Maxmasharifova Shodiyabegim

A prospective specialist acquiring knowledge in Economics and Pedagogy

The Motif of Fear in Abdulla Qahhor’s Short Story “Daxshat”:

The Clash Between Psychology and Social Environment

Abstract

This article analyzes the short story “Daxshat” by the prominent Uzbek writer Abdulla Qahhor. In the work, the motif of fear is not presented merely as a narrative element, but as a manifestation of the violation of individual social rights and profound psychological suffering. The story is examined from the perspective of modern psychology, particularly through the theory of fear developed by Sigmund Freud. The literary-critical views of Ozod Sharafiddinov and Matyoqub Qo‘shjonov are also discussed in a scholarly and publicistic manner.

Keywords: Abdulla Qahhor, “Daxshat”, Unsin, motif of fear, social oppression, realism, cemetery.

Abdulla Qahhor entered Uzbek literature like “a ray of light.” Each of his short stories represents a small world; however, carrying the weight of this world requires considerable emotional and intellectual readiness from the reader. Despite their concise form, Qahhor’s stories possess deep psychological intensity.

As literary scholar Ozod Sharafiddinov noted:

“Qahhor turns his gaze to such layers of the human soul where the boundary between fear and courage, baseness and nobility, is thinner than a strand of hair.”

The image of Unsin in Abdulla Qahhor’s short story “Daxshat” exists precisely on this fragile psychological boundary. Analyzing Unsin’s inner experiences through the lens of modern psychology—specifically Sigmund Freud’s theory of fear—helps reveal the core essence of the work. Freud classified fear into three types: real fear, neurotic fear, and moral fear. In Unsin’s character, all three forms tragically collide.

Real Fear and the External Environment

According to Freud, real fear arises from a tangible danger in the external world. For Unsin, the nighttime cemetery, wild animals, or corpses represent real sources of danger. However, Qahhor’s artistic mastery lies in using real fear merely as a background element rather than the central focus. When Unsin enters the cemetery, his mind sends a signal to “escape,” yet social pressure and coercion shackle his movements and suppress this instinct.

Moral Fear and the Superego

Moral fear emerges from a person’s sense of responsibility toward their conscience and the moral norms imposed by society. Freud explains this phenomenon through the concept of the Superego. Unsin fears not the horror of the cemetery as much as Dodkho’s wrath and the violation of his honor and dignity. His tragedy lies in the fact that the Superego—social obligation—defeats his instinct for survival. Although he fears death, he trembles even more at the prospect of living in forced submission with Dodkho.

Neurotic Fear

The most critical moment in the story occurs when Unsin’s foot sinks into the mud and he imagines that he has stepped on a corpse. This episode is a classic example of neurotic fear as defined by Freud. Here, the threat does not originate from the external world but from the individual’s internal imagination. Under extreme emotional tension and panic, rational thinking collapses. Unsin’s unconscious fears are awakened, and reality is interpreted in a horrifying manner. As a result, the human psyche cannot withstand such pressure.

Regarding this scene, Ozod Sharafiddinov states:

“Unsin’s death is not merely a cardiac arrest, but the collapse of a human imagination that crashes into the terrifying wall it has created itself.”

Literary scholar Matyoqub Qo‘shjonov writes:

“It was not the cemetery that killed Unsin, but the remnants of outdated traditions that enslaved his will and the violation of human dignity that led him to this state.”

Conclusion

The motif of fear in Abdulla Qahhor’s “Daxshat” serves as a symbolic representation of a society in which personal freedom is suppressed. Through Unsin’s tragic death, the author exposes the ugly reality of his era and highlights the individual’s psychological loneliness. The story demonstrates that fear is not solely generated by external threats, but is intensified by inner powerlessness and social oppression.

In my view, for contemporary readers, this story stands as a profound moral lesson emphasizing the importance of protecting human dignity and liberating individuals from the shackles of fear and ignorance.

References

Qahhor, A. Selected Works. Tashkent: G‘afur G‘ulom Publishing House, 2010.

Sharafiddinov, O. The Difficult Path of Creativity. Tashkent: Literature and Art, 1980.

Qo‘shjonov, M. The Mastery of Abdulla Qahhor. Tashkent: Fan, 1988.

Freud, S. Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. (translated edition)

Hadaa Sendoo 

Children’s Prayer at Dawn 

I wake up from the dream

That lights our way home

I’ve lost my favorite schoolbag

And colored pencil

I asked myself sadly

If I had a sacred school

I will study hard. And I am

Still singing and dancing

If I had the wings of Angels

I’d fly to heaven

Perhaps, there, no bleeding

And the pain of the dawn

  …..

