Introduction

1An oft-cited instance of unsuccessful generic transfer in the prehistory of comparative literature comes from the twelfth-century Andalusian scholar Ibn Rushd. In his careful and lucid commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics, he translates kōmōidía [comedy] as hijā’ [satire], and tragōidía [tragedy] as madḥ [panegyric] (Habib, 2005, pp. 197-201). Jorge Luis Borges, in his short story Averroes’s Search, recounts this moment of misreading as a tragedy in itself, the result of Ibn Rushd’s life in a society where theatre was relegated to the play of children (Borges, 1962, pp. 148-155; Berg, 2010, pp. 148-159). But Ibn Rushd’s moralistic, purposive interpretation, so congenial to the humanists of the European Renaissance, still found favour with at least one twentieth-century observer, in the Soviet Union of the 1930s. In the transcripts of the first All-Union Soviet Writers’ Congress held in 1934 in Moscow, we encounter the old Bolshevik Nikolaj Bukharin’s erudite speech, in which he approvingly cites Ibn Rushd as a pedagogical critic who “spoke of tragedy as the ‘art of praising’ and comedy as the ‘art of censure’” (Bukharin, 1977, p. 213).

5To overlook this claim is to place excessive emphasis on the divisive nationalization of traditions and figures shared by multiple republics, at the expense of a public discourse of cosmopolitanism that reflected a complicated reality in the 1930s. On the one hand, the late 1930s saw the dismantling of the Comintern and the purge of foreigners and those with any foreign connections. On the other, the Writers’ Union and the anti-fascist congresses of the period immediately preceding the purges established the precedent and the discourse for the world-literary organizations and discourse of the later twentieth century. Another potential confusion is the long retrospective shadow that the exclusivist cultural nationalisms of the post-Soviet states have cast over the Soviet national arts of the 1930s. Although contemporary nationalisms draw on Stalin-era theoretical and rhetorical formulations, it is a mistake to conflate the two periods.

6A case study from the Stalin-era national arts will elucidate some of the less chauvinistic ways that national writers conceived of Soviet cosmopolitanism and world literature. Further, by focusing on one of the key mechanisms of this cosmopolitanism, transposition from non-European to European genres and forms, I will suggest that the European-ness of these forms played a less central role than it may seem at first glance. This article examines the transformation of one genre, tragedy, in theatrical adaptations of a single classical Persianate romance plot, the tale of Khusraw, Farhād and Shīrīn, from three Soviet nationalities, Tajik, Uzbek, and Azerbaijani.

7These pieces, two operettas and an opera, present an interesting case for the possibilities of inter-canonical transfer in multiple dimensions: the painted scenery, the music, and acting styles. Because of the limited documentation of these works’ early performance, and the limits of my own discipline as a literary scholar, this article focuses on the works’ librettos. My examination of the 1936 Tajik musical Khisrav va Širin, by Abdusalom Dehotī and Mirzo Tursunzoda, emphasizes the relationship between the Persianate literary canon and the newly-imagined world literary canon. Discussion of the 1928-1940 Uzbek musical-turned-opera Farhod va Širin, by Abdulhamid Čölpon and Khuršid Šarif, will draw out the process of transposition. My treatment of the 1941 Azerbaijani musical Färhad vä Širin, by Sämäd Vurghun, will draw out commonalities and vernacular specificities in the Stalinist spectacle of heroic suffering. By attempting to distinguish those aesthetic elements that are vernacular or idiosyncratic from those that are more broadly Persianate or reflect the Stalinist artistic ecumene, I hope to demonstrate the generic range that Soviet national artists achieved under conditions of unpredictable state violence. The alternate neoclassicism of these works permitted a series of creative misreadings of tragedy and the tragic, capable of addressing a heterogeneous Soviet public.

