29 (15) june 1910 – 31 may 1993

The Ingush writer, poet, and playwright was the grandson of Bunukho Bazorkin, one of the first Ingush generals in the Imperial Russian Army, who took part in the Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878) and was awarded medals for bravery during the Liberation of Bulgaria. His six sons received an excellent education and became part of the first generation of the Ingush intelligentsia. Idris’s father was the third of them and emigrated to Persia during the Russian Civil War.

The future writer grew up under the care of his mother, the daughter of a Swiss engineer, who introduced her son to the richness of Russian and European culture and literature. While still a student at the Ingush Pedagogical College, Idris wrote his first poems. After graduating, he enrolled in the Faculty of Literature at the North Caucasian Pedagogical Institute in Vladikavkaz in 1930. During this period, he wrote short stories, poetry, and articles and contributed to the publication of an Ingush-language textbook for first-grade pupils in rural schools.

In 1937, the first full-length multi-act play in Ingush literature, At Dawn, was published. It portrayed the struggle against the White Guards in the Caucasus in 1919. The defining work of his life, however, was the historical novel From the Darkness of Ages (1968), described as an “encyclopedia of the life of the Ingush people.” The author himself described its significance as a book about “the formation of the individual and the clash of characters against the background of major historical events.”

The bust monument to Idris Bazorkin is the work of the talented young sculptor Ibragim Polonkoev – the only Ingush artist with an academic education in the field of sculpture and the youngest son of the renowned self-taught artist Murat Polonkoev.