Understanding Cho’lpon

They say that if a scientist creates some world-shaking discovery, then in order to make the people understand it, he must bring this discovery down from the heights of thought to the ground of everyday life, translating it from the language of abstract and complex formulas into the language of familiar notions and simple concepts.In art, however, the opposite is true.The poet also makes world-shaking discoveries — he creates a beautiful world filled with unique colors, enchanting radiance, magical meanings, and treasured wisdom. However,to comprehend and convey this world, it cannot be simplified or translated into ordinary, mundane speech. When we try to change it, the beauty vanishes; the charm of the work is lost, and those poetic lines that just now sent tremors through your soul turn into powerless chains of words… In order to comprehend the discovery created by the poet, a person must, without fail, rise to the very height of that discovery. Only when the person’s heart beats in unison with the poet’s heart, only when the person’s heart, too, thirsts for the refinement within the poet’s heart, only when it throws open its doors to beauty as the author’s heart does — only then can one perceive the supreme beauty that has been revealed. And this, indeed, is an exceedingly difficult task.

Of course, not everyone attains the fortune of rising to the heights to which the poet has ascended. After all, although the notion of “the people” is frequently invoked, it never signifies a force that is equal and whole in every respect. There are always the people, the crowd, the common folk, and the wise…Usually, it is only those whose hearts are awake, who thirst for truth and beauty — the wise — who are able to perceive the world of refinement created by the poet, and they in turn make the heedless aware of its beauties. In this way, the beauty created by poets becomes the property of the people and serves the elevation of their spiritual world. Unfortunately, as has been said above, this process is by no means an easy one — how many poets have there been who passed their lives lamenting that they were not understood, complaining of being unappreciated, suffering from the lovelessness of their contemporaries?! Even a poet like Pushkin, in a number of his poems, called those unable to approach the street of beauty the “common rabble”(“crowd’”), and expressed his disdain toward them. The “Marxist” literary scholars who once called Pushkin the “great poet of the people,” however, were deeply vexed by such “skepticism” and “arrogance toward the people,” for they could not fit it into the mold of “class character.” This was not difficult to explain — it would have sufficed simply to acknowledge the truth that “not everyone is granted the fortune to ascend to the divine abodes of beauty.”

Abdulhamid Sulaymon og‘li Cho‘lpon (Choʻlpon; 1897–1938) was a leading Uzbek poet and translator of the early 20th century) was among those great poets who were capable of creating — and indeed created — a unique and unparalleled world of poetry. He began his literary activity in 1914, but his flight soared in the 1920s. Especially between 1920 and 1927, Cho‘lpon’s inspiration gushed forth like a vibrant spring, surged like a storm overflowing its banks — in addition to three poetry collections, he created numerous poems, stories, articles, and essays, wrote dozens of dramatic works, and enriched our literature with a series of masterful translations. These works provided the basis for his extraordinarily high recognition.Particularly, some literary critics abroad tried to determine the essence of his creativity with fairness and objectivity.

        They assessed Cho‘lpon as passionate and, at the same time, extremely sensitive, delicate-hearted and therefore, perhaps unsurprisingly, a fearless artist. In their view, Cho‘lpon could never imagine himself as being separate from the people, apart from the life and spiritual world of his contemporaries for whom he served as a poetic source of inspiration. All the tones of Cho‘lpon’s lyricism emerge precisely from this circumstance. Now, let us take a look at the fate of this great poet. Cho‘lpon, who deserves to be the pride of any world literature, who in any cultured society would be recognized as a divinely gifted genius, revered as a “master” and “teacher,” — what kind of destiny did he encounter?

