The picture below was intended to be used as a cover to the first Tatar translation of Turgenev’s “Fathers and Sons”. At the time (1928) it was the first literary work in Tatar to use Latin script called Yañalif instead of Arabic script that preceded it, and one of the very few books that managed to use Yañalif before Tatar writing was forced into Cyrillic script (1939), though many baptised Tatars had already been using Cyrillic for centuries.

The book, faithfully titled “Atalar häm Balalar” in ...