Eduard Arbenov

Eduard Arbenov was the pen name of Alfred Rudolfovich Bender. He was born on 2 January 1913 in Kharkiv, into a German family of a white-collar employee. In 1918 his father was transferred to Tashkent as chief accountant of the Turkestan–Siberia Railway (TurkSib), and the family settled there; Bender lived in Tashkent for the rest of his life.

In 1935 he graduated in history from Tashkent State University. As a student he already contributed to the newspaper Komsomolets Uzbekistana, in 1938 he became head of the literature and arts section of Pioner Vostoka, and in 1941 a special correspondent of Komsomolets Uzbekistana for the Samarkand region. That year a play in five scenes, “Na postu” (“On Duty”), appeared under the name A. R. Bender.

In August 1941 he was repressed because of his German origin and was rehabilitated in 1947. From 1947 to 1957 he worked as a secretary-assistant to writers; in 1958 he returned to Tashkent and resumed work as a Komsomolets Uzbekistana correspondent. From 1961 he was a senior editor at the Yosh Gvardiya publishing house, from 1965 its deputy editor-in-chief, and from 1969 until retirement deputy editor-in-chief of the magazine Zvezda Vostoka.

Arbenov joined the Union of Writers of the USSR in 1965. Under his pen name he published the novellas “Svetlye strui”, “Esli vstretite Borisa…”, “Zhdanka ostayotsya s nami” and “Chuzhoy porog”, followed by spy novels. “Feniks” (“Phoenix”, 1966) and “Berlinskoye koltso” (“The Berlin Ring”, 1969) were written with Leonid Nikolaev. The film “V 26-go ne strelyat” (“Do Not Shoot the 26th”, Uzbekfilm, directed by Ravil Batyrov), based on “Feniks”, was the leader of Soviet box office in 1967; Arbenov is credited as one of its screenwriters alongside Nikolaev and Batyrov. The novel “V shest tridtsat po tokiyskomu vremeni” (“Half Past Six Tokyo Time”, 1975) was written with Moisey Pismanik.

For many years Arbenov also translated Uzbek prose writers into Russian, among them Sharof Rashidov, Nazir Safarov and the Karakalpak writer Saidbergenov. He supervised young poets and prose writers attached to the republic’s writers’ organisation; the poet Alexander Feinberg is named among his pupils. He held the title of Honoured Worker of Culture of Uzbekistan. He died in Tashkent on 1 February 2002.