          It is clearly known that this poet, who “could not even imagine himself apart from the people, separated from the life and spiritual world of his contemporaries,” was subjected to condemnation for nearly seventy years. During this period, there was no slander that was not cast upon his name; a kind of competition in denouncing and humiliating him reached its peak. In hundreds of articles, books, and lectures, he was branded with labels such as “bourgeois poet,” “Jadid,” “ideologically corrupt,” “singer of the basmachi,” “nationalist,” “counter-revolutionary,” “a fool who did not understand the October Revolution,” “an alien element poisoning the mind of youth,” “enemy of the people,” and countless other curses. Not for one year, not for ten years — but for almost seventy years!

           This rises a question: could it really be that throughout all those years, among a people as numerous as the Uzbeks, not a single enlightened person could be found who truly understood Cho‘lpon, who grasped that he was a genuinely great poet, and who was not afraid to proclaim this truth? Could it really be that our people are so ungrateful as to fail to appreciate the stream of water flowing right before them? Could it be that our people are so blind and deaf before beauty? A profoundly difficult and complex question. For in the Soviet era, we had become accustomed to speaking of the people only in vague, pompous, high-sounding phrases — the people are wise, the people are great, the people are magnanimous, the people are creative, the people are the builders, and so forth…

          Yet to say — or even to suggest — that the people’s thinking might be limited, that their cultural level might be lacking, that they might fail to honor their own true sons, was impossible. Regardless of whether such statements were just or unjust, they would be deemed disrespectful to the people, slander against their name. And yet, Cho‘lpon, Abdulla Qodiriy, Fitrat, Usmon Nosir, Habib Abdulla…(and how many more great figures could we recall, whose lives unfolded amid tragedy!) — their lives, their fates, their tragedies all took place before the eyes of the people! But the people, as though their mouths were filled with ashes, remained utterly silent, stood by as mere spectators — not only silent spectators, but at times, failing to grasp the essence of the matter, knowingly or unknowingly, they would applaud, and with choked voices shout, “Death to the nationalists!” Yes — their eyes bloodshot with rage, their mouths spitting foam, they would scream in frenzy. And alas, in those moments, not a single brave soul rose up to say, “Hey, brothers! What are you doing? These are flowers of the nation! These are the heroes who sacrifice their lives for the nation!” Yes, this is a fact — an undeniable truth. However, despite this bitter truth, one cannot quite bring oneself to say that “throughout seventy years not a single person among our people was capable of understanding Cho‘lpon.” For indeed, though very few, there were such brave souls. Alongside Boymirza Hayit, whose article we cited earlier, figures such as Zaki Validi — a prominent leader of Tatar-Bashkir culture — Vali Kayumkhan, one of the leaders of the Uzbek émigrés, Dr. Ibrahim Yorkin, who went to study in Berlin in the 1920s and remained there, and others, expressed the highest of opinions about Cho‘lpon. They regarded him as one of the most talented artists of the 20th century. However, the reality is that all of them voiced these opinions while living abroad, and due to the towering, impenetrable iron wall that stood between our socialist homeland and the outside world, their words never reached us. So what about within our own country? Was there any sincere assessment, any warm word said about Cho‘lpon here? Yes, even here such views were expressed. There were times when Cho‘lpon’s works were welcomed warmly by critics, and they were met with positive responses.

          The first scholar to express warm thoughts about Cho‘lpon in the press was Zarif Bashariy. He was originally from Tatarstan, who lived in Uzbekistan during the 1920s, wrote many articles in Uzbek, published stories, made translations, actively participated in the debates of that time, and even compiled an anthology of modern Uzbek literature, which he had published in Kazan in 1929. On May 4, 1923, Zarif Bashariy published a review of Cho‘lpon’s first collection Awakening (Uyg‘onish) in the newspaper Turkiston. At the very beginning of the review, he wrote: “Comrade Cho‘lpon is one of the foremost among recent Uzbek poets, and being truly worthy of being called a poet, his poems can and should be examined and critiqued through the lens of true literature and poetry.” He then describes Cho‘lpon as “a poet of genuine heart and feeling”—that is, a sensitive lyricist—and supports this idea with illustrative examples. Through his analysis, the critic highlights the vivid imagery in Cho‘lpon’s poetry, the depth of emotions, and the poet’s high mastery in word usage.

