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Kecha va Kunduz
Night (1934), the first novel of Abdulhamid Sulaymon o’g’li Cho’lpon’s unfinished dilogy of novels, Night and Day, gives readers a glimpse into the everyday struggles of men and women in Russian imperial Turkestan. More than just historical prose, Cho’lpon’s magnum opus reads as poetic elegy and turns on dramatic irony. Though it depicts the terrible fate of a young girl condemned to marry a sexual glutton, nothing is what it seems. Readers find themselves questioning the nature of women’s liberation, colonialism, resistance, and even the intentions of the author, whose life and sequel, Day, were lost to Stalinist terror.
304 pages, Hardcover
First published November 1, 2019
About the author
Choʻlpon
5 books10 followers[Chulpán - Choʻlpon]
Abdulhamid Sulaymon oʻgʻli Yunusov, was an Uzbek poet, playwright, novelist, and literary translator.
He was one of Central Asia's most popular poets during the first half of the 20th century. He was also the first person to translate William Shakespeare's plays into the Uzbek language.
Choʻlpon's works had a major impact on the works of other Uzbek writers. He was one of the first authors to introduce realism into Uzbek literature. Choʻlpon was executed during the Great Purge under the leadership of Joseph Stalin.
Abdulhamid Sulaymon oʻgʻli Yunusov, was an Uzbek poet, playwright, novelist, and literary translator.
He was one of Central Asia's most popular poets during the first half of the 20th century. He was also the first person to translate William Shakespeare's plays into the Uzbek language.
Choʻlpon's works had a major impact on the works of other Uzbek writers. He was one of the first authors to introduce realism into Uzbek literature. Choʻlpon was executed during the Great Purge under the leadership of Joseph Stalin.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
January 23, 2026
mazza qildimey, 8 yil deganda o’zbek tilida endi kitob o’qibman. “silliq ketti, gap yo’q”:
lekin bu o’zbek ayoli hayoti shuda endi. Miryoqub o’zini o’g’lini tortib olib o’zbekning o’qimagan uy tashvishlariga botgan onasidan o’risga tarbiyalaysan deydi, sodda o’zbek qizi sibirga surgun qilinadi… balki Kunduz bo’lganda ko’p savollarga javob toparmidik. yozishniyam boplagan ekan na oq na qora personajlarni. Miryoqub yaxshimi xo’p yomonmi? bir tomondan shustriy ayyor tulki, bir qarasang jadidlarga qo’shilmoqchu bo’lgan yuragi ochiq yigit. Anov o’risni voobshe gapirmayman chala ja**bdan erlik to’kis bo’ldi qo’ydi moviy ko’zlari uchun. Akbarali semiz to’nka asabga tegadiyu lekin oxirida o’layotgandagi holati odamni baribir yig’latay deydi. O’lmasxonga nima bo’ldi endi? So’fi qayoqqa yo’q bo’ldi? Savollar ko’p javoblar kam degan situeyshn
lekin bu o’zbek ayoli hayoti shuda endi. Miryoqub o’zini o’g’lini tortib olib o’zbekning o’qimagan uy tashvishlariga botgan onasidan o’risga tarbiyalaysan deydi, sodda o’zbek qizi sibirga surgun qilinadi… balki Kunduz bo’lganda ko’p savollarga javob toparmidik. yozishniyam boplagan ekan na oq na qora personajlarni. Miryoqub yaxshimi xo’p yomonmi? bir tomondan shustriy ayyor tulki, bir qarasang jadidlarga qo’shilmoqchu bo’lgan yuragi ochiq yigit. Anov o’risni voobshe gapirmayman chala ja**bdan erlik to’kis bo’ldi qo’ydi moviy ko’zlari uchun. Akbarali semiz to’nka asabga tegadiyu lekin oxirida o’layotgandagi holati odamni baribir yig’latay deydi. O’lmasxonga nima bo’ldi endi? So’fi qayoqqa yo’q bo’ldi? Savollar ko’p javoblar kam degan situeyshn
March 15, 2021
Night and Day - Cho’lpon (Abdulhamid Sulaymon o’g’li Cho’lpon)
Cho’lpon was an iconic writer and poet of modern Uzbek literature in 20th century with his sharp, unforgettable voice. He was shot during the Stalin’s Great Purge in 1938 among other bright talents and intellectuals of Uzbekistan.
