1878 – 1954
Sadriddin Ayni
Writer, poet, scholar
A writer and scholar who wrote in both Tajik and Uzbek and is regarded as the founder of modern Tajik literature. He lived for some 35 years in a house near the Registan, where he wrote his best-known books.
© Hasan Tohirov, CC BY-SA 4.0
From the madrasas of Bukhara to Samarkand
Sadriddin Saidmurodzoda was born into a peasant family on 15 April 1878 in Soktare, a village near Gijduvan in the Emirate of Bukhara. Orphaned by a cholera epidemic in 1889, he went to Bukhara at twelve and studied at the Mir-i Arab, Kukeldash and other madrasas, working as a cleaner and cook to get by. From 1896 he wrote verse under the pen-name Ayni.
As a Jadid reformer he opened new-method schools in Bukhara and compiled a textbook for them, Upbringing of the Young (1909). In April 1917, on the emir's orders, he was given 75 lashes and thrown into prison; Russian soldiers from Kagan set him free. After recovering he moved to Samarkand; the emir's men later killed his brother.
The house in Samarkand
Ayni lived in a house near the Registan and the Gur-e-Amir from 1917 until the early 1950s. He worked in education and the new press, writing poems, articles and satirical sketches in Tajik and Uzbek. Here he wrote The Executioners of Bukhara (1922), Odina (1924), Dokhunda — the first major novel in Tajik — Slaves (1934), the satirical novella Death of the Moneylender (1939) and his four-part Memoirs (1949–1954). Writers such as Gafur Gulyam, Hamid Olimjon and Fitrat were frequent guests.
He was also a fine literary scholar, writing on Ferdowsi, Rudaki, Avicenna and Navoi and compiling the anthology Specimens of Tajik Literature (1926). It was Ayni who, drawing on texts and local lore, identified Rudaki's burial place at the village of Panjrud.
Legacy
In 1951 Ayni became the first president of the Academy of Sciences of the Tajik SSR. He died in Dushanbe on 15 July 1954 and is buried there. His Samarkand house opened as a memorial museum in the 1960s, preserving his living rooms, two studies, his desk, manuscripts and the trees he planted in the courtyard.