Tracing the Lovers Through the Canon: Imitation, Translation, Transposition

11The poems of the Khamsa were also imitated in languages whose literary standards were bound to Persianate culture, from Bengali to Ottoman. The late fifteenth-century poet Alī Shīr Nawā’ī of Herat’s Farhād wa Shīrīn was one book of a Chaghatay Turkish Khamsa, at the heart of his larger project to establish that language as Persian’s literary equal (on terms established by the Persian canon). Nawā’ī compares his version anxiously to those of Nizāmī and Amīr Khusraw (Toutant, 2012). In his plot, Nawā’ī closely follows Amīr Khusraw, but the poem is a translation only in the sense that a linguistic dimension is added to the imitation/reply (Burrill, 1974, p. 56; Abdullah, 1948, pp. 565-567). Nawā’ī was conscious of Chaghatay as a language benefitting from coexistence with Persian (he also wrote a Persian divan), but also in competition with Persian for courtly recognition. Thus, to the usual personal battle, for an imitator to be recognized as worthwhile, we must add a battle for his minor language to be likewise recognized (an important subtext for the Soviet period).

12At this stage, a third dimension must be added: transposition, the transfer of artistic works between forms or media. The Shīrīn romance had been transposed numerous times before the twentieth century, most obviously in miniatures illustrating the story, but the adaptations that concern us here are from poetic romance to staged drama. The leap is not so far as might be expected; Persian literature scholar Peter Chelkowski has described the romances of the Khamsa as “closet dramas” (Chelkowski, 1988, pp. 179 ff). While these romances were not written to be staged, they are full of long dialogues, monologues, and set pieces. Before the Soviet period, Azerbaijan, the first Islamic region with a European-style theatre, was the site of a 1911 operatic version with a classical Caucasian mugham score. After the adaptations examined here, the story would continue to feature in Soviet and international leftist theatre and film, such as the Turkish fellow traveller Nazım Hikmet Rân’s 1945 play Ferhad ile Şirin.

13Caryl Emerson provides a theory of transposition in her study of the Boris Godunov story in the nineteenth century. Transposition, Emerson writes, “is that one category of ‘translation’ where co-authorship is not hidden but rather celebrated, where the independence of the second voice is guaranteed by the new genre or medium, and where dialogue among versions is inevitably explicit” (Emerson, 1986, p. 8). Emerson’s model is imperfect for the Persianate literary tradition, where explicit dialogue between imitator and model is quite typical, not a special feature of transposition. Nonetheless, she does highlight an important shift: in transposition, the question is no longer whether the later artist is worthy of standing beside the former, but whether the later artist has adequately represented the work of the former.

14The Soviet context likewise requires some modification to this model of transposition. Philip Ross Bullock, who describes transposition as “a central feature of Soviet culture,” contrasts Emerson’s “inclusive unity between competing versions” with the culture of Soviet opera under Stalin, in which any difference between accounts of a narrative was to be suppressed in favour of a single, totalized narrative (Bullock, 2006, p. 97). It is unclear whether the Uzbek, Tajik, and Azerbaijani librettists watched, read, or encountered each other’s adaptations, though both the plays and the writers travelled extensively. Still, what emerges from these works is a genuine diversity of representations of the story, representations that are not entirely nationalized, but do reflect distinct approaches to its transposition into the theatre, its translation into national languages, and its approach to imitation according to Soviet aesthetics and ethics. Rather than examine the works in chronological order, I will begin with the most direct adaptation of a classical model, the Tajik version, and move through the somewhat freer Uzbek version toward the radically transposed Azerbaijani version.

Dehotī and Tursunzoda’s Khisrav va Širin: Claiming World Culture

18As Vladimir Paperny writes, “by the beginning of World War II, [Soviet culture] already saw itself as the inheritor of all the traditions of all humankind” (Paperny, 2002, p. 21). Katerina Clark, in her Moscow, the Fourth Rome, has outlined the process by which the Stalinist cultural authorities laid claim to the mantle of the cosmopolitan centre of world culture, the Hegelian heir of the best writers and works of every era and region (Clark, 2011). Although her account focuses on Europe, the discourse that she describes encompassed Asia as well. In the Soviet imagination, the position of the ussr between Europe and Asia made it uniquely qualified to embody a truly broad literary international. ‘Great-Russian chauvinism’ did return to acceptability in the later 1930s, but in the same years, the affirmative action empire gave levels of recognition to ‘national’ writers that did reflect a certain Soviet cultural provincialization of Europe (Platt & Brandenburger, 2006; Martin, 2001). If Goethe provided the clearest source for a world-literary imaginary, his engagement with classical Persian poetry made that tradition the non-European literature par excellence. Thus, the first of many major Soviet celebrations of past non-European writers was the 1934 Firdawsī Jubilee, held in Moscow, Petersburg, and Central Asia, with a large delegation also sent to the Iranian celebration (Shahbazi, 1999).