I Pray for the Silence of the Rivers 

My heart, this morning

With anxiety for someone or a place

Can I be the green wind

Over all countries

I’m living, today

I don’t feel happier than yesterday

I pray for the silence of the rivers

And the quiet night of the earth

Hadaa Sendoo is a world-renowned Mongolian poet, translator, and literary critic. He is considered one of the leading voices in contemporary poetry, and his work is a unique milestone in modern poetry worldwide. His work often explores the intersection of nature, nomadic traditions, and universal human suffering. Critics note his ability to blend traditional Mongolian subjects with modernist and avant-garde sensibilities. Sendoo’s poems have been translated into more than 40 languages. In 2012, at the Poetry Parnassus festival in London, where his poems were literally dropped by helicopter over the city as part of a “Rain of Poems” event. He has received numerous honors, including: Poet of the Millennium Award (2000). Mongolian Writers Union Prize (2009). World Peace Prize (2019). 

Meadow Mystic

Inside the meadow there was a stand of trees and inside there was the cool shade and whimsical winds sometimes made a sound through the branches. I stood there and rested, halfway through my sojourn exploring nature. There were times outside of there that blue butterflies were thriving and many grasshoppers bloomed, plus some spiders. 

Up above in the summers a blue sky often, but, if it turned and became overcast and that atmospheric energy entered the air, that sort of ‘before the storms’ feeling, well that was just as good as I wasn’t that far from the paths that led out and it was also an interesting change to feel that charge in the air. 

And in the four seasons, that area was a dutiful and true friend, for it at its base never wavered. I think I realize now that the truth of the truth of the truth of the real and actual truth is that that area became along the way a special and loved and loving destination, a marriage of sorts between a poet and the lands where the walking would help the poet go a symbolic and literal step more towards becoming a mystic. 

Spirit message. Intuition. Renewal of the mind, body, and spirit. self-healing. Kindness. Clarity. A structure out of regular psychological sets and more centred in the universal or cosmic. Society was literally and figuratively so far away in those moments, times with feet grounded on the earth, and say, the summer fields colourful or the spring universe beginning to bloom, but also the autumnal grounds with leaves or after, the wild winter, its snow resting upon the world’s reeds, branches, and pathways. Yes, it was a fine place to be and learn, to get ideas for poems, stories, and pictures. And to naturally expand consciousness. 

Sons of Turan

Soft winds caress the silent groves,
Along the roads thin pine rows rise.
A raven circles — distant envoy,
A lone horse wanders under open skies.

Here mountains stand and valleys widen,
Among a thousand lands on earth —
No place has ever been more precious,
No soil of greater sacred worth.

The ruins of forgotten cities,
Old fortresses of ancient days,
The lands once held by noble peoples —
Massagetae and Saka ways.

So many wars we fought for freedom —
No count can hold the tears we’ve known:
For land and honor, truth and homeland,
For sacred right to guard our own.

Here came the early Arab marches,
Met by lions proud and brave.
Here rode the khans of Genghis’ empire,
And blood was spilled in every wave.

Yet through the storms and burning ages,
Through iron will and destiny,
The sons of sacred Turan guarded
Their living flame of liberty.

From grief, from chains and bitter sorrow
Rose simple fighters, firm and strong.
Fathers and Jadids stood together,
Side by side where they belong.

Unbroken stands our spirit, rising,
High and steadfast through the years.
Wide-hearted, open, kind and noble —
The Uzbek people persevere.

Kholbekov Ozodbek Makhammatovich

The Bridge of Colors

It matters not the clay that shaped the jar,
nor the wind that blew through the flute of bone,
art is the thread, subtle yet well-known,
that binds all maps into one single star.
The hand that weaves, the voice that tells the tale,
belong to no shore, nor a single wall;
they are lights that guide through the future’s call
with rhymes of silk and silver’s trail.
Let the brush travel through paths of earth,
let the dance awaken the sleeping square,
for a statue is life that breathes the air,
erasing the hate and giving peace birth.
Peoples of the world, open every door:
let your neighbor’s song become your own way,
for art is the sun, the wine, oand the day
that joins our distant souls forevermore.

