Additionally, punctuation posed something of a challenge. Cho’lpon makes ample use of ellipses in the original text in ways that would confuse a contemporary English-language reader. He uses ellipses 1) to indicate a speaker is trailing off; 2) to indicate that something has been left unsaid by either the narrator or the characters (this is often sexual innuendo or the act of sex itself); 3) to indicate an impending contradiction, often at the end of chapters or sections, creating suspense; 4) to simulate stream of consciousness when the narrator enters the minds of characters; and 5) to denote the narrator’s incomplete sentences, which are often used when describing the layout of a new space or room. I have retained ellipses in the first case and rarely in the cases of numbers two and four.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Xotam Mirzaxo’jaev, Cho’lpon’s nephew, and his family for kindly providing the rights to publish this translation. Unfortunately, Mr. Mirzaxo’jaev passed before this translation could be printed. I would also like to thank Dr. Naim Karimov for aiding me in deciding the textological questions that arose from the many different editions of Cho’lpon’s novel. Iskandar Madgaziev of the Andijan Region Literary Museum kindly helped me locate a copy of the 1936 edition of the text and shared with me a number of notes and documents on the novel’s various republications. Nabi and Zahiriddin Jaloliddin were of great assistance in liasoning with contacts in Andijan. Adeeb Khalid, Zulxumor Mirzaeva, Iqbol Mirzo, Isajon Sulton, Xosiyat Rustamova, Dildora Isoqova, Yulduz O’rmonova, Sohiba Solieva, and Mohlaroy Ahmedova deserve special thanks for providing consultation over some of the more difficult passages of the text. I would also like to thank the Embassy of the Republic of Uzbekistan to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland for their generous support that made this publication a success. My wife, Elena Fort, has demonstrated infinite patience with this project, and through the reading of many drafts, I hope she has come to love the novel as much as I do. If not, I hope she at least still loves me. Finally, Dr. Oleh Kotsyuba and Dr. Rebecca Gould have been a tremendous help. This project would not have been a success without their insight, drive, and scholastic acumen.
Figure 1. Abdulhamid Sulaymon o’g’li Cho’lpon. Photograph taken in 1925.
An Introduction to Cho’lpon and his Night and Day
Abdulhamid Sulaymon o’g’li Cho’lpon (1897–1938) is best known as the most outstanding Uzbek poet of the twentieth century. When he emerged on the literary scene in the years following the Russian February Revolution of 1917, he became a leading voice for the new Turkic lyric that came to dominate Uzbek poetry in the 1920s. He developed a reputation for an elegiac style punctuated with colorful imagery and an innovative use of traditional symbols and metaphors. In the late 1920s, as Bolshevik-trained Uzbek intellectuals took over the literary sphere in Uzbekistan, Cho’lpon’s poetic fame transformed into notoriety. He became a political pariah, the subject of constant attacks in the press. In 1934, attempting to reconcile with Soviet power, he submitted the present novel, the first book of a planned dilogy Night and Day, to a Soviet literary contest. Three years later, Cho’lpon was arrested by the NKVD (the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs—Stalin’s secret police) as part of Stalin’s Great Terror (1936–1938). The work translated here, Night, was pulled from the shelves and banned; the sequel, if it existed, was likely destroyed by the NKVD. Night circulated in Uzbekistan in secret, influencing new generations of Uzbek litterateurs. Only with glasnost was the novel republished. It now stands as an exceptional piece of Uzbek prose. In the minds of Uzbek readers, Night tends to be overshadowed in the canon by the first Uzbek novel, Abdulla Qodiriy’s Bygone Days (O’tkan kunlar, 1922), but Cho’lpon’s chef d’oeuvre is arguably the superior work.
In post-Soviet Uzbekistan, Cho’lpon is perhaps equally well-known as a so-called “national caretaker” (millatparvar). In the second decade of the twentieth century, Cho’lpon and like-minded reformers, often called jadids, embraced a reformist discourse that involved, among other dimensions, an interest in European technology and the idea of the nation alongside traditional Islamic critiques of societal decline. The jadids implored their fellow urban Turkestanis to awaken themselves to the dangers of Russian colonialism and restore the lost glory of their people. Despite what modern Uzbek critics and Cold War-era Western researchers assert, these reformers’ main rhetorical and political opponent was not Russian imperialists but the religious elite, the ʿulama, whom the jadids felt impeded their nation’s progress towards modernity. For jadids, the Russian conquest of Turkestan was a result but not the cause of the decline of Islamic civilization.1 At the end of the present volume as Cho’lpon’s character Razzoq-sufi, so named for his duty to perform the call to prayer,2 loses his grip on reality, the voices around him poignantly ask, “who is crazy? The Russians or us?” These rhetorical questions direct the reader to first seek fault for the novel’s tragedies in Turkestani backwardness. Naturally, educated reformers like Cho’lpon presented themselves as the people best suited to lead Central Asia in the twentieth century, a strategy which brought them into direct competition with the ʿulama for the ears of ordinary people. Russian colonial administrators, for their part, bridled jadid ambitions, consistently siding with the ʿulama in all disputes to maintain their rule over Central Asian society.
The Russian revolutions of 1917, February and October, profoundly transformed the jadids and Cho’lpon. Whereas the Russian imperial state supported the traditional religious class, Lenin and the Bolsheviks found temporary allies in jadids. The Bolsheviks never trusted their native partners completely, knowing they were not Marxists. Nevertheless, the communists temporarily granted jadids the state tools to enact a jadid vision of modernity. As their power grew, jadid ideas and philosophies transformed dramatically. The Turkestani Muslim nation they intended to revive before the revolution became a specifically Turkic nation.3 Before 1917, jadids wrote in both the local Turkic tongue and in Persian, often mixing the two languages. Soon after October, under the influence of Ottoman modernizers and Turkic reformists of the Russian Empire, jadids began to see Turkic culture as more suited to modernity than Persian. Cho’lpon, one of the more active proponents of this view, introduced new Turkic meters and Turkified the lexicon of local poetry. By 1924, when Stalin ordered the national delimitation of Central Asia, splitting the territory into the contemporary five republics (Kazakhstan, Kyrgystan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan), jadids had come to a consensus on the Turkic nature of their nation, calling the culture Uzbek, a name with Turkic origins, and the territory—Uzbekistan.
After the revolution, women’s liberation became another critical part of the jadid program and one of Cho’lpon’s main concerns. Jadids, like modernizing intellectuals in many other neighboring Muslim societies such as Turkey and Iran, were influenced by European concepts of sexual morality and domesticity and began to agitate for their society to adopt them. They championed monogamous marriages based on romantic love and in turn attacked polygamy, pedophilia, homoeroticism, prostitution, and adultery. While the jadids may have exaggerated the prevalence of these phenomena in their society, they were no doubt as in evidence here as in any other society. The jadid solution was to open women up to the world, to release them from the confines of their “four walls” (a common metaphor for women’s internment in the home), and put them on more, though not completely, equal footing with men. Cho’lpon’s 1920s elegies and later his prose in the novel therefore often take readers inside local women’s sequestered lives, invading, with the reader, the intimacy of their homosociality in order to eliminate it. As a narrator, he mourns women’s innocence and failure to recognize their own imprisonment.
As several scholars have noted, the jadid vision for women’s liberation was far more limited than that of the Bolsheviks.4 In their literary portrayals, Cho’lpon and his fellow reformers rarely acknowledged women’s agency.5 Cho’lpon’s narrator often bewails Uzbek women’s captivity but simultaneously relies on it for protection of the “innocent” femininity he feels is crucial to