The Editorial Platforms: Tajik Literary Magazines and Publishing Houses

Newspapers (ruznoma) and journals (majalla) represented the main editorial platform for the spreading of Soviet Tajik fiction. Not only short stories, but also long prose narratives such as novels were published in serial form in the literary and cultural magazines. In a number of cases, the publication of novels as stand-alone books followed their previous appearance in serial form in the periodicals.Footnote ⁷

As regards the literary field, skimming through the different Tajik periodicals of the first Soviet decades one can easily note that the fictional narrative published there was dominated by the figure of Ayni and mostly revolved around the literary image of the “poor Tajik,” who was in most cases a mountain peasant of the eastern Bukhara emirate whose traditional habits would have been radically changed by the Russian revolution of 1917. The image of the “poor Tajik” eventually enriched by the ideals of the revolution is to be explicitly found, for example, both in the work commonly regarded as the first story in the history of Soviet Tajik literature—Odina, yo ki sarguzasht-i yak tojik-i kambaghal (“Odina, or the destiny of a poor Tajik,” 1924‒25) by Ayni—and in the name of the first Tajik newspaper published in the Soviet period, the monthly Ovoz-i tojik-i kambaghal (“Voice of the poor Tajik”), founded by Ayni. The story of the adventures and misadventures of Odina was just published in serial form in that newspaper, between August 1924 and April 1925.

Ovoz-i tojik-i kambaghal was established in Samarkand in August 1924.Footnote ⁸ Like many other Tajik and Central Asian magazines published during the Soviet period, it changed its name several times in the course of the twentieth century, mainly due to the dictates of Soviet propaganda in Central Asia, but also by the choice of the founders or editors: in May 1925, for example, it became a weekly and changed its name into Ovoz-i tojik (“Tajik voice”), dropping the adjective “poor,” as desired by Ayni; in 1931, for reasons to do with the territorial politics in Central Asia (notably the allotment of Samarkand to the Soviet republic of Uzbekistan), rather than the choices of the newspaper’s founder, the newspaper was renamed Haqiqat-i Uzbekiston (“Truth of Uzbekistan”). In the same year, its editorial office was moved from Samarkand to Tashkent, though the newspaper continued to aim particularly at Tajik readers of Samarkand, since it was mainly there that Tajik-language cultural circles, publishers and schools were in operation. After a suspension of the publications during World War II, it reappeared in 1950 with the name Uzbekiston-i surkh (“Red Uzbekistan”), and in 1964 returned to the name Haqiqat-i Uzbekiston. In 1993, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, it regained the name Ovoz-i tojik, that has survived till today, though the articles published there, to be frank, deal more with the culture and politics of Uzbekistan than with the life of the Tajiks of Bukhara and Samarkand.

The first Tajik newspaper that appeared in Dushanbe was Bedori-yi tojik (“Tajik awakening”), which started publication in the last months of 1924. Its first editor-in-chief was Abbos Aliev (1899–1958), a Bukharan statesman who became the first minister of education of the Tajik autonomous region in 1924. In 1925, the newspaper was renamed Tojikiston-i surkh (“Red Tajikistan”), and in 1955 changed its denomination once again, to Tojikiston-i soveti (“Soviet Tajikistan”). After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, it was rebaptized Jumhuriyat (“Republic”), a name that it has retained up to now.

The official periodical in service to the emerging Soviet Tajik literature remained, in any case, the journal Baro-yi adabiyot-i sotsialisti (“For a socialist literature”), founded in 1932 in Dushanbe as the mouthpiece of the newly established Union of Writers of Tajikistan. Its first editor-in-chief was the poet Abulqosim Lohuti (1887–1957), an Iranian emigré who was to become one of the leading figures of Soviet Tajik poetry. In 1938, the journal was renamed Sharq-i surkh (“Red east”), and in 1963 changed its name to Sado-yi sharq (“Voice of the east”). It is one of the few Tajik literary journals that has remained active up to now.

