The Soviet Literary and Cultural Environment in the 1920s and 1930s

In the first two decades of Soviet rule, culture was of constant and major concern to the political leadership. Literature in particular was considered an essential tool for educating individuals and nations and turning them into suitable members of Soviet society. Along its promised “road to Communism . . . written texts assumed enormous importance in the political life of the country.”Footnote ⁶ To translate Soviet ideology and make the Soviet narrative accessible to the masses, or proletariat, borrowing Kathryn Douglas Schild's apt phrasing, “Soviet society didn't just need new literature, it needed new writers.”Footnote ⁷ As if the creation of different national-language literatures was not a big enough task, especially in the newly created republics in Central Asia with their rather small pro-Soviet cultural elite, these new writers also were needed as state workers—in publishing houses, as newspaper and textbook editors, and as administrators and educators.Footnote ⁸

Between 1927 and 1932, the political atmosphere, economic order, and ideological framework in the Soviet Union changed radically. These five years saw Stalin's victory over his internal competitors, the declaration of yet another “great transformation,” and the departure from Lenin's New Economic Policy and move toward an authoritative command economy. The forced collectivization and sedentarization campaigns led to famines, armed resistance, and excessive use of state violence against “enemies” all over Central Asia. In terms of culture and literature, this revolutionary period saw an aggressive fight against all signs of backwardness and the first show trials against the “old elites,” who were replaced by a first cohort of Soviet-educated intellectuals and liquidated step by step.Footnote ⁹ The introduction of a Latin-based alphabet put an end to the centuries-old Perso-Arabic script, established a standard pronunciation for Tajik (and other languages in Central Asia), and helped to produce new Sovietized readers.Footnote ¹⁰

The year 1932 marked a watershed moment in the field of Soviet literature. In April 1932, the political, ideological, and institutional struggles of the cultural revolution culminated in a resolution of the Central Committee on “restructuring literary and artistic organizations,” which aimed at the streamlining of literary voices. It was the prelude to the formation of a unified Soviet Writers’ Union. The proclamation of socialist realism one month later finally put an end to the aesthetic and cultural pluralism of the revolutionary 1920s and helped strengthen direct party control over literary production and its various stakeholders.Footnote ¹¹ When the First Congress of Soviet Writers was finally held in Baku in 1934, Tajik literature and literary criticism were still in the identification stage, and a school of professional writers and criticism was just starting to develop.Footnote ¹²

However, there was not much time for development in Stalin's Soviet Union. By the mid-1930s, the political climate had become so tense that every Soviet Central Asian intellectual “felt like an acrobat . . . stumbling along a thin tightrope barely keeping his balance.”Footnote ¹³ A little later, this unpredictable and dangerous tightrope act led directly to the Great Terror of 1937 and 1938. In contrast to the literary scene in neighboring Uzbekistan, which at the end of the 1930s found itself deprived of its leading figures and “deprived . . . of the best of its ingenuity and creative potential,” in Tajikistan at least two literary heavyweights with a pre-Soviet past survived the Stalinist repressions of the late 1930s relatively unscathed.Footnote ¹⁴ Ṣadr al-Dīn ʿAinī and Abū al-Qāsim Lāhūtī were declared Soviet heroes and became the undisputed icons of Tajik prose (ʿAinī) and poetry (Lāhūtī) in the post-purge phase, especially after their deaths in 1954 and 1957.Footnote ¹⁵

Yet, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, a period that became known as the formative years of the Tajik nation and Tajik literature, this outcome was not at all predictable. As in many other national literatures of the Soviet Union, the Tajik literary landscape was largely unknown and its literary canon and core cadre of writers remained to be formed.Footnote ¹⁶ When Stalin sent his first greetings to Dushanbe, the capital of the newly established Tajik Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR), and “all the working people of Tajikistan” in March 1925, it was still far from clear who belonged to this Tajik nation and what this new Tajik language and literature (or culture in general) should look and sound like.Footnote ¹⁷ In the years to come, cultural and political activists of all kinds participated in making Tajiks and Tajikistan: politicians, scientists, writers, literary critics, and translators—sometimes all one and the same person—contributed to this Soviet nation-building project.Footnote ¹⁸ Their debates were publicly discussed and disseminated in a newly created Tajik press. In August 1924, the weekly Āvāz-i Tājīk (The Voice of the Tajik) was created for this purpose in Samarkand. In 1925, it was followed by Tājīkistān-i Surkh (Red Tajikistan) and, two years later, by Rahbar-i Dānish (The Guide to Knowledge), a multi-thematic monthly “social, educational, scientific and literary journal” (majala-i ijtimāʿī, tarbiavī, fannī va adabī), as the subtitle of its masthead aptly put it.Footnote ¹⁹

A Short but Varied History: Rahbar-i Dānish (1927–1932)

Although the first Tajik monthly, Rahbar-i Dānish was mainly aimed at informing and guiding Tajik schoolteachers, right from the start it also was the main platform for writers, poets, and intellectuals to debate and discuss a new Tajik language and literature. In an editorial on the occasion of Rahbar-i Dānish's first anniversary, the journal's main goals were described as eliminating the shortcomings of the Tajik education system and supporting the “red teachers” (muʿallimān-i surkh) in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan in their daily pedagogical work. In this endeavor, the authors of the editorial assigned a significant educational role to literature and literary criticism.Footnote ²⁰ To support the Tajik government in its massive literary campaigns and the formation of a new Soviet Tajik elite, the editors of Rahbar-i Dānish considered it “absolutely necessary to establish and develop a new Tajik literature.”Footnote ²¹ The editorial suggests that this was not easy to implement. Directly addressing intellectuals and teachers (munavvar al-fikrān va muʿallimān), the editorial asked them, first, to actively participate in the magazine and, second, to spread its ideas and read from it to those who were not yet able to do so themselves. Already by its second issue the journal was proclaiming: “Hey Tajik teacher! The journal Rahbar-i Dānish will teach you all social necessities and guide you in acquiring all methods of teaching. Never miss buying and reading it.” The masthead of almost every issue declared in bold type that “every teacher should subscribe to Rahbar-i Dānish.”Footnote ²² But the path to knowledge was not straightforward for the journal.

