Louis Aragon, French writer:
It is impossible that such a rich literature would not be based on the rich legacy of the past. Twenty years ago Kavi Nadzhmi told me about a classical poet Gabdulla Tukay who worked under the yoke of tsarism. In the poem “Prayer” Tukay tells:
Captivity has come, I came back to the earth;
The only thing left is to remember how I dreamed in my free time.
But now it is empty in my soul;
Don’t be angry very much if my work has fallen to decay.
(Word-for-word translation)
Such a severe beginning prepared a way for todays’ writers of Tatarstan.