Shukur Sa'dulla

Shukur Sa'dulla was born on 15 January 1912 in the Toshkentlik quarter of Jizzakh, into the family of an office worker. At seven he went to the old-style school of his neighbourhood, learned to read quickly and then continued at the newly opened Narimanov School. He finished it at twelve and in 1924 left for Samarkand to study further.

In 1924–1929 he studied at the Samarkand Pedagogical College, where he took up writing poetry in earnest. His first poems were mostly addressed to adults and responded to the social and political events of the time. Early in 1929 a conference on children’s literature was held in Samarkand; after it he, like Zafar Diyor, Ilyos Muslim and Sulton Jo'ra, began writing for children. In 1929–1931 he studied at the Faculty of Philology of the Pedagogical Academy.

In 1931 he was invited to join the children’s and youth literature department of the State Publishing House of Uzbekistan as an editor and stayed there until 1964. In those years he was one of the leaders of the literary circle at the Women’s Teacher-Training College: the first poem of one of its members, Zulfiya, “I Am a Daughter of Labour”, was printed through him in the newspaper “Ishchi” on 17 July 1931. His own first collection, “The Cry” (“Hayqiriq”), with eleven poems and a short narrative poem, came out in Tashkent in 1932.

In 1938 he wrote the musical drama “Yoriltosh” on the plots of Uzbek folk tales. The collections “What Have You Done?” (1942) and “Shohista” (1944), and the later “A Sweet Day” (1947) and “The Great City” (1951), reflect the events of the war. His plays “Our Soldier” (1942) and “The Campfire” (1943), about children’s lives in wartime, were staged at the Republican Young Spectators’ Theatre.

Later came his children’s books “Our Holiday” (1953), “Ko'kbuloq” (1957), “The Magnet” (1959), “The Helpful Girl” (1961) and “Ozoda” (1964). He retold folk tales such as “The Tailless Foxes”, “Three Foxes” and “The Fox and the Crane” and wrote short poems about toys and animals, among them “The Bear”, “The Calf”, “The Foal” and “Mitti”. His comedy “Holiday in the Field” (1954) was staged by many theatres. With the composer Sobir Boboyev he created the musical drama “Love for the Homeland”, written together with Z. Fatkhullin (1958, Muqimiy Musical Theatre), and the musical comedy “Two Bracelets” (1962). In 1967 he wrote the libretto of “Yoriltosh”, on which Boboyev based a children’s opera in 1969.

As a translator he rendered into Uzbek, with Ilyos Muslim, the poems and tales of S. Marshak (1950). He also translated H. C. Andersen, N. A. Nekrasov, A. S. Pushkin, L. Tolstoy, B. Zhitkov, S. Mikhalkov and A. Barto, B. Gorbatov’s novel “The Unvanquished” (1953), V. Oseyeva’s “Vasyok Trubachov and His Comrades” (1954) and K. Chukovsky’s “Doctor Aybolit” (1966).

In 1964–1972 he was a literary consultant at the Writers’ Union of Uzbekistan. In 1972 he was named an Honoured Art Worker of the Uzbek SSR. Shukur Sa'dulla died in Tashkent on 14 September 1972. In 1973 Sobir Boboyev turned “Love for the Homeland” into the opera “Fidoyilar” to a libretto by Shukur Sa'dulla and Z. Fatkhullin.