Cho’lpon did not study at a jadid school, but in the mid-1910s, he began his literary career by publishing in jadid journals and joining discussion and poetry circles with these men. In 1914, he produced his first prose stories, “A Victim of Ignorance” (Qurboni jaholat) and “Doctor Muhammadiyor” (Do’xtur Muhammadiyor), both of which, like many jadid stories and articles of the time, employ characters without much depth to demonstrate the potential catastrophes of ignorance and the benefits of secular education in medicine, the natural sciences, and the humanities.13 These stories are largely didactic and lack aesthetic ornamentation. Towards the February Revolution, he met and became close friends with Abdurauf Fitrat (1887–1938), the most prominent jadid of the 1920s, who remained a mentor to Cho’lpon throughout his life.14 Fitrat pushed the younger man to engage more in poetry and reportedly suggested to him the pen name Cho’lpon—meaning “morning star” or “Venus”—because as a poet he stood out among his peers.15
When the February Revolution came, Cho’lpon and his fellow jadids were quick to embrace it. Muslims reformers saw in the revolution a chance to increase Turkestan’s autonomy within a new federation containing the territories of the former Russian Empire that would devolve power to the regions and champion democracy. Post-Soviet Uzbek historiography emphasizes that Cho’lpon and other jadids’ eventual goal was independence, not simply autonomy, but this interpretation ignores jadids’ precarious position in their own society. Jadids did not advocate independence because if Turkestan separated from the Russian state, they feared they would be left to the mercy of the ʿulama, who enjoyed more popularity among the masses than jadids.16 Because of jadids’ socially marginal position and their understanding of history as expressed in their literature, Cho’lpon and his compatriots’ literary works at this time portray the February Revolution as something of a deus ex machina: it appeared as a sudden and unprecipitated solution to their problems. In a country moving to the left, suddenly the jadids were on the right side of history.
Cho’lpon’s first published poem celebrated the February Revolution and socialist movements for these very reasons, seeing revolution as salvation from without. Published in 1918 but written in April of 1917, this excerpt from “Red Banner” (Qizil bayroq) demonstrates the poet’s interest in the democratic and anti-imperial politics promised by socialism.17 It is important to remember that the poem by no means signals support for the Bolsheviks, who were one among many socialist parties at the time. I have translated the below excerpt in a fashion that somewhat captures the caesura-inflected style of the original. The original contains fifteen syllables per line and is read with slight pauses every four syllables (4–4–4–3). The rhyme scheme, which I have not captured here, is abab.
Red banner!
There, look how it waves in the wind,
As if the qibla [direction that a Muslim should face when praying] wind is greeting it!
It is not glad to see the poor in this state,
For the poor man has the right because it is his.
Has the red blood of the poor not flown like rivers
To take the banner from the darkness into the light?
Are there no workers left in Siberian exile
To take the banner to the oppressed and weak people?
You, bourgeoisie, conceited upper classes, don’t approach the red banner!
Were you not its bloodsucking enemy?
Now the black will not approach those white rays of light,
Now those black forces’ time has passed!
The red banner, in scarlet red blood, that blood—the blood of workers,
Those oppressive executioners, those haughty classes, have spilt that blood,
The oppressed love more than anything that call to unite and awaken,
While those murderers, those upper classes, plug their ears!
Oh, seize the flag, wave it high over the oppressed,
The oppressed who have given their blood and lives.
From the workers, soldiers, and the downtrodden there will be greetings,
From the evil merchants, the bourgeoisie—only pain, sorrow, and grief.
From the angels—justice and satisfaction.
And from my pen, my paper, and myself—love!18
As is typical of jadid literature at this time, Cho’lpon underplays Central Asian agency in the toppling of the Russian Empire by showing the February Revolution here as an event to which Central Asians have contributed little. As the first stanza indicates, Cho’lpon describes the revolution, the red banner of socialism, as the active observer of a passive Muslim East. The banner is blown in the direction of the qibla, the direction of Mecca, suggesting that the socialists of Petrograd must take their revolution to the Muslim world. The conclusion of the second stanza highlights the passivity of Central Asians in the revolution by calling on the workers imprisoned and in exile in Siberia, outside Central Asia, to bring the banner to the “oppressed and weak people,” by which Cho’lpon means his own community. The reference to the blood and lives given by the oppressed to the red banner in the final stanza, in keeping with the view of Central Asians as passive, indicates that the revolution is not so much the product of their sacrifices as it is a cosmic gift given in redemption of their suffering. Throughout the poem, Cho’lpon adapts Chagatai poetic language to the politicized times by recasting traditional images used in mystical poetry into new roles. Blood, often used as a metaphor in Sufi poetry for mystical experience, is literalized here as “red blood” and becomes a call to political action, identified with the revolutionary cause.
Cho’lpon’s poetic persona of the 1920s was rooted in the complex intersections of ethnicity, class, and revolution in 1917 Central Asia. After the February Revolution, Russians and native Muslims, both ʿulama and jadids, jockeyed for power in Tashkent until October 27, 1917, when the Tashkent soviet, a committee of socialist railroad workers and soldiers allied with the Bolsheviks, took power in the city by force and declared itself sovereign over all of Turkestan. The soviet and its supporters were entirely European and therefore hardly representative of majority-Muslim Turkestan.19 While the ʿulama tried to negotiate with the soviet, which denied all Muslim claims to authority because there were no Muslim proletarians, many jadids left for the Ferghana valley city of Kokand where on November 27, 1917, they established the short-lived Kokand Autonomy. Cho’lpon, like other reformist Muslim poets, wrote several poems celebrating the formation of the Autonomy as a rebirth of his Turkic nation. In less than three months, once the Tashkent soviet could afford the expedition, it destroyed the Autonomy, killing thousands in the process.
After this juncture in 1917, Cho’lpon’s poetic output increased greatly. He spent much less time on marches and odes. Instead, contemplative and elegiac lyric made up the bulk of his poetic oeuvre in the 1920s. Perhaps his most famous work of this period is his 1921 lament “To a Devastated Land” (Buzilgan o’lkaga), an elegy for the destruction of Turkestan caused by the outbreak of war between the Red Army and Basmachi, the Central Asian fighters opposed to Soviet power.20 The following is a prose translation of an excerpt from the poem, which, like the previous poem, is written in a syllabic meter that alternates the number of syllables in each stanza. In the first part of the excerpt below there are fifteen syllables per line read this time with a caesura after the first eight syllables (8–7 and sometimes 8–4–3). The second part of the excerpt contains twelve and eleven syllables, read 4–4–4 and 4–4–3 respectively. The final two lines repeat the fifteen syllable structure of the first two lines. The rhyme scheme is aabbccdd.
Hey, mighty