Ulug-Zoda, Satym

Born Aug. 29 (Sept. 11), 1911, in the kishlak (settlement) of Varzyk, in what is now Namangan Oblast, Uzbek SSR. Soviet Tadzhik writer. Corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the Tadzhik SSR (1951).

Ulug-zoda graduated from the Tadzhik Institute of Education in Tashkent in 1929; he began publishing in 1932. He fought in the Great Patriotic War (1941-45). Since the late 1930’s, Ulug-zoda has been active mainly as a playwright. His play Shodmon (1939) dealt with cotton growers, the heroic drama Redsticks (1941) was devoted to the struggle with the Basmachi, and the drama In the Fire (1944) was about the war.

After the war, Ulug-zoda published the novella Noble Friends (1947; translated into Russian as The Return), which dealt with the regeneration of a family devastated by the war. Other works by Ulug-zoda have been the autobiographical novella The Morning of Our Life (1954; Russian translation, 1962), the novel Renewed Land (1953; Russian translation, 1956), the historical novel Vose (1967), the screenplay Avicenna (1957; with V. S. Vit-kovich), and the historical drama Rudaki (1958), the source for the film Fate of a Poet (1959; first prize and Golden Eagle medal at the Second Film Festival of the Countries of Asia and Africa, 1960).

Ulug-zoda has also translated V. I. Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? as well as plays by C. Goldoni and A. N. Ostrovskii and short stories by Chekhov and Gorky. He has been awarded five orders and several medals.