Sadriddin Ayni Memorial House Museum

About

The museum occupies the house on Registanskaya Street where Sadriddin Ayni (1878-1954) lived from 1920 — a writer, scholar and public figure equally important to Uzbek and Tajik literature.

The life the display unfolds reads like a novel. Ayni was born in the village of Soktari near Gijduvan; his father made millstones, his grandfather was a mullah. His first teacher turned out to be illiterate, and a neighbour returning from Bukhara taught the boy to read and write. At eleven he lost his father, mother and uncle in a smallpox epidemic and became head of the family, feeding his younger brothers. In 1890 he nevertheless reached Bukhara and entered the Mir-Arab madrasah.

Poetry interested him more than the madrasah curriculum. He took the pen name Ayni in 1896, was a known poet by 1905, founded the Enlightenment society and wrote textbooks for the new-method schools. His closeness to the Jadids cost him: watched from 1915, he went into hiding and worked at a cotton plant, and after the demonstration of 1917 he was given seventy-five strokes of the cane and thrown into the Obkhona dungeon, which few left alive. Russian soldiers freed him. One brother was executed on the emir's order, another killed by basmachi.

From 1920 Ayni lived in Samarkand and devoted himself to writing. He compiled the first anthology, Specimens of Tajik Literature, wrote Odina, Dokhunda, The Slaves and Reminiscences, and scholarly books on Rudaki, Ibn Sina, Saadi, Bedil, Navoi and Ahmad Donish. In 1949 he became an honorary member of the Uzbek Academy of Sciences, and from 1951 the first president of the Tajik Academy of Sciences.

The rooms gather photographs, manuscripts, editions and personal belongings that show both the writer's work and the age it was done in.