His works, along with those of others who were executed alongside him like Fitrat, were banned in the Soviet Union from 1938 until Stalin’s death, though they circulated among Uzbek intellectuals and students in secret. After Khrushchev’s famous “cult of personality” speech at the twentieth party congress in 1956, both Cho’lpon and Fitrat were rehabilitated; however, publication of their works continued to be proscribed.61 Only during Gorbachev’s glasnost’, which began in 1987, did Cho’lpon’s works start to reappear in print. As the Soviet Union was falling apart, Uzbek intellectuals recovered Cho’lpon’s legacy. In the short period of glasnost’ before independence, they cautiously set him within the Soviet canon, arguing that he had been an unjustly persecuted and misunderstood pro-Soviet writer. Then, as the Soviet Union collapsed and the narrative of Uzbekistan’s historical victimhood took over, they transformed him into an anti-Soviet national visionary, a people’s poet, and a martyr for the cause of independence.
HISTORY OF THE NOVEL AND ITS PUBLICATION
It is unclear when exactly Cho’lpon began writing his Night and Day, but scholars speculate that he started around 1932 during his time in Moscow.62 As mentioned above, he submitted the first part of Night and Day to a contest for Uzbek socialist prose works towards the end of 1934. The judge, who wrote the report on the novel (Oydin, a major Soviet Uzbek poetess),63 noted that it lacked the proper ideological qualities necessary to be awarded a prize and expressed doubt that the proposed sequel, the content of which she seems to have known somewhat, would fix the political mistakes.64 Nevertheless, the judges collectively recommended the novel for publication.65 The first chapter of the novel was published in the journal Soviet Literature (Sovet adabiyoti) in the third issue of 1935, the second chapter was published in the tenth issue of Rose Garden (Guliston) in the same year, and the entire novel was published in October 1936 as a book. It received a short laudatory review in Young Leninist (Yosh Leninchi) in February of the following year, while all the other major critics held their tongues.66 Few dared to associate themselves with Cho’lpon publicly because of his reputation in the press. Only in August of 1937, three critics coauthored a scathing review after Cho’lpon’s arrest, targeting the writer for “replacing class struggle with pornography [parnografiya],” and “showing jadids as revolutionaries for the people” rather than as “allies of the Russian bourgeoisie and imperial officers.”67 The book was banned along with the author’s name.
Glasnost allowed its republication. In 1988, the novel was republished serially in Star of the East (Sharq yulduzi), the largest literary journal in the Uzbek language.68 Star of the East (Zvezda vostoka), the journal’s Russian-language counterpart, released a Russian translation the following year.69 Despite the freedom permitted by glasnost, the editors of the 1988 serial publication felt obligated to censor certain parts of the novel. Because Cho’lpon had been accused of anti-Russian nationalism, the editors removed references to Russians that could be perceived as chauvinistic, despite the fact that Cho’lpon probably did not identify with the characters who utter them. They also added an epigraph from Gorky to increase the novel’s Soviet credentials. As far as I can tell, there was little threat in 1988 that representatives from Moscow would be concerned with the anti-Russian sentiments of a writer repressed fifty years earlier. The editors had more to fear from Uzbek critics, some of whom likely participated in Cho’lpon’s repression and built their careers on it. Since Uzbekistan gained independence in 1991, Uzbek publishers began printing the novel as a reproduction of the 1936 edition transliterated into the Cyrillic orthography.70 Uzbek and Russian scholars produced another translation of the novel into Russian based on the uncensored manuscript in 1991, and Stéphane Dudoignon translated the novel from Uzbek into French in 2009.71 This translation of the novel follows the version of the text published in 1936 and post-1991 republications (some of these offer explanatory and textological notes), while the footnotes indicate where the text of the 1988 serial publication differs.
The sequel to the novel has served as the source of much controversy among Uzbek literary scholars. In all extant editions, the present novel is clearly labeled “Book one: Night,” indicating that Cho’lpon intended a sequel Day to complete the suggestion of the dilogy title, Night and Day. Naim Karimov, the foremost expert on Uzbek jadids, suggests that the projected sequel was merely a myth made to appease Cho’lpon’s Soviet critics and that Night should be considered a novel complete in and of itself.72 Dilmurod Quronov, a specialist on Cho’lpon’s prose, has argued the opposite. He contends that Cho’lpon not only planned a second novel but most likely wrote it before his arrest. In a 1937 article, Cho’lpon mentions his “novels” in the plural, and an unidentified incomplete work was discovered among his belongings upon his arrest.73 If the NKVD possessed a copy, the opening of their archives to a select few senior Uzbek scholars in the 1990s would have turned up the sequel. Because there has been no mention of scholars finding such a text, it is likely that the NKVD destroyed it as they often destroyed confiscated texts in the event that those texts could not lead to additional arrests.
READING AND INTERPRETING THE NOVEL
Most scholars have interpreted the novel as an attack on the Soviet Union and its socialist ideology, reading Cho’lpon as an unambiguously anti-Soviet author, but there are ample reasons to doubt this easy conclusion.74 Cho’lpon’s Night and Day is certainly unique for its time. Its language, plot, and interests are, as earlier noted, little like the canonized works of Socialist Realism, the demands of which would become increasingly stringent by the time of the Great Terror. However, scholarly accounts of the construction of the novel within the framework of Cho’lpon’s oeuvre and the literary and historical context of the time are almost nonexistent. All appearances suggest that Cho’lpon intended to reconcile with and show support for the Soviet government with this novel and its potential sequel, but much of his drama and prose from the late 1920s on pose more questions than they resolve. In his writing, he constantly reworks and revises assumptions, never ending on a sure conclusion that would clearly support or reject socialism. His prose emphasizes mistakes and misunderstandings, highlighting the characters’ ignorance of their surroundings. In showing his ideological loyalty, Cho’lpon borrows from the texts and techniques of socialist writers, but he mainly makes use of those practices that enhance the indecisiveness of his characters. Although his goal was to support socialist ideology and to write an ideologically correct novel, Cho’lpon’s commitment, first and foremost, was to an aesthetic of the indecisive, an aesthetic which emerged from his background in Muslim reform. The resoluteness required by late 1930s Socialist Realism was ultimately inimical to his method.
Scholars and contemporaneous observers have argued that Cho’lpon wished for his novel to scandalize and offend the Soviet establishment because its plot is nothing like the model Socialist Realist plot that lionizes a socialist hero and his victory over class enemies. The first recorded use of the term Socialist Realism was in 1932 in a speech given by the literary critic Ivan Gronsky, but its interpretation only solidified later in the decade, a few years after the writing of Cho’lpon’s novel.75 According to the Socialist Realist “master plot” outlined by Katerina Clark (2000), Socialist Realist novels realize the Marxist-Leninist theory of