Sulton Jo'ra

Sulton Jo'ra (born Sulton Jo'rayev) was born into a peasant family on 15 January 1910 in the village of Qog'oltom, in what is now the Shofirkon district of the Bukhara region. Orphaned early, he made his way to Bukhara to live with his elder sister and went to school there. In 1930 he graduated from the Bukhara Pedagogical College; as a student he helped to set up and teach literacy classes for adults. Besides his native Uzbek he knew Russian, Tajik, Tatar and Kazakh.

His first poem, “In the Embrace of Labour”, appeared in 1927 in the magazine “Yangi yo'l”, and his first collection, “Poems”, in 1933. From 1930 to 1936 he taught in schools, then moved to Andijan, where in 1936–1939 he studied at the Andijan Pedagogical Institute and taught Uzbek language and literature there and later at a teachers’ institute. He wrote a great deal for children: poems such as “The Parade of Letters”, “The Meeting of the Punctuation Marks”, “The Liar” and “How Many Moons?” turn school lessons and the rules of language into play.

The late 1930s were his most productive years. In 1938 he wrote “Bruno”, a narrative poem about the Italian thinker Giordano Bruno. The year 1939 brought the collection “Selfless”, the ballad “Parvoznoma”, the verse fairy tales “The Blue Carpet” and “The Swallow”, based on folk motifs, and the narrative poem “Karim and Qunduz”, devoted to the Great Fergana Canal that was dug that year. The Soviet “Literary Encyclopedia” of 1939 called Sulton Jo'ra an innovator in Uzbek versification and singled out his poems about Bruno and about the canal. The same year he was awarded the Order of the Badge of Honour.

His collection “Moscow” came out in 1941. When the war began he was exempt from call-up, but he kept applying to be sent to the front, volunteered for the army in 1942 and fought as a machine gunner. Poems he wrote at the front were printed in army newspapers, among them “The Machine Gunner’s Voice”, “Muhammad the Gunner”, “Our Spear”, “The Horseman” and “Greetings with Longing”, written for the people he missed. His last work, the play “Will” (1942), written with Vosit Sa'dulla, was staged at the Andijan regional theatre.

In November 1943, in the fighting of the Belorussian Front for the village of Borshchovka in the Loyev district of the Gomel region, Sulton Jo'ra was badly wounded, and on 14 November he died at a medical battalion in the village of Pustaya Gryada. He was first buried there; his remains were later moved to the mass grave in the village of Kozerogi in the same district. He was posthumously awarded the Order of the Patriotic War, 2nd class.

His books went on appearing after his death: a Russian collection, “Poems”, translated by Dmitry Kovalyov, in 1951, and in Uzbek “After the Rain” (1965) and “Poems” (1973); the literary scholar G'. Mo'minov devoted the book “A Poet with a Fiery Heart” (1970) to him. Streets in Andijan, Bukhara and Shofirkon, a school in the Shofirkon district and streets in Gomel and in the village of Kozerogi bear his name. He and his wife, Mohira Jo'rayeva, had four children — Botir, Nuriya, Rumiya and Ilhomiya; the youngest daughter died as a child.