As regards the Tajik fictional narrative that appeared as a stand-alone book, and not in serial form in the periodicals, one should keep in mind that from the mid-1920s to the 1970s the book market in Tajikistan was monopolized by the Nashriyot-i davlati-yi Tojikiston (“Tajikistan state publishing house”). It was established in Dushanbe on 7 October 1925 and specialized in publishing Tajik fiction and collected poems, as well as scientific and translated literature.Footnote ⁹ In 1964, it changed its name to Irfon (“Knowledge”), and for a couple of years incorporated the Tajik publishing house Maorif (“Education”), which specialized in publishing textbooks and children’s literature.Footnote ¹⁰

In Tajikistan, Irfon’s monopoly over the publication of Persian classical authors and Soviet Tajik writers finished in the late 1980s, when, in the milieu of glasnost’, openness and transparency in government institutions and activities had increased in the Soviet Union. In 1987, one more publishing house was established in Tajikistan: Adib (“Writer”). It was founded in Dushanbe and had different sections devoted to the following subject areas: Persian classical literature, modern Tajik literature (covering the period from the mid-nineteenth century onwards), Russian literature, translated literature (into Tajik), children’s literature in Tajik, children’s literature in Russian, school books in Tajik and school books in Russian.Footnote ¹¹

Remembering Bukhara: Ayni’s Fiction under Stalinism

In Tajikistan, Sadriddin Ayni is universally acclaimed as the most prominent cultural and literary personality of the twentieth century. In Uzbekistan, his name is included among the major representatives of realistic fiction. This author had a fine literary command of both Tajik and Uzbek, and published widely in both languages.

In the field of twentieth-century humanities, Ayni remains the most popular and studied author in Tajikistan. From the 1950s until today, countless monographs and articles on his life and work have been published in the country, and one may state that almost all the Tajik scholars working on twentieth-century Tajik literature have devoted at least one article to Ayni’s oeuvre.Footnote ¹²

Although he was not only a fiction writer, but also a poet, an educator, a historian and an academician, in Tajikistan he is especially known to the general public for his stories and novels, which in the first Soviet decades laid the foundations of modern Tajik fiction.

Ayni was from the 1920s to his death in 1954 the undisputed fiction leader in Soviet Tajikistan, though, one should specify, he did not live there, and nor did he set his stories and novels there, albeit in those years the Stalinist orientation was stimulating the development of a “national” literature to be concentrated within the bound of the Soviet republic of Tajikistan. Ayni did live most of his life in Samarkand, in what was then the Soviet republic of Uzbekistan, and set his fictional narrative almost entirely in Bukhara, where he was born and received his education. His movements to the Tajik capital Dushanbe, where he finally died, became more frequent from the early 1950s, when he became the first president of the newly established Tajikistan Academy of Sciences (1951).

Ayni contributed to the literary edification of Soviet Tajikistan in a way that differs somewhat from that of other Tajik fiction writers active during the years of Stalinism, who set their fictional narrative within the borders of Soviet Tajikistan by depicting, for example, the life of the farmers during the collectivization of agriculture (Ikromi’s novel Shodi, 1936; Ulughzoda’s novel Navobod, “New land,” 1953), or by portraying the rural life of the Tajik families whose sons had been sent to the battle front (Jalil’s Hikoyaho-yi zamon-i jang, “War era stories,” 1944; Niyozi’s novel Vafo, “Loyalty,” 1949). Rather, Ayni’s fiction explores the Bukharan past. Its common denominator is the Bukhara emirate, its socio-economic and intellectual decline in the late nineteenth century, and its fall due to the coming of the Soviet power in the 1920s. Specifically, Ayni fictionalized the main social problems of the emirate, notably usury and superstition, and depicted the stagnant state of the traditional maktabs and madrasas due to the incompetence and bribery of the teachers. Moreover, he portrayed the impact of the Russian revolution of 1917 on the life of the lower social strata, among whom were small farmers and craftsmen, and especially mountain peasants.

This is the leitmotiv of Ayni’s fictional narrative, which consists of three novels, three stories and two short stories, published for the most part during the most restrictive years of Stalinism, namely the 1930s. The novels are Dokhunda (“Highlander,” 1930), Ghulomon (“Slaves,” 1935) and Yatim (“Orphan,” 1939), the stories are Odina, yo ki sarguzasht-i yak tojik-i kambaghal (1924‒25), Marg-i sudkhur (“Death of a usurer,” 1937) and Jallodon-i Bukhoro (“Executioners of Bukhara,” 1937); the short stories are Ahmad-i devband (“Ahmad, the conjurer of demons,” 1928) and Maktab-i kuhna (“Old[-fashioned] school,” 1935). Ghulomon and Jallodon-i Bukhoro were originally written in Uzbek and translated into Tajik by Ayni himself; the other fictional works were composed in Tajik.Footnote ¹³

