Qaysin Quli

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Kaysyn Shuvayevich Kuliev (Russian: Кайсын Шуваевич Кулиев) aka Qaysin Quli (Balkar: Къули Къайсын) (November 1, 1917 - June 4, 1985) was a Balkar poet. He wrote in the Karachay-Balkar language and his poems are widely translated mostly to USSR languages, such as Russian and Ossetian.

Quli was born on November 1, 1917, in Balkar aul Upper Chegem to a family headed by a stock-breeder and hunter. He spent his childhood in the mountains, but became an orphan and started to work at an early age. In 1926 a school was established in his aul, and he started to read and study Russian. By age 10 he wrote his first poems. After Quli graduated school, he entered a technical college in Nalchik, where he was published at the age of 17. In 1935 Quli arrived in Moscow and entered GITIS Theater Institute. At the same time, he visited lectutres in the Literature Institute and wrote poems. In 1939 he returned to Nalchik, where he taught literature in the local teacher's training college. In 1940 he published his first collection, Hallo, Morning!.

In 1940 he was drafted to the Red Army, where he served in the paratrooper brigade. In the summer of 1941, his brigade was moved to Latvian SSR, where Quli fought in theSecond World War, and in battles near Orel he was wounded. In the hospital Qaysin Quli wrote many poems that were published in Pravda, and Krasnaya Zveda and later he participated in the battle of Stalingrad as a military correspondent of Syny Otechestva newspaper. Participating in the operation to free the Southern cities, Quli was wounded again. During the period between 1942 and 1944, he wrote In an hour of Trouble, About Someone Who Didn't Return, and Perekop.

In 1945 he moved to Kyrgyzstan, where he worked in the local Writers' Union. Quli's poems could not be published, as Balkars were deported during the war, so he instead translated many poems in this period. In May 1956, he traveled to Moscow, where in the following year he published Mountains and The Bread and the Rose (1957) with the help of N. Tikhonov. In 1956, Balkars were able to return and Qaysin Quli returned to Nalchik. There he published his collections The Wounded Stone (1964), The Book of the Land (1972), The Evening (1974), The Evening Light (1979), A Beauty of the Earth (1980), and others. Qaysin Quli died in 1985 at the age of 68.