Sadriddin Ayni

Sadriddin Ayni (born Sadriddin Said-Murodzoda) was born on 15 April 1878 in the village of Soktare in the Emirate of Bukhara (now in the Gijduvon district of the Bukhara region). His father, Saidmurodkhoja, a village craftsman and farmer, could read and write, loved poetry and made sure his son was taught; his mother was named Zevar. The boy went to the village school from the age of six. In 1889 a cholera epidemic took both his parents within a short time. In 1890, aged twelve, he moved to Bukhara, where Sharifjon Makhdum, a senior official of the emirate who wrote poetry as Sadri Ziyo, took him under his protection.

From 1890 to 1900 Ayni studied at the Bukhara madrasas of Mir-i Arab, Olimjon, Badalbek, Hoji Zohid and Kukeldash. Having no means, he earned his keep as a sweeper and cook at the madrasa. His real literary schooling came from the gatherings at Sharifjon Makhdum’s house, where he befriended poets such as Hayrat and read Hafez, Jami, Navoi and Bedil. He wrote his first ghazals in 1895 under the pen names Sifli, Muhtoji and Jununi, and from 1896 signed himself “Ayni”. Ahmad Donish’s “Navodir ul-vaqoe” had a strong influence on his outlook.

In the early 20th century Ayni joined the reforming Jadids. In 1907 he taught at a new-method school opened in Bukhara for Tatar children, and in 1908, with Abdulvohid Munzim, he opened a new-method school teaching in Tajik; the emir’s authorities closed it in 1909. In those years he helped found the publishing society “Shirkati Bukhoroi sharif” and the secret society “Tarbiyai atfol”. For the new schools he wrote the reader “Tahzib us-sibyon” (1909) and the handbook “Zaruriyoti diniya” (1914); he contributed to the newspaper “Bukhoroi sharif” and the journal “Oyina”, and wrote poems in both Tajik and Uzbek. From September 1915 to April 1916 he worked at a cotton-ginning plant at Kyzyltepa station, where he met the prototypes of the heroes of his later stories.

In April 1917, after the Jadids held a demonstration in support of the emir’s reform decree, arrests began in Bukhara. Ayni, who had not taken part in the march, was seized too, given 75 strokes of the rod and thrown into the Obkhona prison. The prisoners were freed by Russian soldiers who came from Kagan; Ayni spent 52 days in the Kagan hospital and then moved to Samarkand. The emir later had his younger brother Sirojiddin put to death, a loss Ayni mourned in the elegy “Marsiya” (1918). In Samarkand he opened one of the first Soviet schools and taught in it, wrote marches and songs in Tajik and Uzbek, among them “Surudi ozodi” (“Song of Freedom”, 1918), and in 1919–1921 regularly published articles and poems in the journal “Shu’lai inqilob”. In those years he married Salohat, the sister of the Samarkand Jadid Vadud Mahmud.

After the Bukharan People’s Soviet Republic was formed in 1920, Ayni worked at its consulate in Samarkand (1921–1923) and then at its trade office. At this time he turned to prose: he wrote “The Executioners of Bukhara” (1922), an indictment of the emir’s regime, and the “History of the Manghit Emirs of Bukhara” (1923), and compiled an Uzbek-language reader for girls’ schools, “The Girl, or Kholida” (1924). “Odina”, which a newspaper began to serialise in 1924, is regarded as the start of modern Tajik prose. In 1926 his anthology “Samples of Tajik Literature” came out in Moscow, bringing together a thousand years of poetry, from Rudaki to the early 20th century, with notes on more than two hundred poets. From 1926 to 1933 he was an editor and scholarly consultant at the Tajik State Publishing House, founded in Samarkand, and published satirical feuilletons in the Uzbek press.

The 1930s were his most productive years. The novel “Dokhunda” (written in 1927–1928, published in 1930), about the poor highlander Yodgor during the revolution, is regarded as the first novel in Tajik. Ayni first wrote the novel “Slaves”, which spans a century from the early 19th century to the 1930s, in Uzbek: it came out in Tashkent in 1934, and in Tajik in 1935. Then came the novellas “The Old School” (1935), “The Death of the Moneylender” (1939), with its satirical portrait of the miser Qori Ishkamba, and “The Orphan” (1940). At the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934 he was elected to the board of the Union of Soviet Writers.

During the Second World War Ayni turned to heroes of the past, writing historical stories about Temur Malik, who defended Khujand against the Mongols, and about Muqanna’s revolt against the Arabs (both 1944). As a scholar he wrote studies of Rudaki (1940), Ibn Sina (1939), Ferdowsi, Saadi (1942), Alisher Navoi (1948) and Bedil (1954). In 1941 he took part in the opening of Amir Timur’s tomb in Samarkand. He was named Honoured Scientist of the Tajik SSR in 1940, was elected an honorary member of the Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan in 1943, and received a doctorate in philology. In 1949–1954 he wrote his four-part memoirs of Bukhara at the turn of the 20th century, published in Russian as “Bukhara”; the first two parts won him a Stalin Prize in 1950. From 1950 he was a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, and from April 1951 until his death he was the first president of the Academy of Sciences of the Tajik SSR.

Sadriddin Ayni died in Stalinabad (now Dushanbe) on 15 July 1954. A mausoleum was built for him there the same year, and a park named after him was later laid out around it. In 1967 a memorial museum opened in his house in Samarkand; there are also house museums in his native village and in Dushanbe. In the 1960s his works were published in Uzbek in eight volumes, and his books have been translated into Russian, French, Polish, Czech, Urdu and other languages. He was posthumously named Hero of Tajikistan in 1998 and, in 2001, posthumously awarded Uzbekistan’s Order “Buyuk xizmatlari uchun” (“For Outstanding Merit”). Streets in Samarkand and Bukhara bear his name, and a monument to him stands in Samarkand. With his wife Salohat he raised a son, Kamol, who became an orientalist, and daughters Kholida and Lutfiya.