In the introduction to the most recent English translation of part of Ayni’s Reminiscences, John Perry and Rachel Lehr stated that Ayni had published “four novels (the first of their genre in Tajik), [and] a half-dozen shorter fictional and quasi-historical works.”Footnote ¹⁴ Ayni’s novels are actually three rather than four. I suppose that Perry and Lehr were partly influenced by the Czech scholar Jiří Bečka (1915–2004), a specialist on Tajik literature, when counting the number of Ayni’s novels. Indeed, in his history of Tajik literature, in his monograph on Ayni, and in other articles, Bečka had defined “novels” as not only Dokhunda, Ghulomon and Yatim, but also Marg-i sudkhur.Footnote ¹⁵

Really, because of its great size, Marg-i sudkhur may also be mistaken for a novel. However, since it does not present a diversity of events and characters, but illuminates a whole period in the life of a single main character—the usurer—it is more appropriately to be considered as a story, or a novella at the most, and such is the case of Odina and Jallodon-i Bukhoro. Ayni himself had never defined Marg-i sudkhur as novel, whereas in the subheadings of Dokhunda, Ghulomon and Yatim he explicitly mentioned the term roman (“novel”).Footnote ¹⁶ It is strange that Bečka, whose scholarly works were usually somewhat affected by the Soviet Tajik and Russian literary critics, had defined Marg-i sudkhur as a novel rather than a novella. In Tajik textbooks and scholarly works on literature that have appeared through the Soviet period, Tajik-Russian literary criticism always referred to Marg-i sudkhur by using the Russian loan-word povest’ (“story, novella”), the term of Arabic origin qissa (“story”) being commonly employed in the Tajik publications of post-Soviet times.

Anyway, what one should keep in mind when studying the Tajik literary genres is that the Soviet Tajik story—like all those published in Russia and the other Soviet republics—usually ranges in size between what is normally called a story and what might also be a short novel, though it is more frequently the length of a short novel than of a story; such is the case of Marg-i sudkhur.

This novella, dealing with the social problem of usury in the Bukhara emirate during Ayni’s lifetime, is also considered the first satire in the history of modern Tajik literature, and still nowadays remains one of the most popular and frequently reprinted fictional works in Tajikistan. Its main character, the usurer Qori Ishkamba, has become the personification—delineated by means of the satire—of the negative element in modern Tajik society: he is a person with all possible faults and with no merits, but he hides behind the mask of an exemplary and devoted man.Footnote ¹⁷ The fact that in Tajikistan this story is still popular nearly thirty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union demonstrates that its connection with the current socio-economic crisis in Tajikistan is possibly strong.

Let us note that Marg-i sudkhur is also the last fictional work that Ayni set in Bukhara. After that, he published just one more prose-work, Yatim (1939), a novel set in the mountains within the borders of the newly established Soviet republic of Tajikistan. After Yatim, Ayni no longer wrote fiction, as if his “duty” to write fictional works was confined to the decade of the 1930s. During the 1940s, he devoted himself to the study of Persian classical authors such as Rudaki, Sa‘di, Vasefi, Nava’i and Bedil, and published widely on their life and works, to some extent laying the foundations of literary criticism in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. From the late 1940s and through the mid-1950s, he composed his monumental Yoddosht-ho (“Reminiscences”), which, besides their literary merit, also offer a rich source for the study of the Bukharan social and intellectual history of the late nineteenth century.

Ayni’s Yoddosht-ho also represents, together with Marg-i sudkhur, a good “laboratory” for studying the first developments of the so-called “Tajik literary language” (zabon-i adabi-yi tojik), whose features were initially codified in a Latin script in the mid-1920s by some Bukharan intellectuals and Russian orientalists, with reference to the parallel Latinization of Uzbek.Footnote ¹⁸ Ayni did not sit on the committee for the Latinization of Tajik, but expressed himself enthusiastically in favor of the move from the Arabic to the Latin alphabet, as demonstrated by some articles he wrote on the subject, among which was Dunyo-yi nav va alifbo-yi nav (“The new world and the new alphabet,” 1927).Footnote ¹⁹

The details of the new Tajik orthography and the new Tajik literary language were discussed at the conferences of Tashkent (1928) and Dushanbe (1930), that defined which grammatical features were to be considered “colloquial” rather than “literary,” and accepted: for example, in “standard Tajik” the progressive tenses formed with the auxiliary istodan (e.g., rafta istoda-am “I am going”), typical of the Tajik northern and northwestern dialects. The Dushanbe conference of 1930 also criticized some grammatical features as “archaizing,” among which was the verbal prefix bi- in the imperatives and in some subjunctives.Footnote ²⁰

In 1939–40, the Latin alphabet was in turn replaced by a modified Cyrillic system. According to Bečka, Ayni’s silence following the switch from the Latin to the Cyrillic script is to be interpreted as his disagreement with the Cyrillization, since after the introduction of the Latin alphabet Ayni had expressed himself favorable towards the Latinization of Tajik.Footnote ²¹ Anyway, it is important to keep in mind that all his life Ayni wrote his works in the Perso-Arabic script, though he saw them published in the Latin and Cyrillic scripts.