In the five years of its existence, the editorial office was based in three different cities: Samarkand, Tashkent, and Stalinabad. Between 1927 and 1932 the post of editor in chief also was filled several times. Only the print run (1,500 copies) and the price of the journal (40 tin, with a discount for subscribers) remained more or less the same throughout these years. Rahbar-i Dānish was founded in Samarkand. The first issue, published in August 1927, had the title Dānish-Bīnish (Knowledge and Vision). The second issue, published in October 1927, opened with Manāfzāda Sābit announcing that henceforth the new title of the journal would be Rahbar-i Dānish.Footnote ²³ “As the first issue had many weaknesses,” Manāfzāda informed readers, “I was commissioned by the editorial board to shape the journal according to contemporary standards,” and he convinced the editors to change the layout (shakl), the format (andāza), and the style (nafāsat), and have the journal printed in Tashkent, where higher quality could be achieved.Footnote ²⁴

In a letter to Rahbar-i Dānish published in issue 3 (1927), ʿAbd al-Qādir Muḥiddīnūf, then head of the Council of the People's Commissars of Tajikistan (prime minister), congratulated the editors on their progress and assured them of continued and additional financial support from the Tajik Ministry of Education (naẓārat-i maʿārif).Footnote ²⁵ However, he stipulated that the journal must reach Tajik teachers throughout Tajikistan and Uzbekistan and that half of the running costs be generated through sales. It is unlikely that these operational benchmarks were ever met.Footnote ²⁶

This third issue of Rahbar-i Dānish was dedicated to the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. Almost all the articles in it celebrated the achievements in politics, culture, and education made since then, as well as workers, peasants, and women in the entire Orient. A number of Tajikistan's successes also were reported in this issue. The establishment of the journal was seen as one element in a far larger undertaking to create a Tajik culture and identity in Soviet Central Asia. The members of the newly established Science Council of the Republic of Tajikistan (shurā-yi ʿilmī-i jumhurī-i Tājīkistān) and the members of the Latin Committee (ḥayʾat-i alifbā-yi nau) were named.Footnote ²⁷ These comrades had to cope with seemingly endless demands and an extreme scarcity of resources. The Science Council's plan for the coming year envisioned that in 1928, in addition to the urgently needed textbooks for primary and secondary schools, books on health and hygiene (these also were continuously important topics in Rahbar-i Dānish) as well as four works of belles lettres (adabiyāt-i nafīsa) would be published on a total of twenty-three quires (printer's sheets).Footnote ²⁸

Initially the editorial board (ḥayʾat-i taḥrīriya) of Rahbar-i Dānish consisted of five people and was based in Samarkand, the capital of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR). The editors involved were: Muḥammad Mūsavī, Muḥammad Ḥasanī, Uyghūr, Jab(b)ārī, and Bīktāsh.Footnote ²⁹ Printing and distribution took place in Tashkent and were supervised by Sābit Manāfzāda. The spatial separation of these areas of responsibility caused many problems and delays and finally led to the relocation of the editorial team to Tashkent in May and June 1928, together with the entire Tajik State Publishing House. On this occasion, the editorial board was redesigned and Muḥammad Mūsavī was appointed the new single chief editor (muḥarrir-i masʾūl).Footnote ³⁰ The move to Tashkent brought another major change in the appearance of the journal. Beginning with the double issue 8/9 (1928), an extra section for contributions in Latin script was established.Footnote ³¹ Yet it seems that the journal did not develop in a way that pleased everyone.

In May 1929, Mūsavi was replaced by Lāhūtī as the chief editor of Rahbar-i Dānish. This change in leadership was explained in the editorial of the double issue 5/6, which appeared in June 1929 (and was probably written by the new editor in chief). Here, without mentioning his name, the shortcomings and omissions of the previous disgraced editor were enumerated, and an “ideological turn” was announced. Although the first year of Rahbar-i Dānish was very successful, from the perspective of the new management, “the hopes for the second year [1929] [had] so far not been fulfilled . . . [since] the magazine could not keep up with the changes in society.”Footnote ³² Especially in the field of literature, Lāhūtī saw major shortcomings. He believed the journal urgently needed a semblance of Marxist-Leninist informed literary criticism. In the future, he advised, “classic Tajik literature (adabiyāt-i kīlāsīkī-i tājīkī) must be analyzed and criticized through a Marxist lens, so that this world-famous literature does not plant its old and contaminated ideology (mafkūrahā-yi kuhna va pūsīda) in the minds of the younger generation.” Just as problematic from the new editor's point of view was the failure of the previous editorial team to bring forward a new generation of local intellectuals and writers, “which was considered one of the main goals of the journal.”Footnote ³³ The articles in the central section, “Teaching and Education” (taʿlīm va tarbīya), of the previous issues of the journal also were viewed critically in the editorial, because the texts printed there were “of no use for the teachers in the villages.” The new editors proclaimed that theory of pedagogy and child-rearing should be conveyed, and above all practical help should be provided. Another goal of the new editor was to offer easily understandable texts (in translation from Russian) to make Marxist-Leninist ideology more accessible to the mass of Tajik teachers and workers. Crucially, however, there had never been a reliable distribution system in place to ensure the journal reached its potential readers. In many rural regions the journal was only irregularly or not at all available.Footnote ³⁴ Finally, in a short message published on the title page below the list of contents announcing the change in management, the “red teachers and writers” and the “Tajik workers” were asked not to leave the editorial team alone on its new path to improve the journal and its accessibility.”Footnote ³⁵

