Uzbek Scholarship (1)

I've reached that point in my preliminary research where I've exhausted most of the published English-language source material, and I'm moving into the realms of Uzbek and Russian publications, more particularly, academic journals.

The initial phase has been to tootle around the stacks of IU Wells Library, plucking volumes, issues or parts of journals from the shelves, flicking through the tables of content, and recording details of relevant articles.

This - children - is bibliographic research the old-fashioned way. The three journals I've most been concerned with in this phase - Sharq Yulduzi [Star of the East), O'zbek tili va adabiyoti (Uzbek Language and Literature) and O'zbekiston tarixi (History of Uzbekistan) - are not readily available electronically (yet...).

However, even with the incomplete sets in the Wells Library, I've identified several dozen likely looking articles which may be of some use, all to do with Nava'i, in some way or other.

Research Methods (1)

In one of the December issues of the London Review of Books last year, the historian Sheila Fitzpatrick recalled her experiences as one of the lucky few foreign researchers allowed into the Soviet archives in the 1960s ('A Spy in the Archives').

It's a wonderful account of the dualities and binaries that seem to have underlain her encounters. On the one hand, there was official suspicion, both from British and Soviet bureaucrats charged with overseeing her visit; at the same time, her host family and acquaintances were seemingly quick to dispense with the formalities and provide her with the proverbial 'home from home.'

Based not on my own experiences, but from what I've heard and read about the experiences of researchers in the current post-Soviet space, it seems that some things haven't changed. For example, it is de rigeur in the acknowledgements section of any monograph written by a European or American scholar on, say, Central Asia (and when this thought first popped into my head, I was able to check immediately agains several such volumes in my bookshelves), to note the wonderful hospitality of librarians and archivists, usually in the form of endless cups of tea and local delicacies (dumplings, bread, pastries, kebabs etc.).

All well and good, you might think ... but I wonder if such a habit is a hangover from Soviet days. Fitzpatrick writes:

We weren’t allowed to go to the snackbar or cafeteria because that would have meant wandering unsupervised around the building; instead, kind-hearted supervisors (dezhurnye, always women) made tea for us and allowed us to eat sandwiches at our desks, dropping crumbs on the state secrets.

Diversions (3)

The New York Times Sunday Book review recently elicited responses from six writer/critics to the question, 'Why criticism matters.' One of the writers canvassed was Elif Batuman, an American writer from a Turkish family, whose wonderful book on the the study of Russian literature and the ups and downs of graduate student life, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2010), was one of the best books I read last year ... ::rewind:: one of the best books I read last year not written by 'Ali Shir Nawa'i.

As her response unfolds, you realise she is championing not the positive review, but the negative review. She writes:

Negative criticism is particularly exciting, not only because of schadenfreude, but because once limitations are identified, we glimpse how to transcend them. Learning the shortcomings of today’s neuronovel, we catch sight of the psychological novel of the future: a novel expressive of the problems we have now, including the encroachment of cognitive science into the concept of the self. When this novel appears, it will be because some people wrote neuronovels and books like “Proust Was a Neuroscientist” and others identified the ways in which these works captivated us but failed to describe human existence.

Such an interpretation can be applied not just to literary criticism, but to any form of criticism where the aim is to help an author revise and improve their writing. Unfortunately, the truly negative book-review is rarely seen in the scholarly journals: in the last couple of years I've seen one particularly dreadful book-length survey of central Eurasian history receive some unfeasibly (and unwarranted) polite reviews.

Glossing Nawa'i (2)

As noted in an earlier post, for the student whose first language is English, the absence of dictionaries and lexicons defining and explaining Chaghatay Turki words and phrases is frustrating.

Another useful aide I've (re)discovered is Cagataische Sprachstudien: grammatikalischer Umriss und Chrestomathie, enthaltend zwoelf Original-Auszuege mit Uebersetzung, nebst Woerterbh dieser ost-tuerkischen Sprache und verwandten Dialekten (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1867; repr. Amsterdam, Philo Press, 1975), by Arminius Vambery, the 19th-Century, Hungarian scholar/explorer/public nuisance who acquired a vast range of materials during his peregrinations in Central Asia.

As the title reveals, it is essentially a chrestomathy, featuring transcribed passages from various Chaghatay Turki texts accompanied by German translations, with a glossary at the back. It also comes with a helpful overview of basic Chaghatay grammar, which at least has the benefit of utilizing Arabic script, rather than the transliterated Latin script examples featured in works on Chaghatay grammar by inter alia Bodrogligeti and Eckmann.