Jolmurza Aymurzaev

Jolmurza Murzauli Aymurzaev (Zholmurza Aymurzayev) was born on 9 May 1910 in what is now the Chimbay district of Karakalpakstan. He spent his early childhood (1922–1926) in a boarding school, then studied at the Kommuna school in Chimbay and entered a teacher-training college. In 1932–1933 he worked as a teacher in the Takhtakupyr district.

His first poems appeared in print in 1927. He joined the Writers’ Union in 1934 and in the same decade studied at GITIS in Moscow (1934–1939). His first collection, “Poems”, came out in Karakalpak in 1935 and included the poem “The Struggle” about class conflict in the village. Until 1942 he was executive secretary of the Karakalpak writers’ organisation.

He took part in the Second World War, fighting with both pen and rifle. After returning from the front in 1944 he headed the Writers’ Union of Karakalpakstan (1944–1951 and 1958–1962). A member of the Communist Party from 1946, he completed the Higher Literary Courses at the Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow in 1956. In 1962–1963 he ran the arts administration of Karakalpakstan, and in 1963–1972 the Karakalpak branch of the Uzbek studio of documentary and popular-science films.

Besides poetry he wrote plays and prose. His one-act satires “Bureaucrats” (1933) and “By His Own Stick” (1940), and the dramas “The Daughter of the Aral”, “Lieutenant Elmuratov”, “Aygul-Abat” and “Berdaq”, about the Karakalpak poet, were staged at the Karakalpak Music and Drama Theatre. For “Aygul-Abat” he received the Berdaq State Prize of Karakalpakstan (1968).

His novel “On the Banks of the Amu Darya” (1958; published in Russian as “The Pranks of Kamekbay”) is a satirical picture of the postwar Karakalpak village and one of the first large prose works in Karakalpak literature. He also wrote the autobiographical story “The Orphan’s Heart” (1967) and the novel “I Love You, People” (1978), and translated Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov, Shevchenko and Franko into Karakalpak.

He was Honoured Art Worker of the Uzbek SSR (1957), People’s Writer of Karakalpakstan (1974) and People’s Writer of the Uzbek SSR (1981), and received the Order of the Red Banner of Labour, the Order of Friendship of Peoples (1980) and the Order of the Badge of Honour. He was twice elected a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of Karakalpakstan. He kept writing to the end: the collection “The Seventy-Ninth Spring” appeared in 1989 and the novel “Roads” in 1990. He died in 1996.