Yet Lāhūtī remained in this leading position for only six months and was responsible for publishing only seven issues.Footnote ³⁶ Despite the announcement about imminent changes to the structure of the journal, the sections remained practically the same during his tenure as editor and in the following editions.Footnote ³⁷ The featured authors, frequency of publication, and distribution problems more or less went unchanged. In December 1929, after a failed attempt to go to Iran as a representative of the Comintern, Lāhūtī returned to Moscow, where he lived throughout the 1930s. With his close ties to the Kremlin, he represented and lobbied for Tajik culture and interests in the Soviet capital.Footnote ³⁸

Starting with issue 12 (1929), Sīrūs Bahrām took over as “temporary editor in chief” (muḥarrir-i masʿūl-i muvaqqatī), and he remained in this position until the journal was moved to Stalinabad, the capital of the Tajik ASSR, at the end of 1930.Footnote ³⁹ This relocation from Uzbekistan to Tajikistan had already been announced in a decree issued by the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Tajikistan) and published in the Latin section of Rahbar-i Dānish 4/5 (1930). In preparation for this relocation the Tajik Ministry of Education was instructed to create a building for the printing facilities and set up a special financial budget for publishing by the end of 1930.Footnote ⁴⁰

According to Jalol Ikromi, who was offered a job as the journal's new executive secretary (kātib-i masʿul), there was a six-month break before publishing continued in Tajikistan.Footnote ⁴¹ But it seems that the disruption lasted even longer. From October 1931 to the end of March 1932, only six further issues of Rahbar-i Dānish were published.Footnote ⁴² Jalāl ad-Dīn Ikrām was assisted in his daily work by a young graduate from Samarkand. In his memoirs Ikromi recounts the difficult restart in Stalinabad. According to him, the editorial team consisted of only two persons and the office was housed in one room, with two chairs, two tables, and two closets. “We did not even have our own typewriter,” Ikromi recalled. There was no corrector (musaḥḥīḥ), no accountant (bukhgalter), no secretary (māshinistka), and no typesetter (metrampazh). All contributions had to be written by hand and were then forwarded to the printer or typed on the typesetter of one of the other newspapers.Footnote ⁴³ It is not clear if there was a manuscript ready for the April edition in 1932, but after the Central Committee's 23 April resolution “on restructuring literary and artistic organizations,” no further issue of Rahbar-i Dānish was published.Footnote ⁴⁴ After the proclamation of socialist realism as the only possible literary method, no other “guide to knowledge” or multivocal debate about the new Tajik national literature was required. Rahbar-i Dānish's short life was over. In March 1932, after forty-six issues and more than 1,000 printed pages, the journal was discontinued. Responsibilities were redistributed and a few months later a new literary journal, Barā-yi Adabiyāt-i Sotsiālistī (For a Socialist Literature), continued on the path that Rahbar-i Dānish had taken, with some of the same staff and using only Latin script.Footnote ⁴⁵

Literary Criticism in Rahbar-i Dānish: Searching for Tajik Literates and Literature

When Manāfzāda took over the lead role on the editorial board of Rahbar-i Dānish in 1927, he opened the literary section with a programmatic statement about the journal's new plans for publishing “revolutionary literature.”Footnote ⁴⁶ He invited more submissions from younger writers, reassuring them that they need not worry about the traditional Persianate gatekeeping mechanisms for excluding those insufficiently familiar with formal conventions or canonic models, as they would be evaluated instead “from the standpoint of new technique and contemporary literature.” Furthermore, he explicitly invited all readers to participate in the criticism of the works that were published in Rahbar-i Dānish. In other words, he sought to democratize critical authority and empower less educated (“proletarian”) readers to value and express their opinions.Footnote ⁴⁷ Manāfzāda (much like the political leadership in Stalinabad) recognized Rahbar-i Dānish as the ideal platform for the endeavor of creating a new Tajik literature, and pushed for a new beginning: “The age of imitation, with its worn-out forms and techniques, has died. Hereafter, new pens and young seekers (nauqalamān va havaskārān-i javān) must get to work to give birth to a contemporary literature.”Footnote ⁴⁸

