TOWARDS THE LIGHT!

TOWARDS THE LIGHT! (Yaktyga), a trilogy. Written between 1958–70 by Z.A.Biisheva. The novels The Humiliated (1958), The Awakening (1966) and Towards the Light! (1970) made up a trilogy that established a new genre form and became an artistic chronicle of the life of the people of Bashkortostan. The novel The Humiliated describes the events on the eve of World War I and the beginning of the Civil War through a narrative about the fate of a poor person named Baygild and his family. The sec‑ ond novel describes the characters and events of the unfolding Civil War. Through an auto‑ biographical style narrative of a young Yemesh, the author shows how the new world of women in the new Soviet era is formed. The work is rich in its ethnographic descrip‑ tion of the life of the residents of the Bashkir villages of Isanbet and Ilsegul, with an abun‑ dance of contrasts between the rich and the poor, and the emerging idea of spiritual free‑ dom of the individual. Literary translation into Russian was done by I.G.Gizzatullin, A.T.Gladilin and Y.G.Aminov.