Nikolay Tevetkel

Nikolay Tevetkel, born Nikolay Aleksandrovich Petrovsky, was a Chuvash poet, prose writer, playwright and literary translator who held the title of People's Poet of the Chuvash Republic. He was best known for translating all 154 of William Shakespeare's sonnets into the Chuvash language and for bringing the sonnet form into Chuvash poetry. He died in Cheboksary on 6 October 2026, aged 89, in his 90th year.

He was born on 11 July 1937 in the village of Savka in the Ibresinsky District of the Chuvash ASSR. He studied at a vocational school in Mariinsky Posad and at the Cheboksary Art School in 1958 and 1959, and later attended the Higher Literary Courses at the Maxim Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow from 1979 to 1981. Before and alongside his writing he worked with his hands, as a cabinetmaker, carpenter, house painter and graphic designer, and at the Cheboksary cotton mill.

His poems began appearing in periodicals in the early 1960s, and his first collection, Poems of Youth, was published in 1964. Around ten more books followed over the next five decades, among them White Grove (1974), Magic Winter (1983), Sheaf of Sun (1987), a volume of his sonnets written between 1962 and 1993, published in 1995, and Distant Lights (2014). He also published in Moscow literary magazines and wrote prose. His verse tragedy Kiremet was staged by the Chuvash Academic Drama Theatre.

As a translator he worked from several literatures. Besides the complete Shakespeare sonnets, he translated works by Arthur Rimbaud, Victor Hugo and Rudyard Kipling, making them available to readers in their own language. Literary scholars in Chuvashia wrote about his crowns of sonnets and the theme of the road in his lyric poetry.

He joined the Union of Writers of the USSR in 1976. He was named an Honoured Worker of Arts of the Chuvash Republic in 1997 and later received the title of People's Poet of the Chuvash Republic, the republic's highest literary honour. He was also known as an artist, and the newspaper Suvar remembered him as a gifted poet, painter and translator whose deeply thoughtful poems opened his soul to readers.

His death was reported on 7 October 2026 by the Chuvash newspaper Khypar and announced publicly by the poet Marina Karyagina. The cause of death was not made public, and no details of the farewell had been announced. He would have turned 90 the following July.