what is Chechen literature?
The question evokes one of those images that stand against the pages of History: the burning building of the Chekhov National Library in Grozny, in 1995. Some people speak about bonfires of piled books that burned for days, even if I can hardly imagine there might once have been such an abundance of literature in that remote corner of the world. Be that as it may, it is the lasting memory of conflagration that counts. But the cultural patrimony of this Caucasian nation was destroyed on many other occasions, such as mass deportations of the Chechens and the Ingush to Siberia and Central Asia (1944-1957).
In fact, it is not easy to find any precise information about what Chechen literature might have been. Certainly, the opacity of the language makes the exploration very hard. Chechen tongue, belonging to the Northeast Caucasian language family, is spoken by some 1,3 to 2 million people. Even in such a relatively small speaking population, it is divided into a dozen or so dialects, making a linguistic continuum with the Ingush language and also with the dialects spoken in Daghestan. This linguistic variation reflects the mosaic of mountain and lowland tribal structures. There are also various systems of writing: the Arabic one before the Russian conquest, the Latin script adopted for this language in the mid-1920s, and the Cyrillic from 1938 on.
The Chechens participate in the common literary patrimony, shared with other peoples of the Caucasus, such as Circassians, Abkhazians, and Ossetians, that of the Nart Sagas, a sort of regional mythology composed by stories about giants (narts), the children of the great matriarch Satanaya. The main, trickster-like hero of the cycle is Sosruko. There is also another trickster figure, Syrdon, a blacksmith deity Tlepsh, and even a sort of Chechen Prometheus, Pkharmat, a blacksmith who steals the fire of the gods.
On the other hand, the slow penetration of Islam in the region left some traces of religious thought and literature cultivated in Arabic. Yet another strand of literary tradition is that of tepparas, chronicles of an individual family or taip (clan entity proper for Chechnya and Ingushetia), scribbled down on available materials, such as leather, stone, or wood.
Quite another kind of writing project started after the 1917 revolution among the elites in closer contact with the Russian. The introduction of the Latin alphabet in 1925-1927 coincided with a clearer prospect of producing national literature, with such figures as Saida Baduev, the author of the first Chechen novel, Hunger, and quite a numerous group of other writers and poets (Saidbey Arsanov, Shamsuddin Aiskhanov, A. Dudaev, Arbi Mamakayev, Magomed Mamakayev, Nurdin Muzayev, Akhmad Nazhaev, Khalid Oshaev, Ibragim-Bek Sarkaev). Nonetheless, the Chechen intelligentsia that started to take shape in the 1920s was almost entirely destroyed by the Stalinist repressions.
The rebirth of the oppressed group started in the 1960s. This is when novel, rather than poetry, became the main form of Chechen literary expression. The trauma of deportations was narrated in such books as The Mountains Hear, But They Are Silent by Magomet Sulaev. Before the turn of the millennium, the country was ravaged by a war, losing its chance of independence from Russia. Yet paradoxically, the two Chechen wars increased the visibility of the country and its cause, resulting in varied literary and cinematographic narrations produced by Caucasian and Russian creators. This interest also brought about some studies produced by Western scholars. Just to give an example, Rebeca Ruth Gould speaks of the "abrek" (a hero of precolonial banditry) as a specific figure epitomizing independence and resistance in Chechen literature under Soviet rule.
The years of post-war reconstruction and relative stability brought about increased creativity, marked by the return of the poetry as the main form of expression. Significantly, recent Chechen poetry has names of women poets, such as Birlant Belyayeva, Lyuba Arsaliyeva, and Petamat Petirova. Their presence marks an epoch in patriarchal history and spells the fulfilment of a project of emancipation that had been formulated by the first Chechen intelligentsia in the 1920s.
