TWENTIETH-CENTURY UZBEK LITERATURE: LITERARY GENERATIONS, GENRE TRANSFORMATION, AND THE DYNAMICS OF TRADITION AND RENEWAL

Abstract

This article offers a critical historical overview of twentieth-century Uzbek literature by examining the relationship among literary modernity, political transformation, genre formation, and continuity with earlier Eastern and Turkic-Persianate traditions. The study uses a narrative-review and historical-comparative approach, drawing on Uzbek literary histories, primary literary works, and scholarship on Jadidism, Soviet cultural institutions, socialist realism, and post-Soviet literature. Rather than treating literary generations as rigid chronological blocs, the article proposes four overlapping heuristic formations: the Jadid generation, the early Soviet generation that emerged in the 1920s and 1930s, the post-Stalin generation associated with the 1960s, and a late-Soviet formation extending from the 1970s through the 1980s. It then considers independence after 1991 as a new literary field rather than a single generation. In prose, Abdulla Qodiriy and Cho'lpon are interpreted as establishing complementary historical-realist and psychological-symbolic trajectories. In poetry, modern lyric forms developed through the interaction of reformist thought, print culture, Soviet institutions, and renewed attention to individual experience. In drama, Behbudiy's chronological priority and Hamza Hakimzoda Niyoziy's broader dramaturgical practice are treated as distinct but complementary foundations. The article concludes that twentieth-century Uzbek literature is best understood not as a sequence of total ruptures, but as a dynamic process in which national tradition, world literature, political institutions, and aesthetic experimentation continuously reshaped one another.