Not By Archives Alone: The “Revolution” in Soviet Central Asian Literary Studies

Abstract

In contemporary Central Asia, Soviet-era authors are national heroes. Writers’ natal homes have become lovingly curated home-museums; statues of poets bedeck city squares; and schoolchildren write dictations from twentieth-century novels. Less often discussed in public, such writers also once belonged to the Soviet Writers’ Union, many of these poets called themselves “proletarian,” and their novels purported to imagine “revolution.” Poems about tractors rarely appear in today's anthologies, and new editions of 1930s novels excise the once-obligatory references to Stalin. In reaction to their Soviet-era canonization, some writers have been knocked from their pedestals, as recently happened to Hamza in Uzbekistan. Due to the political sensitivity of many Soviet writers in Uzbekistan, most serious scholarly attention has turned, since 1990, toward transitional Jadid writers of the early revolutionary years who were ultimately devoured by the official regime, such as Cho'lpon and Fitrat.