In fact, it is not easy to find any precise information about what Chechen literature might have been. Certainly, the opacity of the language makes the exploration very hard. Chechen tongue, belonging to the Northeast Caucasian language family, is spoken by some 1,3 to 2 million people. Even in such a relatively small speaking population, it is divided into a dozen or so dialects, making a linguistic continuum with the Ingush language and also with the dialects spoken in Daghestan. This linguistic variation reflects the mosaic of mountain and lowland tribal structures. There are also various systems of writing: the Arabic one before the Russian conquest, the Latin script adopted for this language in the mid-1920s, and the Cyrillic from 1938 on.
The Chechens participate in the common literary patrimony, shared with other peoples of the Caucasus, such as Circassians, Abkhazians, and Ossetians, that of the Nart Sagas, a sort of regional mythology composed by stories about giants (narts), the children of the great matriarch Satanaya. The main, trickster-like hero of the cycle is Sosruko. There is also another trickster figure, Syrdon, a blacksmith deity Tlepsh, and even a sort of Chechen Prometheus, Pkharmat, a blacksmith who steals the fire of the gods.
On the other hand, the slow penetration of Islam in the region left some traces of religious thought and literature cultivated in Arabic. Yet another strand of literary tradition is that of tepparas, chronicles of an individual family or taip (clan entity proper for Chechnya and Ingushetia), scribbled down on available materials, such as leather, stone, or wood.
Quite another kind of writing project started after the 1917 revolution among the elites in closer contact with the Russian. The introduction of the Latin alphabet in 1925-1927 coincided with a clearer prospect of producing national literature, with such figures as Saida Baduev, the author of the first Chechen novel, Hunger, and quite a numerous group of other writers and poets (Saidbey Arsanov, Shamsuddin Aiskhanov, A. Dudaev, Arbi Mamakayev, Magomed Mamakayev, Nurdin Muzayev, Akhmad Nazhaev, Khalid Oshaev, Ibragim-Bek Sarkaev). Nonetheless, the Chechen intelligentsia that started to take shape in the 1920s was almost entirely destroyed by the Stalinist repressions.
The rebirth of the oppressed group started in the 1960s. This is when novel, rather than poetry, became the main form of Chechen literary expression. The trauma of deportations was narrated in such books as The Mountains Hear, But They Are Silent by Magomet Sulaev. Before the turn of the millennium, the country was ravaged by a war, losing its chance of independence from Russia. Yet paradoxically, the two Chechen wars increased the visibility of the country and its cause, resulting in varied literary and cinematographic narrations produced by Caucasian and Russian creators. This interest also brought about some studies produced by Western scholars. Just to give an example, Rebeca Ruth Gould speaks of the "abrek" (a hero of precolonial banditry) as a specific figure epitomizing independence and resistance in Chechen literature under Soviet rule.
The years of post-war reconstruction and relative stability brought about increased creativity, marked by the return of the poetry as the main form of expression. Significantly, recent Chechen poetry has names of women poets, such as Birlant Belyayeva, Lyuba Arsaliyeva, and Petamat Petirova. Their presence marks an epoch in patriarchal history and spells the fulfilment of a project of emancipation that had been formulated by the first Chechen intelligentsia in the 1920s.
Bibliography
Gould, Rebecca Ruth. "One The Abrek in Soviet Chechen Literature". Writers and Rebels: The Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016, pp. 33-91. https://doi.org/10.12987/9780300220759-004
Gould, Rebecca Ruth. "One The Abrek in Soviet Chechen Literature". Writers and Rebels: The Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016, pp. 33-91. https://doi.org/10.12987/9780300220759-004
I have read.Nino Haratischwili, Die Katze und der General (2018)
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I have written... nothing ...
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latecomers of History |
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Chechens' claim of independence came late, when the fallen giant was already about to start gathering his forces once again. The power had already shifted from the trembling hands of Yeltsin to those of young KGB officer, Vladimir Putin. The moment was no longer that of separatisms.
