Hamid Ismailov fled authoritarian Uzbekistan for the UK in 1992, and works for the BBC World Service. He is known for novels, such as The Dead Lake, that were originally written in Russian. The Devil’s Dance is the first of his Uzbek novels published in the UK, and the first major Uzbek work to be translated directly into English. It provides a crash course in Uzbek literature, and the main character is the real-life prominent Uzbek writer Abdulla Qodiriy.
When Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD, imprisoned Qodiriy in 1937, they destroyed the novel he was writing – about Oyxon, an alluring 19th-century slave girl forcibly married to three khans. But as NKVD interrogators tell Ismailov’s Qodiriy in The Devils’ Dance, “nothing in this world disappears without trace”. Ismailov reimagines Qodiriy’s lost novel, recreating Oyxon and her brutal husbands. He interweaves these fragments with details of Qodiriy’s life and with verses, fables, anecdotes and letters, some taken from real life, told and read by 1930s political prisoners and by poets trapped in harems. It’s Ivan Denisovich meets Scheherazade meets the Lannisters at a postmodern party.
The succession of rulers, rapes and fratricides rivals Game of Thrones, and the novel has a similarly playful central metaphor. The Uzbek title was The Devils’ Dance, or the Great Game, and each chapter is named after a different “game”, from chess to Russian roulette. Arthur Conolly, who coined the term “Great Game” to describe the geopolitical struggle between the British and Russian empires in central Asia, is one of around 40 characters to appear in the novel, along with multiple languages and regional varieties of Uzbek. Translator Donald Rayfield, a professor of Russian and Georgian, has had a monumental task and some of the novel’s linguistic diversity was – by his own admission – lost in translation.
Oyxon’s story echoes Qodiriy’s own, so that she is raped and he is beaten in grisly parallel. There are powerful contrasts: the prison scenes are all millet gruel and urinating in buckets, while the 19th-century sections contain perfume and peacocks. Gradually the two worlds converge in Qodiriy’s mind. Oyxon, beautiful and betrayed, becomes a symbol of “his wretched people and their errant history”. The cultural poignancy draws on Ismailov’s own identity as an exile: in his novel, a simple poem recited by condemned writers becomes “the song of a nation, the sorrow of their land”.
- Devil’s Dance by Hamid Ismailov (Tilted Axis Press, £9.99). To order a copy for £7.99, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.
