Usmon Nosir

Usmon Nosir was born on 13 November 1912 in Namangan. He lost his father early and was brought up first by an uncle and then by his stepfather, Nosirhoji, whose name gave him the surname Nosirov and later his literary name. After the family moved to Kokand he spent his childhood in a boarding school there and finished secondary school in the same town.

His first poem appeared in print in 1927, when he was fifteen. In 1929–1930 he studied at the screenwriting faculty of the State Institute of Cinematography in Moscow, and then, briefly, at the Faculty of Language and Literature of the Pedagogical Academy in Samarkand. His first collection, “Conversation with the Sun”, came out in 1932, followed the same year by the collection “Mobilized Lines” and the narrative poem “Norbo'ta”, set during the Civil War in Uzbekistan. In 1933–1934 he worked for the newspaper “Yosh Leninchi” in Tashkent, and in 1934 he joined the Writers’ Union of Uzbekistan.

The mid-1930s brought the collections “Traktorobod” (1934), “Heart” (1935) and “My Love” (1936) and the narrative poem “Naxshon” (1934), about the Armenian people’s struggle for freedom. In poems such as “Monologue” and “The Nile and Rome” he voiced the lyric hero’s feelings with an openness and intensity uncommon in the Uzbek poetry of the time. He wrote the plays “Nazirjon Xalilov”, “Zafar” and “The Enemy”; his play “Atlas” (1935) was staged by an amateur theatre. He translated Pushkin’s “The Fountain of Bakhchisaray” and Lermontov’s “The Demon” into Uzbek, and Moscow newspapers of those years hailed him as a new Pushkin who had appeared in the East.

On 27 January 1937 the tenth anniversary of his literary career was widely celebrated in the republic. Six months later a meeting of the Writers’ Union discussed the poet’s “behaviour” and expelled him, and on 13 July 1937 he was arrested as an “enemy of the people”. The indictment accused him of nationalist agitation and of deliberately distorting Pushkin in translation. On 5 October 1938 a visiting session of the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court sentenced him to ten years’ imprisonment and five years’ loss of civil rights.

In January 1939 he was sent to the prison in Zlatoust, and that summer, via Vladivostok, to the camps of Kolyma. On 20 August 1940 he wrote to Stalin from Magadan, protesting his innocence and saying that in prison he had written a novel in verse, three plays and a number of poems; the fate of those manuscripts is still unknown. Later, gravely ill, he was transferred to a camp near the village of Suslovo in the Mariinsk district of the Kemerovo region, where he spent his last months in the camp hospital. Usmon Nosir died on 9 March 1944, aged 31, and was buried on 15 March in the prisoners’ cemetery at Suslovo (now Pervomayskoye).

His appeal and a petition from his mother, Xolambibi Masodiqova, led to a review of the case. In 1944 a commission made up of the linguist A. K. Borovkov, the poet Maqsud Shayxzoda and Siddiq Rajabov, editor of the newspaper “Qizil O'zbekiston”, concluded that the charges against him were groundless, but by then the poet was already dead. On 21 March 1957 the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court quashed the 1938 sentence, and Usmon Nosir was posthumously rehabilitated.

In the Kemerovo region a memorial to the poet stands on the site of the former cemetery for political prisoners, and a museum bearing his name and literary readings keep his memory alive. In Uzbekistan his 90th anniversary was marked in 2003 and, by a presidential resolution, his 110th in 2022. On 13 November 2022 a statue by the sculptor Qodir Namozov was unveiled in Namangan, in the alley named after him, and on 4 September 2023 a monument by Konstantin Zinich was put up in the town of Mariinsk.