Night and Day is a duology with Night part becoming one of the best novels of Uzbek literature while Day part’s manuscript is believed destroyed by NKVD.
The novel, Night, follows the fate of a 15 year old girl, Zebi as she falls in love with a neighborhood boy yet gets married off to an old administrative official, Akbarali Mingboshi, as a fourth wife. With that her and her family’s life take complete different turn.
At the backstage Cho’lpon portrays darkness the nation is in:
- patriarchy repressing Uzbek women, with physical violence, emotional and financial abuse deemed to be norm, and women has no choice other than to surrender or turn into a trickster.
- state, religion officials both corrupt to the root, serving their self interests and Russian empire only, oppressing already poor common folk.
- the nation too naive, trustful and fearful deprived from knowledge and information with almost no hope of tomorrow.
But there was hope, jadids - reformists, much needed rescuers of the nation. They were advocates of literacy and modern education, advocating for progressive values, opening schools and establishing newspapers, theaters and much more... and of course Russians being against it, trying to hold on to its vassal. And of course local conservatives (almost whole men of power and religious fanatics) being against the reform.
One can believe Night was all about the nation in the darkness, its suffering, while Day was about the hope, bright future, what Jadids could have turned their reforms into a national revolution.
Cho’lpon was an iconic writer and poet of modern Uzbek literature in 20th century with his sharp, unforgettable voice. He was shot during the Stalin’s Great Purge in 1938 among other bright talents and intellectuals of Uzbekistan.
Night and Day is a duology with Night part becoming one of the best novels of Uzbek literature while Day part’s manuscript is believed destroyed by NKVD.
The novel, Night, follows the fate of a 15 year old girl, Zebi as she falls in love with a neighborhood boy yet gets married off to an old administrative official, Akbarali Mingboshi, as a fourth wife. With that her and her family’s life take complete different turn.
At the backstage Cho’lpon portrays darkness the nation is in:
- patriarchy repressing Uzbek women, with physical violence, emotional and financial abuse deemed to be norm, and women has no choice other than to surrender or turn into a trickster.
- state, religion officials both corrupt to the root, serving their self interests and Russian empire only, oppressing already poor common folk.
- the nation too naive, trustful and fearful deprived from knowledge and information with almost no hope of tomorrow.
But there was hope, jadids - reformists, much needed rescuers of the nation. They were advocates of literacy and modern education, advocating for progressive values, opening schools and establishing newspapers, theaters and much more... and of course Russians being against it, trying to hold on to its vassal. And of course local conservatives (almost whole men of power and religious fanatics) being against the reform.
One can believe Night was all about the nation in the darkness, its suffering, while Day was about the hope, bright future, what Jadids could have turned their reforms into a national revolution.
October 16, 2020
A highlight of Uzbek (or, more generally, Central Asian) literature, it took time for me to get into this novel. The particulars of the culture, politics, and relationships that are so important to understanding the plot are complex and far from my usual experience. That said, it is a story that is gripping, humourous in places, and highly interesting to get to know a culture and era that is worth exploring.
Read
January 3, 2026Жадидлар нима учун курашканликларини чуқурроқ тушундим.
Ўқишга озроқ қийналдим. Асардаги рамзлар (символика) маъносини тушуниш учун тарихни яхши билиш керак экан
Ўқишга озроқ қийналдим. Асардаги рамзлар (символика) маъносини тушуниш учун тарихни яхши билиш керак экан
July 4, 2026
This book genuinely torn apart many thoughts I had about the 20th century Uzbeks. Wow! This book covers the freaky side of Uzbek people, and it was very interesting to read. One thing I didn't quite favor in this book was the pacing: it was a bit slow. But overall, it's a damn good book that everyone who wants to know about the lives, mentality of old Uzbeks must read.
