Remembering Shamshad Abdullaev, the world-class Uzbek poet too few knew

Dedicated to his art form, Abdullaev, who has died at 66 after battling cancer, was embraced by unorthodox artists in ex-Soviet republics.

Shamshad Abdullaev’s very name was a confluence of cultures.

A Persian first name (“a pine-like tree”), an Arabic last name (“A servant of God”), and a Slavic “ev” ending that simply means “of”.

This combination was possible in the former heart of the Great Silk Road, in ex-Soviet Uzbekistan, a Central Asian nation once associated with political purges and child labour in the cotton industry.

With the look of an ageing Italian film star and the demeanour of a refined aristocrat, Abdullaev, who died of cancer at age 66 on Tuesday, was a poet and essayist who wrote in Russian.

His artistic output is modest – several small books of poetry and essays, and a film script that never became a film but helped him buy an apartment in the eastern Uzbek city of Ferghana in the late 1980s.

His poems lacked rhyme and steady meter, and yet, his life and work help answer some of the hardest questions an artist faces in today’s world:

Is art to blame for wars and imperialism?

How do you decolonise your culture, if you write in your former coloniser’s language?

As the Russia-Ukraine war grinds into its third year, how far do you need to go in rejecting Russian language and culture?

And what if this language is the artistic tool of an apolitical man who detested autocracy, did not have a single drop of Russian blood and was lambasted for not following Russian poetic traditions?

For those who know about ex-Soviet Central Asia, the word “Ferghana” is mostly associated with the valley of 16 million people, the most fertile and densely populated piece of land between China, Iran and Russia.

Ferghana was