Ghafur Ghulam

Ghafur Ghulam (born Ghafur Ghulomov) was born on 10 May 1903 in the Qo'rg'ontegi quarter of Tashkent. His father, Ghulom Mirza Orif, knew Russian and wrote verse himself, and local poets used to gather at the family home. The boy was orphaned early: he lost his father at nine and his mother soon afterwards, and the care of his sisters fell to him.

He studied at the traditional school and madrasa of his neighbourhood, from 1916 at a Russian-native school and in 1918 at the “Hayot” school. To earn a living he worked as a cobbler, a tinsmith and a typesetter at a printing house. After a teacher-training course he taught at the “Cho'lpon” (1919) and “Hayot” (1924) schools, worked at an orphanage (1926) and in 1928 became head of the “Urfon” school.

His poems began to appear in print in 1923. From 1928 he was executive secretary of the newspaper “Kambag'al dehqon”, from 1929 of “Sharq haqiqati”, and in 1930–1942 a literary staff member of the magazines “Mushtum” and “Yer yuzi” and the newspaper “Qizil O'zbekiston”. The collections “Dynamo” (1931) and “Living Songs” (1932) made his name as a young poet. In the 1930s he also turned to prose, writing the novellas “Netay”, “The Corpse that Came Alive” and “Yodgor”, and the autobiographical “Shum bola” (“The Mischievous Boy”), about a quick-witted boy who wriggles out of every scrape. Documents on the case of Abdulla Qodiriy published in 1992 include reviews, signed among others by Ghafur Ghulam, that accused the novelist of nationalism.

His best-known poems date from the Second World War: “You Are Not an Orphan” (1942), addressed to children who had lost their parents and been brought to Uzbekistan, “Seeing Off”, “Longing” and “There Will Be a Holiday on Our Street Too”. The collection of his wartime verse, “I Am Coming from the East” (1943), won a Stalin Prize in 1946. The National Encyclopedia of Uzbekistan describes “Time”, written in the first months after the war, as a new stage in Uzbek philosophical lyric poetry.

In 1943 he was elected a full member of the Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan, and for the rest of his life he was a senior research fellow at its Institute of Language and Literature. He wrote on Navoi, Muqimiy and folklore and prepared Navoi’s “Farhod and Shirin” for publication. He translated Shakespeare’s “Othello” and “King Lear”, Beaumarchais’s “The Marriage of Figaro” and works by Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov, Shevchenko and Mayakovsky into Uzbek. He joined the Communist Party in 1946 and was named People’s Poet of the Uzbek SSR in 1963.

Ghafur Ghulam died in Tashkent on 10 July 1966 and was buried in the Chig'atoy cemetery. He was posthumously awarded the Lenin Prize (1970) and the Order “For Outstanding Merit” (“Buyuk xizmatlari uchun”, 2000). A publishing house, a metro station and a park in Tashkent bear his name; his house became a museum in 1983, and in 2003, his centenary year, a monument to him was put up in the park. “Shum bola” was filmed in 1977, and in 2023 the BBC included it in its list of the 100 greatest children’s books.