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They have trod over your breast for many years,
You curse and moan, but they crush you nonetheless,
These haughty men with no rights to your free soil,
Why do you let them trample you without a murmur as if a slave?
Why do you not command them to leave?
Why does your freedom-loving heart not unleash your voice?
Why do the whips laugh as they meet your body?
Why do hopes die in your springs?
Why is your lot in life only blood?
Why are you so despondent?
Why do you no longer have that smoldering fire in your eyes?
Why are the wolves running through your nights so sated?
Why do those flying bullets not raise your ire?
Why is there such destruction across your plains?
Why do you not rain storms of vengeance?
Why has God forsaken you, sapped you of His strength?
Come, I will read you a little story,
I’ll whisper a tale of years past in your ear,
Come, I’ll wipe the tears from your eyes,
Come, let me look on your wounded body until I can’t look anymore.
Why is that poison arrow in your breast?
That poison arrow of an overthrown kingdom.
Why do you not desire vengeance?
Why do you not want the death of those enemies?
Hey, free land that has never known slavery,
Why is that shadowy cloud lodged in your throat?21
Nearly all readers, particularly Stalinist critics, saw through the thinly veiled metaphors here; Cho’lpon condemns the civil war and the Bolsheviks in particular. Indeed, the denunciations of Cho’lpon’s anti-Soviet views that began in 1926 referenced this poem specifically.22 The poem’s narrative pessimism, consonant with its elegiac form (the poem is a marsiya—the Persian genre name for a lament or elegy), is present throughout Cho’lpon’s oeuvre of the 1920s. Cho’lpon also exhibits here a fascination with nature that never left him throughout his career. He exercises personification and chremamorphism, the identification of people with animals and natural objects, extensively. Here the land becomes a woman whose breast has been trampled by invaders and conquerors. Cho’lpon’s lyric persona calls out to the effeminized land, just as he calls out to oppressed women in many other poems, desperately and unsuccessfully imploring them to rebel against its tormentors.
As the 1920s proceeded, Cho’lpon, justifying Fitrat’s confidence in him, became the most prominent poet among his Turkestani peers, not only because of his exquisite elegies, but also because of his formal innovation. He mastered a new form of versification, which was introduced to the Central Asian Turkic language around the time of the revolution, called barmoq (finger) meter. In previous centuries, Turkic-language poets wrote their works in ʿaruz meters, which were borrowed from Arabic verse via Persian. ʿAruz meters rely on the interchange between long and short vowels typical in both Arabic and Persian. When the meters were adapted to Chagatai in the fifteenth century, poets mapped the Persian vowel system onto the Turkic language because Central Asian Turkic did not have vowels of variable length. In the 1920s, Fitrat and others insisted on the adoption of barmoq, which had first been pioneered by Turkish poets in the Ottoman Empire, because it was, according to them, better suited to Turkic languages.23 Barmoq is a syllabic meter that requires an equal number of syllables in each line as we have seen in Cho’lpon’s poems above. Alongside barmoq meter, Cho’lpon and Fitrat also transformed the vocabulary of local poetry. Before the 1920s, Turkic-language poets wrote with copious amounts of Arabic and Persian words in a pedantic, often esoteric style. Cho’lpon pioneered a new Turkic vocabulary for poetry, writing in a language more understandable to the rural masses who were not literate in Persian. Fitrat and Cho’lpon’s interest in all things Turkic was not unique: the early 1920s saw an increased fascination with specifically Turkic culture, and jadids and other Central Asian intellectuals hailed the embrace of Turkic roots as a superior path to modernity.24
Despite these innovations, Cho’lpon was formally more conservative than many of his contemporaries. While he pioneered a new lexicon and meter, he retained much of the traditional imagery and themes of Chagatai poetry. Natural imagery, chremamorphism, themes of longing and loss are quite typical of Islamicate poetry, and Cho’lpon, like many in the canon before him, innovated by endowing this common material with new meaning, not by doing away with it altogether.25 In the latter half of the 1920s, Uzbek poets such as Oltoy and Shokir Sulaymon would take up the futurist poetics of Russian poets Mayakovsky and Kruchyonykh, experimenting with sound, speech registers, and graphic representation, but Cho’lpon never expressed interest in this kind of writing. His modernism, if we might call it that, was a homegrown one based on jadids’ new political consciousness and engagement with European thought about the nation.26 Cho’lpon’s art, as the coming pages show, emerges from a mix of traditional Islamicate poetics, new Turkic forms and vocabulary, an interest in the psychologism of proletarian prose, and an aestheticization of his political and historical philosophies.27
After the liquidation of the Kokand Autonomy, Cho’lpon began a bohemian life, moving from job to job and wife to wife. In 1918, he went to Russia as part of a travelling Uzbek theater troupe. There he made a lifelong friend, Mannon Uyg’ur, a theater director, and in Orenburg, he married a Tatar woman, Mohiro’ya, about whom little is known.28 In 1921, he accepted Fitrat’s invitation to work at Axbori Buxoro, the main newspaper of the People’s Soviet Republic of Bukhara, which was created in 1920 in place of the Bukharan Emirate, a protectorate of the Russian Empire within Turkestan.29 There he fell ill and was diagnosed with diabetes, from which he would have multiple stints in hospitals for the rest of his life.30 In 1923, pursued by Soviet critics and secret police, Fitrat left for Moscow, while Cho’lpon returned to his hometown of Andijon, taking up the position of deputy editor of the local newspaper The Emancipated (Darxon).31 In Andijon he married a woman named Soliha (whom he divorced in 1931).32 A quarrel with his father in the same year, likely over Cho’lpon’s reformist views, led him to abandon his home and move to Tashkent.33 In 1924 Cho’lpon was among twenty-three other Uzbek dramatists, directors, and actors selected to study in Moscow at the Uzbek Drama Studio, which had been established in 1921.34 Cho’lpon’s prior experience in theater made him ideal for this spot. While in Moscow, he became thoroughly acquainted with Russian literature and theater and may have even met with some of the Silver Age greats such as Mayakovsky and Yesenin.35
Drama became a large part of Cho’lpon’s oeuvre thanks to his time at the Uzbek Drama Studio. He had dabbled in theater before, but many of his major dramas came after his study of Gogol (he translated The Government Inspector [1836]), the Italian playwright Gozzi, and other dramatists while in Moscow.36 During that time, he became fascinated with the poetry and drama of Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali writer who in the 1920s was becoming well known among modernists throughout the world.37 In 1926, Cho’lpon reworked and published Bright Moon (Yorqinoy), a play he had written in 1920. Its mystical quality is close to that found in Tagore. He produced several other dramas after this point, but only two other plays, A Modern Woman (Zamona xotini) and The Assault (Hujum), survive.38
As Cho’lpon left for Moscow in 1924, Stalin initiated the national delimitation of Central Asia, a move that has commonly and mistakenly been interpreted as a surreptitious Bolshevik imperial strategy to “divide and conquer.” The 1924 delimitation created the Kazakh, Uzbek, and Turkmen Socialist Soviet Republics (SSR) (Kyrgyzstan