Maqsud Shayxzoda

Maqsud Shayxzoda was born on 7 November 1908 in Aghdash, in present-day Azerbaijan, to the physician Ma’sumbek and his wife Fatima Khanum; he was Azerbaijani by nationality. After primary school in his home town he studied in 1921–1925 at the teachers’ seminary (Darulmuallimin) in Baku, where Abdulla Shaig and Huseyn Javid were among the teachers. His first poems, written in Azerbaijani, appeared in the Baku newspaper “Kommunist” in 1921.

After the seminary he taught in Dagestan, in Derbent and Buynaksk. In 1927 he was arrested on a charge of involvement in a “counter-revolutionary” group and sentenced to exile; in February 1928 he was sent to Tashkent, where he lived for the rest of his life.

In Tashkent he studied briefly at the Oriental faculty of the Central Asian University (1928) and then worked on the staff of the newspapers “Sharq haqiqati” (1929–1932), “Qizil O'zbekiston” and “Yosh leninchi” (1932) and the magazine “Guliston” (1933–1934). His first poem in Uzbek came out in 1929, followed by the collections “Those in Tune with Me” (1933), “The Third Book” (1934) and “Republic” (1935). In 1933 he passed the examinations of the Baku Pedagogical Institute as an external student, in 1934 he began postgraduate studies, and in 1935–1938 he was a research fellow at the Institute of Language and Literature.

From 1938 until his death, apart from the years of imprisonment, he taught the history of Uzbek literature at the Tashkent Pedagogical Institute (now the Nizami university), serving as dean and head of department; he held a candidate’s degree in philology and the rank of associate professor. He studied Alisher Navoi throughout his career, from the collection of articles “The Poet of Genius” (1941) to the study “The Sultan in the Realm of the Ghazal” (1966), and also wrote on Babur, Muqimiy, Furqat and the epic “Alpomish”.

During the war he published the collection “What Is the Fight For?” (1942) and others, and the narrative poems “The Elder” (1943), about Yo'ldosh Oxunboboyev, and “The Third Son” (1944). His verse tragedy “Jalal ad-Din Manguberdi”, about the Khwarazmshah’s struggle against the Mongol invasion, was staged in Tashkent in 1944 but removed from the repertoire in 1946 for allegedly “idealising the feudal past”.

In 1951 his life and writings were placed under investigation, and on 20 September 1952 he was arrested. In January 1953 he was sentenced to 25 years’ imprisonment and sent to a labour camp in the Irkutsk region. After Stalin’s death the case was reviewed, and in the mid-1950s Shayxzoda was released and rehabilitated, his health badly damaged by imprisonment.

In the last decade of his life he wrote the lyrical-philosophical poem “Tashkentnoma” (1958), the collection “Years and Roads” (1961) and the tragedy “Mirzo Ulugbek” (1961) about the last two years of the scholar-ruler’s life; it was staged by the Hamza Theatre, and from his screenplay the director Latif Fayziyev made the film “The Star of Ulugbek” (1964). He translated Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” and “Romeo and Juliet”, Pushkin, Lermontov, Rustaveli and Nâzım Hikmet into Uzbek. In 1964 he was named Honoured Art Worker of the Uzbek SSR; he also received the Order of the Badge of Honour. A play about al-Biruni remained unfinished, and its manuscript has been lost.

Maqsud Shayxzoda died in Tashkent on 19 February 1967 and was buried in the Chig'atoy cemetery. In 2001 he was posthumously awarded the Order “For Outstanding Merit” (Buyuk xizmatlari uchun). School No. 167 in Tashkent bears his name, and in 2008 the Uzbek post issued a stamp with his portrait.