What is the image of the Chechen wars that I have kept in my mind? A blurred one, although at the time I was already a university student. The little I remember are the nonsensical comments pronounced by Polish intellectuals on television. Later on, I often saw Chechen refugees in a kebab bar at the Warsaw train station. Strangely, the Poles made an impression of keeping the side of Russia in that war, even if later on I learned that Poland accepted a considerable amount of Chechen refugees. But it was the decision of the state, kept away from popular awareness. Were it advertised, I suppose it would give rise to widespread discontentment. Only isolated voices timidly tried to make us remember that what the Chechens were doing might be rightly compared, for instance, with our own national insurrections of the 19th century. I would say such statements were against the political correctness of the time in Poland; few people were inclined to see things in such a light. The majority shared the imperial vision of the Chechens as barbarians. They were Muslims. In Poland, at the time, it was enough to say that. In fact, the Chechens were latecomers also to Islam. A periphery of the world, a borderland of empires (the Russian, the Ottoman, the Persian), the country was entirely Islamised as late as the 18th century (even if the process started sometime in the 15th c.). Russian influence and the attempts at dominating the Caucasus are almost as ancient as Islam; they date back to the time of Ivan the Terrible. Nonetheless, those attempts intensified and brought about clear outcomes only in the 19th century. The year 1818 marks the beginning of the Caucasian wars, this is why many a Russian Romantic poet contributed to that vision of a barbarian nation that was later shared by the rest of the world, including the Poles. Russian encroachment upon the Caucasus was also the beginning of the city of Grozny, originally a fortress founded by the Russian general Ermolov. Yet the country could only be regarded as conquered in 1859, after the rendition of Imam Shamil, the leader of the Chechen (and Daghestani) resistance. And this is how Chechnya became, together with Ingushetia, a part of the Russian empire. Later on, there was an ephemeral independent state in 1921, a short-lived "Republic of the Mountains", but in 1936 a so-called autonomous Soviet republic of Chechnya-Ingushetia was created, only to suffer Stalin's repressions, deportations, and all the remaining calamities of the subaltern peoples of the Soviet empire. And this is how the Chechens survived, badly bruised, till its collapse. In 1991, they attempted to acquire their independence, just like many other parts of the former Soviet Union did. Yet their cause was unsuccessful. This is how the war began, a war that after several bloody years, they tried to bring back to the capital of the empire. But the 300 dead in Moscow in 1999 only served as a pretext for the intensification of Russian intervention. In 2000, the conquest of Grozny was the first triumph of the newly elected Wladimir Putin. It could hardly be seen as the beginning of peace; there were further episodes, such as the creation of the Nord-Caucasian emirate in 2007. In 2009, Russia officially proclaimed peace once again. The years passed by. It was April 2019. I entered a bookshop in Poznan to buy something to read on the train to Kraków. As a gift, I received a promotional brochure containing the first chapter of the Polish translation of Nino Haratischwili's German-speaking novel Die Katze und der General. The narration captivated me, illuminated me. We are back in 1994. Nura goes to the mill for a bag of flour. On her way, she thinks about freedom. Aspirations. Basic female freedom from other females, those old ones, looking disapprovingly at her uncovered hair. Freedom is the keyword of the day, but men take it differently. She meets them on the highway. It is the beginning of the war. And this is where the promotional brochure ends. I returned to the novel in 2024, already with a greater amount of information about the Chechen wars. This knowledge bored through to the Polish mind during yet another of Putin's wars, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. And I read the extensive, yet thrilling text to the end. Haratischwili is a Georgian; she wrote her novel in German during a creative residency in any of those orderly and welcoming German cities. She had to pay back the hospitality and offer something that might be close to European interest. Perhaps this is the reason why Orlov, dubbed the General, the merciful raper and killer of the Chechen girl must become a Russian oligarch. I guess this twist in the narration provides him with sufficient brightness and impact. Yet in the background, there is Moscow, its grey blocks of flats, and its uncertain local color. There is also Berlin, the Far East of the West, where the Georgian actress closely resembling the Chechen girl is recruited. The General has a grievance against his former comrades that had made him a rapist and a killer. Nino Haratischwili, Die Katze und der General, Frankfurt am Main, Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt, 2018. Kraków, sometime in 2018 - February 2024. |
