Jonrid Abdullakhonov

Jonrid Muhitdinovich Abdullakhonov was born on 3 March 1929 in Namangan. His father, Muhitdin Abdullakhonov, was one of the founders of the Namangan Drama Theatre and went missing near Stalingrad in October 1942. His fate became known only in 2008, through the Polish Red Cross: he had died in March 1943 in the Benjaminow prisoner-of-war camp and was buried near the village of Białobrzegi outside Warsaw. His mother, Shahribonu, was a schoolteacher and died in 1943.

He published his first poems at the age of twelve in Namangan’s city newspapers. After news of his father’s disappearance and his mother’s death, the fourteen-year-old walked from Namangan to Tashkent and found work as an announcer on the children’s programme “Pioner ertaligi” (“Pioneer Morning”) on republican radio.

In 1949, as the author of many poems and the play “Aleksey Peshkov”, he was admitted to the newly founded journalism faculty of Central Asian State University (today the National University of Uzbekistan) and graduated in 1954. He joined the Union of Writers of the USSR in 1956, and in 1960 completed the Higher Literary Courses at the Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow, in the seminar led by Konstantin Paustovsky.

For many years, with interruptions, he was editor-in-chief of literary broadcasting at Uzbek radio and television, worked in the apparatus of the Writers’ Union, and served as chief specialist at the Ministry of Culture of the Uzbek SSR. From 1976 to 1982 he headed the Uzbek branch of the USSR Literary Fund. In the early 1960s the newspaper Trud printed his article “Is the Jayhun Our Friend?”, which urged rational use of water resources and warned that the Aral Sea would shrink; it provoked the displeasure of the republic’s party leadership.

After the poetry collection “Maktabdoshlarim” (1952) and the story collections “Hikoyalar” (1956) and “To‘yga kelinglar” (1960), he turned to the novel: “Yo‘l” (1964), “To‘fon” about the working class, “Borsa-kelmas” (1978) on the Aral Sea problem, “Xonadon”, “Suiqasd” (1991) and “Tergov” (2000). For “To‘fon” (published in Russian as “Uragan”, 1975) he won the competition held by the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions and the USSR Writers’ Union, and his play “Olov qalblar” (“Fiery Hearts”) won the republican drama competition. A television film, “Azizakhon”, directed by M. Mukhamedov, was made from his screenplay in 1964. He also translated Daniil Granin and Abbé Prévost into Uzbek.

From 1991 he was a member of the Writers’ Union of Uzbekistan, and in the 1990s he wrote for the trade-union federation’s newspaper Ishonch under the pen name Abdusamad. He was awarded the Order of Mehnat Shuhrati. He died on 29 March 2015 in Tashkent and was buried in the Minor cemetery.