Aaly Tokombaev

(pen name, Balka). Born Nov. 7, 1904, in the village of Chon-Kemin, in what is now Kemin Raion, Kirghiz SSR. Soviet Kirghiz writer. People’s Poet of Khirghizia (1945). Hero of Socialist Labor (1974). Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Kirghiz SSR (1954). Member of the CPSU since 1927.

Tokombaev graduated from the Middle Asian Communist University in Tashkent in 1927. He began publishing in 1924. He contributed greatly to the emergence and development of Soviet Kirghiz literature. Tokombaev wrote the poetry collections On Lenin (1927), Flowers of Labor (1932), and Early Poems (1934) and the novellas The Dnestr Empties Into the Deep Sea (1939) and The Wounded Heart (1940).

During the Great Patriotic War (1941–45), Tokombaev wrote patriotic poems, the narrative poem The Fellow Countryman of Manas (1941), and the poetry collection Gratitude (1944). In the postwar years and the 1960’s he emerged as a master realist with the narrative poems With One’s Own Eyes (1952), My Birth Certificate (1955), The Melody of the Komuz (1960), and Living History (1969) and the collection The Voice of Time (1966). Tokombaev also wrote a novel in verse dealing with the Kirghiz people’s national liberation struggle against tsarism, Before the Dawn (part 1, The Bloody Years, 1935; part 2, Before the Dawn, 1947; revised and combined into Before the Dawn, 1962; Russian translation, 1966; Toktogul Satylganov State Prize of the Kirghiz SSR, 1967).

Tokombaev’s works have been translated into many national languages of the USSR. Tokombaev has translated works by Goethe, Schiller, A. S. Pushkin, M. Iu. Lermontov, V. V. Mayakovsky, S. Ia. Marshak, Nizami, Abai, and Dzhambul. He was chairman of the administrative board of the Writers’ Union of the Kirghiz SSR from 1934 to 1949. He has been awarded two orders of Lenin, four other orders, and various medals.