Yet, the “new pens and young seekers” Manāfzāda referenced here first needed to be convinced to become Tajik writers. Most of them were bilingual and wrote in both Uzbek and Tajik early on in their careers. Born in the first decade of the twentieth century, they all came of age in towns belonging to the Uzbek SSR, outside the demarcated Tajik territory—in Bukhara, Samarkand, Uropteppa, or the Ferghana Valley. And many of them initially identified and registered as Uzbeks.Footnote ⁴⁹ But there were several reasons that members of the younger generation might opt for a Tajik rather than an Uzbek identity.Footnote ⁵⁰ The first was the need for Tajik writers, journalists, and other Persian-speaking cadres and the many opportunities for employment and quick promotion connected to it, especially after Tajikistan was declared a Soviet republic in 1929. A second reason was related to family background. Many of these “new pens” decided to concentrate on being Tajik based on the fact that they were the sons of the former religious, scholarly, and economic elite of the Emirate of Bukhara (and Russian Turkestan), and they and their families were well known in Soviet Uzbekistan.Footnote ⁵¹ But even in distant Stalinabad this family background was a liability: they were openly addressed as “sons of mullahs” (mullābachahā) or “rich kids” (bāybachahā), and always feared being exposed and denounced because of the wrong family origins. A clear decision to become Tajik seemed the only way out, and Tajikistan became a preferred destination for members of scholarly families fleeing from harassment and repression in Uzbekistan. After 1929, many of them moved to the new Tajik capital where they formed the new intellectual and cultural elite. However, some could not withstand the pressure and left Stalinabad after being mocked or threatened there.Footnote ⁵²

Critical Shortages

During the entirety of its run, literature and literary criticism comprised roughly 10 percent of the content of Rahbar-i Dānish. In some issues these topics were gathered under the header “Literary Section” (qism-i adabī) and in others under “Literary Investigations” (tadqīqāt-i adabī). As mentioned, when Lāhūtī took over responsibility he complained that much more of the latter was needed to achieve the goals of the Rahbar-i Dānish. Yet, as in the rest of the Soviet Union of the late 1920s and early 1930s, there was “a critical shortage of critics.” According to Katharina Schild there were several reasons for this shortage—namely, that “criticism presented bigger political risk than writing, offered less potential reward than organizational work, and required a higher level of education.”Footnote ⁵³

In Central Asia, this shortage of critics was accompanied by a critical shortage of theory. A clear idea of what a new Tajik literature and literary criticism should look like was missing. More often than not, “young literary critics made little effort to grasp the essence of the works they examined,” but instead simply imposed their own tastes on literature.Footnote ⁵⁴ Or, even worse, their criticism turned “into a mouthpiece of the party, and de facto into an exponent of Stalin's opinion.”Footnote ⁵⁵

Since too few Tajik scholars, critics, and theorists were available, the editorial team of Rahbar-i Dānish also sought to recruit authors from outside Central Asia. There were good relationships with Azerbaijan, where some Central Asian intellectuals of the younger generation had completed study visits at the Eastern Faculty of the Baku Darülfünun in the first half of the 1920s, among them Narẕullāh Ḥaidarī Bīktāsh and Sharīfjān Husainzāda.Footnote ⁵⁶ There they encountered and became acquainted with the Russian school of literary criticism of Georgi Plekhanov (1856–1918) and Aleksandr Voronsky (1884–1937) and their notion of historical materialism.Footnote ⁵⁷ And it was Bīktāsh who convinced his former teacher and head of the Persian program in Baku, Mīrzā Muḥsin Ibrāhīmī, to contribute several articles for Rahbar-i Dānish.Footnote ⁵⁸

Half a year after his first call to young writers, Manāfzāda was disappointed with the results they had achieved. In an article published in early 1928, he vented his anger and stated that most authors had not yet grasped the meaning of “literary criticism” (tanqīd-i adabī). “It is completely unknown to most people in Tajikistan, because when they hear the term tanqīd,” Manāfzāda complained, “they immediately think of personal humiliation or insults (taḥqīr yā taubīkh).”Footnote ⁵⁹ Manāfzāda then harshly criticized some of the poems and a short story (ḥikāya) recently sent to the editors of Rahbar-i Dānish. In only one of the writers did he see a promising future for Tajik prose. Manāfzāda praised Jalāl al-Dīn Ikrām for choosing a contemporary setting for his short story “Shīrīn.” He criticized, however, the author's character descriptions and the artificial or unnatural (ghayr-i ṭabīʿī) nature of the events depicted. In Manāfzāda's view, “this type of description is usually only found in ancient and classic fairy tales of the Orient” (īn gūna taṣvīrhārā faqat az afsānahā-yi kuhna va kīlāsikī-i sharq paydā kardan mumkin ast).Footnote ⁶⁰ Therefore, he suggested that Jalāl al-Dīn Ikrām should instead study the European “naturalists” and “realists” and avoid using too many “incomprehensible” words from his hometown, Bukhara. He concluded the article with the advice that the young author should not take the criticism personally or be offended because “not only novices make mistakes, but they also are to be found in the works of the masters” (na īn ki dar navishtahā-yi nauqalamān-i havaskār, balki dar asarhā-yi ustādān ham bisyār khaṭāhā-yi shāyān-i tanqīd dīda mīshavad).Footnote ⁶¹

In 1928, this final comment drawing attention to the mistakes of “masters” would easily be understood as referring to Ṣadr al-Dīn ʿAinī's anthology of Tajik literature Namūna-i adabīyāt-i tājīk (Samples of Tajik Literature), which was published in 1926.Footnote ⁶² Even before its publication, ʿAinī's compilation aroused severe criticism among scholars and Uzbek politicians.Footnote ⁶³ A year later, in 1927, the handling of prerevolutionary literature changed in the Soviet Union, and it was decided that from then on “the publication of poetry from the era of feudalism can no longer count among our tasks. . . . In the future it has to be refrained from printing the works of Makhtumqulī as well as collections of ancient poetry from Uzbekistan, Tajikistan.”Footnote ⁶⁴ This course correction was aimed directly at the sampler compiled by Ṣadr al-Dīn ʿAinī and similar endeavors related to Uzbek literature.Footnote ⁶⁵

