Maqsud Shayxzoda and “Mirzo Ulug‘bek” (I)

Maqsud Shayxzoda was born in 1908 in the city of Agdash (Oqtosh) in Azerbaijan into a doctor’s family. After secondary education in his town he studied by correspondence at the Baku Higher Pedagogical Institute and taught at school. In 1927 he was arrested and in February 1928 sent to Tashkent; afterwards he worked in newspapers and journals, as a researcher at the Institute of Language and Literature, and from 1938 as a docent of Uzbek classical literature at the Tashkent pedagogical institute. He began publishing from 1929; in the 1930s his collections such as “Loyiq soqchi”, “Jumhuriyat” and “Yangi devon” appeared. In the war years, in the collections “Kurash nechun” and “Jang va qo‘shiq”, he called for the fight against fascism and for raising the people’s spirit; in 1944 he wrote the drama “Jaloliddin Manguberdi”, in which the Khorezm shah fights for the freedom of his homeland against the Mongol invaders. After the war too he was unjustly repressed, yet he published collections such as “Zamon torlari” and “Chorak asr devoni”. In 1958 he wrote the long poem “Toshkentnoma”. He also has narrative poems such as “Ovchi qissasi” and “Iskandar Zulqarnayn”. His studies on Navoiy took Navoi studies to a new stage; he translated Rustaveli, Shakespeare, Pushkin, Lermontov, Nizami, Fuzuli and others into Uzbek. Shayxzoda died in 1967.