20On the level of idejnost’ [political consciousness], a desideratum of socialist realism, there is little to mark this problem play as an appropriately Soviet work. The audience must preserve an uneasy sympathy with Khisrav as he wins Širin’s love by trickery, jealously deceives the worthy Farhod into labour and death, and is murdered because of his son’s poor moral education. Farhod, the more plausible worker-hero, is limited to two scenes that, as in Nizāmī, focus on his personas as singer, sculptor, and lover. Even where Širin marvels at Farhod’s canal, this soon shifts to a more classical aestheticization of the labour project: a Kamāl-i Khujandī ghazal with a refrain of čašm [eye/spring], playing on thirst for love and weeping (Dehotī & Tursunzoda, 1965, pp. 36-37).

22Khisrav va Širin draws both poets and characters together into the same post-historical apotheosis. Tursunzoda makes this claim more explicit in a 1941 poem, The Treasury of Song. There, the Mongol invasion disrupts a Persian culture of craftsmanship, but the revolution restores it for the Tajiks:

When they learned the precepts of Lenin
The light of knowledge was kindled in their hearts
Now, Rūdakī’s song came to life
Firdawsī’s zenith arrived in the spheres
For Hāfiz and Sa‘dī of Shiraz
The Tajiks opened wide their embrace
(Tursunzoda, 1971, p. 51)

23Read through the bombastic primordialism of later Soviet Tajik works, such as Bobodžon Ghafurov’s monumental national history of the 1960s, this poem would seem to exemplify the reification of the Soviet nations, making a broad claim for Tajikistan as the authentic heir of Persian culture (Gafurov & Litvinov, 1963-1965). A contrary reading, however, captures more of the specifically early Soviet vision of national identities: dialectical materialism and the Soviet ecumene allowed the Tajiks to once again tap into the mainline of world literature, and participate in the wider culture from which they had (ostensibly) been isolated.

Čölpon and Khurshed’s Farhod va Širin: Collective Labours

24In 1937, a year after the Tajik Khisrav va Širin, an Uzbek Farhod va Širin premiered in Moscow (Madžidi, 1937; Uspenskij, 1937). It was not a new play, strictly speaking, but the product of almost a decade of criticism and reworking by Uzbek and Russian writers, composers, and directors. In its initial form, it had premiered in Tashkent in 1928, with a libretto by Abdulhamid Čölpon, one of the most important Uzbek poets of the first Soviet generation, in collaboration with Khuršid Šarif, a playwright, and directed by Mannan Ujghur. Both Čölpon and Ujghur were former members of the Chaghatay Gurungi, a literary circle interested in classical Chaghatay Turkish literature that had been forcibly disbanded in the early 1920s. Their 1928 play was the product of three state-ordered years of re-education in Moscow, in which they had studied Russian language and learned contemporary theatrical techniques from Vsevolod Mejerhold, and others (Allworth, 1964, p. 221). After performances in Tashkent and at the Moscow multinational theatre olympiad in 1930, the play left the stage under harsh criticism. When it returned at Moscow’s 1937 Uzbek art festival before Stalin, it was credited to Khuršid but not Čölpon, who had been purged by this point. That production, for which a substantially new score was prepared, proceeded under the direction of the Tashkent transplant Emil’-Ol’gerd Ûngval’d-Khilkevič, advised by Ujghur (Madžidi, 1937, p. 10). Between 1928 and 1937, the musical evidently underwent an operatic transformation that illustrates the complexities of multinational collaboration.