watching Russian movies about Chechnya
I wonder how many movies about Chechnya I have seen; it must be quite a lot. The first one of them, chronologically, but also by the order of relevance, was "The Twelve", a 2007 legal drama by Nikita Mikhalkov. It was several years ago when I was still a professor at the University of Warsaw. I shared a postcolonial seminar with a Buryat colleague. It must have been around 2008 or 2009 when the movie was still a novelty; it was she who brought this material to the classroom. We were so very confused on the topic of postcolonial theory, and the limits of its application to the Russian historical reality. But the influential book Imperial Knowledge by a Polish-American scholar Ewa Thompson, translated into Polish under the captivating title Trubadurzy imperium, was making a sort of school. So we attempted to give a postcolonial treatment to this cinematographic narration. Years later, I saw another Russian movie about Chechnya that deserved much more urgent postcolonial deconstruction. It was a beautiful image of the Caucasus, Amanat (Аманат) directed in 2022 directed by Anton Sivers and Rauf Kubayev. It tells a romantic story of Imam Shamil's son, Jalal-ud-Din, who was educated, as a captive prince, among the Russian aristocracy. With the rustling of silk gowns weared by delicate Russian beauties, the son of the rebel is brought to civilization, epitomized by books written in Cyrillic and brass telescopes constructed by a local science man. The movie, ending with a touching scene in which the Caucasian wife of Jalal-ud-Din gives back, after his death, the letters and the copy of Robinson Crusoe to his fair lover Lisa Olenina.
The imperial eye looks to the Chechens with benevolence: also they are beautiful. Their fortress is shown as a pristine place; they look elegant, romantic and mysterious while riding nimbly their best horses. And of course, the protagonist makes a fine figure, not only in his uniform of a Russian officer, but also in the dark romantic shirt he dons after his return to the mountains. The Caucasian history is made of war, love, romanticism, and rebelry when the sister of a killed officer runs away from her brother mountain grave right into the arms of her lover, who is a friend and and enemy all in one. Even Imam Shamil is full of dignity, yet emotional when he is given the chance of visiting the classroom where his son had learned it all, and discovers an engraving of a Caucasian bird in full flight he had made with a knife in the corner of his desk. By school, love, honourable death, and the rustling of silk, this is how empire has been made in this movie. The sordid side is entirely omitted. And of course, this purified vision, however attractive, is deeply false.
But let's come back to Michalkov. “The Twelve” is a sort of trial movie quite in the old, American tradition of the 1950s ("Twelve Angry Men"). The jury called for the case of a teenage Chechen orphan, accused of having murdered the Russian officer who adopted him, is quite a make-shift one, and for some reason, they meet in a disaffected gym hall rather than a real court of justice. I believe that this is exactly the main topic of this movie: the cultural presence of mercy (inscribed in the Orthodox Christian affects) and the cultural absence of justice, in the modern sense of the term. During all those years of Soviet rule, the accusation was essentially consubstantial with condemnation, and the summary judgments were pronounced in all sorts of improvised circumstances. This is why the newly established "Twelve", copied from the American system, go to great lengths to establish the truth. Evidently, it was not the boy who killed the demobilized soldier. The proofs point out to a group of gangsters who were simply interested in evacuating the flat occupied by the officer and his adopted Chechen boy.
Apparently, it is the intimate knowledge of the Caucasus that helps the jurors to establish the truth. Yet there is something tortuous in the logic they follow. They remark that a Chechen would never shout "I will kill you" - and such is the deposition of one of the neighbors; this is how they reach the conclusion that something must be false in the presented sequence of events. A strange knowledge indeed, more like one of those colonial stereotypes about the barbarians of the mountains who attack and kill like tigers, quickly, efficiently, and without a warning.
