Suddenly she remembered Saltanat’s behavior in the cart: Saltanat had cried out “mingboshi!” She had become pale and lost consciousness. When she opened her eyes and stared at everyone, she then looked directly at Zebi and threw herself into her arms. Then two days ago Saltanat’s mother came and conducted a conversation in whispers with her mother. Since then, her mother had looked like she was constantly mourning.
Oh, if only Saltanat were with her now! She could have shared these things with her, and Saltanat would have comforted her, right? Did Saltanat already know? Wouldn’t she have said something in the cart if she knew? They talked the whole way, and she didn’t say anything about this. Or could she have been hiding it? If she was hiding it, was she really Zebi’s friend? What kind of friend is that?
As seen in this passage, bodily communication inadequately replaces speech. Saltanat says only one word, mingboshi, and expresses her thoughts largely through looks and embraces. Saltanat’s embrace, meant to relay her remorse and misery at not sharing her secret with her friend, fails to achieve its goal. At the time of the embrace, Zebi is dumbfounded, and later she understands only betrayal in that hug and not Saltanat’s perhaps misguided, but well-meaning intentions. Saltanat, to Zebi’s chagrin, does not speak to her.
The characters’ ignorance of their surroundings and themselves is further reflected in the way Cho’lpon describes actions. A surprising number of the main characters’ movements are depicted as involuntary. Cho’lpon, for example, describes Zebi’s unwitting attraction to the young O’lmasjon with the following: “at that moment, her voice became alien to her. The voice producing those words sounded to her ear as if it came from the far side of the creek.” Like many of Cho’lpon’s characters, Zebi cannot account for her own actions. Zebi often feels as if another entity has control over her, such that she acts contrary to her will.
Cho’lpon’s narrator openly sympathizes with his characters, but also criticizes and mourns their lack of self-consciousness. He inserts himself into the story to mourn Zebi’s situation and the societal imprisonment of women:
Why don’t the poor women who grow up inside four walls, who don’t see anything other than the sharp looks of those permitted inside, sense the tragedy of their sheltered lives? If they are so used to seeking little joys inside their four walls, can these poor things ever believe that the shameful joys which wander in from outside are part of something greater?
The narrator’s interruption here is little different than the work his lyric persona performs in his poetry. We have already seen how Cho’lpon’s lyric persona bewails his war-torn homeland in his 1921 poem “To a Devastated Land” by likening it to a silent, slavish woman, and here we see the same rhetorical strategy.
Ignorance becomes a structuring device not just through Cho’lpon’s prose style and narration, but also through plot structure. Misjudgment, miscommunication, and misrecognition provide most of the turns in the narrative. Akbarali’s youngest wife, Sultonxon, invites Zebi to her house without grasping the consequences—that Akbarali will fall in love with Zebi and that Sultonxon will lose her status as favorite wife. Zebi’s father warns her not to sing during her trip to the village, but losing herself in the moment she releases her voice, which leads to her eventual marriage to Akbarali. One of Akbarali’s elder wives, Poshshaxon, mistakenly murders him when she intends to poison Zebi, which leads to the novel’s climactic trial. Miryoqub and Maria constantly misunderstand one another, unable to speak the same language. Each mistake draws the characters out of their usual environment and transforms them. Sultonxon, a naïve young girl, realizes the pain of her elder co-wives. Zebi, a poor girl at the beginning of the novel, is forced into a life of luxury with a man who revolts her. Miryoqub and Maria wind up married after a disastrous misunderstanding, which should have separated them forever: Miryoqub gives Maria a check, signifying, to him, his loyalty but, to her, that he sees her only as a prostitute. That such mistakes, even at the novel’s conclusion, continue to dictate the action, undermines the sense of closure that the epiphanies experienced by characters in the course of the novel may suggest.
