In memory of Shamshad Abdullaev, the world-class Uzbek poet whom few knew | Art and Culture

Shamshad Abdullaev’s name was a confluence of cultures.

A Persian first name (“a pine tree”), an Arabic surname (“A servant of God”) and a Slavic “ev” ending that simply means “of.”

This combination was possible in the former heart of the Great Silk Road, in former Soviet Uzbekistan, a Central Asian nation once associated with political cleansing and child labor in the cotton industry.

With the looks of an aging Italian movie star and the demeanor of a refined aristocrat, Abdullaev, who died of cancer on Tuesday at 66, was a poet and essayist who wrote in Russian.

His artistic output is modest: several small books of poetry and essays, and a film script that never became a film, but with which he was able to buy an apartment in the eastern Uzbek city of Ferghana in the late 1980s.

His poems lacked rhyme and steady meter, and yet his life and work help answer some of the most difficult questions facing an artist in the world today:

Is art responsible for wars and imperialism?

How do you decolonize your culture when you write in the language of your former colonizer?

As the war between Russia and Ukraine enters its third year, how far should you go in rejecting Russian language and culture?

And what if this language is the artistic instrument of an apolitical man who despised autocracy, did not have a single drop of Russian blood and was criticized for not following Russian poetic traditions?

Ferghana

For those who know about Central Asia from the former Soviet Union, the word ‘Ferghana’ is mainly associated with the Valley of 16 Million People, the most fertile and densely populated stretch of land between China, Iran and Russia.

Ferghana was the focal point of the Great Silk Road that brought together, fused and spread technologies, cultures and religions.

Ferghana, unevenly divided between Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, also became the scene of post-Soviet political tensions and massacres.

But Abdullaev made the name ‘Ferghana’ – that of the valley and town of the same name where he was born in 1957 – associated with an unusual cultural hybrid of his writings.

In the Soviet 1970s, Abdullaev transplanted forbidden trends of Western modernism into Russian verse:

‘The afternoon – spring wound – with its lilac skin
cracked along a fold, reveals a path to fruition,
the nest feels heavier, and death
do not immerse in a jar of iridescent honey”

(from “Midday, 1975”, translated by Alex Cigale)

‘The Eastern Star’

Such introverted escapism was at odds with the official tone and tenor of Soviet literature, and only Ferghana’s remoteness from Moscow kept Abdullaev under the radar of communist apparatchiks and secret services who recruited more politicized writers – and future Nobel laureates – Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Josef Brodsky expelled. of the USSR.

Meanwhile, Ferghana, a quiet, sleepwalking city, where giant plane trees covered the apartment buildings from merciless sunshine, became a cradle of unusual art.

Enver Izmaylov, a musician born into a family of exiled Crimean Tatars, developed a “two-handed” style of guitar playing that would make him a sensation at European jazz festivals.

Artist Sergey Alibekov combined European oil paintings with Central Asian imagery and created a cartoon that dared to depict the work of the human mind.

Abdullaev’s works were not published until after the perestroika reforms that opened the Soviet Union to the world – and vice versa.

In 1991, shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Abdullaev began contributing to a minor cultural sensation. For four years he was poetry editor of the literary magazine Zvezda Vostoka (“The Eastern Star”).

The magazine once published banned works by Western modernists – in addition to the revised translation of the Quran, works by Sufi theologians, Chinese Taoist philosophers and the Nobel Prize-nominated Syrian poet Adonis.

Russian novelist Sergey Spirikhin landed in the Uzbek capital Tashkent to write a ‘mocking novel’ by recording what happened to a colony of street performers within a day – and had the work published in the Zvezda Vostoka.

Meanwhile, Abdullaev became a star among unorthodox and underground artists in former Soviet republics, while being rejected by more conservative writers.

“In the 1980s, Shamshad was already writing in his own newly invented language that was angrily rejected by all traditionalists of Russian literature,” says Daniil Kislov, an acolyte of Abdullaev who eventually became editor of the influential news website Ferghana.ru and a central newspaper. Asia analyst, told me.

In 1994 he received a prize named after the pioneering Russian poet Andrej Belyi – a counterculture prize in the form of a glass of vodka and an apple to be consumed in front of the jury and the cheering crowd of literati.

Abdullaev, who barely touched alcohol, had to force himself to “accept” the prize.

The magazine’s circulation rose to an astronomical 250,000 copies, most of which were sold in the now independent Russia and the Baltic republics.

My friend and mentor

Then I met and befriended Abdullaev – and he immediately convinced me to translate several poems from English and Italian. I was a 19-year-old student of English literature and was happy to see my name in a ‘serious’ magazine.

Later, after I got an office job, I typed dozens of his poems to be emailed to his publishers and friends thousands of miles away.

“The center of the world is nowhere and everywhere,” Abdullaev told me more than once, proving that world-class literature can be forgotten in a remote corner of Central Asia.

But a groundbreaking literary magazine was not something Uzbekistan’s authoritarian President Islam Karimov could tolerate. In 1995 he ordered the entire editorial staff of Zvezda Vostoka to be dismissed.

Abdullaev became an unemployed poet who lived modestly on the edge of poverty but traveled regularly to literary festivals in the former Soviet Union, Europe and the United States.

Like hundreds of like-minded artists who eschew state sponsorship, media fuss and politics, he symbolically redeemed the original sin of high art.

High art requires decades of dedication to an art form – music, literature, painting – and centuries of tradition.

It thrives in prosperous countries that are often empires – and often condones the blood shed by their rulers.

The world’s best-known first ‘author’ was poet Enheduanna, whose father, Sargon of Akkad, unified the empire of the Middle East – and appointed his daughter high priestess of the moon god Nanna.

The Roman Emperor Augustus showered Virgil, whose long poem Aeneid became a focal point of Latin literature, with gold plundered from throughout the Mediterranean.

For many Iranians, Shahnameh, an epic by Ferdowsi, embodies their national spirit. But it was paid for by Mahmud Gaznavi, who drowned what is now Pakistan and northern India in blood after dozens of attacks.

However, artists like Vincent van Gogh, the itinerant Japanese haiku master Matsuo Basho, the French “damn” poet Charles Baudelaire and, yes, Abdullaev, never wrote paeans to rulers.

They never crawled into the halls of power, never accepted rich commissions and state pensions – and paid for their honesty with their lives:

“The song of a mockingbird permeates the taste of black cherry
especially here with father and mother
yard where the question first appeared
and the answer is heard in unison –
the freshness of the disappearing provinces
the end of a century then
the final stage of each microcosm resembles a prolonged dawn.”

(“Family”, translated by Alex Cigale)