ZEFIRA KIRILLOVNA BUTAEVA

An Ossetian. Born on 24 May 1926 in Vladikavkaz.

She graduated with honours from the Philological Faculty of Moscow State University, specialising in Oriental languages, and studied Persian, a language with affinities to her native Ossetian.

Zefira was a woman, a mother, a daughter, a sister who walked a difficult path through life, one that brought her face to face with the cruelty of communist rule, poverty, loss, and serious illness — yet through it all she remained a luminous person who carried love, warmth, and faith in people wherever she went.

Books and culture were an important part of her life. Her father, Kirill Solomonovich Gutnov, devoted his life to printing and to translating books into Ossetian. He worked at a printing house in Vladikavkaz, helping and regularly corresponding with his elder brother Evgeniy, who owned a printing house in Germany. Kirill's favourite Ossetian poet was Kosta Khetagurov. In 1937 Kirill was arrested and officially sentenced to "ten years without the right of correspondence" — in reality, he was shot by the Soviet NKVD on the fabricated charge of being "a member of a counter-revolutionary, bourgeois-nationalist insurgent organisation, conducting counter-revolutionary propaganda and espionage."

Zefira's brother Alexander died at the front in 1944 during the Second World War, while she and her elder sister Fuza remained close and stayed friends their whole lives.

During the Second World War, in 1942-1944, in the gaps between her studies — disrupted by the front line's proximity to the city of Ordzhonikidze — she worked alongside her mother at a cannery that supplied the front, for which she was awarded the medal "For Valiant Labour in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945."

Zefira dreamed of studying in Moscow. She finished school with distinction, which gave her the chance to enter Moscow State University in 1944. She graduated in 1951 with a degree in Iranian philology. Her choice of the Philological Faculty was influenced by her uncle, Elbrus Gutnov. That same year she began teaching Russian language and literature at the Moscow Technical College of Architecture and Construction, where she worked until 1953. In Moscow, Zefira met a close friend who became part of the family — Natella Matikashvili. Their friendship lasted Zefira's whole life.

Toward the end of her studies, Zefira met her future husband, Georgiy Mikhailovich Butaev. In early 1954 the family was forced to leave Moscow: they feared the consequences after Zefira had written on an official form that she was the daughter of a man who had been repressed. The family moved to Ukraine, where Zefira and Georgiy both went to work at KhAI (the Kharkiv Aviation Institute).

Zefira and Georgiy had three daughters — Zalina, Olga, and Tamara.

Zefira worked at KhAI for 28 years, until her retirement in 1984. Her career there began in 1956 as a librarian, and she went on to serve as a bibliographer, head of the acquisitions and processing department, and senior librarian. From 1973 she transferred to teaching Russian at the preparatory department, then served as an assistant in the foreign languages department, and from 1976 worked as a senior lecturer in the foreign languages department.

Throughout her life Zefira tried to learn the truth about her arrested father's fate. When the era of glasnost began making official information available, she learned the truth and did everything she could to clear her father's name — a man who, together with his brothers, had made a significant contribution to printing and book publishing in Ossetia.

In the 1990s Zefira wrote a memoir, later published by Zalina under the title "The Scent of My Homeland's Wind." The book reflects her longing and love for Ossetia, the cruelty of the times and of those in power, childhood memories of warm churek bread and Ossetian pie, and a love that filled her heart with warmth, passion, and feeling her whole life long.