in the USSR, were forced to use a non-native language (i.e. French rather than Arabic). Latin Dili thereupon highlights the irony that elsewhere there's a language (Latin) that remains widely used despite no longer belonging to any living culture. This nearly got Vahabzadeh in trouble with the KGB but it could not be proven that the poem's subtext was Azerbaijan not Morocco as he claimed. In a similar vein, the 1972 poem Dawn examined the USA's McCarthy-era attacks on pacifist scientist Linus Pauling while unspokenly reflecting a similar sense of political paranoia in the Soviet Union. Other well-known poetic works and collections include: Mənim Dostlarım (My Friends, 1949) Bahar (Spring, 1950) Dostlug Nağmesi (Book of Friendship, 1953) Ebedî Heykel (Eternal Statue, 1954) Çınar (Plane Tree, 1956) Sadə Adamlar (Plain Men, 1956) Ceyran (Currency, 1957) Aylı Geceler (Nights at Moon, 1958) Şairin Kitaphanası (Library of a Poet, 1961) E'tiraf (Confession, 1962) İnsan ve Zaman (Man and Time, 1964) Seçilmiş Eserler (Selected Works, 1967) Kökler-Budağlar (Roots and Branches, 1968) Deniz-Sahil (Sea-Coast, 1969) Bindörtyüzonaltı (Fourteen sixteen, 1970) Dam Yeri (On the Roof, 1974) Seçilmiş Eserleri (Selected Works, 2 volumes, 1975) Yücelikte Tenhalık (Tranquility in Eminence, 1998) Benim Garibim (My Strange, 2002) Controversy Vahabzadeh's poem Gülüstan was written in 1959. It laments how the Aras River has separated Azerbaijani-speaking people in the Azerbaijan SSR of the Soviet Union and Iran and is a symbol of the pan-Turkism doctrine, that seeks incorporation of the Turkic people of Iran. The poem is part of a literary genre conceived in the Azerbaijan SSR of the Soviet Union, the context of which is related to Iran's Azerbaijan region. This Soviet Azerbaijani literary genre, also referred to as "a literature of longing", had become dominant in the 1950s and 1960s in the Azerbaijan SSR. As a rule, works that belonged to this category, as the historian and political scientist Zaur Gasimov explains, "were examples of blatant Azerbaijani nationalism stigmatizing the “division” of the nation along the river Araxes, as well as denunciations of economic and cultural exploitation of Iranian Azerbaijanis, etc." Such themes, including the poem by Vahabzadeh, were incorporated into the history and literature curricula of the Azerbaijan SSR. Gasimov adds: "An important by-product of this literary genre was strongly articulated anti-Iranian rhetoric. Tolerance and even support of this anti-Iranian rhetoric by the communist authorities were obvious." Vahabzadeh, for instance, was decorated on numerous occasions by the ruling