Abdulla Qahhor

Abdulla Qahhor was born in Kokand on 17 September 1907 to the blacksmith Abduqahhor Jalilov and his wife Rohat (some sources give his birthplace as Asht in present-day Tajikistan). His father’s trade could not keep the family, so he moved from village to village around Kokand in search of work, and the boy grew up in Yaypan, Buvayda, Oqqo'rg'on and other villages. He studied at a new-method school in Oqqo'rg'on, at town schools after the family settled in Kokand, and then at the Kokand teacher-training college.

His first poem, “When the Moon Was Eclipsed”, appeared in the satirical magazine “Mushtum” in 1924 under the pen name Norin shilpiq; he signed later satirical verse and stories as Gulyor, Nish, Erkaboy and other names. After college he worked for the Kokand town Komsomol committee, and in 1925 he moved to Tashkent, where he ran the readers’ letters page of the newspaper “Qizil O'zbekiston” and attended the workers’ faculty of the Central Asian State University. In 1929 he taught at a teachers’ course in Kokand and worked for the newspaper “Yangi Farg'ona”, and in 1930–1934 he studied at the university’s Faculty of Pedagogy.

After the story “The Headless Man” (1929) Qahhor concentrated on prose, publishing the novella “The Village on Trial” (1932), his first collection of stories, “The World Grows Young”, and the novel “Mirage” (1935), about the fate of the Uzbek intellectual Saidiy in the late 1920s. In the mid-1930s he wrote the stories “The Thief”, “The Patient”, “The Pomegranate”, “The Nationalists” and “The Literature Teacher”. He later said that reading Chekhov helped him see his childhood experiences with new eyes, and he is often called “the Uzbek Chekhov”. In 1934–1938 he was executive secretary of the magazine “Sovet adabiyoti” (today “Sharq yulduzi”), in 1938–1939 head of the literary department of the Hamza Theatre, and then for many years an editor and translator at the State Publishing House of Uzbekistan.

During the war he wrote about soldiers and home-front workers in the stories “Grandpa Asror”, “A Hero from Dardaq” and “The Old Women Sent a Telegram” and the novella “The Golden Star”. After the war came the novel “The Lights of Qo'shchinor” (1951), set in the years of collectivisation. His comedy “Shohi so'zana” (“Silk Suzani”, also called “The New Land”, 1950), about the reclamation of the Mirzacho'l steppe, won a Stalin Prize in 1952 and was widely staged. It was followed by the comedies “Aching Teeth” (1954), “A Voice from the Coffin” (1962) and “My Dear Mothers” (1967). Qahhor joined the Communist Party in 1952, chaired the board of the Writers’ Union of Uzbekistan in 1954–1956 and was elected to the Supreme Soviet of the Uzbek SSR in 1955.

His best-known novellas date from his last decade: “Sinchalak” (1958; filmed by Latif Fayziyev in 1961), about Saida, a young party secretary who stands up to the high-handed collective-farm chairman Qalandarov, the autobiographical “Tales from the Past” (1965) and “Love” (1968). “Tales from the Past” won him the Hamza State Prize of the Uzbek SSR in 1966 and was translated into Russian by Konstantin Simonov and Kamron Hakimov. In 1959 he began “Earthquake”, a novella about the Stalinist repressions, but never finished it; the surviving chapters were published in “Sharq yulduzi” in 1987.

Qahhor translated into Uzbek Pushkin’s “The Captain’s Daughter”, Gogol’s “The Government Inspector” and “Marriage”, Gorky’s “My Universities”, Serafimovich’s “The Iron Flood” and stories by Chekhov, and, together with his wife, the translator Kibriyo Qahhorova, Tolstoy’s “War and Peace”. His own works have been translated into Russian and many other languages.

In 1967, on his 60th birthday, Abdulla Qahhor was named People’s Writer of the Uzbek SSR. Long ill, he went to Moscow for treatment and died there on 25 May 1968; he was buried in the Chig'atoy cemetery in Tashkent. In 2000 he was posthumously awarded the Order “For Outstanding Merit” (“Buyuk xizmatlari uchun”). The Tashkent house where he lived from 1958 to 1968 became a museum on 6 May 1987, on the initiative of Kibriyo Qahhorova. Streets in Tashkent and Kokand bear his name; his centenary in 2007 was widely celebrated and marked with postage stamps.