In December 1929, three years after ʿAinī's book was published in Moscow, a critical review article on Namūna-i adabīyāt-i tājīk appeared in Rahbar-i Dānish. The article was signed by Jalāl al-Dīn Ikrām.Footnote ⁶⁶ The critic considered the six-hundred-page anthology, which “consists of forty printer's sheets and was printed in an edition of 5,000 copies,” to be “a waste of resources.” Although he acknowledged ʿAinī's efforts to compile the anthology, Ikrām—in the typical dialectic approach of the time—sharply attacked ʿAinī and highlighted several conceptual mistakes and ideological shortcomings in his work. In his view, the anthology had been compiled without “Marxist methodology” (uṣūl-i markīsīstī) and a proper “theory of class” (naẓariya-i ṣinfī), lacked a clear intended audience, and arbitrarily selected poems without necessary explanation. Furthermore, according to the critic, ʿAinī failed to contextualize the “poems of the old poets” (sheʿrhā-i shuʿarā-i qadīm), provided no answer as to why the old poets wrote the way they did, avoided properly comparing the old poems with contemporary ones, and did not positively rate the literary progress since the revolution. As a result, the anthology benefited only a tiny group of Tajik men of letters (ahl-i sukhan) and was “useless for its intended audience”—namely, a whole generation of novices (nauāmūzān) in need of literary instruction. Given these flaws, he reached the conclusion that ʿAinī's collection “failed to respond to the current needs of Tajikistan” and, even worse, “provoked and increased national enmity” (sabab-i ziyād shudan-i dushmanī-i millī mīshavad), particularly between Tajiks and Uzbeks.Footnote ⁶⁷

When literary debates became overly confrontational, the editors of Rahbar-i Dānish also weighed in and commented on the inconclusive nature or excessiveness of criticism: “We do not see the Namūna-i adabiyāt-i tājīk as an error-free work without weaknesses, but we also do not agree with some of the criticisms listed in this article. We will explain our thoughts on this in detail in a later issue.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Yet this did not happen, because a short time later ʿAinī's anthology was banned and withdrawn from circulation by the Soviet authorities. In 1930, the year in which ʿAinī published his much acclaimed first Tajik novel Dākhunda, the fate of his anthology was sealed when politicians in Tashkent and Moscow accused it of containing counterrevolutionary and pro-monarchic messages.Footnote ⁶⁹

Translations and Radicalizations

In search of proper models for future Tajik literature, the literary section in Rahbar-i Dānish also offered space for portraits of non–Central Asian writers and translations of their works. But here too no clear line can be discerned. The selection was probably based primarily on the taste of the respective translator and biographer.Footnote ⁷⁰ In addition to the well-known short stories “One Night” by Rabindranath Tagore and “The Tunnel,” taken from Maksim Gorky's cycle Skazky ob Italii (Italian Fairy Tales,” 1911–1913), a number of lesser-known works of mainly Russian authors from the collection Library of the Youth Organization of the World in Struggle (Kitābkhāna-i kāmsāmālān-i jahān dar mubāriza) were translated and presented to readers from 1929 onward. The translators do not elaborate on the selected authors and their works, nor do they give reasons for the selections made.Footnote ⁷¹

Slightly more revealing are the portraits of writers also presented in this period. The first of these, by Raḥīm Mīm, appeared in issue 4/5 (1928) and summarized the life and work of Mirzā Fatḥ-ʿAlī Ākhūndzāda (1812–1878).Footnote ⁷² In the same issue Maksim Gorky and his writings were introduced to Tajik readers.Footnote ⁷³ On the occasion of the hundredth birthday of Lev Tolstoy, Manāfzāda took the opportunity to propose the work and style of this world-famous Russian “classic” and “romantic” littérateur as a model for young Tajik writers. However, as a precaution he added that in today's time of revolution and class struggle Tolstoy's “ideology of nonviolence is of course no longer appropriate.”Footnote ⁷⁴ In the following year, Raḥīm Mīm dedicated himself to the “skilled and prominent playwright and short story writer” Anton Chekhov on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death, although the article is preceded by the author's warning to the readers that the works of this “bourgeois writer do not deal adequately with the subject of work nor of workers.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Conflicting messages also can be found in a 1930 obituary written by Bīktāsh in which he commemorated and bemoaned the early death of the “Russian revolutionary and red poet” and “truly proletarian writer” Vladimir Mayakovsky. However, in Bīktāsh's view, Mayakovsky had betrayed the ideals of the revolution and done harm to the proletarian cause by committing suicide.Footnote ⁷⁶

So it seems that at the beginning of the 1930s nobody knew any longer who exactly the Persianate or European literary models for young Tajik writers should be. With this growing uncertainty, the tone of criticism also changed in Soviet Central Asia. In Uzbekistan, the heated atmosphere of the cultural revolution and the upcoming first Five-Year Plan “favored a general rhetoric of struggle and acceleration . . . and the fiery youth was ready to adopt this verbal radicalism rather than following some Party publicists’ call for patience.”Footnote ⁷⁷ This aggressive tendency also can be observed in Rahbar-i Dānish. However, most contributions in the journal were less ideologically “committed” than those appearing in other Tajik language periodicals of the time, such as Tājīkistān-i surkh, run by the twenty-year-old Ghulāmriżā ʿAlīzāda and his circle, most notably Sātim Ulūghzāda.Footnote ⁷⁸ For all of them, literary criticism was a powerful weapon in the intensifying “class war” announced by the political leaders. ʿAlīzāda did not accept any literary figure except Lāhūtī. In a 1932 serial article, ʿAlīzāda wrote that he “witnessed the appearance of a bourgeois ideology in our literature” and demanded that his contemporaries “intensify the struggle against the rotten liberalism and the agents of class enemies on the battlefield of ideology.”Footnote ⁷⁹ ʿAlīzāda's ideological outlook was built upon similar ideas published in Tājīkistān-i surkh three years earlier by the eighteen-year-old ʿAlī Khush, who wrote:

