Central Asia

Overview

Samarkand and Bukhara were capitals of Persian long before Tehran, and Rudaki, born near Samarkand in the ninth century, is held to be the father of Persian poetry. The Turkic peoples carried their epics by voice into the twentieth century: the Kyrgyz Manas, which a single reciter can perform for days, was written down only from 1856. The Soviet period imposed Cyrillic, created academies and studios, and set down in writing what had not been, at the price of close control over what could be said. The written word arrived here with the state that imposed it.

What circulates

Russian remains the language in which these literatures were translated and circulated, and many authors wrote in both; Chingiz Aitmatov published in Kyrgyz and in Russian. Persian links Tajikistan to Iran and Afghanistan across borders, but the alphabet divides them, Cyrillic on one side, Arabic on the other.

Limits of this grouping

The borders of these six countries were drawn between 1924 and 1936 by Soviet power, which parcelled mixed populations into national republics: Bukhara and Samarkand, Tajik-speaking cities, lie in Uzbekistan. Afghanistan, never Soviet, appears here through language and history rather than through that map.

Works cited

• PoetryMunis ul-ushshoqShermuhammad Munis · 1814not translated into EnglishThe court of Khiva at the beginning of the nineteenth century, where the khan keeps poets who are at the same time his chroniclers and his water-masters.Literature
• PoetryАлтын кызDzhoomart Bokonbaev · 1933not translated into EnglishA Kyrgyz poem of the thirties, later brought to the stage as a musical drama.Literature
• NarrativeБаёноти сайёҳи ҳиндӣAbdurauf Fitrat · 1912not translated into EnglishA Bukharan student settled in Istanbul writes to awaken the emirate, which the Jadid reformists want to modernise.Literature