This article addresses an understudied aspect of Soviet-era interethnic cultural relations: the contribution of the Russian writer, critic and translator Lydia Grigorievna Bat (1897-1980) to the popularization of Uzbek literature and culture among Russian-speaking readers. The relevance of the study stems from the need to reassess so-called “second-tier” figures of Soviet literature whose work sustained the “friendship of peoples” model at the level of concrete texts. The purpose of the article is to determine the generic specificity and functions of Batʼs historical-biographical novella The Garden of Life (1956), devoted to Alisher Navoi, and of the critical-biographical essay Oybek (co-authored with M. Koshchanov, 1966), within a comparative-literature framework. The methodology combines comparative-historical, biographical and structural-typological methods. The analysis shows that Batʼs prose combines documentary reliability with artistic invention, forming a type of biographical narrative about the “creator of culture” that was stable within Soviet literature of the 1940s-1960s. The article discusses the relationship between authorial invention and scholarly Navoi studies, as well as the role of Batʼs personal ties with Uzbek writers (Oybek, Zulfiya) in shaping her creative position. It is concluded that Batʼs work constitutes a significant yet insufficiently studied episode in twentieth-century Russian-Uzbek literary relations.