Effendi Kapiyev

1. Effendi Kapiyev Mikhail Nokhov Gymnasium # 1 Khasavyurt

2. Effendi Kapiyev was born on March, 13, 1909 in a high mountainous Lak village of Kumukh. He left nine year school in 1928 in Buinaksk and worked as a teacherof the Russian language in the kumik village of Aksai.

3. At the beginning of his literary career he was mostly as a collector and translator of the oral folk lore of the peoples of Dagestan, and of young Dagestan poetry and prose. In 1931 he was elected an executive secretary of the writers organization in Dagestan and in the year of 1934 he became the member of the Writers Council of the USSR.

4. He was the first to translate into Russian many works of mountainous lyrics and epic literature, compiled and edited some translated into Russian almanacs: Poets of Dagestan (1932); Anthology of Dagestan Literature (1934); “Poetry of the Mountaineers of the Caucasus” (1934); “Poets of the Soviet Dagestan” (1936); Dagestan almanac (1937), “the Highlanders’ Songs” (1939), and other.

5. In Spring 1934 Effendi Kapiev got acquainted with the famous Lezghi poet Suleiman Stalsky and for many years until S. Stalsky’s death in 1937 was his assistant in poetic activity, translated his verses, poems, songs and published his creative works.

6. In 1935 E. Kapiev moved to Pyatigorsk where he worked in the regional newspaper ”Young Leninist”. In 1940 a book of his poems “Stone Carving”, based on the mountainous folklore was published in Moscow. That same year he finished his work on the book “A Poet” about Suleiman Stalsky which he had been working on for many years, and which was published in 1941 in the journal “The Young Guard”, and later was republished several times. During the Great Patriotic war he worked as a propagandist and agitator. At the end of 1941 he was sent to the front lineof the Southern front. After he returned he published the book of stories and essays “The Kazaks on the Front”, which was written together with S. Babayevsky.

7. In the Fall of 1942 he served as a correspondent of the newspaper of the Northern Caucasian Front “Forward for the Motherland’. The essays which were published in the newspaper were later collected into one collection “Essays from the Front”. Serving as a military correspondent he made his writer’s notes every day which were published after his death in the book ‘Sketches from the Front” in Moscow in 1956.

8. In 1943 he was put sent to the hospital to be cured and on January, 27, 1944 he died in the hospital in Pyatigorsk. His books were translated and published in the languages of the former fraternal republics of the USSSR and nations of Dagestan.

9. His name was given to the Lak Theater which is in the central Part of Makhachkala.