Want to Read
December 26, 2023Note to self: the "Day" novel never got published.
April 4, 2025
I learned a lot about early 20th Century Uzbekistan in this poetic, tragic novel.
May 29, 2024
vaqtilarga to'g'risi arzimaydi
July 10, 2026
Unable to locate a contemporary Uzbek novel in English that resonated, I turned to the classics, and found this: book one, ‘Night’ in the incomplete dilogy ‘Night and Day’, by Cho’lpon. A novel and author whose history were worth exploring.
Cho’lpon was an Uzbek poet, writer, and translator popular in the first half of the 20th century (first guy to translate Shakespeare into the Uzbek language!). He was considered progressive and reformist, which made him a target of the Stalinist regime, and in 1938 he was executed during the ‘Great Purge’, alongside other intellectuals. The second book in the dilogy - Day - was never published, and many believe the manuscript was destroyed by the NKVD.
In the decades since his death, Cho’lpon has been by turns celebrated and censored within Uzbekistan - depending on the national narrative of the day. At times he was espoused as an unjustly killed pro-Soviet writer, and at others, an anti-Soviet visionary and martyr for independence.
The book itself - Night - has a varied history of its own. Originally published in 1936, banned, republished posthumously in a redacted form, then published in full at the fall of the Soviet state. It’s a fairly grim tale, following a young girl - Zebi - in Russian imperial Turkestan (modern Uzbekistan) who is married off to a gluttonous town official, and then framed for his murder by one of his other scheming wives. There are other narratives running alongside - including Miryakub, a political fixer of dubious morality who falls in love with a Russian sex worker as he grapples with the identity and future of his nation, but Zebi’s was the more sympathetic tale. The translation is excellent, and the analysis and introduction by translator Christopher Fort truly illuminating. Without them, I’m almost certain I would have DNF’d this book, which I found tedious and frustrating.
I’d read that Cho’lpon was progressive and an advocate for gender equality in a society where women were sequestered in the home, multiple wives were still common, and even speaking to a woman was considered a blight on man’s masculinity. Sadly, I wasn’t able to glean this in any meaningful sense from the way his novel depicted women under Uzbek patriarchy. The female characters are fetishised in their powerlessness, any meaningful words or actions that drive the narrative forward spill out of them unconsciously, and even when this happens, there’s a sort of unintentionality to it - “oh! I didn’t mean to!”. The novel certainly highlighted the suffering of women living under extreme patriarchy, but for me, the complete lack of agency (in thought or action) undermined any position the book / author might have taken on whether women should (or were even capable of) existing outside that structure. The detail of domestic life and social norms of the time was really interesting, but I just couldn’t get past the helplessness of it all.
I was fascinated by the moments of tension between the ‘sarts’ (ethnic Turks / Persians of the region) and Russian imperialist / European characters. There appeared to be a lot of self-loathing and self-deprecating on the ethnic Turk / Persian / Uzbek side, and a constant struggle between hatred of, and aspirational yearning for, the European culture, which is often framed as superior by the characters. The counterbalance to this comes late in the book - when the character Miryakub becomes so impressed by the jadid vision of a future Turk / Uzbek “nation” that is both modern and in possession of its own worthwhile identity. The reader is left to wonder whether this shift in self-perception and self-worth might have been fully realised in book two.
The ending isn’t such a cliffhanger as a marshy slide into nothing, but with the dilogy unfinished, it’s hard to say where Cho’lpon’s characters might have ended up. Fort’s analysis and some other reviews I’ve read suggest that book two, ‘Day’, might have been the bright, hopeful counterpoint to the bleak and backwards ‘Night’. As the manuscript is lost along with the author himself, we will never know!
Not my favourite book in my Read the World series by a long shot, but still an interesting research and reading experience.
