Khurshid

Khurshid (born Shamsiddin Sharafiddinov) was born in 1892 in Tashkent into a gardener’s family. Sources disagree on his birthday: publications based on the National Encyclopedia of Uzbekistan give 20 June, while theatre reference works give May. He studied at a Tashkent madrasa and then at a Russian-native school (1908–1910); after his father died in 1910 he left school, moved to Andijan and worked there as a shop assistant until 1918.

He came to literature through poetry: in 1912 he gathered his verse into a divan, “Devoni Shohidiy”, and from 1914 published in the press under the pen name Xoib. In 1915 he first appeared on stage, playing comic and character roles in the Tashkent amateur troupe Turon. In the summer of 1918 he returned to Tashkent, finished a teacher-training course and taught at the Behbudiy and Namuna schools.

From 1920 his work was mostly tied to the theatre. He was a prompter in Mannon Uyghur’s troupe and in those years wrote plays such as “A Bad Comrade”, “Inexhaustible Wealth”, “The Little Soldier” and “The Great Soldier”; he wrote about twenty plays in all. He was technical editor of the satirical magazine Mushtum (1924–1926), where his comic verse appeared under the pen names O‘jar, Tajang and Chayon.

His chief innovation was to write the first musical dramas in Uzbek drama based on the poems of Navoi’s Khamsa. “Layli and Majnun” was staged in 1923 and “Farhod and Shirin” in 1926 by the state model troupe; he later reworked both for the musical theatre and the opera. He also wrote the musical dramas “Qalin” (1930), “Siyovush”, after Firdawsi’s Shahnameh (1945), and “Oybonu” (1955). The songs he wrote for them to the folk modes Dugoh, Segoh, Chorgoh, Ushshoq and Bayot became classics of Uzbek song.

Khurshid was on the literary staff of the Andijan regional theatre (1929–1933) and of the Alisher Navoi opera and ballet theatre (1933–1948). In 1941 he was named Honoured Art Worker of the Uzbek SSR. As a translator he rendered Schiller’s “The Robbers”, Shakespeare’s “Othello” and Uzeyir Hajibeyov’s “Arshin Mal Alan” into Uzbek, and in the 1950s a number of ghazals by Hafez.

In the last eleven years of his life (1949–1960) he was a researcher at the Literature Museum attached to the Institute of Language and Literature, where he prepared editions of the divans of Munis and Ogahi and of the poem “Yusuf and Zulaykho”. He died in Tashkent on 13 September 1960. A neighbourhood, a street, a school and a cinema in Tashkent bear his name.