Azerbaijani and Russian writer and literary critic Chingiz Husseynov tells ‘VK’ about his latest books, as well as about his perception of contemporary Caucasian literature.
- It’s been three years since our last interview, and we would very much like to know what has changed in this time. What are your new plans?
- In this time I’ve published two books, the first one is called “Freed Subtext: A Triptych of Novels”. I gathered three of my earlier novels from the 60s, 70s and 80s in this book and tried to uncover the underlying messages… You know, in Russia literature – and I wrote in Russian, so it is as much Russian literature as it is Azerbaijani – there was a very narrow stream of legal opposition literature. The majority of Soviet literature was eulogistic, but they still let a very small amount of opposition literature be published so that those opposition authors wouldn’t turn completely anti-Soviet. You know that along with legal literature there was a great amount of works promulgated illegally. This alternative literature was being created in the Union as well as abroad. I was one of those legally admitted authors, but I still had to hide what I really wanted to say in the subtext. So its role increased in Russian literature in general at that time. We used subtext not only to hide the truth; it was a fact of stylistic development. So when they say that today you can say what you think openly – its good, but today’s ‘honest literature’ is very vast and it's rubbish for the most part. Style is very important. So I’ve decided to re-publish these three novels and reveal the subtext, so this book is a re-edition on one hand and a textbook on Soviet publishing practices on the other. It shows how the censorship machine worked. It was a multi-stage work - first the author censored himself, then the editor, then the publisher, etc. Yes, I’ve published this book as the “Freed Subtext”.
The second book I told you about was the re-edition of the “Fatal Fatali” novel. It was also a part of that narrow stream of admissable opposition literature, as I wrote there about Russian history of the 19th century and I told the truth about the history of the South Caucasus and Azerbaijan at the epoch as it was. In Soviet times this truth was twisted, falsified in order to fit the ideology. This is my second book.
And now I’m publishing, in two languages, in Moscow and Baku, a book called “Qalam’s dreams”. A qalam is a type of pen made from reed. But at the same time Qalam is a name of the book's protagonist. So it is a personal name and a ‘heavenly pen’ meant to write down only true things at the same time. These ‘dreams’ have been published every week for a year now in Russian and Azerbaijani. It is the first time I have used Azerbaijani in 30 years. My previous book in this language was published in 1986, it was the ‘Fatal Fatali”. These ‘Dreams’ I publish now are short stories, in which one can’t tell if we live in the real world today or in a virtual reality. It’s all complicated. Today some things happen – things that can’t really be happening, things beyond morality and ethics … But they still exist.
I’m an optimist as far as common life is concerned, but when I look at things from the point of view of an historian, I’m quite a pessimist. And it would be very hard to convince me otherwise.
- You called your new book “Freed Subtext: A Triptych of Novels”. Why not a trilogy?
- A triptych of three novels. A trilogy would have implied a single arch, if you will, a sort of inner connection between the three. But in this case there is no such connection, no common heroes, different styles – and a trilogy can’t be written in different styles. The word ‘triptych’ initially had religious implications, but now it has become a word of common use. A ‘triptych’ is something shorter than a ‘trilogy’, ‘trilogy’ has a vain sound to it. So that is why I chose to call it a triptych.
- During your career as a writer you we’ve written a lot of books. But sometimes our views change during our lives. Would you like to change anything in your early works if you could?
- I wouldn’t. The works I’ve written in Azerbaijani – I conceder them to be weak. I was just a beginner back than. I didn’t get it right from the very beginning. I started realizing what literature really is only by the time I wrote my first novel, “Magomed, Mamed, Mamish”. Before that I wrote like all others did. There were no revelations. But if you want to write a truly artistic work… than I understood that first of all you should write for yourself. When you do so, you can’t lie; you don’t try to please anyone in particular. Of course, you should understand ‘writing for yourself’ metaphorically. You shouldn’t take it as writing only for yourself to see. I wish all writers did that… And I suppose classical literature was created exactly this way. Today a lot of interesting works appear, but I feel modern authors have lost the sense of measure and the sense of quality. One can put a lot of things into his story, and today they all want to write huge books, but they’ve lost the sense of plot, characters, conflict… But the life itself is still interesting, and as we think, and we analyze, and we enjoy this analysis in the form of literature – it means all is good.
- You’ve almost answered my next question! I wanted to ask you if you think our epoch will have its great writers…
- One can’t know that… Each epoch has its own heroes. But unfortunately – or I’d better say fortunately – we can’t know that, and it’s a great joy, just like the joy that we are not given to know when each of us will pass away. It’s a great bliss, this ignorance. I don’t believe there will be any major works left from our time, but there are still talented people being born. Maybe our epoch will be remembered as a time of searching before a new major breakthrough. You see, for example Gogol’s “Dead Souls” are perceived as a great work in any epoch (well, I don’t know how they accepted it in his own time, but still). And maybe some works of this rank will appear today. In any case, we fortunately can’t know that for sure.
- Which writers of the South Caucasus will be remembered by the progeny? Who are these remarkable figures?
- It’s a hard question. I would list Mamedkulizade among Azeri authors, he’s a prosaist of arly 19th century, he created marvelous plots. Akhundov is also a major personality. As for the poetry, many of its works will definitely live on as it has accumulated all the emotion, all philosophy, the very essence of life itself. As for the Georgian literature, Chabua Amiredzhibi’s legacy will definitely remain. This author is still alive, by the way, he’s 91, if I’m not mistaken. There’s also history-novel writer Otar Chiladze. But they all need a little bit of PR. In the Soviet epoch the very fact that they were translated into Russian boosted their popularity. Without this promotion via a larger language-mediator there’s no PR, and it’s an important thing, or else who would know them? I have a curious story to tell you that could serve as a good example here. I was waiting for my wife in the ‘Kievskaya’ subway station hall, and it is, as you know, decorated by a great number of mosaics. I happened to enter into a conversation with a young Russian man who was sitting beside me. I asked him if he could name the heroes of the mosaic that was right in front of us. He looked and said that he couldn’t recognize anyone. I told him it was Shevchenko, Chernyshevsky, Dobrolubov and Nekrasov, and the portrait that’s hanging on the wall depicts Belinsky. Than I asked him if he could tell me who’s depicted in the far corner of the hall, with moustache, holding out his sward. He suggested it’s Napoleon. I said that it wasn’t. Than he managed to head the inscription, “Poltavskaya battle”. I asked him who battled with whom under Poltava. He suggested that it was the French army. I tried to remind him of a Russian proverb connected to this historical event, but he still couldn’t remember. So I told him that it was Peter the Great combating the Swedish army. So what can you expect, if people don’t know such things. Than I thought that perhaps it’s normal not to know who’s Peter the Great, you can live with that. But no, in Nigeria maybe, but not in Russia. You have to know such things if you live here.
- Could you say something about contemporary Iranian literature? Iranian cinema is living through a renaissance, they got an ‘Oscar’…
- But as I see this renaissance is happening to the Iranian culture outside of Iran. Within the borders of Iran there’s no cultural breakthrough, as art is first of all connected to the freedon of personality. It is the inner world of a person, not a crowd or a leader that creates art. So I think there will be a new Iranian literature, but outside Iran. There are a lot of prominent figures; they have a very rich cultural heritage, deep traditions. I know one young talented Iranian, he got his PhD in MSU, he translates Russian poetry, his thesis was about Yesenin. I believe he can write some poetry of his own.
