Night and Day

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Abdulhamid Sulaymon o’g’li Cho’lpon. Night and Day

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Central Asian Literatures in Translation

Series Editor: Rebecca Ruth Gould (University of Birmingham)

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I’ve been reading my fortune and “unhappiness” keeps coming up. Not promising. He’s going to take my Jakob [Maria’s name for Miryoqub— C. F.] away! Is there anything worse than this culture? That cultured sart does nothing but talk from morning to evening.

As is common in Cho’lpon’s treatment of women, here Maria exhibits a fickleness that undermines readers’ impression of her character, but this time it also undermines Xo’jaev’s confidence in Maria’s cultural superiority. Central Asian jadids often condemned Muslim women as ignorant for their engagement with superstitions and magic. Ironically, the Russian woman Maria’s fortune-telling with her cards is just the kind of “backward” behavior that a jadid like Xo’jaev would have condemned in Muslim women. Likewise, Xo’jaev rants about the vices of Tashkent, among them prostitution, as instruments that deprive Muslims of their agency, and yet he praises Maria, who, unbeknownst to him, is a former prostitute. Cho’lpon’s support of his jadid character and Miryoqub’s conversion to jadidism is hardly without irony and ambiguity.

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