JllUBECKA (CESKO-(RANSKA SPOLEOlOST, PRAHA)
TWO IRANIANS IN MODERN TAJIK POETRY
n Central Asia, the rise of the Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Re• I public after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the so-called Bukhara Revolu• tion in 1920, and finally the national division in 1924, all of these events marked the beginning of a significant shift in the development of local culture.~ and especially literature. Until then the term Tajik language and literature were almost unknown. Tajiks lived there, using the Persian language in talking and writing. In the classical and old poetry, there was the word tajik known as the contrary to the term tork. 1 The scholar Sadriddin Ayni (1878-1954), the fore• most personaliry of modern Tajik literature and scholar, also talked of the lan• guage as forsi and Persian poetry. But there were certain indications of a some• what different Central Asian literature in the Persian language during the last centuries and this was what the Tajik Soviet literary history leaned on.2 After the creation of the Bukhara Republic, and later on the relatively dis• tinct Tajik Republic,3 the term zaboni tojik,"' started to be used and the year 1926 saw the edition of the anthology Namunai adabiyoti tojik by Sadriddin Ayni the aim of which was to prove the thousand-year existence of the Tajiks and their culture in Central Asia, in the defence against pan-Turkic attacks of Uzbek and some Tajik ideologists. In the subsequent development, especially af• ter the Second World War, large university textbooks of the Tajik grammar and a number of monographs on the individual linguistic branches were prepared: Tajik phonetics, syntax, lexicography, along with two-language and explanatory
1 - E.g. Sa OM, XXII n.s. (LXXXIII), I, 2003 30 J/RJBECKA dictionaries etc. There are also high-school textbooks of the independent Tajik Literature which has the most important characteristics, i.e. a language of its own with its own grammar, the lexicon partly differing from the Iranian or Af• ghan Dari-Persian, and even its own script.5 Also the thematic repertory is dif• ferent from that in Iran or the themes of Dari literature in Afghanistan. There is the Union ofTajik writers with a couple of hundreds of members, and literature is cultivated, with poetry still prevailing, but with a marked increase of belles• lettres. Hundreds of collections of poems, collections of short stories, hundreds of novels and many dramas have been published and read or seen in theatres. The inhabitants of the country relatively soon reached almost full literacy. The price they had to pay for all of this was the duty to create a literature "Soviet in contents and national in form". Fortunately there was a rich basis formed by the thousand-year classical and old Persian literature as well as folk poetry. The end of the second millennium brought about significant changes in this aspect; e.g. the Constitution of the (relatively) independent Republic of Tajikistan from 1989 states as the state language tojiki (forsi). In this Persian literature written in Central Asia in the 19th and the begin• ning of the 20th century, we may see hints and innovations in the writings of Ahmad Donis, Fitrat, Munzim and some early works of Sadriddin Ayni. After the installation of the Soviet regime, this literature had to cope with the pres• sure from outside, the aforementioned nonsensical claim of the Panturks that were no Tajiks but only tajikized Uzbeks. The Namune-ye adabiyit-e tijik quoted above (Moscow 1926) exemplified the thousand-year literary tradition in the Persian (Tajik) language in Central Asia. Another danger, fortunately also transient, was presented by local ultrarevolutionaries asserting that all clas• sical and old poetry and literature was "feudal lumber", an anachronism which has to bee forgotten, and that it was necessary to go a quite different way. In this respect, too, the reason gained victory, a respected personality proving the aberration of this ideology by his writings being Abolqasem Lahuti - or Abul• qosim Lohuti in Tajikistan. Lahuti (1887-1957) was an Iranian from Kermanshah, a revolutionary poet in confrontation with Iranian government since his youth, which was reflected in his poetry. After twofold emigration and the threat of death penalty for head• ing the suppressed Tabriz insurrection against Qajar dynasty in 1922, he left for the then Soviet Azerbaijan and then Moscow. He lived there till his death in 1957. He wrote many books of poetry, mostly lyrics of revolutionary and so• cially oriented contents, but also love poetry. Among his writings also lyrico-epic poems, of social-didactic contents may be found. In 1935 Lahuti visited Prague; his poem Europe was then printed in a Czech translation in the daily press, along with an interview. 6 Remarkable is the fact that this long poem has not been in- 5 - Like all other countries of the then Soviet Central Asia, also Tajikistan took over in 1930 the Roman script instead the Arabic one. After ten years, as ordered by Stalin, the Latin script was re• placed by the Cyrillic which has remained in Tajikisran in use till today. 6 - "A Persian Soviet poet in Prague", Hald noviny, 111/193 (1935), p. 4. Evropa (Europe), transl. by J. Prokop, Rudi prdvo, XVl/292 (1935), p. 6.