26Theatre and opera were aspirational forms in the hierarchy of the socialist realist arts (Yekelchyk, 2000, p. 600; Adams, 2005, pp. 351-353; Frolova-Walker, 1998, pp. 333 ff.). Opera in particular was a young and struggling Soviet art throughout the 1930s and 1940s, but it was a key form to establish in each Soviet republic (Bullock, 2006, pp. 83-85). Further, transposition to opera represented the best chance for a beloved pre-Soviet writer or literary work to find full multinational recognition as an important part of the world literary heritage. This may be explained in part by the distinct history of the Russian adoption of opera in the late nineteenth century, in which ‘The Five’ and their successors attempted to produce specifically national epics. In Soviet Russia and in the national republics, the stakes for establishing an operatic idiom specific to each nation were high. Beyond the specifically Russian or Soviet valuation of these forms, Laura Adams has highlighted their hegemonic importance in Soviet and post-Soviet Uzbekistan in connection with more general discourses of modernity and development, and the formation of modern subjectivity (Adams, 2005, p. 336).

29As such, the story was appropriate not only for the historical drama, but for the totalizing, monologic epic. Viewers were invited to experience the story as a work collectively authored by the Uzbek folk, mythologizing their own experience with a single voice. In all versions of the Uzbek Farhod va Širin, the plot is framed throughout by the narration and singing of a baânči [traditional storyteller], “who conveys our audience into the alcove of Uzbek everyday life (byt)” (Madžidi, 1937, pp. 10, 13). During the cultural revolution of the late 1920s, with a ubiquitous struggle underway against the backwardness of Soviet citizens’ byt in Russia and Central Asia, such ethnographic elements were often criticized as ‘orientalizing’ (aziâtŝina) or ‘ethnographizing’ the progressive Soviet nationalities. In 1929, the Uzbek ‘proletarian’ critic S. Husainov criticized Farhod va Širin for a “curious exoticism” (Allworth, 1964, pp. 66-67).

30Without multiple full texts, it is difficult to judge aesthetic shifts, and the telephone game that transmitted artistic campaigns and terms of criticism between Moscow and national academies makes the question of periodization for arts policy even blurrier for the non-Russian arts (Yekelchyk, 2000, pp. 597-601). However, whatever changes did take place, the 1937 version was presented before a more receptive critical and official establishment. In the later 1930s, (delimited) difference was publicly fetishized as ‘local colour’ and the spontaneous feeling of the folk was the natural source of legitimacy for the state. This horizontal vision of the artist as a naive mouthpiece for the folk coexisted uneasily in the 1930s with the vision of the artist as a genius who can see the people’s condition from a position of transcendence, as in a world literature that is a range of vertiginous peaks (Vurghun, 1976, p. 92).

31However opportunistic accusations of exoticism may have been, there is plentiful orientalist discourse in the version of Farhod produced for the 1937 Moscow festival. Much of this enters in the libretto’s Russian translation. In one Uzbek aria, Farhad addresses the breeze:

Morning breeze, traveling, take my greeting along the path to my beloved,
From my distressed mind, take a petition to my dear.

32The breeze in question, the sabah, is a messenger in classical Arabic and Persian lyrics. The Russian translation performed for the dekada in Moscow extends the image:

Morning breeze, gentle breeze, you rush to my beloved
Carry along, o heart, the thrill of a heart full of love
Recount, ah, how I thirst, how I am attracted by passion
Warm wind, Southern wind, stroke my beloved.
(Uspenskij, 1937, pp. 10-11)

33Listeners are carried out of Persianate conventions into a pastiche of Pushkinian imperial reverie. In other instances, orientalist discourse is externalized through the nightmare Iranian court, with its Asiatic despot eager to add Širin to his large harem by force. The characterization of the Bukharan emir’s decadent oriental culture as specifically Persian was a feature of pro-Turkic Jadid rhetoric that played an important role in the formation of Uzbek historiography, and it is unsurprising to find it here.

