Through this conclusion, the play suggests that women should not have to defend themselves at all and that Central Asian men have forgotten their roles as protectors and heroes. Rahima xola’s husband Rustam’s name is no accident, for it alludes to the hero of Ferdowsi’s Shahname (The Persian Book of Kings). Cho’lpon’s Rustam, however, is a degenerated hero who has lost touch with his roots. Instead of using his strength to protect his wife and fellow villagers, he consorts with prostitutes, drinks, and beats his wife. Cho’lpon thus leaves his Rahima xola in an unresolvable situation: her husband refuses to act responsibly, and the author condemns her to tragedy for taking action herself. Despite the novelty of this figure in Cho’lpon’s oeuvre—powerful heroines like Rahima xola were popular in the dramaturgy of the hujum and Cho’lpon’s drama is something of a parody—Cho’lpon grants her a tragic fate all the same. In denying her a happy end, Cho’lpon expresses his ambivalence to the problem of women’s emancipation.
Cho’lpon’s unabating interest in ambiguity and the unresolvable is the product of his aestheticization of jadid political rhetoric and philosophy of history as expressed in jadid literature. Like other Islamic reformers of previous generations, many jadids saw history as a cyclical series of declines and ascents away from and towards civilizational peaks.84 In jadid literary works, the main agent in this history is God, not Muslims, and only His actions can renew Muslim society. The reformers’ role was to attune their ignorant brethren to the will of God so as to return the community to His favor. Jadid works across genres therefore depict the time of decline and ignorance in which they felt their society existed and then conclude, before the revolution, with a catastrophe, often sent by God, which warns readers and spectators of the follies of their ignorance, or, after the revolution, with salvation in the form of a deus ex machina, often the revolution itself. Though jadids certainly exercised agency in their society, much of their literature does not reflect that fact and instead, suggests that salvation comes from without. The depiction of ignorance naturally suggested certain rhetorical modes—elegy and lament of lost glory, exhortation and admonition to regain that glory, or satire of the time of ignorance—all of which became the favorite rhetorical modes of jadids. In the early 1920s, several jadids came to the realization that their art, as expressed in the above rhetorical modes, emerges precisely from the depiction of decline. They therefore endeavored to indefinitely defer the moment of consciousness in order to fully exploit the aesthetic possibilities of ignorance. Ironically, the jadid aesthetic came to work at cross purposes with jadid politics: while their politics called for an end to the age of ignorance, the jadid aesthetic demanded its continuation. This aestheticization of ignorance explains Cho’lpon’s ambivalence to the events he depicts in the novel. On one level, he detests the ignorance of his countrymen and desires that they awaken, but on another, he is fascinated by the opportunities for creativity that ignorance permits.
Cho’lpon’s 1920 poem “Someone’s dream” (Xayoli) beautifully demonstrates how the author reconfigures ignorance from the object of political condemnation into an engine productive of artistic material. Cho’lpon in this poem suggests that there is a creative energy in sleep, in unconsciousness—jadids often implored their brethren to “awaken” from their “ignorant slumber”—which is maintained by its unfinalizability or unrealized potential. To wake up from such a sleep is to lose something of the possibilities engendered by that sleep’s dream. This poem has a syllabic meter of eleven syllables per line and is read with a caesura every four syllables (4–4–3). The rhyme scheme, which I have captured here, is abcb.
I hid the spark of love inside my heart,
Tucked it away in the depths of my dream.
Concealed in my bosom, the wound from that spark
Burns and burns, tearing each stitch at the seam.
I hear: “take your desire” from
The morning [azonlar] with its dev’lish voice;
But I ignore it and continue my tales,
Thanking the angel that granted me choice.
That devil, toying with its hair,
Responds in anger: “Your stories are all in vain!”
Its words arrive at my ear changed:
“I flow,” it says, “like blood from red and golden veins.”
“Now flow with me,” it says, “you lord of tales,
Await in me all your desires and your throne;
In that golden and bloodred water,
Your soul, once clothed in black, will take on new tones.”
Leave me, oh devil, torture me with nightmares no more.
My shield is broken, my sword in two snapped.
Do you see me? I’m crushed, and I lie now,
Under a mountain of misfortune, trapped.
Oh angel, at my last breath, still I am enthralled,
Come, look at me, and let the heavens fall.85
The artistry of this poem is closely related to its lack of a conclusive awakening. A devil, tempts the speaker to awaken from his sleep—I have rendered azonlar, the calls to prayer, as “morning” to show how the poet continues his metaphor of dream—and achieve the “desire” of his dream in reality. That devil identifies the lyric persona as an artist—“lord of tales.” In declaring that the persona’s “stories are all in vain,” the devilish voice invites the artist to stop toying with the artifice of dream; however, the speaker refuses because he finds art, the ability to weave his tales, within dream. Cho’lpon then ends the poem not with the happiness and prosperity—that is, awakening—that the devil offers but with a crushing death. Rather than exiting the state of ignorance for which sleep and dream were so often metaphors in the literature of his jadid predecessors, Cho’lpon chooses to remain within that state, even as it leads to a tragic end. By rejecting an exit from dream because of the artistic play it permits, Cho’lpon suggests that art emerges from the indefinite deferral of awakening.
This aesthetic of ignorance on display in “Someone’s dream” is Cho’lpon’s main structural device in Night and Day. Drawing on this aesthetic and the author’s experience as a dramatist, the novel is filled with dramatic irony: the characters are ignorant of their political, social, and familial environments. They know far less about their predicaments than we as readers do. The plot develops through self-discoveries, but these are always preludes to further epiphanies, and thus character development is a never-ending process. Ultimately, every discovery or recognition is a misrecognition that postpones enlightenment to another time.
The inability to understand one’s self and others plays a large role in the novel’s character interactions. Cho’lpon, perhaps because of his education in Russian literature during his two periods in Moscow, frequently employs one of Tolstoy’s favorite techniques—that of non-verbal communication. Often his characters communicate not so much through words, but through glances, gestures, body movements, and facial expressions. For Tolstoy, a longtime lover of Rousseau, this bodily communication is closer to nature and thus conveys more than do words, which are abstracted from nature and therefore false. For Cho’lpon, on the other hand, non-verbal communication often indicates that something remains indeterminate and unable to be articulated. For example, after their trip to the village, Zebi’s friend Saltanat realizes how her actions have unwittingly begun the process of Zebi’s betrothal to Akbarali. She decides not to tell Zebi to avoid upsetting her, but after imagining Zebi’s life