Mirzakalon Ismoili

Mirzakalon Ismoili was born on 15 October 1908 in the city of Osh, into a peasant family. He studied first at a village school and then at a town boarding school. After moving to Tashkent he graduated from the institute of education in 1928, then in 1928–1930 studied at the Oriental Faculty of the Central Asian State University and taught at its workers’ faculty.

His first play, “March the Eighth — the Liberation of Women”, appeared in 1927, and he entered translation in 1928 with “Yanko the Musician”. He worked at the State Publishing House of Uzbekistan in 1932–1937, at the Tashkent film studio in 1937–1938 and at the Writers’ Union of Uzbekistan in 1939. In 1938 he translated Leo Tolstoy’s novel “Resurrection” into Uzbek.

In 1942 he went to the front and served until 1947, working on the army newspaper “Red Army” as executive secretary, deputy editor and war correspondent. In the first days of the war he wrote the film script “We Will Win!”, which was made into a film. His wartime sketches and stories were collected in “A Song About a Free Man” (1948), and his play “Wide Fields” was published in 1949. He was awarded the Order of the Red Star.

In 1948–1949 he worked at the newspaper “Qizil O‘zbekiston” and in 1949–1950 at the magazine “Sharq yulduzi”. In 1950 he was arrested and served his sentence in the mines of Karaganda, where he wrote the first book of his novel “Fergana Until Dawn”. He was cleared and released in 1955 and in 1955–1958 headed a department at the Ghafur Ghulam Publishing House of Literature and Art.

The first book of “Fergana Until Dawn”, “The Rumble of the Depths”, came out in 1958 and the second, “The Last Night”, in 1967; the novel portrays the lives of ordinary people in early twentieth-century Turkestan and their longing for education. His later works — “Our Novel” (1963), “Human Beauty”, “A Tale of Humaneness” (1972), “The Girls’ Notebook” (1980) and “Blame Yourself” (1986) — deal with the conduct of young people, harmony in the family and mutual respect.

He translated more than 200 works of world literature into Uzbek, among them Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina”, Sholokhov’s “The Fate of a Man”, Voynich’s “The Gadfly” and Reşat Nuri Güntekin’s “Çalıkuşu”. In 1983 he was named Honoured Art Worker of the Uzbek SSR. He died in Tashkent in 1986. A neighbourhood in Tashkent’s Darkhan area and a school and cinema in Buloqboshi bear his name, and in 2008 Post of Uzbekistan issued a stamp with his portrait.