 As a writer he is known for his novels "One Can Hear the Noise of the Forest", about the 1905 Revolution, and "Elnet", about the life of a pre-revolutionary Mari village.A victim of the Great Purge during the "struggle with bourgeois nationalism", he was executed in Yoshkar-Ola on 11 November 1937 and was posthumously rehabilitated in 1956.The State prize of Mari El is named after Chavain.