By the end of the decade, the more radical writers and critics had pushed their way into the journal. In the first two years of its publication, articles that were too abrasive were still being rejected by the editors of Rahbar-i Dānish. In issue 3 (1927) the following editorial note was addressed to Sātim Ulūghzāda: “The things that you criticized are not in the article. Read the article again carefully.”Footnote ⁸¹ Having his contribution rejected did not discourage the young critic. Only two years later, Ulūghzāda's damning review of a short story by Manāfzāda was published in the journal. Spanning three pages, Ulūghzāda's review was even longer than the work he criticized. He accused Manāfzāda's short story “Latāfat-āy firīb khūrd” (The Deceived Latāfat) of not being literature because its author delivered a “mere journalistic” report “based on pure chance and random encounters.” Ulūghzāda did not see the text or the female protagonist described in it as a “typical” (Russ. tipichnyi) representation of his own generation.Footnote ⁸² Now, in the early 1930s, the editors had little choice but to add in small print at the end of Ulūghzāda's harsh review that those who read it also should have a look at the criticized work. Be that as it may, the critically panned work remained Manāfzāda's only short story published in Rahbar-i Dānish.Footnote ⁸³

Yet, in general, the literary criticism in Rahbar-i Dānish was more moderate than in other contemporary periodicals. As late as 1930, it was still possible to publish an article in which the virtues of prerevolutionary Jadid literature—especially ʿAbd al-Raʾūf Fiṭrat and his prose writings of the 1910s—could be praised and proposed as models of a new Tajik literature.Footnote ⁸⁴ Sharīfjān Ḥusainzāda viewed Fiṭrat as “the first to pioneer prose and novel writing in Tajik literature” and a master who “uses the commonly understandable Tajik language in his prose and the fine and beautiful style of courtly literature in his poetry.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Although he criticized the Jadids (as was customary at the time) and especially Fiṭrat as “moral preceptors of the local bourgeoisie” and saw severe shortcomings in Jadid “content and ideology,” he contextualized this Central Asian enlightenment movement as caught in a historical quandary, as they had to fight a two-front battle against “foreign capital” (sarmāya-i ajnabī) and the “remnants of the [local] feudal system” (anṣarhā-yi bāqīmānda-i daur-i fīādālīzm).Footnote ⁸⁶ In Uzbekistan, the former members (and sympathizers) of the Jadid movement had fallen out of favor as early as 1927 and subsequently became prime political targets.Footnote ⁸⁷ From that year, Fiṭrat, after not having published any texts in Persian or Tajik for almost a decade, became engaged in the creation of Tajik culture and literature. In 1927, Fiṭrat authored the first ever play in Tajik, and for two years he published articles in Rahbar-i Dānish mainly dealing with the Tajik Latinization program.Footnote ⁸⁸ Apparently, he was supported by the very influential educator and cultural functionary Nis̲ār Muḥammad Afghān, who won him over to the Tajik cause.Footnote ⁸⁹

Prose and Poetry

The literary section in Rahbar-i Dānish was divided into prose and poetry, poetry having been considered the true essence of Persian literature for centuries. An average of two to three poems appeared in every issue. Poetry in Rahbar-i Dānish was dominated by a handful of names. Most prominent among them were Ātajān “Pairau” Sulaimānī, ʿAbdullāh “Suhailī” Jauharīzāda, Aḥmadjān ʿAbd al-Saidzāda “Ḥamdī,” and, outshining all others, Lāhūtī.Footnote ⁹⁰ More than 80 percent of the poetry published in Rahbar-i Dānish came from these authors. Another poet featured in Rahbar-i Dānish was the nineteen-year-old ʿAbd al-Salām Pīrmuḥammadzāda “Dihātī,” who in February 1930 also contributed a literary critique in which he attacked his older colleague Suhailī for his use of Arabic and old-fashioned Persian words and his frequent repetition of motifs as a negative example of backward poetry.Footnote ⁹¹ Condemnation of the “old poetry” was a running theme throughout the issues of Rahbar-i Dānish. But there was no consistent idea about how to properly replace the old and outdated poetic forms. It is telling that despite the fact that Suhailī was often criticized quite sharply in Rahbar-i Dānish, he was one of the most frequently printed poets in the journal. In response to Dihātī's criticism of Suhailī, the editorial staff again felt compelled to submit its own position on the criticized work. The editors emphasized that it did not suffice to simply condemn old-fashioned poetic usages and demanded a more proactive approach and concrete suggestions for a reform of the literary language and poetry.Footnote ⁹²

But at the end of the 1920s, poetry was no longer regarded as the prime genre of Central Asian literature. Prose writing gained importance, and even the generation of young poets like Pairau and Dihātī tried their hands at writing short stories (ḥikāya), albeit without much success.Footnote ⁹³ In issue 2 (1927) the editors of Rahbar-i Dānish announced a competition for young Tajik writers (nauqalamān-i tājīk) and suggested some topics for future works of poetry and prose. They promised to select the best submissions and publish them in the journal. The proposed topics for prose writing were the following: (a) How did Raḥmatullāh Īshān get his fourth wife?; (b) Why was Fāziljān excluded from the youth [organization]?; and (c) What were the atrocities committed by Būtābāī Qūrbāshi in the village Jūībār during the Basmachi revolt?Footnote ⁹⁴ A few months later Jalāl al-Dīn Ikrām's short story “Raḥmatullāh Īshān” was published in Rahbar-i Dānish.

