of socialist content in the novel, Cho’lpon wrote very much in line with the psychological prose put forward by contemporaneous proletarian novels.
Unfortunately, the absence of the second novel will always give rise to debate, but there is enough evidence in and around the present novel to suggest that Cho’lpon intended to make Miryoqub a socialist in the sequel, especially given the historical transformation of jadids themselves. Throughout the novel, it is suggested that only socialists have a program to destroy empire, while jadids are interested in its preservation for the purposes of developing the nation through capital accumulation. Historically this is true: jadids wanted Turkestani autonomy within a federated system like that proposed by the provincial government after the February Revolution. They had little interest in overturning economic relations and undoing the state. Only with the October Revolution did jadids become radicalized, seeing the Soviet state as a means to overcome all the ills of empire and colonialism (to questions of class they were largely indifferent). The early 1920s saw Central Asia become a hub for anti-colonial discourse. Jadids and socialists exchanged ideas and strategies with visitors from the colonized and dominated world such as India, Afghanistan, and Iran.94 By the 1930s, when Cho’lpon wrote, former jadids like himself were now familiar with Marxist teachings and knew, to an extent, how to discuss them. Cho’lpon therefore anachronistically instils in his Miryoqub both anti-colonial and anti-capitalistic tendencies alongside their opposites. We see the potential for a socialist Miryoqub, when, despite all his fears about the loss of his land and capital, he spontaneously vows to destroy empire.
“Very well, master. Tomorrow afternoon everything will be as you ask. We’ll destroy the empire the day after tomorrow.”
“What do you mean?”
“I meant we’ll do away with lust … sweet dreams, master! Goodbye, ladies!”
Miryoqub suddenly speaks of undoing empire because he, through his internal self-interrogations, has identified empire with lust. Through further such interrogations, he later identifies lust with his capitalistic greed. After all, he forgives himself his promiscuity by justifying his multiple sexual partners as necessary for business transactions. As he undergoes his conversion to jadidism, he attempts to do away with his lust and commit himself to one woman, Maria. Given the transformation of many jadids into socialists and the focus of Uzbek socialists in the 1920s on the matter of women’s liberation, one might assume then that Miryoqub’s battle against lust will lead back through his chain of logic such that he begins to attack capitalism and empire.
A prosopographical point adds credence to the argument that Miryoqub would become a socialist in the sequel. Several prominent jadids married Russian women before becoming socialists. Hamza, the penname of Hamza Hakimzoda Niyoziy (1889–1929), became one of the most revered Uzbek socialists in the late 1920s. After he was murdered in the Uzbekistani enclave of Shohimardon in 1929, enterprising Uzbek socialists ignored his jadid background and canonized him as the first Uzbek Socialist Realist writer. Before 1912, he achieved notoriety in his Central Asian community by marrying a Russian woman.95 After the revolution, Botu (the penname of Mahmud Hodiev (1904–1938) became one of Fitrat’s favorite pupils and a superior Uzbek poet. In 1923, he moved to Moscow where he married a Russian woman, Valentina Petrovna Vasil’eva, and became a fervent socialist.96 In Moscow, he began to condemn his former teacher and Cho’lpon, accusing them in the press of anti-Soviet positions.97 In having Miryoqub marry Maria, Cho’lpon may have been following several prominent historical examples of jadids becoming socialists.
In fact, through Miryoqub’s marriage to Maria, Cho’lpon may have intended the novel as something of an apology for himself. If Miryoqub is set on his way to becoming a socialist by marrying a Russian woman, then Cho’lpon was as well. While in Moscow in 1932, Cho’lpon married a Russian woman, a marriage which some Uzbek scholars have read rather cynically as Cho’lpon’s way to deflect accusations of bourgeois nationalism.98 Regardless of intent, this move coincides with his conversion to socialism in several respects. Cho’lpon married a Russian woman in the 1930s just as he began to produce new poetry in which he declared his optimism and pro-Soviet views. Cho’lpon may well have intended to explain his own slow conversion to socialism through the confused, ignorant Miryoqub, who, though at first duped by jadids, eventually becomes a socialist.
