Mashrab Boboyev

Mashrab Boboyev was born in 1941 in the Payariq district of the Samarkand region into a peasant family (some sources name the Chelak district as his birthplace). He finished secondary school in 1956 and worked on a collective farm and then in a village library.

In Tashkent he studied at a culture technical school and then in the acting faculty of the Tashkent Theatre and Art Institute (1960–1965). Alongside his studies he worked at the Republican House of Folk Art; he then returned to Samarkand, where he was chief specialist and director of the regional House of Folk Art and worked on regional newspapers.

In 1967 he moved to Tashkent and became an editor at the Yosh Gvardiya publishing house (now Yangi Asr Avlodi). He later worked at the Gafur Gulam literature and art publishing house, on republic radio, at the magazine Sharq Yulduzi (head of its prose section from 1992), at the Writers’ Union, as a literary associate in theatres, and as head of the repertoire department of the Ministry of Culture. In his last years he was chief editor of the translation department of the National News Agency of Uzbekistan.

He began to appear in print in the 1960s; his first poetry collection, “A Letter to Mother”, came out in 1971. It was followed by “Spring Mood”, “The Evening Trolleybus”, “The Lamp Far Away”, “The Word”, “The Secret I Know”, “Where Is My Star?”, “Nameless Stars” and dozens of other books. His plays “The Thirty-Year-Olds”, “The Root of the Earth”, “Our Courtyard” (“Mother”) and others were staged in the republic’s theatres. He wrote the libretto of the national ballet “The Call of Love”, based on Navoi’s poem “Sab’ai Sayyor”, and the script of the multi-part video film “The Streets of the Heart”.

Boboyev was also a translator: into Uzbek he rendered poems by Pushkin, Rasul Gamzatov and Otar Chiladze, a novel by Valentin Kataev, and more than twenty dramatic works. In 1995 he was given the title Merited Cultural Worker of Uzbekistan.

Mashrab Boboyev died in Tashkent on 23 July 2003.