Ğabdulla Tuqay

Ğabdulla Tuqay (1886-1913) was a Tatar poet, critic, essayist and translator in the Russian Empire, and is often regarded as the founder of modern Tatar literature. His work helped replace the Old Tatar literary language with the modern Tatar language, a change that made him a central figure in his people's culture.

He was born in Quşlawıç, in Kazan Governorate near the present-day town of Arsk, into a family of hereditary village mullahs. His father died when he was only a few months old, and his mother died when he was still a child. He was raised by several families in Kazan and in the countryside before, in the mid-1890s, the Gosmanov merchants took him to Uralsk, where he attended a madrasah and first encountered Russian literature, above all Pushkin.

At the madrasah he developed an interest in folklore and popular poetry and became familiar with Arabic, Persian and Turkish verse. He worked as a typesetter and proofreader for the publications of his teacher Kamil Motıyği, where his first poems appeared. In the turbulent years after 1905 he wrote social and patriotic poems and satires against the conservative Muslim clergy. Over time he moved away from the Old Tatar language towards a Tatar closer to everyday speech, which was new in the poetry of his people.

In 1907 he left Uralsk for Kazan, the Tatar cultural capital, where he kept writing until his early death in 1913. His legacy is twofold: he laid the foundations of modern Tatar literature and made it accessible to readers from many walks of life. He is remembered today as the national poet of the Tatars.