Sobir Abdulla

Sobir Abdulla (born Sobirjon Abdullayev) was born on 18 September 1905 (5 September Old Style) in Kokand into a clerk’s family. His father, Abdullajon Alimov (1863–1933), was a mirzo — a scribe — and a connoisseur of classical Uzbek, Persian and Tajik literature and an admirer of Bedil; his mother, Xo‘jarbibi Muhammadamin qizi, taught him to read and write early. His elder sister and an aunt also wrote ghazals.

By the age of eight he read Eastern poets freely in the original and tried to compose verse himself. He finished school in 1920 and went on studying in Kokand, and in 1924–1926 attended courses for training local cadres in Tashkent. From the mid-1920s he worked for the Kokand newspaper “Yangi Farg‘ona”, for “Yosh leninchi” and for the magazine “Mushtum”, publishing poems, feuilletons and stories; his first play, “Muxbirga hujum”, appeared in 1927.

In 1928, after a course for journalists, he became the Fergana Valley special correspondent of the republican newspaper “Qizil O‘zbekiston”. From that year until his death he contributed to the satirical magazine “Mushtum”, mocking ignorance, callousness and greed. In 1931 he was invited to head the literary department of the Uzbek State Music Theatre (now the Muqimiy Theatre), and later worked in the music-drama theatres of Samarkand, Andijan and again Tashkent.

Sobir Abdulla wrote about thirty stage works. The best known is the musical drama “Tohir va Zuhra” (1939), with music by Tokhtasin Jalilov, first staged in 1940; it gave rise to an opera libretto and to the screenplay of the film of the same name (1945, directed by Nabi Ganiyev), which he wrote together with A. Speshnev. His other plays include “Qurbon Umarov”, “Davron ota”, “Alpomish”, “Muqimiy” and “Gul va Navro‘z”.

His first poetry collection, “Erk ilhomlari”, came out in 1931. He wrote in classical forms, above all in the aruz metre, and was the first modern Uzbek poet to compile his own “Devon” (1965), which gathered ghazals, muxammas, rubais and other genres; many of his ghazals have been set to music. He also wrote story collections, the novel “Mavlono Muqimiy” (1965) and the tale “Besh sarguzasht” (1971), and translated verse from the “Thousand and One Nights” from Arabic and poems by Faiz Ahmad Faiz from Urdu.

In 1944 Sobir Abdulla was named Honoured Art Worker of the Uzbek SSR, in 1965 People’s Poet of the Uzbek SSR, and in 1971 he received the Hamza State Prize of the Uzbek SSR for the “Devon”. He was a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1945. The poet died in Tashkent on 24 October 1972 and was buried in the Chig‘atoy cemetery; streets, schools and a library in Kokand and Tashkent bear his name.