Yavdat Ilyasov

Yavdat Ilyasov (Yavdat Khasanovich Ilyasov) was born on 16 February 1929 in the village of Islambakhty in the Belebey canton of the Bashkir ASSR (now the Yermekeyevo district of Bashkortostan). His father, Khasan-agay Ilyasov, was a Volga Tatar cabinet-maker; his mother, Saidikamal Khisametdinova, came from a Bashkir tarkhan family. They separated while he was an infant. Some publications give 1928 (25 October) as his birth date, but the Bashkir Encyclopedia and the 1977 reference book “Writers of Soviet Uzbekistan” give 1929.

Part of his childhood was spent in Uzbekistan: his mother moved to a state farm near Yangiyul in 1931 and took him there in 1934. He went first to an Uzbek and then to a Russian school. During the war years he drove a cart, herded horses, worked as a tractor driver and as a baker. In 1948 he began his first book and later graduated from the teacher-training school in Beloretsk. He then worked as a fitter, draughtsman and decorative artist, ran a club and a library, and taught Uzbek, drawing and technical drawing at school.

From 1952 he headed the literature and art department, and was translator and correspondent, of the Ufa newspaper “Leninets”. He then moved to Tashkent and in 1953–1958 worked as a staff writer for “Tashkentskaya Pravda”, “Komsomolets Uzbekistana” and “Fizkulturnik Uzbekistana”; from 1957 he headed the poetry section of the magazine “Zvezda Vostoka”.

Ilyasov wrote his fiction in Russian and his journalism in Bashkir, Russian, Tatar and Uzbek. His main subject was the ancient and medieval history of Central Asia. He wrote the historical novellas and novels “The Arrow and the Sun” (1954), “The Path of Wrath” (1956), “Sogdiana” (1959), “Spotted Death” (1964), “The Black Widow” (1966) and “The Golden Idol” (1973), and two novels about Omar Khayyam, “The Snake Charmer” (1979) and “The Tower of Silence” (1982). He also wrote poems, stories and essays and translated Bashkir, Uzbek, Karakalpak, Korean and Crimean Tatar poets. The total print run of his books exceeded 23 million copies.

Ilyasov drowned on 19 June 1982 while swimming in Komsomol Lake in Tashkent. He is buried in the Chilanzar-ota cemetery. A memorial plaque is fixed to the house in Tashkent where he lived.