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Lie of the Land
| Article
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19528 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1991 |
2,837 Words |
| Author
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Marat Akchurin
Marat Akchurin is a Soviet writer and publisher. His
forthcoming book, Lost Empire: A Tartar's Tour through Soviet
Ethnic Republics, will be published in January 1992
(HarperCollins). In the Soviet Union, Akchurin supervised the
editing of more than fifty volumes of Asian ethnic literature. |
AZ I YA
Olzhas Suleimenov
Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan: Zhalyn Publishers, 1990
Ten years before perestroika, in 1975, the Kazakh poet Olzhas Suleimenov published his book Az i Ya, in Alma-Ata, the capital of Kazakhstan. Its effect was like a bomb exploding in Soviet society, and Soviet authorities immediately banned the book. Fifty thousand freshly printed copies of Az i Ya were removed from bookstores and libraries.
One of my friends borrowed this book from me fifteen years ago. He read it, then gave it to another friend of ours, who lent it to still another. Since that time my copy has passed through dozen of other hands. Despite the ban, people have recopied Az i Ya by hand, retyped it, and illegally photocopied it.
Suleimenov's title had two different meanings, a fact that was in itself suspicious. Az is the first letter of the old Russian alphabet, which, in Old Church Slavonic, means I. The letter i in the middle is not just a letter, but also the conjunction and. Ya is the last letter of the Russian alphabet, which in Russian also means I. Read as three separate words, this phrase recalls two mirrors placed one in front of the other. Read as one word, the phrase Az i Ya meant Asia, which sounded even more frightening to the paranoid authorities.
Az i Ya became extremely popular among the intelligentsia of the Turkic peoples of the Soviet Union. Among my acquaintances there was no one who had not read or at least heard about this book. On the other hand, rank-and-file Russian patriots (or chauvinists) reacted violently whenever this book was even mentioned. Few of them had any idea what the book was about, as few had read it. Some charged that the book had been commissioned by Jews and Masons, pointing to Suleimenov's marriage to a Jew. But at least one ideologue from the Russian chauvinistic movement read it, the late prose writer Vladimir Chivilichin, who write two books in response, both published under the title Pamyat'(Memory). Later this title was taken up as the banner of the Russian chauvinist organization Pamyat', today known as the National-Patriotic Front.
Az i Ya has recently been re-published, as part of a huge volume of selected works by Suleimenov, for the first time since Brezhnev's era. Despite an edition of two hundred thousand, it again immediately became a
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