Sadriddin Ainī - founding father of modern Tajik literature and his relationship with the Soviet government

Sadriddin Ainī (1878-1954), who will be discussed in this presentation, can be described as a founding father of modern Tajik literature. Born in Saktar and raised during the turbulent pre-communist years in the Emirate of Bukhara, a Russian protectorate at that time, Ainī encountered a lot of injustice and suffering in his youth, which Soviet literary critics used to explain his ‘natural inclination’ towards socialism. Left an orphan early on in his life and having endured various difficulties during the years preceding the October Revolution in Russia, Ainī found himself imprisoned because of his participation in the Jadidist movement – and he was later saved from that prison by Russian Bolshevik soldiers. These factors had a direct influence on Ainī’s writings, with his style becoming more and more conforming to the ideas of Socialist realism in his later works. This presentation will explore the development of his socialist realist ideas by comparing his early work (Odina, 1924) and with one of his later ones (Margi Sudkhūr, 1939).
One of the main Soviet researchers working on Aini’s legacy, Iosif Samuilovich Braginskiĭ, described the writer’s works in terms of “томление по правде и отвращение к неправде” [longing for truth and aversion to deception] (Braginskiĭ, 1974: 7)). On the other hand, modern western research in this field tends to place more focus on Aini’s relationship with Jadidism (Mixon, 2011: 1; Grassi, 2009: 68), which Soviet scholars, including the above-mentioned Braginskiĭ, tried to deny (or, alternatively, tried to call it ‘Aini’s youthful mistake’). This presentation will begin with an analysis of the political landscape in the region and will discuss general directions of the early Soviet cultural policies, as well as certain biographical details of Aini’s life, and will then proceed to the analysis of the two of Sadriddin Aini’s works – Odina (1924), Aini’s first important work of prose fiction that narrates the tragic story of a young Tajik worker, and Margi Sudkhūr (1939), generally reckoned to be his mature prose masterpiece that narrates the story of a greedy Bukharan moneylender whose power is destroyed by the Bolshevik Revolution. By comparing and contrasting the literary methods Aini used in the two of them, this presentation will explore the development of his literary ideas in the light of his evolving relationship with the Soviet government.