Central Asian jadids often condemned Muslim women as ignorant for their engagement with superstitions and magic. Ironically, the Russian woman Maria’s fortune-telling with her cards is just the kind of “backward” behavior that a jadid like Xo’jaev would have condemned in Muslim women. Likewise, Xo’jaev rants about the vices of Tashkent, among them prostitution, as instruments that deprive Muslims of their agency, and yet he praises Maria, who, unbeknownst to him, is a former prostitute. Cho’lpon’s support of his jadid character and Miryoqub’s conversion to jadidism is hardly without irony and ambiguity.
Not only does Cho’lpon parody and ironize jadid rhetoric in the novel, but he also plainly paints Xo’jaev and the novel’s other Muslim reformer character, the inspector of village credit unions, Hasanov, negatively, imbuing them with the fictitious anti-Soviet qualities for which jadids were condemned in the late 1920s and 1930s. In the train, Xo’jaev repeatedly attacks Russians as the absolute enemies of Muslims, a chauvinistic view more consistent with the negative Soviet portrait of jadids than actual jadid thought. Cho’lpon’s Xo’jaev says of Russians:
We hate those people. They are our enemies! They are our enemies in every sense! It’s not so often that we find a friend from among them. But those that we do find are good. Very good friends. But when we embrace them, we’re always ready to escape their clutches!
Jadids indeed disliked the illiberalism of the Russian Empire and naturally blamed colonialism for many of the ills, such as alcohol and prostitution, that they believed had poisoned Turkestani youth. However, their presentations of Europeans, Russian or otherwise, as Adeeb Khalid notes, were “uniformly positive.”87 Attacks on Russians like Xo’jaev’s above are characteristic largely of the jadids of the Soviet imagination. Hasanov similarly embodies an anachronistic Soviet impression of jadids. He belittles Akbarali mingboshi for his blind adherence to the tsarist state, hinting that the mingboshi’s loyalties should lie instead with Turkestanis’ coethnic and coreligionist Ottoman Turks. In reality, jadids had sympathies for the Ottomans, but the majority of them remained steadfastly faithful to the Romanov Empire. They felt their show of allegiance would raise the status of their community in the empire, which would then permit more Turkestani participation in Russian political life.88 To show them as supporters of the Ottoman Turks again discloses an anachronistic Soviet view. By giving his jadid characters such ahistorical negative characteristics, Cho’lpon’s novel clearly suggests that we should doubt Miryoqub’s acceptance of jadid ideas.
Even as the capitalist and temporarily jadid Miryoqub angered Stalinist critics in 1937, we should note that Cho’lpon’s psychological prose was entirely consonant with the prose of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), the dominant literary organization in the Soviet Union until the inauguration of Socialist Realism in 1932. RAPP, contrary to the demands of later Socialist Realism, prized deeply psychological writing. In his 1928 monograph, Vladimir Yermilov, a leading RAPP critic, entreated proletarian writers to “illuminate and electrify the vast and humid cellar of the subconscious.”89 Doubt, indecisiveness, and fickle minds were the stock-in-trade of proletarian writers. In introducing a character like Miryoqub, Cho’lpon was no different than many other Soviet writers who wrote for RAPP.
In fact, Cho’lpon almost certainly borrowed from a proletarian text popular in early 1930s Uzbekistan in crafting his Miryoqub. In 1932, the head of the Uzbek Writers’ Union, Rahmat Majidiy held up Russian and Ukrainian writing as models for Uzbek prose writers and singled out for praise The Valley (1929), the novel of Ukrainian VUSPP (the Ukrainian division of RAPP) writer Ivan Le.90 Written thanks to Le’s time in Uzbekistan, The Valley follows the Uzbek socialist Saidali as he constructs an irrigation system in the Ferghana valley.91 Saidali falls in love with a married Russian woman and finds himself in an internal dialogue in which two parts of his self pit his socialist pedigree against his lustful urges. Le’s psychological doubling of his Saidali should be familiar to any reader of Cho’lpon’s novel. As Le writes:
Two Saidalis began to heatedly and passionately argue:
“I’ve taken this woman from another man for myself, a woman who doesn’t concern herself with the tasks of the party and the people, a woman who decorates herself, a petty bourgeois who walks around wagging her tail. The shame of class inequality, of not having paid my party dues for two months, of not being on the party list for two months. I’ve surrendered my ideology and my purity.” This new Saidali, who looked soft and inexperienced, began to contemplate things he had never thought about before.
