Central Asian literature

Central Asian literature consists of poetry and prose in several languages produced across a region bounded to the east by China’s Tarim Basin, to the west by the Caspian Sea, and to the south by the Oxus River that runs through Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. It encompasses a largely under-the-radar body of work from a region known more for its transmitters of ideas and innovations rather than for its creators.

Traditional Central Asian literature had no written form; rather, traveling minstrels and bards passed it down orally in the form of stories, verses, and poems. Many Central Asian ethnicities have a tradition of epic verse, singer-storytellers, and legends. Among the region’s most important and well-known writers are poets Omar Khayyam and Abu Abdulrh Rudaki, who is considered the father of Persian literature, as well as Soviet-era writer Chinghiz Aitmatov.

Background

Central Asia had no written language in its early history. Knowledge of the region before the sixth and seventh centuries, which brought the first written language (Sogdian), was derived mostly from material remains rather than literary sources. Another challenge in unearthing a solid history of the region is the lack of historical consciousness by its people. This has resulted in a dependence on distorted Chinese or Persian accounts that often conveyed a negative image of Central Asia.

The region, which is nonetheless regarded as vibrantly diverse, is broadly considered to include five countries that were formerly part of the Soviet Union—Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, which are Turkic speaking, and Tajikistan, which is Persian speaking—as well as the Xinjiang province of China. The Turkic people had a rich literary tradition dating to the ninth and tenth centuries, long before the Russian conquest of the region.

Predominantly Muslim with both nomadic and settled populations, the region was under Russian and Chinese rule after the 1700s, having experienced its golden age centuries earlier. That renaissance period was considered to have lasted from 800 to 1100, a time when the region was squarely at the hub of world culture. It was that era that gave rise to the poet Khayyam, who also solved all forms of cubic equations to contribute to the field of mathematics. Several of the great Persian-language poets and foremost Muslim philosopher Abu Nasr al-Farabi, whom some consider second only to Aristotle, also emerged during this era.

By the fourteenth century, empires had crumbled and trade routes became more expensive, causing traders to seek alternatives. Religious pluralism declined in favor of Islam, and the arts and sciences suffered greatly as a result. As a fractured Islam came to dominate the culture, orthodoxy grew and brought cultural and intellectual work to a grinding halt.

In the ensuing centuries, war, political directives, nationalism, and rebirth all factored into the literature of the times.

The interaction of Turkic and Iranian populations and cultures throughout the region has been the central influence on the character of Central Asian literature thanks to a historical split between the urban cultures of the Tarim Basin and Transoxania (which includes modern-day Uzbekistan as well as parts of Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan) and the more northern and western nomadic cultures. Most of the Central Asian people are considered nomadic. These nomadic cultures were known for more literary innovation than the settled cultures in the seventeenth century.

The seventeenth century also saw the emergence of Turkmen literature, which remained highly influential across the region through the late nineteenth century. Also in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a number of Central Asian literatures developed into modern literatures under tsarist and Soviet rule. Among the modern literatures treated separately were Kazakh, Mongolian, Turkmen, and Uzbek literature. Chagatai literature, a historical literature, was also treated separately.

The oldest Central Asian literatures used the Iranian languages Sogdian and Khwarezmian, but by the eighth century, after the Arab conquest, the New Persian language became established in urban centers such as Bukhara (now in Uzbekistan) and gradually replaced the region’s indigenous languages. Turkic languages also began appearing in Central Asian literature in the eighth century. In the ensuing century, when the Uighurs ruled the Orhon River valley in Mongolia, people moved between this region and the cities of the Tarim Basin. The resulting contact between the different populations helped shape Central Asia’s literature.

Overview

Central Asian literature can be considered to have three significant periods: the Islamic-Imperial; the colonial; and the post-independence. The Islamic-Imperial period, lasting until the second half the nineteenth century, was the longest, with numerous works produced under emperors, kings, sultans, and emirs and their courts.

The second half of the nineteenth century brought the imposition of Russian colonial rule, and scholars have largely ignored works produced during this period due to the ideological perspectives in play. The colonial period in Turkistan, which began in 1861, was a dark era for native literature as Russia used literature to further its self-interests, promoting works that praised Russian culture, politics, and identity.

At the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, Central Asian writers were still beholden to their Persian and Islamic roots, and literary tradition was influenced by a conservative political and social system as well as heavy-handed Muslim clergy who protected the holy tradition during a time of rampant illiteracy. Traditional forms were prevalent with little vernacular, and poetry – often praising sitting rulers – was highly favored. Mystical pieces and commentaries on sacred writings were common, while long prose was rare, and prose itself was often reserved for amusement or the occasional social commentary.