The second novel, should it ever be found, probably reads much like A Modern Woman: that is, nominally in support of socialism but creating more questions than answers by way of its inconclusiveness. A few of Cho’lpon’s works in the 1920s include the deus ex machina endings sometimes employed by jadids, but it is difficult to believe that he could stretch such a minimalistic conclusion with a style so antithetical to his writing across the space of an entire novel. Cho’lpon’s 1928 short story “The Baker Girl” (Novvoy qiz) includes just such a deus ex machina, and here the exception truly proves the rule of Cho’lpon’s aesthetic. The story revolves around a young woman who was abused and raped by a man, O’lmasboy, before the revolution. As in Night, the narrator laments the girl’s powerlessness and inability to rebel. Likewise, chremamorphism abounds as the narrator likens the girl to a sea and her rapist to an insurmountable mountain. Long, run-on sentences, again coincident with the prose of Night, describe her suffering in detail. The final chapter breaks with this style completely. The events take place after the revolution and are narrated in short, staccato sentences. At the conclusion, the girl appears in a Soviet court intent on bringing prerevolutionary criminals to justice. She takes the stand to face her rapist, but thanks to the Soviet Revolution she is no longer a victim: she is suddenly omnipotent. Instead of testifying and reliving the powerlessness of the past, she releases a powerful scream that knocks O’lmasboy off his feet. Returning to the story’s central metaphor, Cho’lpon emphasizes the seemingly impossible and thus miraculous nature of the act: “the sea, formerly silent and obedient like a slave, spoke […] the mountain crumbled.”99 Such an ending might fit a short story but could not suit an entire novel.
Day most likely reads like Night, full of misunderstandings and a lack of self-knowledge, the only difference being that the action takes place after the revolution. It is also possible, though less likely given Cho’lpon’s other works in the 1920s and 1930s, that Day could simply have been an artistic failure much like the second volume of Gogol’s Dead Souls (1842). Unable to write the story of the righteous in a way that, in his own assessment, matched his brilliant satire of the wicked, Gogol burned the manuscript of his sequel. Accustomed as he was to the rhetoric of elegy and satire, Cho’lpon may have found it impossible to describe a new, post-ignorance era.
While the question of what Cho’lpon wrote in his sequel will likely remain the subject of speculation, the present novel may well suit Cho’lpon’s aesthetic best in its incomplete form. Working through the literature of his jadid predecessors, Cho’lpon early in his career came to the conclusion that his and their art emerged from the perpetuation of the very state of ignorance that jadids maligned. Realizing this aesthetic plan in Night and in his other works such as A Modern Woman, Cho’lpon celebrates the ignorance of his characters by reveling in the misunderstandings that result from it. Many of his characters, particularly the men, undergo epiphanies, but these epiphanies are ultimately fleeting and inconclusive, undermined by the irony and parody that the author employs. Though by the 1930s Cho’lpon most certainly intended to demonstrate in his work that he now supported Soviet ideology, we only see that support through his use of irony. He ironizes his presentation of jadids in the novel and parodies their literature, which necessitates doubt in Miryoqub’s conversion to jadidism. Ultimately, Night concludes in the same way as Cho’lpon’s “Someone’s Dream,” in which he first articulated his aesthetic. Just as the lyric persona remains in dream (i.e. ignorance) and is crushed by a tragic death, Zebi is crushed by the weight of the Russian state for a crime of which she had no knowledge. She does not awaken to a bright future, and even by the end of the trial in which she is convicted of murder, she does not fully understand what has happened to her. Whatever the second novel Day might have contained, Night fully accords with the prolongation of ignorance that is Cho’lpon’s aesthetic.
I hope that with this translation, new minds will begin to grapple with Central Asian literature and provide innovative