To the ear of the Iranians and the Afghans, this “literary Tajik” that developed first in the works of Ayni, adapted in the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets, and later inherited by the subsequent generations of Tajik fiction writers, may perhaps seem like a crude Iranian slang and sound archaic in its morphology, lexicon and syntax; but for all the Tajiks of today this is consciously the Tajik literary language.

Tajik Fiction during De-Stalinization: Ikromi and Muhammadiev Towards Dushanbe

Though not overtly revolutionary, the era following the death of Stalin and the condemnation of his regime on the part of his successor, the First Party Secretary Nikita Khrushchev (1894–1971), represented a new period of gradually increased freedom in the history of the Soviet Union. This increased freedom also involved the field of literary discussion and creation. After Khrushchev’s “Secret speech” to the Twentieth Party Congress of February 1956, in which he denounced some of the excesses of Stalin’s regime, the Soviet writers’ relationship with the political authorities gradually changed, becoming somewhat more relaxed.

In the history of modern Tajik literature, the 1950s are particularly significant for the appearance of Ayni’s final major work, the Yoddosht-ho. There is no doubt that Ayni’s memoirs represent an important stage in the evolution of modern Tajik literature and the “standardization” of the Tajik literary language, but let us note that the popularity of this work has perhaps overshadowed the publication, in 1957, of a novel by Ikromi that arguably represents, more than Ayni’s memoirs, a breakthrough in the history of modern Tajik literature. This novel is Man gunahgoram (“I am guilty”), which deals with problems of family, marital infidelity and morality.

As a native of Bukhara and a major Tajik representative of the genre of the historico-revolutionary novel set in Bukhara, Ikromi is probably more popular in Tajikistan for his novel Dukhtar-i otash (“Daughter of fire,” 1960) rather than for Man gunahgoram.Footnote ²² Indeed, Dukhtar-i otash—dealing on the one hand with women’s social position in Bukhara during the intellectual revolution and the social riots of the early twentieth century, and on the other hand with the effects of the Jadid movement on the educational system addressed to women—received wide critical acclaim in Tajikistan following its appearance, and still enjoys great popularity in the country.Footnote ²³ Conversely, Man gunahgoram does not enjoy the same popularity, and, as denounced by Ikromi himself, soon after its publication it was targeted by some members of the Union of Writers of Tajikistan as lacking in ideological character.Footnote ²⁴ Anyway, its literary value has been always recognized by both Soviet and post-Soviet Tajik scholars, according to whom this work is artistically one of the best novels in the history of Tajik literature and is to be considered as the first Tajik psychological novel.

Let us note that Man gunahgoram is also the first Tajik novel which is set within the borders of Soviet Tajikistan without being a Soviet “production novel” praising the collectivization of agriculture, as was the case, for example, of Shodi by Ikromi or Navobod by Ulughzoda. Man gunahgoram is set in the post-Stalin years in Lolazor, a village located not far from the capital Dushanbe, and in a sea of Tajik historical novels published in the post-Stalin decades it is the first novel to detail the everyday life of Tajik society of the time and its psychological dimension. Ikromi is especially successful here in his use of “inner monologue” (monolog-i botini), which reveals the attitudes, moods and personality of the main character of the novel, Anvar Salimov—the head of the elementary school in Lolazor—who feels guilty for having betrayed his wife Surayyo and denounces himself at the police station in his village.

Man gunahgoram is the first and the last novel by Ikromi treating contemporary issues. All the other novels that the author wrote thereafter are historico-revolutionary novels set in the Bukhara emirate. When analyzing Ikromi’s fiction, it is important to keep in mind that the psychological dimension of the characters we find in Man gunahgoram continues in Ikromi’s historico-revolutionary novels. Among these works, besides Dukhtar-i otash, one can cite Duvozdah darvoza-yi Bukhoro (“Twelve gates of Bukhara,” 1969) and Takht-i vozhgun (“Upturned throne,” 1974). The Bukharan revolutionary events of the early twentieth century and the psychological dimension of the characters represent not only the common denominator of Ikromi’s novels, but also the main scene of his most popular stories, notably Tor-i ankabut (“Cobweb,” 1960).