Because incomplete epiphanies play a role throughout the novel, we should regard Miryoqub’s conversion to jadidism, the conversion which both Soviet and post-Soviet authors have cited as evidence of Cho’lpon’s anti-Soviet stance, as an unfinished transformation and not necessarily a product of Cho’lpon’s antagonism towards the Soviet Union. Miryoqub is, at times, as Soviet critics accused, a scheming capitalist, a sexual profligate, and very nearly a jadid, but Cho’lpon’s narrative emphasizes the ephemeralness of these identities and denies them authorial approval. Miryoqub undergoes a number of epiphanies based on the contradictory advice he receives from various interlocutors and as a result of his own self-questioning. In several episodes that take place only in his mind, his self is split in two, and one half of Miryoqub submits the other to an eerily prescient interrogation à la the NKVD. Cho’lpon no doubt knew about the many secret police arrests and questionings of the late 1920s and early 1930s, but the interrogation in the novel has literary precedent, as discussed below. Interrogator-Miryoqub attacks his other self for his sexual licentiousness and callousness toward women, but in those interrogations, the Miryoqubs’ capitalistic inclinations always win out. The defendant Miryoqub justifies his every transgressive sexual act by arguing for his lack of choice in the matter or by suggesting it as merely a way towards greater wealth, which appeases the money-grubbing interrogator. Miryoqub assuages his conscience of his guilt in several matters by persuading his greedy interrogator, but the reader senses that Miryoqub is letting himself off easy with unconvincing arguments. Miryoqub, Cho’lpon therefore hints, will have further epiphanies still.
Those familiar with jadid literature once again doubt the conclusiveness of Miryoqub’s epiphany when he meets the jadid Sharafuddin Xo’jaev and seemingly becomes a jadid. His conversion to jadidism is noticeably undermined by the parodic nature of the text in this episode. Because Miryoqub and Maria cannot communicate with one another—neither know the other’s language—Cho’lpon formats the pair’s meeting with the jadid Xo’jaev in a train headed to Moscow as a series of hypothetical diary entries, the collection of which he calls a sarguzashtnoma (travelogue). The travelogue genre went by many names in Turkic and Persian Central Asian letters. Zokirjon Xolmuhammad o’g’li Furqat (1859–1909), a generation previous to the jadids, is the only writer to use the term sarguzashtnoma, but whatever its name, the travelogue genre in jadid letters had a few fixed attributes which proved ripe for Cho’lpon’s parody.86 Jadid travelogues are monologic texts: they beat their readers over the head with an uncompromising view of progress and ruthlessly criticize Central Asian society by comparison with others. Cho’lpon’s sarguzashtnoma parodies these previous travelogues by way of its dialogism. The jadid Xo’jaev, more pamphlet than person, speaks like the narrator of these travelogues: he praises the benefits of education through European examples and berates the backwardness of his countrymen. But his speech passes through the prism of Miryoqub’s hypothetical diary in which Miryoqub questions and misunderstands him. At the end of their encounter, Miryoqub notes that he does not entirely trust jadids:
Now I will never say that the path of our fathers is the only one. But I can’t say that the jadids are right either. Though I do understand what the jadids have to say more easily and quickly than what others say. Is it just that they talk well?
Cho’lpon’s sarguzashtnoma furthers his parody of this genre of Muslim reform through yet another level of dialogism. Xo’jaev’s diatribes are read opposite Maria’s hypothetical diary, which often directly contradicts the jadid’s rhetoric. Xo’jaev implores Miryoqub to idolize Maria as a culturally superior individual because of her Russian background. She, Xo’jaev argues, will teach Miryoqub and his children to be cultured and educated individuals. But Maria’s hypothetical diary entries show us her utter ambivalence to culture and education. At times, she desires a more enlightened Miryoqub, and at others, she envies his new relationship with Xo’jaev:
I’ve been reading my fortune and “unhappiness” keeps coming up. Not promising. He’s going to take my Jakob [Maria’s name for Miryoqub— C. F.] away! Is there anything worse than this culture? That cultured sart does nothing but talk from morning to evening.
As is common in Cho’lpon’s