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Nabokov, Vladimir Dmitrievich (1860-1922)
Jurist. Cadet. Member 1st Duma. Delegate to Moscow State Conference. Member Praesidium PreParliament. Executive Secretary, Provisional Government. Minister of Justice in Crimean (counter-revolutionary) Government. Killed in Berlin by Russian reactionary in an attempt on the life of Miliukov.
Nagalingam, Ponnambalam
Born Tellippalai (Jaffna District), Ceylon. Educated Jaffna College, Vaddukkoddai, Ceylon; Parameswara College, Tinnelvely; and Ceylon Law College. Practiced law in Tellippalai, Uduvil, and Chunnakam. Active in student politics and Tellippalai the Tamil Youth Congress. Joined Lanka Sama Samaja Party in early ‘fourties. Contested 1947 parliamentary elections (Kankesanthurai Constituency), lost to S.J.V. Chelvanayakam. Lanka Sama Samaja Party representative in the Senate, 1951-57. Chairman of the Chunnakam Town Council from early ‘sixties.
Compiled by Charles Wesley Ervin
Nagy, Imre (1896-1958)
Become a Communist while a prisoner of war in Russia, and had been in the USSR since 1930. He was a popular figure in Hungary, and regarded as a moderate. As Interior Minister he carried out sweeping land reforms, but was soon removed from his post by the ardent Stalinist Rakosi. Rehabilitated and made Prime Minister in 1953 after the death of Stalin. Instead of repressing the uprising of 1956, Nagy had joined it, and vainly attempted to dissuade the Soviet Union from intervening. After the Uprising was crushed by Soviet intervention, Nagy was put on trial and executed in 1958.
Napoleon I (1769-1821)
French general and Emperor, in 1804-15. Defeated in the battle of Waterloo.
Napoleon III (1808-73)
Charles Louis Napoléon Bonaparte , Nephew of Napoleon I, President of the Second Republic of France (1848-52), and then Emperor of the Second Empire from 1852-70.
Brought up in exile by his mother, the stepdaughter of Napoleon I, Louis Bonaparte was drilled at an early age to belove the great Napoleon, and the Empire he had created for France. By the age of 24, Bonaparte considered himself the heir to the (presently non-existent) throne of the great Napoleon. Believing his heritage would inspire the loyalty of French soldiers, Bonaparte attempted and completely failed to win over the Strasbourg garrison for a coup d'état on October 30, 1836. Ruling French King Louis-Philippe exiled him to the United States, but only a few months later Bonaparte returned to Switzerland, to see his dying mother. A year later he was expelled from Switzerland, and immigrated to England.
On August 6, 1840, Bonaparte again attempted a coup from Boulogne, but the local garrison did not join him and his effort miserably failed. Bonaparte was captured, arrested and sentence to permanent imprisonment inside a fortress. Bonapartes' spirit was unhindered, however, and in May 25, 1846, he escaped again to England.
After the revolution of 1848 began, Bonaparte hurriedly traveled to France but was immediately sent back to England. Bonapartes supporters, however, among them the Party of Order, supported him in the elections putting his position in the September at five departments, which he took as a start to run for the office of the presidency. After intensive campaigning and propaganda, in December, 1848, Bonaparte was the only candidate voted for. In the presidency, Bonaparte immediately sent French legions to help the Pope reconquer Rome and at home he subdued workers with stern brutality.
Bonaparte spent much of this time consolidating power, and staffing the government administration with people in support of him. But the Constitution dictated that the president have only a four-year term, and Bonaparte, not all satisfied with this, sought to amend the Constitution – but he was unable to get the majority he needed to legally do so. So on December 2, 1852, before his presidency expired, Louis Bonaparte staged a coup to overthrow the government and install himself as Emperor.[...]
