HODJA NASREDDIN

He is young and he is old and he is a middle-aged man. He is wise and he is foolish. He is greedy and stingy and he is generous and noble. He has a beautiful wife, resembling a houri on one hand, and he is married to a loud and ugly fool on the other. He is a mullah and an atheist, a merchant and a beggar, a potter, a blacksmith, a weaver, and an advisor to a ruler. Even his name is changeable - Hodja, Molla, Kozhanasyr, Afandi...

And yet we always recognize him because behind his malevolent donkey always follows laughter. This is the laughter that allows us to lift our heads up and straighten our shoulders; the laughter that saves no one and respects not a sacred thing.

Hodja's homeland is claimed by about thirty countries and disputes about how real his prototype is have been going on for hundreds of years. Some popular anecdotes about him suggest that if his prototype did exist then he would have lived in the 14th century, which is also supported by the image of Tamerlane (Timur) that often appears in these anecdotes and against whom the cunning man stood.

In any case, it is known for sure that the first written surviving mentions of Hodja Nasreddin are dated to the end of the 15th century in a composite description of the life of another folk hero, the warrior dervish Sari Saltuk Dede, compiled by the Turkish author Abu al-Khair Rumi.

Of course, the anecdotes about Hodja Nasreddin were created and tested by people according to the same principle by which the anecdotes about Chapaev or the naughty boy Vovochka were told with no concern for matching the image. People would simply insert a familiar name into any funny situation. The eclecticism of such a hero is inevitable, but some features that are being passed from one story to another are always inherent to him. Vovochka is rude and cynical, Petka is naive, whereas Hodja thumbs his nose at the powerful of this world.

It was precisely this feature that was developed in the great, yes, indeed great books by a man who gave Hodja Nasreddin to all children and adults who lived in the Soviet Union. The incredible in its coverage circulation of his duology about Hodja The Disturber of Peace and The Enchanted Prince, eventually united in a single Tale of Hodja Nasreddin, did an amazing thing: they turned Central Asia into something close and familiar to a great number of schoolchildren in Moscow, Kiev, Tallinn, or Chisinau. Although adults were amazed by the incredibly colorful, vivid, and lively tale, they no longer knew how to incorporate it into their world. However, for the children of Hodja, it was simply a fantasy world to immerse themselves in, for those who could read, of course. All the turbans, caravanserais, old men, and Baghdad thieves gave a child raised in the European tradition the key to the gates of Asia.

Interestingly, Soloviev's Hodja is not a children's book at all, and it is a cultural and pedagogical mystery why it was published by Detgiz Publishing House from the very beginning in the rather puritanical USSR, and why it is still included in the list of one hundred mandatory books for extracurricular reading in high schools for the students in Russia. The horrific scenes of torture and impalement on stakes are bad enough, but there are also overly erotic and indecent scenes in that book - more than enough. Let us remember the knives of palace physicians who turn men into eunuchs, or the naked lover of the beautiful Arzi-Bibi sitting in a chest, or the beautiful almost exposed female dancers on the drums... The author of this text once almost drove his parents crazy at the age of seven, insisting in the presence of some guests on showing him "the bed on which I was conceived." The process of conceiving was not even vaguely understood by the author at that time, but the phrase from the book "Cursed be the bed on which I conceived you!" apparently deeply intrigued the child's imagination.

Another childhood memory: my parents entertain their guests again. I am together with my relatives, a few boys and girls, in the children's room, and we are playing Bridge of Fortune Tellers from Hodja. We wrapped towels into turbans over our heads and put on our grandmothers' robes... We also still needed a human skull for fortune telling — so we had to remove poor Doll Nadya’s head. However, with some effort, we could always put the head back on the neck peg.

Solovyov placed his Nasreddin in Uzbekistan: Bukhara, Fergana, Kokand — all these names lured us no less than the Caribbean and Jamaica. It's hard to say now what percentage of Soviet schoolchildren had a period of deep infatuation with Central Asia thanks to Solovyov's book, but it was definitely huge. Simultaneously, Hodja delivered another powerful message to its readers, which was somehow missed by Soviet censors. This book truly taught to hate and despise the authorities.

