Zainab Biisheva

Zainab Abdullovna Biisheva is one of the prominent Bashkir writers. She has a versatile talent: she is known as a prosaic, poet, dramatist, journalist and interpreter. Zainab Biisheva’s creative work combines documentalism and fiction, realistic depiction of life and romantic aspiration to future, belief in endless creative potential of the Bashkir people.

Zainab Biisheva was born in January 1908 in the village of Tuyembet, Orenburg province. Her family was poor. She had four sisters and a brother. Very early, when she was eleven, she became an orphan, as her parents died. She had to live with her step-mother, an energetic, skillful, but stern woman.

Zainab was eager to learn, she read a lot. In 1924, Zainab was sent to the Bashkir Institute of Public Education which was situated in Orenburg, in the building designed by Brullov, an outstanding Russian artist. The years of learning were years of hard work. Zainab studied literature, history, political economy, Russian. She read a great number of Russian authors, such as A.S.Pushkin, N.V.Gogol, L.N.Tolstoy, F.M.Dostoevsky. She also liked reading Bashkir and Tatar writers.

After graduating from the institute she worked as teacher in a Bashkir village of Baimak district, then she was transferred to Ufa where she became an editor. At that time she began to publish her stories and poems.

During the Great Patriotic War her life was very hard: Zainab’s husband fought against the fascists at the front, while she had to look after her three sons and a sick sister. But she wrote a lot. She translated into Bashkir the works by S.T.Aksakov, N.V.Gogol, I.S.Turgenev, L.N.Tolstoi, A.P.Chekhov.

The postwar period was also very fruitful. Zainab Biisheva proved to be a many-sided writer. She published more than 40 books of stories, poems, publicistic essays, and dramas.

Her famous stories are: “A Strange Man”, “Where Are You, Gulnisa?”, “Love and Hatred”, “Master and Apprentice”.

The main work of her life is the trilogy “To the Light”. It is a result of many years of labour and thinking. This trilogy depicts the life of a young Bashkir girl Yemesh and other characters on the background of the historical events in Bashkiria beginning with the prerevolutionary time. The trilogy is considered not only Biisheva’s great achievement, but a new stage in the development of Bashkir prose.

(After Алибаева С.А., Журавлева А.А., Журавлева А.Н. Зайнаб Биишева. Жизнь и творчество. - Уфа, 1993)