Mirkarim Osim

Mirkarim Osim was born in Tashkent on 14 August 1907 into a family of intellectuals. He attended an old-method school, then the Shams ul-urfon primary school (1917–1920), and in 1921–1924 the Narimanov technical college, where Oybek was his fellow student. His first novella, “The New Canal” (1925), was never published: it was judged to idealise the age of the khans.

In 1926–1930 he studied at the Faculty of History and Economics of the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute. He then taught at teacher-training courses in Samarkand (1930), worked as an editor at the State Publishing House (1931), and from 1932 to 1949 was a research fellow at the Research Institute of Pedagogical Sciences in Tashkent, compiling history manuals and textbooks. In 1944 he was named Honoured Teacher of the Uzbek SSR.

He began with poetry but soon turned to historical prose. His first major work was the novella “Astrabad” (1940), drawn from the life of Alisher Navoi; it was followed by “Alisher Navoi and Darvesh Ali” (1941), “Exile”, “Ulugbek and Navoi” and other stories about the poet, printed in periodicals on the eve of Navoi’s 500th anniversary.

In the 1940s Mirkarim Osim fell victim to the Stalinist repressions and spent several years in labour camps. Back in Tashkent in the 1950s, he went on writing about history, and in 1959–1972 worked as an editor at the Publishing House of Literature and Art (now named after Ghafur Ghulom).

His novellas cover the history of Central Asia from antiquity to 1917. Ancient legend inspired “Tomyris”, about the queen of the Massagetae, “Shiroq”, about the shepherd who led the army of Darius into the desert, and “Iskandar and Spitamenes”; resistance to the Mongol invasion is the subject of “Otrar”, “Temur Malik” and “Mahmud Torobiy”. Scholars and poets are at the centre of “Light in the Darkness” (1963), about Navoi, “Clouds over the Oxus” (1973), written for the millennium of al-Biruni, “The Story of Ibn Sina”, “The Birth of Algebra” (1983), about al-Khwarizmi, and “The Broken Setor”, about Mashrab. Everyday life of past centuries fills “The Envoys” (1960, later retitled “On the Caravan Roads”) and “Mohlaroyim and Xonposhsha”.

Osim translated into Uzbek the second book of Mikhail Sholokhov’s “And Quiet Flows the Don”, Sergei Borodin’s novel “Bayazid the Thunderbolt”, a novella by Lidiya Bat and other works. His own books also appeared in Russian: “The Envoys” (1963), “The Envoy of Khwarazm” (1974) and “The Silent Witness” (1981).

In 1977, on his 70th birthday, he was named Honoured Worker of Culture of the Uzbek SSR. He died in Tashkent in 1984. In 2001 he was posthumously awarded the Order “For Outstanding Merit” (Buyuk xizmatlari uchun). His novellas are still reprinted, including editions for schoolchildren.