In Solovyov's book, the khans, emirs, their courtiers, judges, customs officials, guards — all of them are described as greedy, repulsive sadists, liars, and hypocrites drunk on impunity. They are sociopaths who revel in executions and the suffering of others. Meanwhile, the bloodiest scenes such as stakes with people writhing on them, prisoners beaten to death with whips in dungeons were described by the author in a completely different way than fans of such medieval horror stories such as Druon, Aleksey Tolstoy, or even George Martin. There is no hidden relishing of tragedy, no sadistic secret eroticism, not even a desire to shock and awe the reader.

We see everything happening through the eyes of Nasreddin, with anger, sadness, completely bewildered at why people do such things to each other?

And we answer this question together with Hodja: the worst always come to power where there is no strong societal control. The greediest come to power and the most cowardly, and the cruellest. Solovyov's selection process for officials and courtiers is based on the fact that the scoundrels can quickly eat up their competitors, the thieves can steal enough money for bribes and gifts, and the flattering liars can pave their ways with deceit, thus quickly rising to the top.

Thieves as guards, unjust judges, and sadistic prison wardens, and at the very top, something completely cruel and paranoid, such is the power structure in The Tale. And this power is only willing to shape the life of the ordinary people into the most abhorrent prison.

"We believe that they no longer fell onto the millstone of that glorious mill where the waters of selfishness turn the wheels of cunning, where the shafts of ambition set the cogs of denunciations in motion, and where the grindstones of envy grind the grains of lies."

"New prohibitions with new threats were constantly announced; just the other day a decree was issued about adultery, according to which unfaithful wives were subject to punishment by whip, and men were subject to a castration by doctors' knives. There were many other decrees like this one. Every resident of Kokand lived as if in the middle of an interlacing of thousands of threads with suspended bells: no matter how careful you were, you would still touch some thread and a quiet ominous ring would sound, fraught with many troubles."

Yes, of course, in post-revolutionary USSR such an attitude towards any authority other than towards a socialist-communist one was highly welcomed: kings, presidents and their minions were supposed to be painted in the darkest colors, but at the same time it was necessary to show that such a state of affairs was abnormal and temporary, that the people would always resist and evil would be punished...

But in Hodja, there is no punishment of the authorities by the people: they drown the moneylender Jafar and throw the greedy Agabek into prison. But those were only rich people, not government officials, and the government itself punished them. All emirs, shahs, and dignitaries are completely safe: woodcutters do not come to save Little Red Riding Hood, the Snow White dies in her coffin, there will be no retribution for high-ranking villains, this is not a fairy tale — this is life.

The people in The Tale is both cautious and unfree; people accept evil as a given, they choose the as-if-nothing-happened approach and do not want to know the truth. If there were some hints of people’s wrath and fears of such wrath on the side of the Bukharan authorities in the first part of the tale, the second part of the book, written several years later, completely abandons these illusions.

"Meanwhile, all this prosperity that he so cherished was just a small teahouse hastily built from clay and reeds by hands, costing no more than two hundred tangas even for the most generous buyer; Safar had nothing else, no house, no garden, no field, but he trembled as if he kept gold ingots in his cellar. This poor man possessed another priceless treasure - his freedom, however he did not know how to use it; he kept himself on a leash, he himself bound the wings of his soul!"

The book, formally created along the lines of agit-prop (soviet propaganda), concealed a huge fig between its pages (Note: to show a fig — a vulgar gesture made by sticking the thumb between two fingers): it exposed any totalitarian power. We can only recall one similar work created by Schwarz around the same time called The Dragon. Many Soviet censors were intelligent people who could read between the lines. The Dragon written in 1942, was banned from any production, staging and publication in 1944, but at least Schwarz himself was not touched.

With Leonid Solovyev, everything was much sadder.