Fernando Josè Martínez Alderete

Mèxico

The Sowing of Silence

Peace is not born from the coldness of steel,
nor from signatures on paper, torn and hollow;
it grows in the furrow where wounds start to heal,
between the stranger and the friend we follow.
It is a language where borders are gone,
trading the rifle for the grain of wheat,
where hands that once fought, before the dawn,
now build the shelter, the bread, and the seat.
Let the walls of shadow and fear now fall,
let the echo of hate be lost in the gale,
for more strength is found in a finger’s call
that reaches for another, beyond the veil.
It matters not language, the faith, or the skin,
the earth is the map of a single heartbeat;
we are the lineage that lets grace in,
leaving the ghosts of the past in retreat.
Peace is the bridge that spans the abyss,
the table is set, the light on the face,
to find in the other a kinship like this:
that their home is our home, a shared holy space.

Fernando Josè Martínez Alderete

Mèxico

Dr. Fernando Martinez Alderete

Writer, poet, theater actor, radio producer. Born in Leon Guanajato Mexico on April 21, 1977, President of Mil Mentes por México in Guanajuato. Dr. HC, global leadership and literature.

His poems were published in more than 200 anthologies in fifteen countries around the world and he is author of ten books, of poetry, short stories and novels.

Moon-aphor

Wait, the moon is a big pizza piein the sky? I don’t think so. Man in the Moon, I never quite saw it.A dinner plate, a saucer, a heavenlybody. (I’d like one of those.) Mistaken for a lampposton a drunken stumble home. That’s more like it.An orb. A cue ball. At times a mere crescent,a meniscus, the Dreamworks logoof the boy fishing off its edge.The cutout in an outhouse door.A half moon doesn’t knowwhich way it’s headed,it’s useless in guiding me.The moon aligns with nothing.Planets can at least do thatfrom our perspective on Earth.Let’s face it, the moon is a symbol.Maybe a cymbal. That’s it.The moon is our soul.

Stephen Schwei is a Pushcart-nominated Houston poet with Wisconsin roots, published in Wax Poetry & Art, RFD Magazine, GetOutMag.com, Hidden Constellation, Borfski Press, and Table//Feast and is the winner of the 2023 Kenan Ince Memorial Prize in Poetry. He has published one volume of poetry, Bluebonnet Whispers and a collaboration, Catch Me at the Carnival. A gay man with three grown children and four wonderful grandchildren, who worked in Information Technology most of his life, he can be a mass of contradictions. Poetry helps to sort all of this out.  www.stephenschwei.com @steveschwei

the new axioms 

pocket calculated risk

You may also have recently noticed a conspicuous trend in an absolute surge of Netflix recommendations on your scroll or in your email box of content exploring plots of false allegations, frame jobs, deceitful accusers. Perhaps you can take a wild guess as to why that might be. No doubt it has at minimum a small something to do with an exponential hum of suggestion, implication, speculation, prevalent whispers, which has steadily increased in volume and urgency over the course of our lifetime, indeed has been exponentially, incrementally ramping up since our grandparents’ day, hell since before the talkies in the silent film era, back to the rosicrucian cavorting of Francis Bacon, until the shrill shrieking of pleas for justice, begging for prosecutions, wailing for the lost, raging for those who might still be saved has reached a veritably deafening fever pitch which threatens to drone out our ability to function as an organized society, and our willingness most pressingly to surrender selves dutifully, forego privacy and autonomy willingly thanks to a prevailing faith in the functionality of this farcical machine we inhabit and make for insignificant cogs in, but which lacking the cumulative combination of contributing blood and labor and their equivalency defined via capital the great mill stone ceases its requisite grinding, and that they cannot allow. So until we might be less expensively replaced by sex dolls, human dolls, artificial girlfriend experiences, until Boston Dynamics can replicate a suitably sniveling and groveling serf and a compliant, adaptable hostess, Bill Gates will have to keep his mosquito legions nominally in check. But those celebrities, politicians, movie stars, musicians, comedy writers, late night hosts, book club paragons, most of them have done things unsavory. Not the acts you thought couldn’t get any worse. Outrages ripped from the pages of the Brothers Grimm. From Edgar Allen Poe. From H. P. Lovecraft. From Stephen King most especially. 