The winds of change were already percolating, and, in the early decades of the twentieth century, writers started to show signs of an “enlightenment,” a time during which rational thought and modern knowledge were used to overcome social and economic back-wardness. European Russia was looked to as the source of reform, and Russia was seen as an intermediary.

In Bukhara, a hub for Central Asian intellectuals, the foremost “enlightener” was the cosmopolitan Ahmad Doniš, a Tajik best known for his prose commentaries on contemporary Central Asian society. A similar figure was Abai Kunanbaev, the leader of the Kazakh intellectuals. Educated in Asian classics, he was grounded in Persian, Arabic, poetry, Chaghatay and Islamic religious doctrine but also admired Russian literature and acquainted himself with Western literature and social thought. He sought bridges between Central Asia and the West while casting a critical eye on both. In his poetry he turned from abstract, metaphorical language to a more direct diction. Contemporary social problems were significant themes.

In the two decades preceding the Russian Revolution of 1917, a second current of change, characterized by a growing cultural and religious identity and an impatience with social and economic stagnation, spread among younger Central Asian intellectuals.

Jadidism came to the fore and led to sustained efforts at educational reform and the founding of a native press. The Jadids, who all had classical educations, favored poetry for expression. While love poems remained popular, social questions also took deep root in period poetry, and education, culture, and religious strife birthed new poetic forms.

Ahmad Baitursynov, the leading Kazakh writer of the time, treated poetry as a tool for social change and was eager to mold the Kazakh language into a proper vehicle for a modern culture. Still, in advocating social reform, he urged a reliance upon the native tradition.

The period also saw modest innovations in prose, and a number of influential works in Persian were meant to entertain as well as instruct. Notable among them were Monāẓara (The Dispute, 1909), the account of a discussion between a reformer and a traditionalist, and Bayānāt-e ṣayyāḥ-e hendī (Tales of a Hindu Traveler, 1912), in which a Bukharan describes to his foreign guest the decadence into which his beloved city has fallen.

The Kazakh poet Sultan-Mahmud Toruaigyrov experimen-ted with the novel. In his Qamar sulu (Qamar the Beauti-ful, 1914), a lyric piece about a young woman in traditional Kazakh society, he had expressed the deep emotions of his main characters.

Uzbek editor and critic Mahmud Behbudiy introduced modern drama into Central Asian literature with Padarkuš (The Patricide, 1911, in Chaghatay), which suggested that a national intelligentsia would lead to the liberation of the Muslim people.

After the 1917 Revolution, the newly installed Soviet regime charted a new course for Central Asian literatures. By recognizing distinct ethnic nations, it pro-vided a political framework for the development of “national talents.” New literary languages, often Russian-influenced, were gradually created.

Diverse influences, including classical and modern Persian literature as well as the poetry and folklore of the Central Asian people, were helping to develop the Central Asian literatures of the twentieth century. Soviet economic and social policies were giving writers new subjects and expressive forms even as the Russians imposed ideological principles in opposition to creativity.

Communist activists tried to mobilize Central Asian writers to build a “new society” in the 1920s, but clashes between na-tionalists and the new order were barriers. Many Jadidists opposed the new cultural norms and found themselves at odds with proletarian culture, which wanted litera-ture to serve the immediate needs of society and belittled the importance of artistic inspiration and form.

The 1920s were a period of transition and lively intellectual back-and-forth but also of disorder incompatible with Communist Party goals. The Communist Party in the 1930s moved to impose literary uniformity by establishing writers’ unions in each of the new Central Asian republics and linking them to the Union of Soviet Writers in Moscow. These organizations were responsible for enforcing what came to be known as socialist realism and were crucial in determining an author’s choice of theme and handling of plot and character. They stressed the need to remain close to the working masses, to submit to party directives con-cerning creative activity, and not only to reflect reality but to change it.

In the twentieth century, older poets who remained faithful to classical form and meter and devoid of social content could not adjust to the new literary order and faded into obscurity, while younger poets were more successful in bridging the gap between old and new creative theories.

The most enthusiastic embracer of new social themes was Abu’l-Qāsem Lāhūtī, the first major Soviet Tajik poet. This Persian revolutionary, who immigrated to the Soviet Union in 1922, became the poet of the radical transformation of Tajik society. His story Tāj wa bayrāq (The Crown and the Banner, 1935) is an epic poem about socialist construction in agriculture that depicts work brigades competing with one another.

