Abstract
Lenin’s argument that all fiction is political still influences the way the Uzbek government considers writers, argues novelist
Replacing monuments on the same pedestal is in fact a metaphor for the whole process of replacing communist ideology with the ideology of mustaqillik (independence) over the last 25 years. Though on the surface the Uzbek authorities tried very hard to show their resolve to get rid of the communist past, what they built instead stands on the same foundations.
Lenin’s argument that all literature is political still defines the Uzbek authorities’ attitudes and the way writers themselves see their role in society today.
Bolshevik ideology that defines the role of literature is based on Lenin’s articles, written between 1906 and 1911, with the main one being Party Organisation and Party Literature. There he wrote: “Down with non-partisan writers! Down with literary supermen! Literature must become part of the common cause of the proletariat, ‘a cog and a screw’ of one single great social democratic mechanism set in motion by the entire politically conscious vanguard of the entire working class. Literature must become a component of organised, planned and integrated social democratic party work.” Lenin continued: “Publishing and distributing centres, bookshops and reading-rooms, libraries and similar establishments must all be under party control.”
Rejecting previous literature as hypocritical and bourgeois, Lenin finally proclaimed his vision of, “a truly free one that will be openly linked to the proletariat”. Everything beyond that was obviously severely censored.
When I first read this article in my twenties, I was horrified, because my writing was not “openly linked to the proletariat” at all. It was about myself and it took 10 years for my first collection of “decadent” poems, Garden, to be published in Tashkent, in 1987. My book of poetry got through the censors, because it was cushioned with a preface by an acclaimed, but liberal writer, who argued that even Soviet poetry needed some whispering voices alongside it, like the background cries heard in bazaars. On top of that, my smart and cunning editor added titles to my poems such as, To the Great Patriotic Widows, though what I had written had nothing to do with war or patriotism.
CREDIT: Alex Green
A celebration in Tashkent’s Lenin Square, Uzbekistan, for the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution in 1967. The Lenin monument was removed in 1992
CREDIT: akg-images/Sputnik
A hundred years after Lenin, the first president of independent Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov, in an article devoted to the role of literature in society, also rejected the previous epoch’s writing, this time Uzbek Soviet literature. He said: “It should be noted that most of the writers were brought up by the Soviet era. For many years, they worked under that dominant ideology. But the truth is, though many of them seemingly approved of the ideas of the communist regime, in their hearts they did not accept those ideas.”
Talking about the role of writers and their work in the new Uzbekistan, however, he nearly repeated Lenin’s maxim about the relationship between literature and society. He wrote: “Since our writers have assumed the great, difficult and complex responsibility of raising, through their talents, the consciousness and outlook, the cultural level of the people, it is for them, first of all, vitally important that they feel profoundly their civic responsibility towards the nation, like a child in front of parents.” Once again, what doesn’t fit into this definition is ruthlessly censored.
Remember what I said about the replacement globe on the pedestal: “A spectre is haunting the globe, the spectre of Lenin?”
As in any traditional society, it is literature that has played the role of public consciousness in Uzbekistan, and the same literature prepared the ground for the creation of the new mustaqillik ideology. However, after this ideology was adopted by the state, Uzbek literature found itself in disarray. The shrewdest writers and poets turned out to be the ones who had, in Soviet times, written poems and novels about the party and Lenin, and who then found it easy to bring their work in line with the new ideology by replacing the party with the nation, and Lenin with Amir Timur (the great medieval conquerer fictionalised in Christopher Marlowe’s play as Tamburlaine), or at worst with the president. They found that this literature was, and still is, in demand. The new lyrics of the Uzbek national anthem are the epitome of this, with its melody left unchanged from the Soviet time, just like how the monument of the globe in the newly named Independence Square still stands on the same foundations.
It has been more difficult for writers and poets with a literary-nationalist streak who had feelings of dissent during the Soviet era. The subject of their dissidence has now become a state ideology, therefore some of them were recruited from the ranks of the opposition to the current ruling party, writing books like Feeling of Motherland: an Encyclopaedia of Uzbekness. A few others, for whom literature was a higher notion than current politics, were forced to emigrate, like Muhammad Solih, Nurulloh Muhammed Raufxon, Yusuf Juma, Xoldor Vulqon and Jahongir Muhammad, or go into internal exile like the late poet Rauf Parfi, the novelist Salomat Vafo and the poet known simply as Shukrullo.
So the process of creating and implementing the ideology of independence in Uzbekistan has been pursued with more utilitarian and pragmatic goals, and in general repeated the communist totalitarian system of ideological governance. If you replace, let’s say, the emblematic figure of Lenin with Amir Timur, or the idea of communism with the idea of nationalism, the philosophy of dialectical materialism with Sufism, the function of these elements in society and the state remain essentially the same. Their essence is the ideology of total control from top down and writers and poets are still seen as “cogs and screws” in the hands of those who are in power. Thus, the famous words of the writer Vladimir Mayakovsky: “Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live forever”, ring true, hidden like a ghost behind the globe with at least one country on it.