         Another critic, Vadud Mahmud, in his review of the collection Buloqlar (Springs), wrote that “a new coat has been put on contemporary Uzbek literature” and revealed that the one who had clothed it in this coat was Cho‘lpon himself. He reflected on the artistic qualities of the Buloqlar collection. Quoting from the poem The Death of Labor, the critic confirmed that “so much poetry, so much awakening melody” is present in it. At the same time, he expressed the view that “the poet vividly and movingly depicts the grief of the nation, the groaning souls of slaves, and the angels who weep in their hearts, consisting of the mothers and young women of the East. Although Vadud Mahmud allowed himself a touch of rhetorical exaggeration in this passage, it can be said that he penetrated quite deeply into the essence of Cho‘lpon’s poetry.

In 1924, two issues of the newspaper Zarafshon published articles titled Young Uzbek Poets and Cho‘lpon. The author, Abdurahmon Sa’diy, examined Cho‘lpon’s work in considerable detail and described the poet with a very brief characterization: “He burns and he makes others burn.” The article also argued, with supporting evidence, that Cho‘lpon was “truly a romantic poet of the heart (a lyricist).”

Similarly, albeit in a very brief form, Abdulla Qodiriy in his short foreword to Cho‘lpon’s book Secrets of Dawn rejected the reproaches circulating in the press that labeled the poet as “a weeping poet.” Qodiriy argued that while tears frequently appeared in Cho‘lpon’s verses, the poet sought “to bring forth blossoms from those tears.”

Another common feature of these early articles on Cho‘lpon was that their authors strove to present an entirely impartial assessment of his poetry. Thus, alongside acknowledging the poet’s strengths, they also pointed out certain weaknesses and shortcomings. Interestingly, one particular flaw emphasized in both articles would, in later years, be magnified and turned into one of the principal arguments for wholly discrediting Cho‘lpon’s poetry.

Zarif Bashiriy wrote: “No matter how frequently Comrade Cho‘lpon writes or speaks the words ‘nation’ and ‘people,’ he is not a people’s poet. He is rather the poet of the intellectuals who are close to the people. In his style and spirit, true populism is scarcely present.”

A year later, Abdurahmon Sa’diy published another article in which he stated: “Cho‘lpon is not the poet of the masses-the people, but of the educated, the intellectuals. The broad populace cannot easily comprehend him. Yet, at the same time, he is a ‘narodnik’ poet who writes of the people’s sorrows—without dividing them into any particular class. Indeed, the very essence of Cho‘lpon lies in this profound quality.”

It should be noted that at the time these words were written—namely, in 1923 and 1924—the assertion that a poet was “not a people’s poet, but an intellectuals’ poet” was not perceived as a political accusation. Thus, such “faults” passed without serious repercussions. Later, however, the very label of “not a people’s poet, but an intellectuals’ poet” would become a dreadful political charge, one that inevitably drew a writer to the brink of death. We shall return to this matter in due course. For now, let us conclude our reflections on the early reviews of Cho‘lpon. However impartial these critiques may have been, and however much warmth and attention they radiated toward a newly emerging young poet, we cannot regard them as significant achievements in understanding Cho‘lpon. At best, they were but the first steps—the lowest rungs on the towering ladder that leads to Cho‘lpon’s true stature. Perhaps, had there been favorable circumstances and a society genuinely invested in deeper understanding, one could have ascended those steps and discovered some of the profound dimensions of the world Cho‘lpon created. Yet that was not to be. On the contrary, the process was cut short at the very outset. No ardent devotee of poetry, no fiery spirit wholly consumed by the passion for beauty and refinement, arose to scale the heights of Cho‘lpon’s genius and grasp his essence. Why was this so? This pressing question—looming large before us once more—we shall postpone answering, as we now turn to the remarkable events unfolding around Cho‘lpon during those years.