Abdulla Kakhkhar

Born Sept. 4(17), 1907, in Kokand; died May 24, 1968, in Moscow. Soviet Uzbek writer. Became a member of the CPSU in 1952.

Kakhkhar graduated from the Oriental department of the Middle Asian State University in 1934. He was first published in 1924 as a topical satirist and feuilletonist. He later began to work in the short story genre and did much for the development of this genre in Soviet Uzbek literature, creating such works as Thief, The Blind See Again, and Pomegranate. Kakhkhar’s stories described both the present and the recent past of the Uzbek people (the collections The World Becomes Younger, 1933, and Stories, 1935). The novel Mirage (1937) exposes the bourgeois nationalists. The novellas Hero From Dardak (1942) and The Gold Star (1946) were written about events of the Great Patriotic War of 1941–45. The novel Lights of Koshchinar (1951–52) is dedicated to the theme of collectivization; the novella The Little Bird (1958; Russian translation, 1959) deals with the postwar life of an Uzbek kishlak (hamlet), and the novella Love (1968, published in 1969), with the life of youth. Kakhkhar wrote an autobiographical novella, Tales of the Past (1965; Russian translation, 1970), and the comedies In a New Land, Silk Siuzane (1950; State Prize of the USSR, 1952), and Aching Teeth (1954). He translated L. N. Tolstoy’s War and Peace and works by such writers as A. S. Pushkin, A. P. Chekhov, N. V. Gogol, and M. Gorky into Uzbek. He served as chairman of the presidium of the Writers’ Union of Uzbekistan from 1954 to 1956. He was awarded three orders, as well as a number of medals. Kakhkhar is buried in Tashkent.