Bozor Sobir

Bozor Sobir (20 November 1938 – 1 May 2018) was a preeminent Tajik poet and politician, known as the national poet of Tajikistan and 'the conscience of the nation'.

Sobir established his reputation during the Soviet era.

His poems, books, and articles have been published throughout the former Soviet Union and translated into Western languages, as well as Persian, Dari, Uzbek, Slavic languages, and several other languages of the Soviet Republics.

His poetry books were also published in Afghanistan and Iran.

Sobir's poetic style is known for its imagery, nationalism, patriotism, its inclusion of the history of the Tajik people, and also for its strong political views.

Many of his poems have been set to music by various Tajik composers.

After his poem We are of Siyovush's Bloodline (Az Khuni Siyovushem) was set to music, it became the de facto Tajikistan national anthem.

As a poet, he contributed much to the revival of Tajik national culture after Mikhail Gorbachev's call for perestroika.

Many Tajiks know his poems by heart.

Bozor Sobir was born on 20 November 1938 in Sufiyen, which is part of the city of Ordzhonikidzobod (now Vahdat District) in Tajikistan.

He is the fourth-youngest of seven children.

After his father died at an early age, he was sent to study at a boarding school in Hisor in western Tajikistan, about 15 km from the capital of Dushanbe.

There, he met Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet, who visited the school as a speaker.

The poet's father was a government tax collector.

His mother was a housewife.

His younger brother Temur Sobirov was a respected mathematician, with a school and a street named after him in Tajikistan.

His second youngest brother, also a mathematician, ran for a Senate seat.

The first publication of Bozor Sobir's poetry was in 1960, while he was a university student.

In 1962, he completed his graduate work in philology and Tajik-Persian literature at the Tajik National University.

After completing his studies, Sobir served as a translator in Afghanistan for a year.

Thereafter, he worked at various newspapers and magazines in Soviet Tajikistan, including Education and Culture (Maorif va Madaniyat), Voice of the East (Sadoi Shark), and Justice (Adolat).

He was also commissioned to translate works of British poet and politician Lord Byron, French poets Arthur Rimbaud and Guillaume Apollinaire, Chilean poet and politician Pablo Neruda, Russian poet Sergei Yesenin and Lithuanian-Soviet poet Eduardas Mieželaitis.

In 1979, he began working at the Writers' Union of Tajikistan as a poetry and editorial consultant.

At their request, he edited and improved the poems of almost all famous Tajik poets throughout his lifetime, though he worked at the Writers' Union for ten years.

The poems of Bozor Sobir are characterized by their novel form, penetrating lyricism, high spirituality, and a tense search for truth and beauty in work and love.

Defining motifs are: the ancient and recent history of Tajikistan's people; the formation of national identity in the complex, changing world of the end of the 20th century; the comprehension of modernity through the moral experience of a man of the post-war generation; the beauty of his native land; and intimate lyrics with features of the mythological understanding of women and nature.

Sobir contributed much to the revival of Tajik national culture, the formation of the Tajik identity and building of a national consciousness in Tajikistan before, during and after the Soviet era.

Sobir is a laureate of a prestigious National Rudaki Poetry Award, Tajikistan's most eminent prize for poetry (1988) and the Star of the President 3rd degree (2013).

With the advent of glasnost, Sobir became actively involved in political and cultural movements for an independent national identity.

He was one of the founders of the Democratic Party, serving as its deputy leader.

The Democratic Party was the secular component of the Democratic-Islamic coalition that governed Tajikistan in 1992, until it was overthrown by pro-communist forces with Russian military support.

He was elected a senator in the Supreme Council of Tajikistan, but resigned from this post and remains the only politician to have done so.

He also subsequently resigned from the party, reportedly because of a disagreement with the leadership over the growing Islamic elements within the party.

A strong proponent of separation of state and religion, Sobir believed religious figures should not engage in politics.

Sobir remains popular in Tajikistan and is the best-known Tajik poet outside the country.

Numerous books have been written about him and his poems.

A play about his life called A Night Away from Homeland (Shabe Dur Az Vatan) was performed by the Tajik State Theater named after M. Vakhidov, with the role of Sobir played by the Honored Artist of Tajikistan, Abdumumin Sharifi.

The poet's nephew, another mathematician, was the head of a Democratic Party in Tajikistan until his resignation in the 2000s.

Another relative was head of the now-banned Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan (IRPT), whose closure Bozor Sobir had advocated.

His other siblings went into teaching.