in the z-space tracking stuff you never heard of

And despite your best attempts to dismiss and disregard you’re going to start hearing about it. You likely have begun hearing about it, and shall in time know more than you’d like to. And that’s not all. Because to further muddle and confuse matters, you may begin to discover that a handful of the most egregious preexisting assumptions of guilt you have spent years processing and reconciling yourself with were in fact among the vanishingly slim, nearly non-existent fraction of a percent of false allegations, of frame jobs, of deceitful hired accusers. This one in a thousand it’s important to recognize, who are laughably, preposterously, outlandishly overrepresented in media, yet in their actual cases (watch for this, and review with bias of hindsight as more illustrations slowly come to light) are presumed guilty immediately without due process, are vilified and smeared far and wide, are the subject of elaborate campaigns and prominent ‘documentary’ programming, of tabloid savaging and wholesale ostracism by the culture and its reining authorities. Now, when a universally revered daughter-marrying pedophilia advocate and enthusiast for consumption of human flesh can keep attracting a-list talent and producing laureled films, garnering the most prestigious honors (and on a parallel track political iterations receive standing ovations for their barbarousness, and have streets and libraries named after them) one wonders how such a permissive and accepting (of profound malevolence at least) industry could so roundly and definitively turn on, condemn and abandon a comrade no more guilty than the rest of their despicable club, while giving a pass in perpetuity to the vast majority for getting out of jail free with on every flamboyant high crime from strangulation to flashing a minor. I’ll tell you: they tried to interfere. Which is not permitted. The skinny, thus, is the patsies of these group efforts, presumably being too valuable alive as salable commodities to retire permanently – more acceptable where they might be enshrined with a profitable tourist attraction, provide a lucrative library of music for divvying to corporate bidders, be commodified to sell a great many dorm room posters and screen printed t-shirts – and/or holding some preventive trump card measures in place should they be heaved into traffic, say a video of underage victims of abuse in a secret holding facility beneath a famous museum, as well as when the retaliation for breaking some sworn oath requires visible humiliation and sadistic glorying in raking person over coals and reputation through the mud as a deterrent to others with some shred of conscience remaining who might be considering similar ill advised candidness, bright whistle brandishing ideas. So examples must be made, and all knowingly play their various perverse and hypocritical roles. That malicious world, perhaps more so than any other, does love a piñata. 

grimoire school

There is a further curious incentivizing element in that if or when the ruse comes to light the real string pullers donning people’s faces like Hannibal Lecter benefit doubly, can appropriate engineered precedent, cite their example, exploit such unjust martyrdom to build their future cases, introduce a liberal seeding of reasonable doubt. For how well they already know the vulnerabilities and exploits to that legal framework in their lowdown, dirty game of manufacturing consent and unscrupulously monopolizing popular perception, having explored each themselves. How can the public truly guarantee an accuser wasn’t hired for reputation assassinating? Is it certain the corrupt police, the final evolution of slave catchers, famous for fabricating evidence, losing exonerations, actively participating in violations of the elites, covering up after their misdeeds, framing innocent plausible parties, can we ever accept at face value the testimony of law enforcers famed for their completely immortal license, or coroners whose findings agree not whatsoever with independent subsequent auditing, who most recently are demonstrably staging deaths and swapping out bodies. 

bitcoin pizza underground

And the reporters, who lied confidently and knowingly, completely bamboozling us time and time again about shocking practices they were apparently not just aware of but hideously participating in, surely we cannot ever trust them again under any circumstances, can we? And then there’s science and history. What a delight to learn that a human trafficking, honeypot operating, morality compromising genocidal spy through an intricate network of publishing empires has been doing all in the planet’s assembled collective power to completely misinform humanity for generations through a devastating stranglehold on school textbooks, science journals, encyclopedias, atlases. Combine this with the irrefutable evidence that these very conspirators were (and so far afflicted platforms have furnished zero indications the capability and pattern in the slightest bit has relented) completely controlling Google, Wikipedia, 4chan, reigning over Reddit, and their cabal is completely rigging, quashing opposition and elevating sympathetic narratives to steer every platform of social media, which itself is a massive op to encourage users to supply exploitable intelligence details. Have a child? Perhaps you heard in America school photograph apparatuses are searching for new vendors, because the ubiquitous nationwide gold standard was being controlled by an island predator using the resulting images as a catalog for literal kidnapping and torture. That was happening, and is only one suckery tip of a single tentacle of this octopus of pervasive treacheries. They will age you years coming to grips with. Verily, how can we be expected to believe again?

magical realism ghosts of christmas

Jerome Berglund has worked as everything from dishwasher to paralegal, night watchman to assembler of heart valves. Currently residing in New Orleans, previously having lived in the Longfellow neighborhood of Minneapolis which was locus to the George Floyd protests, his writing as often as possible strives to engage with significant social and economic concerns of our day that align with missions of decolonization and abolition across prevailing institutions. He has been involved in grassroots activism for the good causes of Occupy Los Angeles, Standing Rock, and the Black Lives Matter movement, supported outreach efforts promoting ecosocialism. Many haiku, haiga and haibun he’s written have been exhibited or are forthcoming online and in print, most recently in bottle rockets, Frogpond, and Presence.