Anna Almatinskaya

Anna Vladimirovna Almatinskaya (born Drzhevitskaya) was born on 31 December 1882 in the Old Style calendar, which is 12 January 1883 in the New Style. Her married surname was Pankratyeva, while “Almatinskaya” was her literary pseudonym. No reliable account of her birthplace or childhood has survived.

She began to publish in 1902 and later settled in Tashkent, where she spent most of her life and carried out her literary work.

In 1914 she edited “Steppe Mirages”, the first literary almanac to appear in Turkestan, which also included several of her poems. She is named among the founders of the Tashkent Association of Proletarian Writers (TAPP).

Her best-known work is the three-book novel “Gnyot” (“Oppression”), on which she worked for nearly a quarter of a century. It portrays pre-revolutionary Turkestan and the events of 1905–1907 and 1917 in Central Asia, and appeared in 1957–1960. Earlier, in 1927, she published the collection of verse and prose “Roadside Grasses”, and wrote the tales “An Oath to the Sun” and “Conquering Death” (the latter with N. M. Makhmudova).

Almatinskaya translated works by Uzbek writers into Russian, among them Askad Mukhtar and Said Nazir. A book of her memoirs came out in 1971.

She received the Order of the Red Banner of Labour (18 March 1959) and the Order of the Badge of Honour (29 December 1972, for services to Soviet literature on her 90th birthday). She died in Tashkent on 30 August 1973, aged 90, and was buried at the Botkin Cemetery.