In Search of a Lost Identity
Regarding patronage in the Ferghana Valley, foreign institutions often have
sponsored cultural organizations there, while domestic businesses (as artists and
cultural figures constantly remind us) rarely do so, preferring instead to make large
donations to religious projects. Such essentially European cultural forms as ballet,
opera, and symphonic music are all in decline in the Ferghana Valley, especially in
the Kyrgyz and Tajik sectors but increasingly in Uzbekistan as well.
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This is due
above all to declining interest among the Kyrgyz, Tajiks, and Uzbeks, although
this is partially offset by other national groups living there, who supplement the
ranks of those who patronize and conserve these art forms. Meanwhile, in all three
sectors of the valley the political elites are committed to the preservation of their
national cultural identity in an age of globalization, and therefore they pay close
attention to the development of the traditional arts.
In a recent session in Uzbekistan involving experts in the fine arts, theatrical
producers, and historians, the question arose whether Uzbek theaters were in a
state of effervescence or crisis. Ildar Mukhtarov, a well-known Uzbek authority
on art, suggested that widely heard concerns over tradition and the social status
of the performing arts imply that theater is in crisis and only the decorative and
applied arts are flourishing. Another participant, Alimjon Salimov, noted the
widespread calls for a return to tradition, but then asked poignantly whether
such a tradition exists. “What are we supposed to return to?” he inquired. “We
did not gain a mastery of European theater yet in the process of trying we lost
our roots.”
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This is not to say that there are no authentic contemporary arts in the Ferghana
Valley. Particularly deserving of mention is the Ferghana School of poetry that
emerged in the 1980s and early 1990s in the city of Ferghana. During those years
this city gave rise to something reminiscent of a true Hellenistic polis, with a group
of poets rising above nationality and race to create a school of poetry espousing
universal principles. The group was ethnically diverse but united by this common
commitment. Its most prominent members were Sasha Kuprin, who wrote under
the pseudonym Abdulla Khaidar (a name he chose in homage to the timeless
spirituality of the Ferghana region), Gregory Kohelet, Khamdam Zakirov, Sergei
Alibekov, Iusuf Karaev, Daniil Kislov, Enver Izetov, Viacheslav Useinov, Olga
Grebennikova, Evgenii Olevskii, Igor Zenkov, Renat Taziev, Khamid Ismailov,
Alexander Gutin, and, notably, Shamshad Abdullaev.
The “Ferghana school” began in the 1980s as part of the Russian literary under-
ground and samizdat movement. In 1984 the filmmaker Sergei Alibekov completed
a prizewinning cartoon based on the works of Ray Bradbury, and then a pointillist
and minimalist film titled Nit that hypnotically depicts the semi-arid outskirts of
Ferghana. The next year Enver Izetov issued a prize-winning volume of illustrations
of poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, Ted Hughes, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Mario Luzi.
By 1986 the group established a film society that amassed an ambitious collection
292 SHOZIMOV, SULAIMANOV, S. ABDULLAEV
of films by French avant-gardists of the 1920s as well as Jean Epstein, Abel Gans,
Jean Cocteau, and others.
Over the first half of the 1990s, the Ferghana poets mounted a section on poetry
in the journal Zvezda Vostoka (Star of the East), which was shortlisted for a Little
Booker Prize. Their editorial manifesto declared: “Our work is a useless attempt
to express our indecision in the face of the freedom that is steadily slipping away.”
Their next initiative came in 1997 with the website Ferghana.ru, which also was
nominated for the Russian Little Booker Prize.
Beginning in 1989 works by Ferghana writers began appearing in alternative
publications in Russia and the West, and in recent years they have received a number
of prestigious awards in Russia, including the Andrei Bely Prize and the Globus
Award. In 2000 the Open Society Institute in Tashkent sponsored the publication
of the Poetry and Ferghana almanac, which in turn led to more recognition abroad,
notably the British Russian Booker Prize.
Today, unfortunately, the majority of Ferghana authors, like many Renaissance
humanists, have left their native city to settle elsewhere, whether in Holland, Israel,
Austria, Finland, Russia, Ukraine, or the United States.
The Ferghana poets set forth their program in the following terms:
• To detach oneself from one’s roots as far as possible, thereby enriching them
by this detachment;
• To stress one’s anti-historicism, distaste for social reality, and fear of action;
• To aspire to maintain one’s distance from all ideological temptations and
emblems;
• To polish fragments rather than the mythic wholeness of artistic memory, with
its Manichean duality . . . and comforting offer of emotional survival within
a fundamental chaos;
• To avoid explaining reality and instead to make it palpable.
A revealing example of this mental outlook is a paragraph taken from the diary
of poet Shamshad Abdullaev:
Returning home from a Muslim cemetery I met a Tajik from the village of Sokh
who was passing along the low brick wall. I immediately recalled a French
compilation of Paul Celan translated by Andre de Bussy. This was a jump into
the unconscious where, strange as it may seem, there reigns an amazing order,
one that can emerge as a thread that can lead us, if we are lucky, to the seeds
of other paradigms or at least to sincere references to a hypnotic terrain where
one can die.
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Taking their work as a whole, the Ferghana poets manifest a steady universal-
ism and at the same time the constant pull of “locality,” in this case Ferghana.
This induces them to search for the identity they have lost but which is constantly
arising anew, like a phoenix, from seemingly inconspicuous fragments of the
CULTURE IN THE FERGHANA VALLEY 293
locality itself, whether a mud brick wall, roof, or tree. In the words of poet Sasha
Kuprin, “words like kishlak (village), aryk (irrigation canal), chinar (oriental
plane tree), bazaar, chaikhana (teahouse), and plov (pilaf) are not mere frag-
ments of exotic vocabulary but worlds through which we experience a common
time and destiny.”
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