Cho’lpon’s novel, as I will show in the analysis to follow, is full of the ignorance and indecisiveness that characterizes his poetry, setting it apart from many of the prevailing literary trends in the Soviet Union. Writing his novel in the early 1930s before Socialist Realism, the official literary method of the Soviet Union, had been canonized and defined, Cho’lpon proceeded along a different path. His characters do not come to the class consciousness that would be demanded by Stalinist critics in the late 1930s; rather they are “unconscious” in their indecisiveness, ignorance, and constant doubt. They misunderstand, misrecognize, and commit mistakes, always receiving epiphanies that are endlessly redacted. His characters are, in a word, incomplete beings, always deferring final judgment to another time, matching, perhaps only by a convenient coincidence, the incomplete form of the dilogy Night and Day (Kecha va kunduz). I use these characters and the structure of the novel to argue that Cho’lpon was himself undecided in his relationship to the Soviet Union, incomplete, like his novel, in his convictions, and thus always available for reinterpretation by future readers.
By bringing out the ambiguity in Cho’lpon’s text and his biography, I intend to challenge the uncritical reception of jadids in post-Soviet Uzbekistan. Since Uzbekistan gained its independence in 1991, its intellectuals have done little in the way of rethinking the legacy of jadids and the larger Soviet system itself. Instead, they have largely inverted the Soviet historical narrative. Whereas the Soviet narrative held that the October Revolution freed Uzbeks from tsarist colonial oppression, gave birth to Uzbekistan, and guided its national culture to modernity, the post-Soviet narrative explicitly asserts Uzbeks’ transhistorical victimization under Russian imperial and Soviet rule. According to this account, the Russian Empire and the Soviets alike stalled Uzbek development and repressed Uzbek native culture in favor of Russian culture. Cho’lpon plays a major role in both narratives: he was reviled in the Soviet Union from the late 1920s up to glasnost as an enemy of the people, but now he is unequivocally celebrated as a national hero. Both narratives lack nuance and rely more on teleology than facts. They each attribute complete conviction to their actors, effacing the ambiguity intrinsic to any indeterminate future. An examination of ignorance in Cho’lpon’s characters helps us grasp the author’s own inconclusive musings on the Soviet state, which consequently permits a more dynamic and exciting engagement with Uzbek literature and history.
Here I offer a biographical sketch of Cho’lpon’s life and times, the history of the novel, and an analysis of its contents. Cho’lpon left no diary or other material giving an account of his life, and thus any biography of him is nothing more than a sketch that relies on the self-censored testimonies of relatives and memoirs of friends. I fill in the gaps in the biographical record by introducing the reader to the historical context of Cho’lpon’s life and his poetic oeuvre. For these same reasons, we know little about the process of writing the novel. Cho’lpon left no authorial explanations about his intentions with the work and the sequel that he is rumored to have written. I therefore make abundant use of historical and literary context to form an argument about the author’s goals with Night and Day.
CHO’LPON’S LIFE AND TIMES
Abdulhamid Sulaymon o’g’li, better known by his penname Cho’lpon, was born in 1897 in Andijan, a city in the Ferghana valley of modern-day Uzbekistan. The Russian Empire had annexed the city with its conquest of the Kokand Khanate in 1876, incorporating it into the colonial administrative unit of Turkestan. Cho’lpon’s life spanned Russian colonialism, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Stalinist purges. His views and literary oeuvre were inevitably affected by his confrontation with both the racial and religious hierarchy of empire and revolutionary calls for radical equality.
As in other European colonies with majority-Muslim populations, Russian colonial administrators in nineteenth-century Turkestan ruled from a distance. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, most Europeans believed that Islam was in its death throes as a religion. Muslims would soon see the superiority of Christian peoples and abandon their faith. Imperial rulers needed only to not provoke their colonized subjects, lest a sudden burst of fanatic revolt breathe new life into the dying creed. Therefore, Russians minimized the so-called “civilizing mission” that justified their colonial conquest in the first place. They banned Christian proselytization, left Islamic law intact, and isolated themselves in Russian quarters of major cities such as Samarqand and the Russian regional capital, Tashkent.6
Annexation into the Russian Empire greatly increased the fortunes of Cho’lpon’s merchant father, Sulaymon mullah Muhammad Yunus o’g’li. While the Romanov Empire left many aspects of Central Asian life untouched, commerce changed dramatically. With new trade routes and modes of transportation, Sulaymon expanded his textile trade routes as far north as Orenburg.7
Russia’s imperial presence changed Sulaymon’s social and cultural outlook as well. Sulaymon was well versed in Islamicate high culture. He participated in poetry gatherings with learned men, mullahs and eshons, and even compiled his own divan (poetry collection), under the penname Rasvo, meaning “base” or “foul,” a sign of humility before God. In educating his eldest child, Cho’lpon, he proceeded in the fashion traditional for precolonial Central Asia and much of the premodern Islamic world. His father sent him to a madrasa, a secondary school where select students train to become Islamic learned men. There, Cho’lpon learned Arabic and Persian, and was initiated into the world of Islamicate high culture.8 However, Sulaymon soon reconsidered his son’s future prospects and enrolled Cho’lpon in a Russian school. Colonial administrators, beginning in the mid-1880s, established so-called “Russo-native” schools, which taught Russian and local native languages to Central Asians. The goal of these schools was to create a class of native intermediaries to administer colonial rule in Turkestan.9 In this school, Cho’lpon learned the basics of the Russian language, arithmetic, geography. He also received some of the native instruction typical of the maktab, a primary school in Central Asia, and the madrasa.
Cho’lpon’s education at a Russian school was rare for his time. Most Turkestani parents did not trust the Russian schools, and enrollment was always low. Russian imperial administrators could often resort to drastic measures. Notably, they sometimes forcibly enrolled children from poorer members of the community in order to fill classrooms.10
In the late 1890s, yet another type of school, associated with a movement of progressive Muslim reformers, was introduced in Central Asia.11 Jadids, named for the pedagogical method they advocated in these new schools, usul-i jadid (new method), promoted a novel means of learning the Arabic alphabet in which the local tongue, called Turki or Chagatai, was written. While traditional maktabs taught the alphabet via the syllabic method whereby students memorized syllabic combinations of letters, jadid new-method schools trained students with a phonetic method, teaching them the sounds that each of the letters represented. As a result, jadid-school students could read new, unfamiliar texts, not just a prescribed corpus of memorized texts.
Jadids may have received their name for this pedagogical method, but their interests expanded far beyond the classroom. The classroom was simply a natural starting point because of the relative freedom the Russian colonial state allowed for religious minorities to regulate their own educational and religious affairs. The jadids’ interest in pedagogy was logically connected to their other ideas for reform. They believed that a new kind of literacy would lead to a social and political awakening. Through newspapers and theater—the production and consumption of which jadids’ functional literacy made possible—they proceeded to “awaken” their fellow Turkestanis to their ignorance by articulating a new interpretation of Islam compatible with European ideas of industry, economic growth, democratization, sexual morality, and women’s rights. Driving this was an ardent belief in their Turkestani Muslim nation and a desire to return it to the glory that it supposedly possessed in a previous age, which both jadids and their intellectual rivals located in the fifteenth-century rule of Tamerlane