Musa Mustafovich Zalilov (literary pseudonym Musa Jalil) is a Tatar poet. He was born on February 15, 1906 in the village Mustafino in the Sharlyksky region of Orenburg province in a family of poor peasant. He studied in the “Khusaniya” medrese (religious school) in the city of Orenburg.

In 1931 he came to Kazan where he completely devoted himself to creative work and social activity. In 1939 he was elected as the Chairperson of the Union of Writers of Tatar ASSR and a deputy of the City Council. As a writer he tried almost all literary genres: songs, verses, poems, plays, publicistic works and gathered materials for his novel about Komsomol (Young Communist League).

When the great Patriotic war began, Musa was called up to military service. On June 26 1942 the senior political instructor M. M. Zalilov with a group of soldiers and officers, breaking out of encirclement, got into an ambush of fascists. In the battle he was severely wounded to breast and then taken prisoner while being unconscious. Staying in the Schpandau concentrating camp he organized a group for escape. At the same time he spread political propaganda among the prisoners and dropped leaflets, calling to resistance and fight. In prison he wrote 115 works of poetry. His notebooks with verses were kept by his comrade, the imprisoned anti-fascist Andre Timmermans from Belgium. After the war Timmermans gave them to a Soviet council. The poems returned to Motherland.

In 1953 the collected Moabit poems in Tatar were first published in Kazan, and in 1955 the collected poems titled “The Heroic Song” were issued by “Molodaya Gvardiya” Publishing House.

The first Moabit hand-made notebook of size 9,5 x 7,5 consists of 60 poems. The second Moabit notebook, also hand-made of size 10,7 x 7,5, implies 5 poems. They are kept in the State Museum of the Republic of Tatarstan. We still don’t know how many notes were there. In 1957 Musa Jalil was awarded Lenin Prize posthumously for the “Moabit Notebook” poetic cycle.

Musa Jalil died on August 25, 1944 in Pletsenzee prison in Berlin.