ABSTRACT Throughout his long career in Soviet letters, Uzbek writer Abdulla Qahhor (1907–1968) referred to the lessons he had learned from Anton Chekhov, the Russian writer he called “ustod” (master or teacher), leading him to be known as the “Uzbek Chekhov.” This article examines two foundational moments in Qahhor’s engagement with Chekhov—a 1939 article “Chexovdan o‘rganaylik” (Let’s learn from Chekhov) and a 1937 story “Adabiyot muallimi” (The Teacher of Literature). Shaped by the didactic tone of Soviet literature in the 1930s, Qahhor centered questions of pedagogy in both texts. However, he also drew from Chekhov, whose stories thematized pedagogy in ways that confounded rather than instantiated the teacher–student hierarchy, as well as from the repressed Central Asian Jadids. Taken as a whole, Qahhor’s relationship to Chekhov shows a non-Russian Soviet writer navigating literary norms through translation and tactical imitation, reworking hegemonic forms (like the short story), and reimagining the teacher–student relationship as a site of critical engagement rather than passive learning.
Sabrina Jaszi (Fri,) studied this question.