Born in 1906 in the Ottoman Empire, in Tripoli, to parents who were officials of the Russian Imperial Orthodox Palestinian Society, Leonid Solovyov spent his youth in Kokand, writing for Tashkent newspapers. At the age of 24, he came to Moscow to study at the literary and screenwriting department of the Institute of Cinematography. He published several fairly weak stories and short stories, as well as a completely falsified work under the name of Lenin in the Creative Work of the Peoples of the East, in which all the folk songs about the great leader were composed by him personally. Then in 1940, he wrote the first volume of the Tales - Disturber of Peace, which caused delight among the reading public. However, due to the started war he had to postpone the continuation of that piece. Solovyov started working as a war correspondent, writing mainly sketches about the lives of sailors and soldiers. In 1946, he was arrested. No, it wasn't for his book. It was for the "terrorist activities". According to the investigation he together with a dozen of other journalists intended to kill Stalin. Of course, all of that was a complete, but habitual nonsense in those times. Nevertheless, the writer got sentenced to a prison confinement of ten years for nothing, and the same imprisonment was awarded to the other lucky ones against whom the authorities could not even come up with a somewhat decent accusation.

It was in the Dubravlag camp in Mordovia republic, where he worked as a guard at a local production facility, and where that he wrote The Enchanted Prince, his second part of the duology. The camp chief was kind to the writer, as he enjoyed the movie adaptation of the first part, and he allowed Solovyov to write and even preserved his manuscript until his release.

He was released in 1954, during one of the first waves of rehabilitations. The writer returned to freedom as a poor, seriously ill, and toothless man, but he managed to see the publication of his book in 1956 and witness its tremendous success. Leonid Solovyov was a semi-paralyzed and tortured 55 year old man when he died in 1962. The cause of death was yet another hypertensive crisis.

Oh yes, he knew what he was writing about...

"And when he woke up and his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness of the prison, he saw around him a multitude of different criminals. Each of them was a step on that terrible staircase by which the nobleman made his brilliant ascent to the heights of power, wealth, and honor...but there were other steps too, very treacherous ones for the climber, on which it is easy to break a leg, or unintentionally, even the neck - this is what the tireless noble builder forgot! Anger and pity choked Hodja Nasreddin; even he, who had seen so much, did not think that such a terrible, such a disgusting place was anywhere possible on earth; as if he had descended into the very abode of evil! Another scar was added to his heart, one of those that armor the heart with the cruelty of mercilessness."

So why this book, written mostly in one of the worst places a person could end up, the book that often tells of quite monstrous events is perceived by many as a funny adventure, a hymn of joy, like a cheerful piece in the children's literature?

Is it because the blood and pain in it passed through the purifying flame of irony?

Is it because Hodja will still fool everyone and emerge victorious?

But take another globally renowned book about Till Eulenspiegel, another medieval trickster. There are also many jokes, anecdotes, and humor in it, but is there anyone in their right mind who would call that book cheerful and joyful? The decorations of this merrymaking are too grim.

There is a suspicion that the feeling of joy and the one of a thrilling adventure from Hodja is the very stamp of the author, who not only wrote dramatic and expositional narration. No, in Hodja we see a lot of love for the depicted world. Love for the world of the author's youth, for that nostalgic feeling of happiness and freedom, which his memories of the cities of Central Asia brought, the people he knew there, the apricots he ate, and the fairy tales that he heard. It's no wonder that the heart of the book is an unexpected short novel insert about the childhood of Nasreddin - the brightest and most vivid part of the diptych, a picture of an ideal world where true evil is only gathering strength, but does not yet dare to cast its shadow on the shaven head of the Bukharan boy. In magical Bukhara under an incredibly blue sky, where birds, cats, and snakes are friends with the child, where an all-forgiving mother waits with a jug of fresh milk, where donkeys have velvety noses, and old, ugly gypsy women turn out to be kind and grateful, and where you have the power to give kindness to everyone who needs it. This feeling of childish omnipotence, when "everything will be according to my will" and there is no real fear because you are sure of your immortality, is also preserved in the adult hero. He is merciful, as only good children can be, but he is also merciless, like them, when he deceives and steals from the scoundrels.

It is no wonder that the people of Asia consider this Tale the anthem of their own: it contains nothing of souvenir forgery, imperial condescension, nothing that irritates so much when you read books about your culture written by someone who is distant from it.