[2] Abdullaev was a contributor to Words Without Borders, where he published several of his poems: "On the Death of Jean Vigo", "Midday 1975", and "Family", all originally written in Russian.
In the early 1990s, he moved to Tashkent just before the collapse of the Soviet Union, and found employment at a local paper, Star of the East (Zvezda Vostoka).
That year he was recognized with the Andrei Bely Prize, becoming the first writer from Uzbekistan to win Russia's most prestigious unofficial literary award.
[2] This resulted in backlash from more traditional communist segments of Uzbekistan's population, as well as the emerging nationalist fraction of Uzbek poets, who were dismayed by his use of Russian.
His poems were published in a number of independent Russian literary journals, including St. Petersburg-based Mitin and Yekaterinburg-based Ural Novye.
Also in 1997, Abdullaev published a Russian-Finnish anthology called Who Says (Russian: Кто говорит), which dealt with the cultural relationship between the two nations.
He appeared alongside Polina Barskova, Keti Chukhrov, Alexandra Petrova, and Aleksandr Skidan, as well as a number of other important translators.
[10][11] In April 2017, Abdullaev teamed up with Words Without Borders' online magazine to release three new poems, translated by Alex Cigale and Dana Golin, respectively.
This visionary project was meant to bring together the Russian literary language, Central Asian collective identities and pasts, and cosmopolitan world culture.
In the 1990s the government-backed writer's union accused Abdullaev of attempting to hinder the development of the Uzbek language through his use of Russian, as well as undermining Central Asian culture.