34Thus, the non-Persian Širin and her mother Mahin-Bonu, unlike Khusrav, rule benevolently over a seemingly classless kingdom where rulers and labourers freely mix. In this account of the lovers’ first meeting, Širin, reviewing her workers, awards Farhod a labour prize; in a telling moment of the erotics between worker and state, he asks to take his prize in the form of a glance beneath her veil (Madžidi, 1937, pp. 16-17). When the Uzbek theatrical Farhod performs labours, they are never in submission to Khusrav, but to strengthen the fortress walls against his attack.

the representative of the old order who comes to see that his class is doomed, but who cannot escape his situation to join the class of the future; and the revolutionary who, although personally defeated by a temporarily recalcitrant reality, knows that his ideals will triumph in the end.
(Scanlan, 1973, p. 330).

Vurghun’s Färhad vä Širin: The Spectacle of Suffering

37If the Uzbek version eliminates the classical romance’s ambiguity of sympathy, and the Tajik version sidesteps such ambiguities as a purportedly naïve adaptation, the Azerbaijani Färhad vä Širin occupies a middle ground that is more ideologically deft, and also more unsettling. Sämäd Vurghun, an Azerbaijani poet of the first Soviet-educated generation, entered with his 1941 musical Färhad vä Širin into a theatrical tradition that had already produced one operatic adaptation of the same story, in classical mugham modes (Vurghun, 1974, pp. 113-222). By the mid-Stalin period, Azerbaijani musical theatre was far more engaged with the conventions of European and Russian opera and verse drama. Though Vurghun was intimately familiar with Nizāmī, having translated his Laylī va Majnūn to Azerbaijani, he composed his version almost entirely in blank verse. The Azerbaijani composer Äfrasijab Bädälbäjli produced a harmonized score, for which the Russian composer Reinhold Glière provided additional material after the war.

38In thematics and plot, too, Vurghun’s adaptation of Nizāmī is quite free. If all of the three adaptations make Širin’s world before Khusraw a pastoral realm of singing maidens, to which the Uzbek version adds singing labour-ers, Vurghun develops this utopian labouring ecosystem along national lines. He moves Princess Širin from Armenia to an ancient Azerbaijan with fire temples, bull statues, and pre-battle prayers. Her love for the humble builder Färhad is blessed by both her mother, Queen Mahin Banu and Färhad’s father, a sage who is not Buzurjmihr but the nationalized Azär Baba. In a discussion of the new fortress that Färhad has just completed, Azär and Mahin introduce all of the key words repeated throughout the play that establish physical labour as a folk value: sänät [craft/industry], hünär [skill/bravery], and zähmät [effort/labour]. Färhad declares upon entering: “To create in the world is my duty,” and proceeds to discuss the technical specifications of the roof with his father (ibid., pp. 115-117).

39Into this world enters Färhad’s dark double, Šapur. As in Nizāmī’s account, the two are old classmates who studied together the parallel crafts of architecture and painting, but Šapur presents an alternate vision of craft. He uses his art to deceive on behalf of his master Khosrov, whose Iran again provides a despotic foil for the ideal kingdom (in 1941, presented contemporaneously with the Soviet occupation of Iran). Färhad’s ultimate characteristic here is not craft, ambiguously associated with guile, but force of will, transmuted into physical force. Thus, Vurghun participates in contemporary Stalinist discourses, from the cult of sincerity and mania for unmasking to the belief that technical norms can be exceeded by enthusiasm. As he enacts his labours, he performs another Soviet trope, the “war with nature,” declaring, “man was made to tunnel through mountains” (ibid., p. 197).

40The self-annihilation that follows, though apparently a needless death based on the misapprehension that Širin is dead, is in fact the only appropriate sacrificial end-point for the ritual excesses of Färhad’s enthusiasm. This forced toil and suffering, which the Tajik and Uzbek adaptations either deemphasize or omit, is the central subject of Vurghun’s play – to achieve this effect, Khosrov’s murder by his son is moved to an earlier scene. The representation of labour and the state, thus, takes an uncomfortable turn when the sincere worker begins fulfilling Khosrov’s absurd, intentionally impossible design for a mountain tunnel. The painful echo of 1930s infra-structural projects such as the Belomor canal, sustained by forced labour that was rhetorically educational ‘reforging’ but effectively pure punishment and exploitation, is impossible to ignore now.

