Sergey Borodin

Sergey Petrovich Borodin was born on 25 September 1902 (12 September in the old style) in Moscow, into an intellectual family: his father was a hereditary nobleman and his mother came from a Tatar princely line. From 1913 to 1920 he studied at the real school in Belev, took part in the local Proletkult studio and learned painting from T. I. Katurkin. He published his first essay in 1915, at the age of twelve.

In 1923 the Central Museum of Ethnography sent him to Bukhara to collect ethnographic material, and in 1925–1926 he lived in Samarkand. He was admitted to the All-Russian Union of Writers in 1925 and in 1926 graduated from the Bryusov Higher Institute of Literature and Art, specialising in Russian folklore. Journeys followed to the Far East (1928), the building of the Turksib railway (1929), Tajikistan (1931) and Armenia (1933); in 1933 he walked across the Pamirs. Until 1931 he was close to the literary group Pereval.

He first wrote as Amir Sargidzhan: friends in Central Asia had added the Eastern affectionate suffix “-jan” to Sergey, and the half-joking “Amir” stuck as a pen name. Under it appeared the novel “The Last Bukhara” and the story collection “The Master of Birds”, about the peoples of Central Asia. From 1941 he published under his own name; the historical novel “Dmitry Donskoy”, written in Staraya Russa, brought him the Stalin Prize, second class, for 1941 (awarded in 1942).

In the early 1950s he moved to Tashkent, where he lived for the rest of his life and married the philologist Rauza Hasanova. There he wrote the cycle “Stars over Samarkand” — “Lame Timur”, “Campfires of the March” and “Lightning Bayezid” — a picture of Central Asia and Transcaucasia in the age of Tamerlane. The fourth book, “The White Horse”, remained unfinished apart from a few chapters. The National Encyclopedia of Uzbekistan notes that these novels portray some historical figures one-sidedly.

Borodin received the Hamza State Prize of the Uzbek SSR in 1968 and the title People's Writer of the Uzbek SSR in 1973. He died in Tashkent on 22 June 1974 and was buried in the Chigatay cemetery. Between 1941 and 1994 “Dmitry Donskoy” went through about twenty-five editions with a total print run of over a million copies; the writer's house-museum in Tashkent opened in 1981.