Musa Jalil is not only a famous Tatar poet and journalist, he is a hero of the USSR, who honorably fulfilled his duty to his homeland during the Great Patriotic War, risking his life. He is also known as the author of the "Moabite Notebook" - a cycle of poems written in prison dungeons. The life and work of Musa Jalil to this day arouse admiration, inspiring people to accomplishments in the name of peace and humanity.
Musa Jalil was born in the village of Mustafino, Orenburg province, into a large family on February 15, 1906. His real name is Musa Mustafovich Zalilov, he came up with his pseudonym during his school years, when he published a newspaper for his classmates. His parents, Mustafa and Rakhima Zalilov, lived in poverty, Musa was already their sixth child, and in Orenburg, meanwhile, there was hunger and devastation. Mustafa Zalilov appeared to those around him to be kind, agreeable, reasonable, and his wife Rakhima - strict to children, illiterate, but having wonderful vocal abilities. At first, the future poet studied in an ordinary local school, where he was distinguished by his special talent, curiosity and unique success in the speed of obtaining education. From the earliest he developed a love of reading, but since there was not enough money for books, he made them by hand, independently, writing in them heard or invented by him, and at the age of 9 he began to write poetry. In 1913, his family moved to Orenburg, where Musa entered a spiritual educational institution - the Khusainiya madrasah, where he began to develop his abilities more effectively. In madrasah, Jalil studied not only religious disciplines, but also common to all other schools, like music, literature, drawing. During his studies, Musa learned to play a stringed plucked musical instrument - the mandolin.
Since 1917, riots and lawlessness began in Orenburg, Musa is imbued with what is happening and thoroughly devotes time to creating poems. He enters the communist youth union to participate in the Civil War, but does not pass the selection due to an asthenic, thin physique. Against the background of urban disasters, Musa's father goes bankrupt, because of this he goes to prison, as a result of which he falls ill with typhus and dies. Musa's mother does the dirty work in order to somehow feed her family. Subsequently, the poet joins the Komsomol, whose orders he fulfills with great restraint, responsibility and courage. Since 1921, a time of famine begins in Orenburg, two of Musa's brothers die, he himself becomes a homeless child. He is saved from starvation by an employee of the Krasnaya Zvezda newspaper, who helps him to enter the Orenburg military-party school, and then to the Tatar Institute of Public Education.
Since 1922, Musa begins to live in Kazan, where he studies at the working faculty, actively participates in the activities of the Komsomol, organizes various creative meetings for young people, devotes a lot of time to creating literary works. In 1927, the Komsomol organization sent Jalil to Moscow, where he studied at the philological faculty of Moscow State University, pursued a poetry and journalistic career, and managed the literary area of the Tatar opera studio. In Moscow, Musa finds a personal life, becomes a husband and a father, in 1938 he moves with his family and an opera studio to Kazan, where he begins to work at the Tatar Opera House, and a year later already holds the posts of chairman of the Writers' Union of the Tatar Republic and a deputy of the city Council.
In 1941, Musa Jalil went to the front as a war correspondent, in 1942 he was seriously wounded in the chest and captured by the Nazis. In order to continue to fight the enemy, he becomes a member of the German legion Idel-Ural, in which he performed the function of selecting prisoners of war to create entertainment events for the Nazis. Taking this opportunity, he created an underground group within the legion, and in the process of selecting prisoners of war, he recruited new members of his secret organization. His underground group tried to raise an uprising in 1943, as a result of which more than five hundred captured Komsomol members were able to join the Belarusian partisans. In the summer of the same year, Jalil's underground group was discovered, and its founder, Musa, was executed by beheading in the fascist Ploetzensee prison on August 25, 1944.
Musa Jalil created his first known works in the period from 1918 to 1921. These include poems, plays, stories, recordings of samples of folk tales, songs and legends. Many of them have never been published. The first publication in which his work appeared was the newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda, which included his works of a democratic, liberating, national character. In 1929 he finished writing the poem "Traveled paths", in the twenties his first collection of poems and poems also appeared "Barabyz", and in 1934 two more were published - "Order-bearing millions" and "Poems and Poems". Four years later, he wrote the poem "The Writer", which tells the story of the Soviet youth. In general, the leading themes of the poet's work were revolution, socialism and civil war.
But the main monument of Musa Jalil's creativity was the "Moabit Notebook" - the contents of two small notebooks written by Musa before his death in the Moabit prison. Of these, only two have survived, which contain a total of 93 poems. They are written in different graphics, in one notebook in Arabic, and in the other Latin, each in Tatar. For the first time, poems from the "Moabit notebook" saw the light after the death of I. V. Stalin in the Literaturnaya Gazeta, because for a long time after the end of the war the poet was considered a deserter and a criminal. The translation of the poems into Russian was initiated by the war correspondent and writer Konstantin Simonov. Thanks to his thorough participation in the consideration of Musa's biography, the poet ceased to be perceived negatively and was posthumously awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, as well as the Lenin Prize. The Moabit Notebook has been translated into more than sixty world languages.
Musa Jalil is a model of endurance, a symbol of patriotism and an unbreakable spirit of creativity in spite of any hardships and sentences. With his life and work, he showed that poetry is higher and more powerful than any ideology, and the strength of character is capable of overcoming any hardships and catastrophes. "Moabit Notebook" is his testament to descendants, which says that man is mortal, and art is eternal.
