Pirimqul Qodirov

Pirimqul Qodirov was born on 25 October 1928 in the village of Kengko'l at the foot of the Turkestan Range. The village then belonged to the Ura-Tyube district and now lies in the Shahriston district of Tajikistan’s Sughd region. His father spent most of his life as a shepherd in the mountains; the writer later drew on the juniper forests and the shepherds’ work in his novel “Black Eyes”. By his own account, in 1930 his father was exiled for five years for throwing a lavish feast to celebrate having four sons in a row, and the family spent those years in the village of Iskandar in the Xovos district. During the war he left school after the eighth grade and worked on the village collective farm in place of the men who had gone to the front.

After the war he came to Tashkent, went through the preparatory department of the Central Asian State University and then its Faculty of Oriental Studies, graduating in 1951. His first book, “Students”, came out in 1950 while he was still a student. Abdulla Qahhor became the young writer’s mentor and advised him to continue his studies in Moscow. In 1951–1954 Qodirov was a postgraduate at the Gorky Institute of World Literature, where he defended a candidate’s dissertation on Qahhor’s post-war writing. From 1954 to 1963 he worked as the consultant on Uzbek literature at the Union of Soviet Writers.

In Moscow he wrote his first novel, “Three Roots” (1958), about young people of his generation; a Russian translation was published in Moscow in 1959. Back in Tashkent from 1963, he was a senior research fellow at the Institute of Language and Literature of the Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan until 1983. In these years he published the novellas “My Treasure” (1961), “Freedom” (1968) and “Legacy” (1974), the novel “Black Eyes” (1966), about mountain shepherds facing the abuses of officials, and “The Diamond Belt” (1976), which raised the problems of village life. The National Encyclopedia of Uzbekistan notes that “Legacy” was the first work of Uzbek literature to show what the cotton monoculture had cost the people. “The Diamond Belt” won the prize of the Union of Soviet Writers in 1983, and “My Treasure” was made into the feature film “Your Traces”. For children he wrote the novellas “The Adventures of Akram” (1974) and “Yayra Wants to Go to College” (1979).

His best-known book is “Starry Nights” (“Yulduzli tunlar”), a novel about Zahiriddin Muhammad Babur. Written in 1969–1978 and published in 1979, it brought him the Hamza State Prize of the Uzbek SSR in 1981. At a time when Soviet ideology discouraged historical subjects, Qodirov carried on the tradition of the historical novel begun by Abdulla Qodiriy and Oybek. Readers welcomed the book, but official critics accused the author of idealising the past. The novel was reprinted many times in Moscow and Tashkent and translated into Hindi, Urdu, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Karakalpak and other languages, and later into English as “Babur: Starry Nights”. Its sequel, “The Pass of Generations” (“Avlodlar dovoni”), set in the reigns of Humayun and Akbar, appeared in the magazine “Sharq yulduzi” in 1988. “Starry Nights” was adapted as a video serial, and his play “Babur” ran for many years at today’s Uzbek National Academic Drama Theatre.

As a literary scholar Qodirov studied the language of fiction and the creative process: he wrote “Language and Heart” and “Folk Language and Realist Prose” and the chapters on the language of the literary work and on the literary process for a two-volume “Theory of Literature”. He translated into Uzbek Leo Tolstoy’s “The Cossacks”, Mikhail Lermontov’s “Bela”, Konstantin Fedin’s “Early Joys” and the novel “Fate” by the Turkmen writer Hydyr Derýaýew.

Around independence and in its first years he was active in public life: in 1989–1994 he chaired the committee for State Prizes in literature, art and architecture, in 1991–1995 he was a deputy of the Supreme Council and chaired its committee on culture and cultural heritage, and in 1997–2000 he was a deputy of the Oliy Majlis and deputy chair of its committee on science, education, culture and sport. In the early 2000s he published “The Mother Falcon’s Farewell”, a novel about Transoxiana in the time of Shahrukh and Gawharshad, and the books “Language and People” (2005) and “The Image of Amir Temur”. In his last years he led the prose council of the Writers’ Union of Uzbekistan.

He was named Honoured Worker of Culture of the Uzbek SSR in 1978 and People’s Writer of the Uzbek SSR in 1988, and received the “Shuhrat” medal (1994) and the orders “El-yurt hurmati” (1998) and “Buyuk xizmatlari uchun” (“For Outstanding Merit”, 2006). He and his wife Sofiya raised four children; he said that she typed out the manuscripts of all his books. Pirimqul Qodirov died in Tashkent on 20 December 2010 and was buried in the Chig'atoy cemetery. In 2017 he was posthumously awarded the State Prize of the Republic of Uzbekistan.