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Uzbekistan
Literature
Uzbekistan's literature suffered great damage during the Stalinist
purges of the 1930s; during that period, nearly every talented
writer in the republic was purged and executed as an enemy of
the people. Prior to the purges, Uzbekistan had a generation of
writers who produced a rich and diverse literature, with some
using Western genres to deal with important issues of the time.
With the death of that generation, Uzbek literature entered a
period of decline in which the surviving writers were forced to
mouth the party line and write according to the formulas of socialist
realism. Uzbek writers were able to break out of this straitjacket
only in the early 1980s. In the period of perestroika
and glasnost , a group of Uzbek writers led the way in
establishing the Birlik movement, which countered some of the
disastrous policies of the Soviet government in Uzbekistan. Beginning
in the 1980s, the works of these writers criticized the central
government and other establishment groups for the ills of society.
A critical issue for these writers was the preservation and purification
of the Uzbek language. To reach that goal, they minimized the
use of Russian lexicon in their works, and they advocated the
declaration of Uzbek as the state language of Uzbekistan. These
efforts were rewarded in 1992, when the new national constitution
declared the Uzbek language to be the state language of the newly
independent state. At the same time, however, some of these writers
found themselves at odds with the Karimov regime because of their
open criticism of post-Soviet policies.
Data as of March 1996
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