Moabit notebook

“Moabit tetrad” ( tat. Moabit dәftәre, Moabit däftäre ) - a cycle of poems by Tatar poet Musa Jalil , written by him in Moabit prison .

Preserved two notebooks, which contained 93 poems. The poems were written in the Tatar language in the first notebook of Arabic, in the second - in Latin script .

In 1946, a former prisoner of war, Nigmat Teregulov, brought a notebook with six dozen poems of Jalil to the Tataria Writers' Union. A year later, a second notebook arrived from the Soviet consulate in Brussels . The Belgian patriot Andre Timmermans carried her out of the Moabit prison and, while fulfilling the poet's last will, sent poems to his homeland.

There was another collection of poems from Moabit, brought by the former prisoner of war Gabbas Sharipov. Teregulov and Sharipov were arrested. Teregulov died in the camp. Gabbas Sharipov served a sentence (10 years), then lived in the Volgograd region.

In January 1946, the Turkish citizen Tatar Kazim Mirshan brought another notebook to the Soviet embassy in Rome . The collection was sent to Moscow, where his trace was lost. The collection was handed over to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, then to the MGB , then to SMERSH . Since 1979, the search for these notebooks has not given results.

For the first time, the poems were published after Stalin’s death in 1953 in the Literary Gazette thanks to editor-in-chief Konstantin Simonov . In 1957, the author was posthumously awarded the Lenin Prize for this cycle of poems.

The Moabite Notebook has been translated into more than 60 languages.

In 2013, a cycle of poems was included in the list of “ 100 books ” recommended to schoolchildren by the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation for independent reading.

The poems that make up the Moabite Notebook are very diverse in their content and mood. Along with the patriotic lyrics and works that angrily denounce the crimes of Nazism (for example, “Barbarism”), the cycle includes love poems and even humorous sketches from peaceful life.