In its attempts to articulate the coming into being of the New Soviet Man, socialist realism (governed by the ideological fantasy of which it is the discursive expression) produces a mangled or mutilated (male) body as often as it produces the hyperbolically healthy and strong Stalinist man.
(Kaganovsky, 2008, pp. 21-22)

44The idea that ‘ashūra and ta‘ziya contained revolutionary potentialities was not an original one: it recurs in the works of writers from the fin-de-siècle Azerbaijani reformist Ähmäd Aghaoghlu to the more familiar Iranian leftist ‘Alī Sharī‘atī and his revolutionary heirs (Aghaoghlu, 1892, pp. 528, 538; Rahnema, 1998, p. 315; Chelkowski & Dabashi, 1999). At least once, the young Bolshevik party attempted to adapt the symbolism of the Shi‘ite passion for a similar purpose. As Michael G. Smith has shown, following the assassination of the Baku Union leader Khanlar Säfäräliev in 1907, the Bolsheviks combined his red funeral with local ‘ashūra commemorations, in a mass demonstration at which Stalin gave his first major speech (Smith, 2001, pp. 366-373; Suny, 1972). In fact, two years before Färhad, Vurghun wrote a play based on Säfäräliev’s life and martyrdom. Any Bolshevik aspiration to use the ritual ended with the anti-religious campaigns that followed the revolution, but ‘ashūra rituals seem to have continued, much to officials’ dismay (Goyushov, 2008, p. 69). The Soviet theatre, strongly committed to broadening its audience base by offering workers free tickets and pre-performance explanations, must have been in direct competition with ‘ashūra commemorations for crowds and sympathies.

45Stagings of Vurghun’s play, with costumes, elaborate sets, and Russian-trained actors, were far more concerned with mimesis than that of ta‘ziya. Nonetheless, the passion of the worker Färhad, like that of Hussain, invites the spectator to bear witness, and to vicariously experience a painful injustice. Hamid Dabashi has argued that ta‘ziya is not structured to produce catharsis, but rather a feeling of communal responsibility “to change the course of history, as it was unjustly determined at the battle of Karbala” (Dabashi, 2005, p. 95). Soviet aesthetic and dramatic theory of the 1930s had its own uneasiness with catharsis. The long article on tragedy in the 1939 volume of the Literaturnaâ ènciklopediâ only mentions catharsis once, and sets the problem aside as “one of the controversial points of tragic theory in bourgeois aesthetics” (Kozina, 1939, pp. 371-372). In the article’s own discussion of the idealized tragic death, the author draws on nineteenth-century Russian critic Vissarion Belinsky’s didactic vision; the ideal tragedy “evokes not pessimistic despair [...] but the will to live and struggle,” a formulation that puts catharsis to work for a cause, as in ta‘ziya (ibid., pp. 369-370).

Conclusion

47In these works transposition to the theatre, then, the generic certainty of their source material (mathnawī, courtly romance) is replaced with grave generic indeterminacy. Certainly, all are historical epics, all remain courtly romances, but on the stage, do they become tragedies? If classical Islamic scholastics had trouble translating the concept, so did Soviet aesthetic theorists. Laura Adams, in her account of the Uzbek theatre, opposes artworks’ content, in which ideological orientation may be manifest, with their forms as “an essential, if often unconscious, part of cultural domination and transformation” (Adams, 2005, p. 351). In doing so she highlights an opposition – form/content – that was and remains important in the way that Uzbek, Tajik, and Azerbaijani writers and artists articulate the choices that they make. In her observation that the form can have ideological significance in itself, another kind of blurring between form and content is obscured. If forms and genres have internal logical rules that shape the content that they are capable of conveying, in a Bakhtinian sense, the form or genre from which a work is transposed can also restrict the meanings that a work carries, particularly in a close adaptation such as the Tajik Khisrav va Širin. Likewise, adjacent, more familiar artistic forms or genres shape the work’s content, both as it is composed and as it is received by its audience, as in the case of the Azerbaijani Färhad vä Širin.