Ninel Vladimirova

Ninel Vasilyevna Vladimirova was born on 24 April 1928 in Mykolaiv (Nikolayev), in southern Ukraine. In 1941, when the war began, she was evacuated to Uzbekistan with her mother and sister and ended up in a rural area of the Tashkent region. There, as a teenager, she quickly learned Uzbek, the language that shaped the rest of her life.

In 1945 she entered the Oriental faculty of the Central Asian State University (now the National University of Uzbekistan) and graduated in 1950. That year she joined the Institute of Language and Literature of the Academy of Sciences of the Uzbek SSR, starting in the dictionaries section, where she took part in compiling the one-volume and three-volume Russian–Uzbek dictionary. In 1952, when a ten-day festival of Uzbek literature and art was being prepared in Moscow, she was transferred to the department of Soviet-period literature.

In the 1950s she published brochures on the poets Aydin (1953) and Zafar Diyor (1954), and in 1958 she defended a candidate’s dissertation on literary translation from Russian into Uzbek. The Uzbek short story became the main subject of her research: her books include “The Formation of the Hero” (co-written with M. Sultanova), “Ideas and Images in Uzbek Stories”, “The Development of the Short Story in Uzbek Soviet Literature”, a monograph on the craft of Said Ahmad, and a collection of articles, “From the Word to the Book” (1988). In the 1980s she defended a doctoral dissertation on the short story and later became a professor.

From 1981 to 1985 she was the institute’s deputy director for research, and from 1985 until the end of her life a leading researcher. She contributed to the one-volume Moscow and five-volume Tashkent editions of the “History of Uzbek Soviet Literature” and to the scholarly twenty-volume edition of Aybek’s works. She returned to the theory and practice of translation in her book “The Art of Translation” (1989).

Vladimirova also translated extensively into Russian: stories by Cho‘lpon, Fitrat, Ghafur Ghulam, Abdulla Qahhor, Said Ahmad, Otkir Hoshimov, Shukur Kholmirzaev and Alim Atakhanov make up her anthology of the Uzbek short story, “Pomegranate”. She also translated novels by Mirzakalon Ismaili, Mirmuhsin, Said Ahmad and Ulugbek Hamdam into Russian.

Ninel Vladimirova was a Doctor of Philology, a professor, an honoured science worker of Uzbekistan and a laureate of the Beruni State Prize. She died in Tashkent in 2009.