Night and Day. Abdulhamid Sulaymon o’g’li Cho’lpon

novel as an anti-Soviet allegory, an approach I find particularly unproductive because it permits the critic to impose his/her own teleology onto the text and forgets the uncertain time in which the text was written. Shawn Lyons’s work is unique in this regard. He argues that the discourse of anti-colonialism found in Cho’lpon’s work is a double-edged sword, which inevitably finds the author, despite his intent, supporting colonialism as much as he resists it. I agree with some of his argument, but I would suggest that Lyons’s equation of Russian colonialism and Soviet imperialism is problematic. Lyons’s piece is unfortunately undermined by some critical misreadings of the text. He mistakes noyib to’ra, the Russian official, for a native official and suggests that Zunnun, noyib to’ra’s cook, is married to the woman who is, in fact, noyib to’ra’s wife. See Lyons, “Resisting Colonialism in the Uzbek Historical Novel Kecha va Kunduz (Night and Day), 1936).”

      75 Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 27.

      76 Clark, 15–24.

      77 See Robin, Socialist Realism: An Impossible Aesthetic, 37–74.

      78 Khalid, Making Uzbekistan: Nation, Empire, and Revolution in the Early USSR, 382.

      79 Abdulhamid Cho’lpon, “Ustodning xislatlari,” Qizil O’zbekiston, June 18, 1937.

      80 For a comparison of early twentieth-century Central Asian gender politics with contemporaneous Muslim societies, see Kamp, The New Woman in Uzbekistan. For a look at the relationship between gender and politics during Iran’s constitutional revolution, see Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). For gender politics in modern Turkey, see Deniz Kandiyoti, “Slave Girls, Temptresses, and Comrades: Images of Women in the Turkish Novel,” Feminist Issues 8, no. 1 (1988): 35–50; Deniz Kandiyoti, “Gendering the Modern: On Missing Dimensions in the Study of Turkish Modernity,” in Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey, ed. Sibel Bozdogan and Resat Kasaba (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), 113–132.

      81 For more on the ambitious program of sexual liberation of some on the Russian left, see Wendy Z. Goldman, Women, The State and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917,1936 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); I. S. Kon, Seksual’naia kul’tura v Rossii: Klubnichka na berezke (Moscow: O.G.I., 1997); Dan Healey, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

      82 For more on the hujum and the reaction to it, see Marianne Kamp, The New Woman in Uzbekistan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006).

      83 Abdulhamid Sulaymon o’g’li Cho’lpon, “Zamona xotini,” in Asarlar: To’rt jildlik, vol. 3 (Toshkent: Akademnashr, 2016), 246.

      84 For more on Islamic reform and the Islamic understanding of history, see Samira Haj, Reconfiguring Islamic Tradition: Reform, Rationality, and Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009).

      85 Cho’lpon, Asarlar: To’rt jildlik, 2016, 1:49.

      86 Jadid authors employed a variety of terms to designate their travelogues. Mahmudho’ja Behbudiy called his sayohat xotiralari (travel reminiscences) and Fitrat—bayonoti sayyohi hindi (notes of an Indian traveler). Fitrat’s text is a fictional travelogue of an Indian traveler who visits Bukhara.

      87 Khalid, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia, 138.

      88 Ibid., 235–243.

      89 Quoted in Evgeny Dobrenko, “Literary Criticism and the Transformation of the Literary Field during the Cultural Revolution, 1928–1932,” in A History of Russian Literary Theory and Criticism (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014), 51.

      90 Nina Nad’iarnykh, Ivan Le: Krytyko-Biografichnyi Narys (Kyiv: Radians’kyi pys’mennyk, 1967), 79. Just two years later, Majidiy would harshly criticize Le for a positive jadid character in the novel. See Rahmat Majidiy, “Doklad R. Majidiy o literature uzbekskoi SSR,” in Pervyi vessoiuznyi s’ezd sovetskikh pisatelei, 1934: Stenograficheskii otchet (Moskva: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1990), 127–128. Cho’lpon could have encountered Le’s novel while in Uzbekistan from 1930 to 1932 or during his second stint in Moscow from 1932 to 1934. An E. G. Grigor’ev translated the novel into Russian in 1930. See Ivan Le, Roman mezhgor’ia, ed. A. Chernenko, trans. E. G. Grigor’ev (Khar’kov: Proletar, 1930). Le brought the novel to Uzbekistan in 1928 or 1929 where he found a translator for it. The translation into Uzbek was published in 1933. See Ivan Le, Tog’ oraliqlari, trans. Abdulla Qahhor (Toshkent-Samarqand: O’zdavnashr, 1932). Thus, for Majidiy to have known about it in 1932, Russian-language copies or translation drafts must have been available in Uzbekistan.

      91 Ivan Le, “Hamza,” Sharq yulduzi 11 (1959): 98–101.

      92 Le, Tog’ oraliqlari, 31. I translate from the Uzbek translation of the novel because I cannot locate the original 1929 Ukrainian novel or the 1930 Russian translation. Le republished the novel in 1957 but with substantial changes due to criticism. See Konstantin Trofimov, “Moi Drug Ivan Le,” Raduga 12 (1987): 151–156.

      93 Le, Tog’ oraliqlari, 50.

      94 Khalid, Making Uzbekistan: Nation, Empire, and Revolution in the Early USSR, 105.

      95 David C. Montgomery, “‘Shohimardon’: Forging a Link in the Chain of Soviet Uzbek Literary Orthodoxy,” Central Asian Survey 3, no. 1 (1984): 88.

      96 Salohiddin Mamajonov, “Alangali yillarning otashin shoiri,” in Yoz kuni (Toshkent: G’afur G’ulom nomidagi Adabiyot va san’at nashriyoti, 1980), 5–6.

      97 Khalid, Making Uzbekistan: Nation, Empire, and Revolution in the Early USSR, 333.

      98 Karimov, Abdulhamid Sulaymon o’g’li Cho’lpon, 32.

      99 Abdulhamid Sulaymon o’g’li Cho’lpon, “Novvoy qiz,” in Asarlar: to’rt jildlik, vol. 2 (Toshkent: Akademnashr, 2016), 352.

      Night and Day: Night, First Book¹

      When spring comes, the work begins.²

      —Folk saying

      1

      Every year the coming of spring joy tickles hearts. Warm blood rushes to nature’s trembling bodies once again.

      The ever-so-green sochpopuks of the willows begin to quiver like a young woman’s intricate braids. Under the ice the somber cheeks of the murky running waters begin to smile; the water, though tired and limping, like a freed slave, begins to gnaw its way forward towards the satisfaction of liberty. Birds begin to appear one by one at the ends of branches. The first bird of spring brings the pleasure of the season’s first well-fried corn. Planted last year, the cobs have just recently poked their heads out from that kohl root that will be applied above the eyes. Oh, how that green of spring, which not long ago emerged from wintry ice that melts in warm hands, so loves to lie on the courtyard platform of the eyes.³ Oh, how the cool wind that playfully toys with those bare women⁴—with their hair and their curls, with the ends of their headscarves—never touches the flower-embroidered skullcaps of men. Spring frolics in the revelation of its beauty.

      Why is life so beautiful and sweet in spring?

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      Zebi’s soul had felt compressed all winter, as if rusting, but it began to expand with spring’s warmth. She had just begun thirsting to ride out into the fields and meadows in a horse-drawn cart, even one covered in straw. The chain of matchmakers that poured into her house uninterruptedly all winter had stopped momentarily for the last one to