Tursun-Zade, Mirzo

Born Apr. 19 (May 2), 1911, in the village of Karatag, in what is now Regar Raion; died Sept. 9, 1977, in Dushanbe. Soviet Tadzhik writer and public figure. People’s Poet of Tadzhikistan (1961). Member of the Academy of Sciences of the Tadzhik SSR (1951). Hero of Socialist Labor (1967). Member of the CPSU since 1941; member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Tadzhik SSR since 1946.

Tursun-zade began publishing in 1930. His first verse collection, Banner of Victory, was published in 1932. He gained renown with the poem “To the Creators” (1934), the play Verdict (1935), and the narrative poems Sun of the Country (1936) and Autumn and Spring (1937). Tursun-zade’s poetry is realistic but is marked by a lofty romantic sensibility and an aphoristic style that stem from traditional eastern and folk poetry.

Tursun-zade’s collection Verse (1939) extolled Soviet patriotism, proletarian internationalism, and the struggle against international reaction. The narrative poems For the Motherland! (1941; with A. Dekhoti) and The Son of His Motherland (1942) dealt with the war and the moral unity of the peoples of the USSR.

Tursun-zade’s works of the second half of the 1940’s and of the 1950’s included the narrative poem The Bride From Moscow (1945), the cycles Indian Ballad (1947–48; State Prize of the USSR, 1948) and I Am From the Free East (1950), and the narrative poems Khasan-arbakesh (1954) and The Voice of Asia (1956; both awarded the Lenin Prize, 1960) and Eternal Light (1957). The narrative poem My Beloved (1960) deals with the individual and society and with civic ideals and convictions; the narrative poem From the Ganges to the Kremlin (1970) portrays V. I. Lenin and associates Lenin with the sources of the national liberation movement of the peoples of the East.

Tursun-zade also wrote works of literary criticism, including Thoughts on the Civic Lyric (1954) and Literature and Life (1959). His works have been translated into many languages. He received the Rudaki State Prize of the Tadzhik SSR in 1963 and the Nehru Prize in 1968. Tursun-zade was a deputy to the second through ninth convocations of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. He was chairman of the administrative board of the Writers’ Union of the Tadzhik SSR from 1946 and secretary of the Writers’ Union of the USSR from 1959. He was a member of the Presidium of the World Peace Council. He was awarded four Orders of Lenin, six other orders, and several medals.