But the broad-shouldered, strong Saidali’s body put a stop to any excessive softening of his character. It wasn’t a second person, but just a dark cloud that had lowered over the corporeal Saidali.
“I haven’t lost my cold nature, my dedication without my party membership. I still go to meetings every day, I still give reports. My briefcase hasn’t left my arm. The time for relaxing has passed. We will let them bring the masses to work, awaken them on their own initiative. After all, they aren’t made of stone.”92 […]
“The two of us. …” Lyuba searched for the right words. “You’re an Uzbek, and I’m …,” and she was silent. She realized that she had already said too much. Crushed by this mad white woman, he was licking his wounds.
Anger and hopelessness sparked in his eyes. It was as if something that had been cohesively joined had suddenly split. He himself had been shattered and broken; deprived of hope, he searched for shelter. Saidali began to lose himself from the pain.
“Uzbek! Asian! A black! You just needed some kind of prostitute to fill your need for ‘culture’? You know, you Europeans …”—he couldn’t finish his sentence. A nearly forgotten sound was barely audible in his ears: “cut her throat.” And he started searching his belt for his knife.93
Saidali’s love, he believes, is a betrayal of his ideological credo. It takes him away from his party duties and makes him question his values. He contemplates whether he will remake himself or remake her. Notably, Saidali accuses Lyuba of essentializing and exoticizing him; she, he alleges, makes him into a “prostitute” for her “cultural tourism.” Cho’lpon imbues his Miryoqub with this same conflict, only he inverts Le’s formulation. Miryoqub’s doubling leads to an interrogation of himself by himself and eventually a discussion about raising his “cultural level,” which will supposedly transform his Asiatic, lustful nature and unite him with a Russian woman, herself a prostitute.
“Oh, Miryoqub! Sly Miryoqub! Tricky Miryoqub! Miryoqub, you fox! You devil, Miryoqub! Miryoqub, you are a slave, you are depraved and shameful! Have you ever bowed your proud head in your life, have you ever abandoned your dog [meaning his sexual lust] for even a second? Is that it? If you’re a dog, then don’t hurry, you’ll still have time to jump on your bitch. You’ll have time. You have the money! That money can buy you whatever you want. You have enough to have an unending chain of pleasures to satisfy your canine urges!”
“The seventh [girl] is yours! Yours! That tender creature has nothing but you now! That woman is yours now! You can’t have her like a prostitute anymore! You can’t hurt her! You can’t destroy her hopes! She looks at you as a man now; you’re no longer a client; you’ve managed to get rid of that impression. Do you hear her voice? This is not the voice of a depraved woman waiting for her next buyer. That’s the sad song of a woman who curses her fate. The song is not one of lust! It is the innocent song of a woman waiting for her bridegroom! It is the song of a young creature who has finally been linked with her love! The grateful melody of a mother bird who has returned to her nest! Miryoqub! Miryoqub! Miryoqub!”
Miryoqub was now two: one is fleeing, the other pursuing; this escape and pursuit between his two selves had him panting by the time he reached noyib to’ra’s home and rang the bell. […]
[Maryam thought,] “a cultured Jakob [Maryam’s name for Miryoqub] is naturally better than a wild Asian Jakob who doesn’t know Russian. He pulled me out of that swamp; now if he becomes a cultured person because of me, all the better!”
This intriguing play with doubles, psychological battles, mental interrogations, and questions of cultural belonging