Younger poets, who emerged in the 1930s, wrote in accessible language and adhered faithfully to the canons of civic poetry as they sought themes in the fulfillment of economic plans and Soviet foreign policy, contrasting the oppressive past with a bright future.

Among Uzbek poets, Ḡafur Ḡulom in such works as Dinamu (Dynamo, 1931) and Mirtamir Tursunov in Zafar (Victory, 1929), extolled the accomplishments of the builders of the new Communist society. Sabit Mukanov was the first important Kazakh poet to embrace the new style and subject matter and to abandon classical verse in poems about daily life on the kolkhoz and May Day. These men were the forerunners of the so-called proletarian writers who replaced the lyric poets of the preceding decade. Yet, there were also poets whose work combined social consciousness with a deep attach-ment to traditional form and meter.

World War II (1939–1945) brought a brief literary pause. Poets fulfilled their patriotic duty of arousing support for the war, but a lyrical and national re-awakening also took place.

Post-war and during the following decade, literary activity came again under the close scrutiny of party ideologists, and writers largely conformed to the directives of the Soviet Communist Party.

Literature was again subordinate to the re-sumed drive for industrialization and ramped-up agricul-tural production. Party activists renewed their vigilance against nationalism, which to them meant stylistic and thematic influences from Persian, Turkic, and Arabic literatures. Local writers’ unions dis-couraged the use of classical meters and symbols as unsuitable in a socialist society. What might be called “production poetry” was in vogue, but utilitarian themes could also serve as a framework for good poetry.

Through the 1950s, prose followed a course similar to poetry, with a transition seen from storytelling to stark depiction of character and plot. Short fiction was prevalent until the end of World War II, which allowed writers to explore their history in a positive light, stirring national feelings by recounting the deeds of heroes real and imagined. But the end of the war imposed even more rigid ideological conformity.

The novel became the leading literary genre after the war, but focused on the heroic Soviet defense of the fatherland and continued socialism. Heroes and villains represented abstract concepts rather than real people, and the traditional Soviet hero was committed to the party cause.

Villains, on the other hand, were those the Soviets judged as evil. Landowners, nationalists, and Muslim clergy were all attacked in literature regularly. Islamic themes disappeared as the Soviet anti-religious campaign spread to Central Asia. Production novels abounded as an abundance of literature addressed life on the kolkhoz.

The development of drama in Central Asia was assisted by the Russian Revolution, with Behbudiy’s Padarkuš marking the beginning of modern Uzbek drama. Soviet authorities raised the status of drama when they used it to promote their social and economic programs among a population that was still largely illiterate.

Between the 1920s and 1950s, themes and characters were adapted amid new political struggles and five-year economic plans. Since the late 1950s, Central Asian writers have been emboldened by looser ideological reins and have probed societal problems and the human condition more deeply and personally. Poets of the 1970s and 1980s also employed their own thoughts and feelings in their work, and women poets wrote often of beauty, love, and family in deeply personal lyrics. Dramatists continued their focus on social problems while abandoning production tales and works about class struggle. Their heroes and villains also became more human. Prose saw similar innovations, and eternal themes, such as the meaning of human existence and the nature of happiness, emerged.

Novelists of this period also tackled once-taboo topics. In Diyonat (Dīānat Integrity, 1978) the Uzbek Odil Yoqubov dealt with the purge of the old political leaders and Jadid intellectuals in the 1930s and their replacement by lesser men who accepted the new Soviet regime simply to get ahead. The Kirghiz novelist Aitmatov, in Proshchaĭ, Gyul’sary (Farewell, Gulsari), similarly condemned the bureaucracy for crushing all who tried to live in accordance with high ethical standards. Heroes and villains no longer conformed to timeworn formulas but stood out as distinct personalities whose emotional and spiritual development were often probed.

Since the 1970s and 1980s, Central Asian writers have been re-inspired by their native cul-tural and intellectual heritage, which they never truly abandoned even amid ideological control.

In Yoqubov’s novel, Uluḡbek Kazinasi (The Treasure of Ulugbeg, 1974), Turkic, Persian, and Arabic words and expressions considered archaic have returned in abun-dance, and the hero of his Diyonat, the man of integrity, is well acquainted with the Uzbek people’s Islamic past and observes many of their traditions, even though he is not religious, and knows Persian and Arabic.

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