Rasul Gamzatov

Rasul Gamzatov: The Mountain Poet Who Wrote for the Dead

In Hiroshima's Peace Memorial Park stands a monument to Sadako Sasaki, the girl who folded a thousand paper cranes against the leukaemia the atomic bomb had given her, and died anyway. A poet from a village in the Dagestani highlands stood in front of it, went home, and wrote — in Avar, a language spoken by roughly half a million people — a poem about dead soldiers who do not lie in the ground but turn into white birds. Within a few years, set to music, it was known in every household from Brest to Vladivostok. Rasul Gamzatov had a long, decorated, comfortable Soviet career and wrote a great deal else. This is the thing that outlived the country.

The Bard's Son

Gamzatov was born on 8 September 1923 in Tsada, in the Khunzakhsky district of the Dagestan ASSR, into a house where poetry was the family trade. His father, Gamzat Tsadasa, was a celebrated Avar bard and a laureate of the USSR State Prize — an heir to the ancient minstrel tradition still thriving in the mountains, and his son's first and most consequential teacher. The apprenticeship was literal. The boy learned verse the way a smith's son learns iron: by watching it worked at home, in the room he slept in.

He finished pedagogical college in 1939 and took the jobs available to a literate young man in a remote republic — schoolteacher, assistant director at a theatre, journalist, radio host. His first collection, *Plamennaia liubov' i zhguchaia nenavist* (Ardent Love and Burning Hate), appeared in 1943, when he was twenty; the Union of Writers of the USSR admitted him at that age. The war took two of his older brothers. The dead soldier would remain the central figure of his work for the next sixty years, and it was never an abstraction to him.

Moscow, and the Uses of Translation

A 1945 Russian translation of his verse opened the door out of the mountains. He was invited to Moscow's Maxim Gorky Literature Institute, studied there from 1945, and graduated in 1950. What he absorbed was the Russian nineteenth century — Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov — and he spent the rest of his life carrying it back the other way, doing more than anyone alive to make Pushkin a household presence in Dagestan. The annual Pushkin Poetry Day held there each 6 June is part of that inheritance.

The traffic ran in both directions, and it had to. Gamzatov wrote in Avar and was read, overwhelmingly, in Russian. His fame therefore rested on translators — a dependency he never concealed, and one that complicates any account of his art, since the lines Soviet readers loved were, strictly speaking, other men's words for his images.

A Thousand Paper Birds

The Hiroshima visit produced "Zhuravli" — "Cranes." Gamzatov wrote it in Avar. In 1968 the poet and translator Naum Grebnev produced the Russian version that made it famous, published in *Novy Mir*. The actor and singer Mark Bernes read it, asked the composer Yan Frenkel to set it, and reworked the lyric himself before the music was finished.

Bernes recorded the song on 9 July 1969. He was dying of lung cancer, and he died five weeks later, on 16 August. Frenkel called the recording his true swan song; it was played at his funeral. From there the song became the Soviet Union's requiem for its war dead — a piece of public grief that needed no official sponsorship to spread. Memorials of flying cranes went up across the region, among them the Cranes Memorial in St Petersburg. A Russian stamp of 1995 used the image for the fallen. A monument was raised in West Hollywood, California, in 2005.

My Dagestan

His major prose work, the lyric novel *My Dagestan*, appeared between 1967 and 1971: autobiography written as something closer to a mountain chronicle — digressive, proverb-laden, circling his own naming ceremony and the customs of his people rather than marching through a life. It established him beyond poetry, and it turned "Dagestan" from an administrative unit into a literary place for millions of readers who would never set foot there.

The Laureate

Gamzatov chaired the Dagestan Union of Writers from 1950 until his death — fifty-three years in one office, a fact that says as much about the system as about the man. The honours were the complete Soviet set: the Stalin Prize in 1952, the Lenin Prize in 1963, Hero of Socialist Labour in 1974, four Orders of Lenin, and at the very end, in 2003, the Russian Order of St Andrew.

He was loyal to the communist order and internationalist in temperament, and he was not naive about what literary celebrity cost. Writers, he complained, were "now surrounded by wicked bureaucracy" and never had time to write. After the USSR dissolved, his lines were quoted by government officials and opposition leaders alike across Dagestan and Central Asia — a rare case of a Soviet laureate whose authority survived the state that manufactured it.

Why Rasul Is Called a Genius

The specific gift is compression into image. Gamzatov's method was to seize one concrete object — a crane, a mother's hands, a mountain road — and let it carry a weight of public feeling that direct statement cannot bear. "Cranes" works because it does not argue. It converts the dead into birds and stops. That is a poet's instinct rather than an intellectual system, and it is rarer than it sounds: whole generations of Soviet war verse produced nothing that lodged half as deep.

The counter-case is substantial and should be stated plainly. Gamzatov was the laureate of a state that rewarded reliability, and he was reliable — Stalin Prize, Lenin Prize, Hero of Socialist Labour, half a century as a regional literary administrator. A portion of that output is the occasional verse such posts require. More awkwardly, his reputation rests on translation. Grebnev's Russian and Bernes's editorial hand made "Cranes" what it became; the Avar original is unreadable to almost everyone who calls Gamzatov great, and a claim of genius that cannot be checked against the original text is a claim about a collaboration.

The available sources do not record critics using the word "genius" of him. What they record is stronger and more specific: readers on every side of a collapsed ideology who kept quoting him after every incentive to do so had vanished. Verse carried by a state apparatus normally dies with the apparatus. His did not.

Legacy

Gamzatov died on 3 November 2003, aged eighty, in Moscow's Central Clinical Hospital, and was buried in the old Muslim cemetery at Tarki. A monument to him was unveiled on Yauzsky Boulevard in Moscow on 5 July 2013. In 2016 his poem "The Oath" became the state anthem of Dagestan. A minority-language poet who reached a continent through other men's translations, he stands as the proof that a small language can furnish a large one with its most durable song about death.

Achievements

• Educated at Maxim Gorky Literature Institute
• Worked as poet, writer and prose writer