Khasan Nazar

Khasan Mudarisovich Nazarov was born on 15 January 1942 into a peasant family in the village of Tavlykay, in the Zianchurinsky District of the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. He was Bashkir by nationality.

After finishing the seven-year school at Kuzhanak he worked on the collective farm as a herdsman. He then studied at a cooperative college in the town of Birsk and worked for the district consumer society, before serving in the Soviet Army.

He was drawn to poetry from his teenage years. Much later, while already working as a journalist in Ufa, he studied by correspondence at the Gorky Literary Institute of the Union of Writers of the USSR in Moscow, graduating in 1975.

On returning from the army Nazar joined Tan, the district newspaper of the Burzyansky District, and rose to head a department. In 1967 he moved to Ufa, where he worked first for the Bashkir youth newspaper Leninsy (renamed Yeshlek in 1990) and then for the literary magazine Agidel.

From 1971 he worked for Sovet Bashkortostany, the main Bashkir-language newspaper of the republic, later renamed Bashkortostan. Between 1974 and 1977 he was an editor at the Committee for Television and Radio Broadcasting of the Bashkir ASSR. From 1987 he headed a department at the children's newspaper Bashkortostan Pioneere (now Yenshishme), and he was executive secretary of Yeshlek from 1990 to 1992 and its deputy editor from 1994 to 1995. From 1995 to 2001 he ran the poetry and arts section of Agidel, and he then worked in the literature and arts department of Bashkortostan until 2007.

His first book of poems, The Eagles' Haunt, was published in Ufa in 1971 and was warmly received. It was followed by I Release the Falcon (1992), The Call of the Times (1995), Ascent to the Heavens (2000) and Life and Time (2008). His poetry was known for its national colour and associative imagery, and for its reflections on the present and future of the Bashkir nation and the moral questions of modern life. He continued to publish cycles of poems in Agidel and Bashkortostan into the 2010s.

Nazar was also an active translator. He rendered works by Alexander Pushkin, Alexander Blok, Valery Bryusov, Rasul Gamzatov and Mihai Eminescu into Bashkir, and the Mazhit Gafuri Bashkir Academic Drama Theatre staged Lope de Vega's The Dog in the Manger in his translation. His own poems were translated into Russian, Tatar, Turkish and other languages, and he wrote essays, literary portraits and reviews for the Bashkir press.

Nazar lived in Ufa. His wife was named Zakiya, and they had two sons, Ilshat and Azamat. He wrote under a shortened form of his name, Khasan Nazar (Khesen Nazar in Bashkir), rather than his full name, Khasan Nazarov.

Khasan Nazar died in Ufa on 1 November 2026, in his 85th year, after a long illness. He was 84. His death was announced the same day by the Union of Writers of the Republic of Bashkortostan and reported by the state news agency Bashinform, Komsomolskaya Pravda in Ufa and other outlets.

The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Bashkortostan and Bashinform expressed condolences to his family. The writers' union said that details of the farewell ceremony would be announced later.

Nazar was one of the generation of Bashkir poets who came of age in the 1970s and carried the Bashkir literary press through the Soviet and post-Soviet decades. As an editor at Agidel, Yeshlek and Bashkortostan he helped publish the work of other writers, and as a translator he brought Russian, Dagestani, Romanian and Spanish classics to Bashkir readers and audiences.

His standing in the republic was recognised with the Salawat Yulayev State Prize in 2000, the title of People's Poet of Bashkortostan in 2017, the Order for Services to the Republic of Bashkortostan in 2022 and, in 2019, a medal of the World Qurultai of Bashkirs. His digitised works are held by the Akhmet-Zaki Validi National Library of the Republic of Bashkortostan.