#Cholpon #BannedBooks #UzbekLiterature #CentralAsianLiterature #ReadTheWorld
Cho’lpon was an Uzbek poet, writer, and translator popular in the first half of the 20th century (first guy to translate Shakespeare into the Uzbek language!). He was considered progressive and reformist, which made him a target of the Stalinist regime, and in 1938 he was executed during the ‘Great Purge’, alongside other intellectuals. The second book in the dilogy - Day - was never published, and many believe the manuscript was destroyed by the NKVD.
In the decades since his death, Cho’lpon has been by turns celebrated and censored within Uzbekistan - depending on the national narrative of the day. At times he was espoused as an unjustly killed pro-Soviet writer, and at others, an anti-Soviet visionary and martyr for independence.
The book itself - Night - has a varied history of its own. Originally published in 1936, banned, republished posthumously in a redacted form, then published in full at the fall of the Soviet state. It’s a fairly grim tale, following a young girl - Zebi - in Russian imperial Turkestan (modern Uzbekistan) who is married off to a gluttonous town official, and then framed for his murder by one of his other scheming wives. There are other narratives running alongside - including Miryakub, a political fixer of dubious morality who falls in love with a Russian sex worker as he grapples with the identity and future of his nation, but Zebi’s was the more sympathetic tale. The translation is excellent, and the analysis and introduction by translator Christopher Fort truly illuminating. Without them, I’m almost certain I would have DNF’d this book, which I found tedious and frustrating.
I’d read that Cho’lpon was progressive and an advocate for gender equality in a society where women were sequestered in the home, multiple wives were still common, and even speaking to a woman was considered a blight on man’s masculinity. Sadly, I wasn’t able to glean this in any meaningful sense from the way his novel depicted women under Uzbek patriarchy. The female characters are fetishised in their powerlessness, any meaningful words or actions that drive the narrative forward spill out of them unconsciously, and even when this happens, there’s a sort of unintentionality to it - “oh! I didn’t mean to!”. The novel certainly highlighted the suffering of women living under extreme patriarchy, but for me, the complete lack of agency (in thought or action) undermined any position the book / author might have taken on whether women should (or were even capable of) existing outside that structure. The detail of domestic life and social norms of the time was really interesting, but I just couldn’t get past the helplessness of it all.
I was fascinated by the moments of tension between the ‘sarts’ (ethnic Turks / Persians of the region) and Russian imperialist / European characters. There appeared to be a lot of self-loathing and self-deprecating on the ethnic Turk / Persian / Uzbek side, and a constant struggle between hatred of, and aspirational yearning for, the European culture, which is often framed as superior by the characters. The counterbalance to this comes late in the book - when the character Miryakub becomes so impressed by the jadid vision of a future Turk / Uzbek “nation” that is both modern and in possession of its own worthwhile identity. The reader is left to wonder whether this shift in self-perception and self-worth might have been fully realised in book two.
The ending isn’t such a cliffhanger as a marshy slide into nothing, but with the dilogy unfinished, it’s hard to say where Cho’lpon’s characters might have ended up. Fort’s analysis and some other reviews I’ve read suggest that book two, ‘Day’, might have been the bright, hopeful counterpoint to the bleak and backwards ‘Night’. As the manuscript is lost along with the author himself, we will never know!
Not my favourite book in my Read the World series by a long shot, but still an interesting research and reading experience.
#Cholpon #BannedBooks #UzbekLiterature #CentralAsianLiterature #ReadTheWorld
December 9, 2020
This novel is actually "Night", part of a two-novel series (Day being the 2nd part), the last part of which was never published (though there is some indication it might have been written and destroyed by NKDV) due to the unfortunate circumstance of being written around the time of Stalin's great purge - the "Terror". "Excessive Nationalism" is what Stalin accused people of, and even through such an innocuous novel such as this one incurring the wrath of totalitarian leftism. And, while this was certainly not a novel worth killing for, neither was it a novel worth dying for. Not that he should have had to die, to blame the victims is something that leftist totalitarianism is also good at. "Well, he shouldn't have said that!" - and the edifice of civilization comes tumbling down.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews