"Ferkhad and Shirin” (Hosroth and Shirin) is an epic poem enjoyed by many of the Oriental authors. A tragic story about love whose characters have real historical prototypes. They lived in the 6 -7 centuries AD.

The Azerbaijan poet and phylosopher Nizami Gyandzhevy (ap.1141-ap. 1209) ("Hosroth and Shirin" - 1181, written in Persian) and the Uzbek poet and state figure Alisher Navoy (1441-1501) ("Ferkhad and Shirin", written in the ancient Uzbek language) are the most legendary authors among those who glorified this fable in various ways. It accounts for the difference in the sounding of the name of the main character: Ferkhad is a Persian name and Farkhad is its Uzbek version.

There was an ancient tradition in the Oriental world to write poems “in response” i.e. a poem based on a story line with its heroes which had already been covered by an earlier author. The product frequently turned out to be absolutely different from the earlier version.

We may very well regard "The Legend of love" written by the Turkish poet Nazym Khikmet, who lived in the second part of the 20th century, "a response" to his great predecessors, in this case to Nizami. But the world known Turkish poet, a staunch communist, ended his version more optimistically. The play was written with the thought about his beloved wife, when the poet was committed to prison for his convictions. According to his words, Khikmet originally meant to finish the play with Ferkhad dying in Shirin’s arms, then he changed his mind, because this sort of end might sound as if he himself died in the arms of his wife soon after his being released from the prison. Nazym Khikmet lived the rest of his life in the Soviet Union. He is known to have personally participated in the mounting of the ballet.

Many of the critics when speaking about the ballet created by Grigorovich and Virsaladze and based on the play by Nazym Khikmet and music by Melikov, admit that a real miracle has been worked – the Oriental fable play, which inevitably suffers losses in the course of translation, proves to be perfectly translatable into the language of dance.

V. Gaevsky writes about it: "... Here comes from the Istanbul prison Nazym Khikmet, a blue-eyed Turk, noble, magnanimous, incomprehensibly handsome. And produces his play as beautiful as he himself, as his Turkish verses... The play is liked and admired – first of all for its utter, absolute irrelevance: the time of Persian motives and tunes seems to have gone forever. And so the drama theatres which rush to stage Khikmet’ play one by one see painful failures. At that very moment Yuri Grigorovich undertakes to mount the ballet.

It goes without saying that the ballet transcription is deprived of the beauty and aura of Khikmet’s original verses, which might actually have been partially lost in the Russian translation of the Turkish play. In the good translation, of course, as connoisseurs say, but nevertheless... Fortunately, to some extent, in a sense, the ballet version has become a back translation into the author's language, a direct reference to the original text. Without any intermediary, the ballet performance has become an adequate dancing embodiment of Khikmet’s orientally picturesque style...
Thus, the ornamental style made its third successful coming onto the stage of Mariinsky Theatre, after Fokin’s mounting his “Shaherezada”, and, further into the past, after Petipa’s “Bayadera”...”

(V. Gaevsky. “Divertissement“, pp. 211-212, 218).
The article is written on the basis of the books: Nazym Khikmet. "Izbrannoe” (Selected works) in 2 vols., V.2. Ìoscow, Khudozhestvennaya Literatura, 1987; Alisher Navoi. "Farkhad and Shirin", State Publishing House of Fiction of UzSSR, Tashkent, 1957.