However, many of the submissions did not meet the demands of the journal. Shortly before he was dismissed from his post, the editor in chief Muḥammad Mūsavī complained in February 1929 that “during the last months we have received some short stories that have only little scholarly and artistic value. . . . Since we have to keep the scientific standard of the journal we cannot publish every single one of these texts.” At the same time, he calls on the literary clubs in Samarkand, Bukhara, and Uroteppa to follow the example of Khujand and set up a “literary wall-newspaper” (rūznāma-i adabī-i dīvārī) for young and inexperienced writers to increase their skills and enthusiasm for literature.Footnote ⁹⁵ A few months earlier, Mūsavī had been dissatisfied with the “endless and fruitless” debates on the renewal of the literary language, and he called on writers to finally translate their words into deed: “Everyone keeps repeating that the literary language has to be changed—but we all know that—now we finally need results in lexicon and style.”Footnote ⁹⁶

ʿAinī and the “Young Pens” of New Tajik Prose: Jalāl al-Dīn Ikrām and ʿAzīzī

Following the publication of the serialized story of the “poor Tajik” Ādīna, its author, Ṣadr al-Dīn ʿAinī, was regarded as the “undisputed leading . . . writer” of Soviet Tajik prose literature.Footnote ⁹⁷ Two of his early short stories were published in Rahbar-i Dānish: “Aḥmad-i dīvband” in 1928 and “Māhrūy” in 1929.Footnote ⁹⁸ The former, which had autobiographical features, over the years became ʿAinī's most famous short story. The latter was reprinted only once, posthumously, in the fifth volume of his collected works. “Māhrūy” is a fictionalized story based on the alleged murder of a young Tajik Red Army soldier by an anti-Soviet (Basmachi) leader in 1926. It tells the story of Māhrūy, the fiancée of the murdered hero, and can be seen as a literary showpiece for young writers, as requested in the announcement mentioned above.Footnote ⁹⁹

Next to ʿAinī, the two most productive and widely discussed young Tajik prose writers in the late 1920s and early 1930s were Jalāl al-Dīn Ikrām and Baḥr al-Dīn ʿAzīzī. Ten out of twenty-four short stories published in Rahbar-i Dānish between 1927 and 1930 were written by them: five by Ikrām and five by ʿAzīzī.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

In his memoirs Ikromi remembers his first meeting with Ṣadr al-Dīn ʿAinī in Bukhara in summer 1927. When he showed ʿAinī his first poems and a piece of prose, the latter advised him to stop writing poetry and instead concentrate on prose. With the support of ʿAinī, Jalāl al-Dīn Ikrām's first piece of prose, “Shabe dar rīgistān-i Bukhārā,” was then printed in issue 2 of Rahbar-i Dānish “without any editorial changes,” as Ikromi proudly emphasized in retrospect.Footnote ¹⁰¹ But the situation didn't last. Jalol Ikromi recalls that ʿAinī corrected and revised his three-and-a-half-page short story “Shīrīn,” about a young bride who is kidnapped on her wedding night by a gang of brutal Basmachi, “six or seven times” before he considered it publishable.Footnote ¹⁰² Even after its publication, some commentators were very critical of Jalāl al-Dīn Ikrām's short story.Footnote ¹⁰³

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, it was not Jalāl al-Dīn Ikrām (the 1960s to 1980s hero of Soviet Tajik prose), but Baḥr al-Dīn ʿAzīzī who was considered the most talented young Tajik writer. Most critics highly praised his simple language and fluid style as well as the up-to-date content of his prose. From the autumn of 1929 onward, the twenty-five-year-old ʿAzīzī published short stories as well as contributions to the regional geography and ethnography section (kishvarshināsī). Baḥr al-Dīn ʿAzīzī was born in Uroteppa in 1894, the son of the poet Mullā ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz “Jazmī.” He visited the madrasa in Uroteppa and, beginning in 1916, continued his education in Bukhara. In the early 1920s, he completed a two-year teacher training course in Tashkent and then worked as a teacher and member of the executive committee in his birthplace. During his studies in Bukhara he wrote in Turki and Persian using the pen name “Azmī.” In the 1920s he also signed his works as “Tarsānchak” and “Tarsakī” (the coward). He was best known for his contributions to the satirical weekly Mullā Mushfiqī and for his articles critical of language and literature. ʿAzīzī was arrested in 1937 and died in prison in 1944.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

In an article published in June 1930, Sharīfjān Ḥusainzāda views Baḥr al-Dīn ʿAzīzī as “one of the promising newcomers” in Tajik literature and “a typical example of our newborn peasant literature. He solely stands out from our contemporary poets and writers in his simple style and language.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Ḥusainzāda saw ʿAzīzī's “biggest achievement” as his “simple style,” remarking that along with his aim “to acquaint the readers with village life and the living conditions of the peasants . . . ʿAzīzī is in touch with the emotions and worldview shaping the peasant outlook. . . . He does not refer to the feudal past but to the socialist reforms introduced at the village level.” But, as was usual in the 1920s and 1930s Soviet dialectical approach, this positive review did not come without criticism: “At the same time, ʿAzīzī's idealization of peasant life is one of his greatest shortcomings. His stories fail to reflect the ongoing class struggle at the village level. He does not show the struggle of the poor against the old elites and parasites. . . . He does not show the role of the Party and the Soviets in the villages. . . . His stories bear witness to his failure to highlight the salient aspects of present-day village life.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ What Husainzāda does not mention is that Baḥr al-Dīn ʿAzīzī was not the son of a peasant but came from a family that belonged to the pre-Soviet religious elite—like most of the other literary newcomers in the late 1920s.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ In his short stories and other pieces of prose in Rahbar-i Dānish, ʿAzīzī turns away from the obsolete and outdated beliefs of his father and forefathers.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Nevertheless, his writings also show the powerful nature of old thought patterns in rural Tajikistan—even under the conditions of the new Soviet power and modern science.

