If I didn’t resist the circumstances that pushed me to Uzbekistan that summer, it was because I believed that out-of-the-way places and literatures are never wasted on writers. And yet, I didn’t write about Samarkand—not for a long time. Consequently, I didn’t think about it much, either. Like a Christmas ornament without a Christmas tree, there was nowhere to put it.
I found myself recalling this anomalous episode from my past only several years later, when I was reading “Onegin’s Journey,” the excised chapter of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, intended to bridge the three years that pass between chapters 7 and 8, during which Tatyana transforms into a Moscow grande dame, while Onegin wanders around Russia and the Caucasus, trying to forget that he just killed a man. Nobody knows exactly what Pushkin wrote in the first draft of “Onegin’s Journey,” since he burned the manuscript, publishing only some fragments which appeared, in later editions of Onegin, as a footnote or appendix after chapter 8. Pushkin is known to have rewritten these fragments in 1829, just after completing his own “journey to Arzrum.” On that journey, Pushkin returned to the lands he first visited at age twenty-one, when he wrote Prisoner of the Caucasus. Everything was different now: “Whatever feelings I harbored then—no longer exist. They all either passed or changed.” Pushkin turned thirty on that second trip.
I began to understand why it had been so difficult to write about my summer in Samarkand which, despite all the appurtenances of a new beginning, an exotic adventure, had actually been the end of something. It had been the kind of strange appendix that doesn’t make sense until later, out of order—as the surviving fragments of the “Journey” appear in Eugene Onegin only as a footnote following the final chapter.
When I came back from Samarkand, I almost entirely lost the ability to read poetry. It was like a language I didn’t speak anymore. What I used to enjoy in poetry was precisely the feeling of only half understanding—a feeling that is intensified, as Tolstoy once observed, when the poetry is written in a foreign language:
Without entering into the meaning of each phrase you continue to read and, from the few words that are comprehensible to you, a completely different meaning arises in your mind—unclear, cloudy, and not in accord with the original phrasing, but all the more beautiful and poetic. For a long time, the Caucasus was for me this poem in a foreign language; once I deciphered its true meaning, there were many cases in which I missed the poem I had invented, and many cases in which I believed the real poem was better than the imaginary one.
After Samarkand, the beauty of cloudy, poetical meanings conjured out of associations and half-grasped words—the beauty of things that don’t appear on the page—somehow lost its charm for me. From that point on I was interested only in huge novels. I started researching a dissertation on the hugeness of novels, the way they devour time and material. And although I suppose it’s just coincidence that Tolstoy compared the subjective charms of half-understood poetry to the Caucasus in particular, nonetheless, I was finished with them, too—with the Caucasus, the Russian East, and the literatures of the peripheries.
School started again, the endless cycle of seminars and coffee, coffee and seminars. Luba had spent the summer researching the life of the princess Dashkova in St. Petersburg; Matej had been in Berlin doing some kind of topographical study of Walter Benjamin. Those were cities with archives, university presses, libraries—cities where students went to learn from books, not from “life.” And they were right, those students: I had seen life, and it hadn’t added up to anything. For a while it was a departmental joke that I had spent two months in Samarkand intensely studying Timurid love poetry, but soon everyone forgot about it, including me. I was busy teaching first-year Russian and reading Balzac. I spent more and more time on campus, returning to the Mountain View apartment only to sleep. In the winter, shortly after New Year’s, I moved out. Samarkand was the last trip that Eric and I took together.
Muzaffar and I still e-mail each other sometimes. He and his wife moved out of his parents’ house last year—a difficult and controversial decision. At the present time, he works as an office manager and has two children: a little boy, Komron, and a baby girl, Komila. Sometimes he travels to Kazakhstan, near the Uzbek border, where he does translation work at a village clinic run by Americans.
For a few years, Dilorom and I exchanged letters and gifts. “Respected Elif qizim! I was not at all surprised to receive your letter—because I was expecting it,” Dilorom wrote in a card enclosed with a hardcover 1992 edition of Past Days, the novel I had looked for all over Tashkent. I think she hoped I would translate it into English, but I never even made it past page two. I dreamed about that book, not about its contents but about the physical book, its black cloth cover embossed with red wallpaper-like arabesques, indicative of the bourgeois character of historical realism. In my dreams, the cover was imprinted with “performative” blurbs ascribed to old school Anglophone literary critics:
“Kicking this book will cause pages nineteen and twenty to stick together. (In the paperback edition, the stuck pages will be fourteen and fifteen.)”
—F. R. Leavis
Northrop Frye has stated that, when addressed in the form of a proper Arab gentleman, the book will clap itself over the nose of the reader’s worst enemy and remain there until the enemy has touched something that once touched a camel.
I would wake filled with relief, understanding that I didn’t actually have to read the book, that the book didn’t work that way (by being read), but rather by being kicked, or addressed in the form of a proper Arab gentleman, either of which was much less time-consuming than poring through the densely typed pages, looking up every other word in the dictionary. And although I am reluctant to say that what ended in Samarkand was my youth, nonetheless, this copy of Past Days brought home to me, with a kind of material immediateness, the truth of human mortality.
_____________
* Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur, as he is known to Western scholarship, lived from 1483 to 1530. The Baburnama is the first—and was for a long time the only—autobiography in Islamic literature, and is one of the longest prose narratives ever written in Chaghatay Turkish. To this day, no one knows what motivated Babur to keep a written record of his life. He hadn’t finished it when he died—the narrative breaks off mid-sentence in 1529.
The Possessed
Within hours of my arrival in Florence to research a magazine article about a Dante marathon, I found myself standing outside the apartment on the Via Guicciardini where Dostoevsky spent nine miserable months ravaged by debt and epilepsy. The building faces the Palazzo Pitti and is surmounted by a plaque:
IN QUESTI PRESSI
FRA IL 1868 E IL 1869
FEDOR MIHAILOVIC DOSTOEVSKIJ
COMPÌ IL ROMANZO “L’IDIOTA.”
Until recently, I had no particular interest in Florence, and had no idea that Dostoevsky had finished The Idiot there. Moreover, in the eternal debate of “Tolstoy or Dostoevsky?” I have always been in the Tolstoy camp. But fate brought me to Dante’s city at the precise moment when I was obsessed by Dostoevsky’s Demons, the novel whose hero, Nikolai Stavrogin, is considered to be the diabolical double of The Idiot’s Prince Myshkin, and the early notes for which were composed right there in Florence.