Parda Tursun

Parda Tursun (born Parda Tursunov) was born on 7 November 1909 in the village of Chorkesar, in what is now the Pop district of the Namangan region, into a peasant family. Orphaned early, he grew up drifting from place to place; in 1918 he moved to Tashkent, where he first worked as a household servant. He then attended the regional Uzbek model school (1923–1927) and the Tashkent teacher-training college (1927–1928).

Until the early 1930s he taught in schools in the Piskent district of the Tashkent region, and it was then that his interest in literature awoke: his first stories, reports and sketches appeared in print in 1929–1930. He served as executive secretary of the newspaper “Batrak” (1930–1931) and as a literary staff member of “Qizil O‘zbekiston” (1931–1934 and 1939–1940); in 1935–1936 he studied for a time at the Central Asian Planning and Economic Institute, and in 1937–1938 he worked as secretary to the chairman of the Central Executive Committee of Uzbekistan.

In those years he wrote the story collections “Alvasti” (1929) and “Zo‘rlik” (1932) and sketches such as “Dadajon rais”, “Yangi raislar” and “Traktorchi”. The story “Domla” (“The Teacher”, 1937) holds a special place in his work: the fate of its schoolteacher hero became the basis for his later major books.

From 1940 to 1945 he was a literary staff member and editor at the Uzbek Telegraph Agency, and from 1948 to 1950 a researcher at the Institute of Party History. During these years he built on “Domla” to write the autobiographical novella “Haq yo‘l” (1947), reworked it as “O‘qituvchining yo‘li” (1949) and finally produced the novel “O‘qituvchi” (“The Teacher”, 1951). The fate of its protagonist, Kholmurod Dustmatov, reflects the hard path of an Uzbek intellectual.

He also translated from Russian and other European literatures into Uzbek, among them works by Saltykov-Shchedrin, A. K. Tolstoy, Émile Zola and Guy de Maupassant. Parda Tursun died in Tashkent on 28 September 1957. Several schools and streets in Tashkent and Namangan bear his name.