In 1870, a Prussian Prince was to become the king of Spain. This upset Bonaparte to such an extent – that a relative to the King of Prussia would control Spain – that France and Prussia plunged into war in July 18, 1870. The war would last for less than six weeks, when defeat after defeat, on September 2, 1870, at the Battle of Sedan, Bonaparte and his 80,000 troops surrendered to the Prussian army.
Bonaparte was, for the last time, exiled to England where he lived for a little more than a year, and died on January 23rd, 1873.
Further Reading: Bonaparte, after the coup he led in 1848, was heavily criticized by Marx in his classic work: the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. Bonaparte was also criticized in his role in the Franco-Prussian war in 1870, in Marx's work: The Civil War and France .
Narayanan, C.K.
Active worker/leader, MLU, 1946. Joined Bolshevik Leninist Party of India. Member, MLU Strike Committee, 1947; arrested during the B&C Mills strike. Councillor, Madras Municipal Corporation, elected 1948. Secretary, Madras Labour Union, in the 1950s and 1960s.
Compiled by Charles Wesley Ervin
Narayana Samy
Party pseudonym: M. Lajapathy
Born in a village near Theni (Theni District, Tamil Nadu). Worked as a teacher in a government school. Joined Bolshevik Leninist Party of India in Madurai. Moved to Madras and became trade union worker for BLPI. Went by his party name, Lajapathy. Joined SP with BLPI. When SP merged with KMPP, remained with the dissidents; elected Convenor, Tamil Nadu Ad Hoc Committee, September 1952. Worked on the trade union front in Madras in ‘fifties. Elected to Central Committee, MKP, January 1955. Joined RWPI in Madras.
Compiled by Charles Wesley Ervin
Natanson, Mark Andreyevich (1850-1919)
A leader of the Russian SR party.
Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976)
Kazi Nazrul is renowned as the National Poet of Bangladesh.
I’m the Rebel Eternal,
I’ll stamp my footprint on the bosom of Almighty!
I’ll tear apart the ribcage of the whimsical Providence.
That’s precisely how Kazi Nazrul Islam elected to describe himself in his arguably the best-known poem The Rebel – Bidrohi in original Bengali. And, not for nothing, he came to be known ever after as the Bidrohi Kabi, the Rebel Poet, of Bengal.
Notwithstanding this deliberately asserted iconoclastic image, the most distinctive marker that runs through his very considerable literary output – consisting of mostly poems and songs but also including short stories, novels and essays – is, however, passion.
Kazi Nazrul was born in a poor Muslim family in an interior village of what is now West Bengal by the fag end of the nineteenth century (May 25, 1899). While still in his early twenties, he made his Comet like entry into the literary scene of the then undivided Bengal of British-ruled India. His social, economic, cultural and religious backgrounds set him much apart from the overwhelming bulk of the contemporary practitioners of Bengali literature.
Kazi Nazrul did more than simply shove away the genteel approach of his peers – mainly Hindu upper-caste males. He also created his very own powerful linguistic style – combining both Hindu and Islamic heritages, boldly melding Sanskritic and Persian-Arabic images, words and idioms with the folk and colloquial.
In terms of popularity, in his heyday – which unfortunately was rather shortlived – he had arguably overtaken even the towering Rabindranath Tagore.
While he is best known for his romantic lyrics, his fiery and militant anti-colonial patriotic poems and songs also inspired millions of Bengalis in their fight for Indian independence.
His composition of devotional songs – again highly popular, both in Islamic and local Hindu traditions – went hand in hand with his intense engagement with radical nationalist and Marxist currents. As a political activist he suffered imprisonment by the colonial ruler. Some of his works were proscribed. Kazi Nazrul also provided a Bengali translation of The Internationale.
He breathed his last as the National Poet of Bangladesh in 1976 in the capital city of Dhaka, to where he had been taken from Calcutta (now Kolkata) in India soon after the birth of the new nation. He had to spend his last three decades completely speechless, suffering from incurable brain damage.
See Kazi Nazrul Islam Archive. For fuller accounts of his life visit: Wikipedia and Banglapedia