the German invasion of 1941 he volunteered and became a war correspondent on the Volkhov Front. Captured in 1942, he passed through several camps before reaching Dęblin, where he organised a clandestine group that tried to undermine the Tatar Legion from within, the unit the Wehrmacht had formed for its own ends. Arrested by the Gestapo in August 1943, he was tortured in Moabit prison, sentenced to death and executed in Berlin, a date that sources place in 1944.

His notebooks survived thanks to fellow prisoners, and in 1945 news of his resistance reached Moscow through a note found in a book. He was awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union and the Lenin Prize, both posthumously, in 1956 and 1957. Today he is a central figure of Tatar culture, commemorated with monuments, a museum in Kazan and musical works inspired by his life.