Tajikan

Abstracta Iranica

Title in Italian: "La letteratura tagica fra riforme e rivoluzioni (1870-1954). Con uno studio preliminare delle Ëddoštho [Memorie] di Sadriddin Ajnī e appendici bibliografiche" The thesis focuses on the period of reforms and revolutions the Tajik intellectuals and men of letters experienced in the field of culture and literature from the second half of the 19th century, when Tsarist Russia penetrated in Turkestan, to the first Soviet decades (1870-1954). In 1870, Ahmad Donish, one of the first reformers in the history of Modern Tajik literature, wrote the Risola dar nazmi tamaddun va taovun [Treatise on the organization and regulation of common decency], trying to persuade the emir of Bukhara of the need of reforms. In 1954, Sadriddin Ayni, the author commonly regarded as the founder of Soviet Tajik literature, died of disease. His final major work, Yoddoshtho [Reminiscences; 1948-1954, uncompleted], to which a preliminary study is devoted to in this thesis, is a collection of lively short-stories where the author describes his childhood spent in two villages near Bukhara, his youth and schooldays in Bukhara city between 1882 and 1903, also depicting the social and economic situation of the Emirate with particular reference to the lowest social strata (petty farmers and craftsmen) living there. The period under consideration in this thesis also marked the transition from the manuscript era to the periodical press age. The reformers of the first two decades of the 20th century, the Jadids, turned newspapers and journals into an instrument of protest against the social, cultural, and spiritual degradation of the Bukhara Emirate. In the 1920s, magazines became a platform for the expression of a nascent Tajik nationalism, as in those years Tajikistan, rather than a Federal Republic of the Soviet Union, was an Autonomous Region within the Republic of Uzbekistan. Moreover, Soviet magazines became the first editorial space for the spreading of the Tajik realistic prose, since during the 1920s and the 1930s Tajik tales and novels were first published there in serial form, later in book form."

Central Asian Survey, 2020

2005

1998

2002

On my first trip to Tajikistan in 1990, after visiting the Academy of Sciences and the Firdowsi State Library in Dushanbe looking for sources of information on contemporary Tajik figures, I felt the need for a com-prehensive volume to help the growing number of scholars, business people, and international officials who would visit the beautiful Republic. The only volume available in Tajiki, Adiboni Tojik (Tajik Scholars, 1966), henceforth TS, was already outdated. Additionally, it covered only literary scholars, and not everyone in it was Tajik. Talking to American, British, and German colleagues, as well as colleagues from other coun-tries working in Dushanbe at the time, I learned that their difficulty was compounded by the fact that they did not know Tajiki either. Since I was in Dushanbe to participate in the 1400th Anniversary Celebration of the birth of Borbad, the famed Sassanian musician and singer, I did not give the matter more thought.

2010