As with Ayni, Ikromi also favored his native city of Bukhara as a setting for his fictional narrative. In particular, there is a certain analogy between the two author’s beloved Bukhara: in fact, they both tend to fictionalize the historical period of their own childhood and early adolescence there, which in the case of Ayni is the late 1880s and 1890s and in the case of Ikromi is the late 1910s and early 1920s. For political reasons, both authors were forced to leave Bukhara and moved to Samarkand (in the case of Ayni) and Dushanbe (in the case of Ikromi).

To some extent it is arguable that Ikromi’s fiction shows the acceleration of a process already discernible in Ayni’s novels and stories: the partially autobiographical basis of the fiction began in fact to acquire a figurative or symbolic meaning, as well as a more conscious psychological dimension. Simultaneously it can be seen that the “revolutionary fiction” began to acquire some of the features of the “historical fiction”; that is to say, it is related to the past of the Tajik people—represented by Bukhara—and is conscious of the need to interpret that very Bukharan revolutionary past to the present of the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic of the post-Stalin period, with its newly established capital Dushanbe.

The social and psychological scrutiny of the Tajiks’ everyday life that began in the mid-1950s with Ikromi’s Man gunahgoram strengthened and developed still further in the 1960s and 1970s, especially in the fiction of Fazliddin Muhammadiev.Footnote ²⁵ Unlike Ayni and Ikromi, Muhammadiev did not write any historical novels, and he rarely chose Bukhara as a setting for his fiction, which is mainly short fiction.Footnote ²⁶ In his works, the city of Dushanbe, its Soviet-style apartment blocks, its parks and suburbs, began to acquire a certain personality in the Tajik literary field.

Muhammadiev was born in Samarkand and in 1947 moved to Dushanbe, where he began his career as a journalist. He enters the literary field in the mid–1950s with a series of documentary essays (ocherk or qissa-yi mustanad)Footnote ²⁷ of a social and socio-political character, among which are Rais-i nav (“The new boss,” 1955) and Muhojiron (“Immigrants,” 1956), both dealing with the village economy and the development of agriculture in Soviet Tajikistan. By blending journalism and memoir, Muhammadiev began his career by analyzing the merit of various events through the use of the documentary essay, passing later to the genres of the story and the novella.

Though at the beginning of his literary career he was popular for having introduced the genre of detective fiction in Tajik literature—notably with the story Tir-i khokkhurda (“The dusty arrow,” 1960)—with the passage of time he gained a reputation as a writer committed to show the generation gap between the Tajik elderly and young, namely between the generation who grew up during the restrictive Stalinist period and that which experienced the gradually increased freedom of the post-Stalin years.

Bridging the gap between the Stalinist generation and young Tajik adults of the 1960s and 1970s, for whom the Stalinist period was an impersonal historical event, is certainly an uneasy task. Muhammadiev’s most successful attempts at doing so are represented by the stories Odamon-i kuhna (“Old people,” 1962) and Dar on dunyo (“In that world,” 1965), and by the novel Palata-yi kunjaki (“Next room,” 1974).

In Odamon-i kuhna, set in the early 1960s in the suburbs of Dushanbe, the life and habits of old Tajik people are told by a young Tajik journalist. In Dar on dunyo, set in the same period, a young Tajik doctor—an atheist—relates the pilgrimage of elderly Tajik Muslims to Mecca and Medina. The two stories share the respectful attitude that the young expressed towards their elders, even when, as in the case of Dar on dunyo, their religious beliefs are not the same.

During his career as a fiction writer Muhammadiev wrote only one novel, Palata-yi kunjaki, which is also the second psychological novel in the history of modern Tajik literature (the first is the already mentioned Man gunahgoram by Ikromi). The novel is set in the 1970s in a room of a hospital in Dushanbe, where there are four people of different ages, and thus differing past experiences: a former president of the Vigilance and Monitoring Committee of the city of Dushanbe; a retired factory worker; a former soldier of the Second World War; and a twenty-seven-year-old film maker. They all have had an ictus and have been cured by a young doctor. The three elderly patients talk to each other about the Soviet life under Stalinism and during de-Stalinization. The younger patient listens to them in silence, joining in the conversation rarely. Muhammadiev represents himself as being in the next room in the hospital and listening to the talk of the four patients. The author wrote this novel when he himself was in a hospital in Dushanbe for treatment of a tumor that some years later would lead to his death in his fifties.

In terms of their general perspective, one may state that in most of Muhammadiev’s fictional works there is a reappraisal of the elderly, who are considered to be of great value for society. In contrast, in the early Soviet period the elderly had been shown in a bad light in the Tajik literary field (and in the Soviet literary field in general), because they represented the “old” world of the emirs, and not the new Soviet world that sought to invest above all in young people.