Paper long abstract:

In an unintentionally humorous 2017 musical drama, Dildagi dog' (A Stain in the Heart), Uzbek writer Qo'chqor Norqobil's characters proclaim a sentiment common among Soviet and post-Soviet intelligentsia: the sacred nature of the canon and the text. The play prognosticates the catastrophic results of Uzbek youths' obsession with texting, social networks, and digital life. The unwitting minors, tempted by the promises of online scammers, go abroad and end up joining ISIS in order to invade Uzbekistan and establish an Islamic State - all while singing and dancing. The drama concludes on the eve of invasion with a scene outside of time in which an authorial mouthpiece announces the moral of the play: today's youth must put down their phones and return to physical texts, the classics of the Uzbek and Western canons, because they permit a knowledge of morality and God not found in other sources.

In her monograph on the Russian Socialist Realist novel, Katerina Clark (2000) argues that the texts of the Stalinist Soviet Union realized as ritual the Marxist-Leninist theory of history. Through their hagiographic lionization of socialist heroes, Russian Soviet novels mimic Christian narratives of contact with the divine. Norqobil's play, however, is part of a tradition of Uzbek drama that precedes the 1930s canonization of Socialist Realism. In this paper, I argue that Islamic reformers in pre- and early Soviet Central Asia constructed their dramas, their favorite medium for the dissemination of their reform ideas, and subsequently their other texts as sacred sites. These reformers' plays dramatize the process by which Muslims in sedentary Central Asia commonly underwent revelatory experiences. This sacralization of Uzbek texts anticipated and conformed to the ritual nature of the Russian Socialist Realist novel, but the Uzbek experience demonstrates that multilingual Socialist Realism empowered and disseminated several competing idioms of the text as sacred site.

Paper long abstract:

Recalling his visits to the Soviet Union from the 1930s to the 1950s, the Iranian literary scholar Sa'id Nafisi remarked that "they give great importance to the book, and I have no doubt that no city in the world has as many bookstores as Moscow. There's no doubt that it has larger printing runs of books than all the countries in the world." He, and other Iranian visitors to Moscow and Central Asia, were particularly impressed by Soviet editions of classical Persian and Turkic texts—the lavishly illustrated Russian translations and lovingly reproduced manuscript facsimiles produced for series such as Academia and Literary Masterpieces [Literaturnye pamiatniki]. Soviet "Eastern" writers contrasted such bibliophilia with the book-burnings of fascist Europe, making it a basis for the Soviet claim to be the leading defenders of World Culture.

The circulation of such books for Soviet audiences was relatively limited, and the Stalinist project of world literature manifested differently before a broader public, in textbook anthologies and cheaper editions, often translated more literarily than philologically. Editions also varied for different language communities: a Soviet Turkic edition of a Chaghatay text or a Tajik edition of a Persian text involved a different menu of choices for prestige or mass editions. B. Venkat Mani has recently proposed "borrowing privileges" as a synecdoche for modeling the ways that institutions of book production and distribution produce the idea and reality of world literature, under conditions of unequal access. The unequal access to literature produced by censorship, samizdat/tamizdat, and central control of print runs has long been part of the mythology of Soviet Russian dissident culture, but there has been no practical examination of the role of "borrowing privileges" in Soviet multilingual mass culture. This paper provides a preliminary examination of the scholarly, prestige, and mass editions of "Eastern" classics published during the Stalin period.

Paper long abstract:

In 1873 the Russian Empire conquered the Khanate of Khiva, the last independent Central Asian state to fall to Russia during the nineteenth century. The conquest completed Russia's physical expansion into Central Asia. The Khivan campaign was politically and symbolically important: the new acquisition "filled in" the map of Russian imperial holdings in Central Asia; and, because Russia had tried and failed twice before to take Khiva, the territory had acquired a reputation as impenetrable, inscrutable, and deadly. This paper will examine that reputation and, in particular, how imaginative literary engagements with the desert landscape surrounding Khiva negotiated both the Romantic Orientalist tropes Russian literature had inherited from its Caucasian encounter and the realist mode that Turkestan writers in the 1870s imported from the Russian heartland.

I focus on Nikolai Karazin's 1876 novel, Two-Legged Wolf (Dvunogii volk), which gives a fictional account of the Russian conquest of Khiva, with an eye both to real historical developments in Russian Turkestan and to the region's meaning for Russian imperial literary and imaginative culture. I argue that the novel invests the desert around Khiva with symbolic, but shifting, meaning. Where Karazin first envisions the territory as a dangerously empty space, devoid of life-sustaining elements and liable to consume whatever enters it, he comes to portray that same space as available and open rather than dangerous. This vision of available desert space, akin to the blank space on imperial maps that signified pre-conquest Khiva, ultimately helped prepare the Russian imperial imagination to see Central Asia as a space appropriate for colonial settlement. Ultimately, I argue, Karazin presents a vision of a "domesticated" Turkestan nearly 20 years before Russian civilians settled the region.

Paper long abstract:

A prominent artist of the late Soviet period, Anuar Alimzhanov had always been fascinated with immense ethnographic compendium. The Kazakh poet wrote with a thorough knowledge of imperial era erudition. He listed its works and annotated them, collating materials relevant to the Kazakh tradition, and then wove this scholarship into his art. There are references throughout to the compilations of figures like Vladimir Dal', A.I. Levshin, and Petr Semenov, a cartographer and statistician expert in enumerating difference and in indexing Eurasian peoples, plants, and insects. Alimzhanov made similar allusions to Vasilli Radlov as well as to Grigorii Potanin, the latter having spent the last decades of the nineteenth century inventorying botanical species as part of survey missions to Mongolia and Tibet.

This fascination with ethnography was not fortuitous. Alimzhanov's effort to sift through the classifications of the imperial era was an attempt to come to terms with the genealogy of his present and with the tangled history of discarded and altered classifications that in some sense shaped Soviet civilization. His art endeavored to make sense of the sediment of taxonomies in the steppe across which the Kazakh SSR sprawled, a geography that was layered with ethnographic, botanical, and linguistic categorizations. He wrote with this inheritance of paper on his mind and while surrounded by gigantic tomes of Soviet erudition like the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, which issued its final volume in 1978. The latter assorted the entirety of the regime's heritages into bounded ethnic geographies while detailing the flora, fauna, and geological characteristics specific to each. Ethnic order was never far removed from the natural order of things in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. Its entry on the Kazakh SSR listed "155 species of mammals and 480 species of fish" as well as early artistic remnants such as "cliff totem images of animals… and earthenware vessels with geometric designs applied by carving, tooling, and stamping."

A reflection on the lineage of this paper empire, his art was also a complex, indeterminate reflection of it. His efforts to make sense of categorizations also reinforced the syntax and grammar of the classificatory heritages he examined. He at times undermined and at others mimicked traditions that imagined it conceivable to create a book consonant with human difference and the multiplicity of existing things. Alimzhanov also envisioned tabulating sprawling realities in minute detail and finding "the ethnic equivalent of Linnaeus's pistils and stamens."