ʿAzīzī's naive village heroes are easily seduced by the allure of the non-socialist life. Most of the people around them still cling to their old traditions, amusements, and beliefs. Status symbols (horses) and gambling (quail fights) are more important to them than working for the common good. The weak heroes in ʿAzīzī's short stories are hurled into the abyss: their children die of curable diseases (“Gul”), they go into debt and drag their families to ruin (“Bedānabāzī”), or they pay for their naivety with their lives (“Buzkashī,” “Pādishāh-Pādishāh”). If there weren't clear references to Soviet modernization and technical innovations in these short stories, their content would be difficult to distinguish from the progressive prose of the 1910s in Central Asia.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

It can be assumed that depicting (and praising) ʿAzīzī as a writer who continued the pre-Soviet literary tradition of the Jadids would have been impossible in other Soviet periodicals in 1930. It is very likely, however, that Husainzāda's positive assessment of ʿAzīzī's works did him a disservice in the years to come. Moreover, the critic also judged negatively one aspect of Azīzī's writings that was thoroughly praised by many other contemporaries. In Husainzāda's view the language used by ʿAzīzī “cannot keep up with the fast pace of the ongoing progress. It is that of a certain locality, and therefore it is not and will not become the language of all Tajiks. It cannot constitute the basis of the Tajik literary language.”Footnote ¹¹⁰

Instead, Husainzāda preferred the language of ʿAinī as someone who, like a few others after the October Revolution, “had turned his back on the bourgeois milieu's prose” and “was the first to side with the Soviet writers.”Footnote ¹¹¹ Ṣadr al-Dīn ʿAinī's recent prose works, and especially his novella (qiṣṣa) “Ādīna,” also were praised by other commentators in Rahbar-i Dānish. Raḥīm Mīm wrote a synopsis and review of this “first Tajik revolutionary novella,” which was published at the end of 1927 and was “out of print just two months after its publication.”Footnote ¹¹² In this novella, ʿAinī described the tragic fate of the “poor Tajik” farmer Ādīna, who had to leave his mountain home to earn a living in the factories of Russian Turkestan. After the October Revolution he returned to his homeland, where the old elites were still in power. After an unsuccessful attempt to take action against them, Ādīna leaves the mountains again and finally dies alone in Tashkent. In this story, Raḥīm Mīm did not see the fate of an individual person, but the portrait of a “damned and oppressed social class and the atrocities before the [revolutionary] reckoning” (tabaqa-i maḥkūm . . . va ẓulmdīda va jafāhā pīsh az ḥisāb) and the birth of a revolutionary Tajik language and literature.Footnote ¹¹³

In the short story “Aḥmad-i dīvband” (Ahmad the Exorcist) ʿAinī succeeded in “transmitting” folk beliefs from the Bukhara oasis in a humorous and yet ethnographically accurate way to present-day Soviet readers. Although at the end of the story the Central Asian spiritual world is explained scientifically, this tale preserves the world and religiosity of the people of Central Asia for later generations.Footnote ¹¹⁴ But ʿAinī's gaze into the menacingly dark throat of the prerevolutionary Central Asian world of ghosts—as depicted in the epigraph of this article—was only a tepid foretaste of the horrors and the “devils’ dance” of the coming decade in the Soviet Union.Footnote ¹¹⁵

Epilogue

The late 1920s and especially the 1930s in the Soviet Union often seem enigmatic, with myriad political and ideological changes and insecurities. The political climate worsened rapidly, and rivalries among intellectuals intensified as violence spread from the central regions of the Soviet Union to the southern periphery. New players were thrown into Moscow's political-ideological arena, and a new generation of Central Asian writers and intellectuals was formed in this period. Jalāl al-Dīn Ikrām—one of the young Tajik literary figures who closely followed the political and editorial guidelines of Rahbar-i Dānish—tried to justify himself in his memoirs: “We did not know [then] that all of this ‘criticizing’ (tanqidhā) . . . was only the introduction to the upcoming murders, arrests and exiles,” he wrote, and concluded, somewhat complacently: “We were naive and believed in the party.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ But in the 1930s, naivety, opportunism, and political conviction did not protect the actors from the mercilessness and brutality of the Stalinist apparatus. Jalāl al-Dīn Ikrām himself was arrested in 1937. He was fortunate enough to survive prison and, after being released in December 1939, he (now going by the name Jalol Ikromi) rose to become the star of the new Soviet Tajik prose. Others, like Baḥr al-Dīn ʿAzīzī and almost all of the pre-Soviet Central Asian cultural elite, did not survive Stalin's rule. Their biographies were erased, their works withdrawn from circulation, and their first attempts to create and shape a new Tajik literature on the pages of Rahbar-i Dānish almost forgotten.