[1] Bersanov was unable to finish school, however, as it had been closed during the war against Finland in 1939, and all senior students were conscripted into the Red Army while the others were forced to return home.
The experience would profoundly affect his life and writing, as his time in the Kazakh steppes led him to develop a more conscious appreciation for his Chechen homeland.
He realized, however, that his passion was the development of Chechen as a literary language, as many of the folk histories and cultural traditions had not been written down at the time, and they risked being lost to future generations after the deportation.
During this time, Bersanov wrote articles describing the Chechen people to newspapers internationally, as his writings were featured in Bulgaria, Germany, Poland, and the United States, as well as throughout the Soviet Union.
[2] He also published the storybooks Lame Starling and Adventures of Hadji Murad in 1966, to popular reception from critics and the press, and gave him a certain degree of renown throughout the region.