Cho’lpon’s novel, however, begins with ignorance—his characters rarely understand themselves, others, and their surroundings—and does not advance much beyond that. The novel follows the paths of three characters that intersect at various points over the course of several years, ending in 1916, a year prior to the Russian Revolution. Night and Day opens with the girl Zebi, who has recently reached marriageable age. The beauty of her voice catches the ear of Miryoqub, the retainer of the Russian-affiliated colonial official Akbarali mingboshi. Although Akbarali already has three wives, Miryoqub encourages his master’s interest in Zebi and arranges a fourth marriage. During that time, Miryoqub meets a Russian prostitute, Maria, with whom he falls in love and agrees to leave Central Asia. As the new couple leaves for Moscow, Miryoqub becomes acquainted with a jadid, Sharafuddin Xo’jaev, and nominally becomes a jadid. After Miryoqub’s departure, the action returns to Central Asia, where Zebi’s new co-wives intrigue against her and her husband. Mingboshi’s second wife plans to poison her, but Zebi unwittingly gives the poison to Akbarali. Zebi is taken to court, convicted of murder, and sentenced to exile in Siberia. The incomplete paths of Miryoqub and Zebi imply a sequel that details their participation in revolution and return to Central Asia, but the near absence of revolution and socialist ideas in the first book has been used by both Stalinist and contemporary critics to argue for Cho’lpon’s anti-Soviet intentions.
That inference, however, forgets the political fluidity of the period from 1932 and 1934 when Cho’lpon was writing. After the failure of collectivization and the Cultural Revolution, Stalin permitted the reconciliation of many persecuted writers to the Soviet literary establishment. Cho’lpon, as we know, took full advantage of this. When Socialist Realism was first coined in 1932, its contents, form, and overall meaning were largely undetermined.77 Stalinist critics attacked Cho’lpon for his failure to match an ideal form of Socialist Realism, but that ideal only congealed during and after Stalin’s Great Terror. Before that time, demonstrating ideological loyalty in literature could take multiple forms.
Nevertheless, as critics have correctly pointed out, Cho’lpon’s poetry-in-prose style in the novel certainly suggests that ideology was not his priority.78 In Night and Day, Cho’lpon’s prose mimics the style of his own poetry. His novel is full of original and striking metaphors that bring Central Asian daily life into the very narration of the text. Of the star overlooking his heroine Zebi’s nighttime journey, he remarks: “the brightest star—so bright that it looked as if it were face to face with its onlookers—trembled as it burned like the eyes of a young girl cutting an onion.” In this example, Cho’lpon interweaves the scenery of the novel with the coming-of-age experiences of his female characters: in Cho’lpon’s time, parents prepared their daughters for a life of domesticity by exposing them at an early age to the demands of Uzbek cuisine, of which the onion is a major component. Metaphors connecting nature and Central Asian culture are a ubiquitous feature of Cho’lpon’s prose. We see it even in the first lines of the novel. When Zebi enjoys a brief moment of liberty, the narrator compares it to the blossoming and expansion implied by the Uzbek word for summer: yoz. This word is homonymous with the verb yozmoq, meaning to expand. Cho’lpon extends the metaphor by equating the impositions of her misogynist father with the contraction implied by winter. “If the cold old man hadn’t returned, the two young girls’ pent up tension from the long winter would have expanded [yozilgan] with the warmth of spring and produced even more mischief” (italics are mine—C. F.). Cho’lpon often associates Zebi’s father with winter, describing him as “cold” and his visage as a “brow from which snow falls” (a figure of speech for “glowering”). The effect of the description identifies Razzoq-sufi with a winter that limits his daughter’s freedom. This is hardly the straightforward prose style one would expect of an ideological novel.
Yet Cho’lpon attempted to reconcile his poetry-in-prose to Socialist Realism not long before his death. In a 1937 article, he locates the same approach to nature in the writings of Maksim Gorky, the father of Socialist Realism. “Gorky is a poet,” Cho’lpon writes, “His writings demonstrate that he is more than a prose writer; each sentence evinces a poet with a tender heart, a lover of beauty, and a writer enamored of nature. I myself love beautiful similes and images of nature and try to include them in every work of prose I undertake.”79 In the 1930s, Cho’lpon translated Gorky’s Mother, which had been declared the earliest Socialist Realist novel, into Uzbek and used his knowledge of Gorky’s style to justify his own. Indeed, Cho’lpon is correct regarding the elder writer’s style, though Gorky’s romantic moments were increasingly underemphasized in socialist criticism as the 1930s advanced.
Cho’lpon’s oeuvre has more in common with Soviet ideology than previous scholars of his work have acknowledged. Throughout his literary career after the revolution, Cho’lpon was deeply concerned with the question of Central Asian women’s liberation. Like many other jadids and contemporaneous Muslim reformers elsewhere, he believed that his society had unfairly limited women by confining them to the home, forbidding them to appear in public without the full-body covering known as the paranji, and restricting their educational opportunities.80 In their project to advance women in society, the jadids found a powerful ally in the Bolsheviks. Progressive Russians had long been concerned with what they called the “woman question” and in the 1920s advocated for the full equality of women with men. The Bolsheviks, particularly those among the younger generation, were far more radical than Central Asian reformers, calling for the end of the family in order to create radical equality among the sexes.81 In 1927, jadid-influenced women, supported by the Bolsheviks, launched “the assault” (hujum)—a campaign for women to remove their paranjis. The “assault” met with a considerable backlash from patriarchal Uzbek men, who used violence to keep women in their place.82 Cho’lpon, for his part, supported the hujum through his dramatic work in the late 1920s, translating from Russian and authoring a few songs for the musical drama The Assault (Hujum [1927]) by Vasilii Ian (1874–1954).
Cho’lpon’s drama A Modern Woman (Zamona xotini [1928]), unpublished in his lifetime, is initially aligned with Soviet ideology in its support for women’s liberation, but because of the ambiguity characteristic of Cho’lpon’s art, the play questions the end result of those politics. Ultimately, it demonstrates contradictions within Cho’lpon’s own self: in his lyric he bemoaned the ignorance and docility of Turkestani women, but here he exhibits ambivalence toward his heroine who overcomes that passivity. The play’s final act shows the principal female character and the eponymous modern woman, Rahima xola, in the role of a successful head of a village ispolkom (executive committee). She scolds and punishes corrupt officials, religious authorities, and village misogynists, but the play ultimately concludes on a tragic note. To reach her position Rahima xola has to sacrifice part of herself, namely her femininity. Cho’lpon emphasizes throughout that the modern woman is actually very masculine. Rahima xola is described in the character descriptions as erkaknusxa (literarily: man-copy) and in becoming the head of the ispolkom, she takes on what is traditionally a man’s role. In fact, she ousts her husband, Rustam, from that position after he beats and almost kills her with a knife laden with symbolism. The knife is suggestive of a phallic object not just in a Freudian sense, but also in Uzbek culture in which a knife appearing in a dream or in an act of fortune-telling portends the birth of a son. When she becomes head of the ispolkom herself, she in turn beats “backward” interlocutors with an equally phallic whip. In the play’s conclusion, she announces her decision to marry the emasculated and sexless Jo’ra, an old man who has never married.
In a short soliloquy, Rahima xola regrets that her husband abandoned her and that Jo’ra cannot replace him. At that moment, Rustam bursts in and again confronts her with a knife. The stage directions suggest that her femininity returns in this final scene. According to those directions, her cries and wails are to “fully express her womanhood.”83