Another memorable scene concerning the limitations of that intimate, yet insufficient knowledge of the Caucasus is a dance, the terrible Caucasian dance the boy performs in the prison; not to entice his anger and aggression, but to keep himself warm in a cell without any heating.
Later on, I saw many war movies about various Russian Ramboes and humble border patrols preventing disasters that might be born in the region. Many of those movies in which blood splashes from the screen right into the viewer's own cozy room. But there is one of those I remember for that typically Russian understanding of humanness and mercy, that finally capitulates in front of the existential absurdity. It is Пленный (Captive), a 2008 war movie directed by Aleksei Uchitel. It is about two Russian soldiers leading a Chechen prisoner, a teenage boy, through the mountains to exchange him against one of their own, a Russian soldier held captive among the Chechens. As they roam their endless way through the wilderness, and save their captive from drowning in a mountain stream, a flimsy closeness starts to build up among them, and mercy, since they even give the boy a spare pair of socks of their own. Oh, how good they treat him, compared to the flashes showing the parallel misery and humiliation of the Russian captive among the Chechens. Certainly, one can see how they are truly the supreme civilization, the Russians, how they are gentle and humane. But at a given moment, hiding in a thicket, they spot a larger group of Chechen insurgents. Overwhelmed by fear, they end up strangling the boy to prevent him from shouting. Both sides lose: the boy is dead, the Russians are not able to exchange him against their colleague; they fail their mission. Also, the Russian concept of humanness, the foundation of their sense of moral superiority, collapses.
And yet another Russian movie I saw was "The Prisoner of the Mountains", a Sergei Bodrov's 1996 war drama based on an 1872 novella of Tolstoy, Кавказский пленник, transcribed into the reality of quite a recent conflict. It is deep, touching, as it shows both that old imperial vision of savagery attributed to the colonized nation and precisely the "savage", primordial values, if I may say so, such as the respect for a mother (it is only a mother that might come to intercede in favor of the war prisoner, but the problem is that the soldier in question has been brought up in an orphanage; he cannot write home for help). In any case, the final mercy is obtained, as I've understood, by a female intercessor (the old father's only remaining daughter, who fell in love with the Russian). Who would expect that from those ruthless macho warriors? And yet they also have their ways of being civilized, they also know forgiveness. Shorty speaking, a truly complex story, standing for values across the cultural divide.
But where is the Chechen narration about themselves?
Yes, finally I found it. Приказано забыть (Ordered to Forget), a 2014 movie directed by Hussein Erkenov, tells the story of the tension between the Soviets and the Chechens, ending in the great deportations of 1944. The narration is framed in female memory. A son takes his mother and his little son to the native mountains, still a closed zone. In their expensive car, they leave the modern Grozny with its skyscrapers and its big mosques. Yet there is a checkpoint on the road, and from that point on, they can only continue on foot. So they go, back into a history of a family, of a community, of a country. Back in the time of wolves and horses, and agile dzhigits in big, hairy papakhas made with karakul sheep skin. Yet soon this world finds its end in a difficult mass deportation, as the lorries carrying the local population slip into Caucasian abysses. And finally, confronted with the logistic inability of his troops, the Soviet colonel gives the order to burn the Chechens right on the spot, in a barn where they stayed for the night. Only a little boy escapes the massacre, yet he will always claim to have died on that day, in that burning barn. This is why two dates of death are written on his grave. "Does it sometimes happen like this, to die twice?", inquires his little grandson in the final scene of the movie.
And what comes to me, absurdly and out of context, to resume the Chechen destiny is a little quotation from Voznesensky:
Живешь — горишь.
Kraków, 8.02.2022 - 5.02.2024.
The imperial eye looks to the Chechens with benevolence: also they are beautiful. Their fortress is shown as a pristine place; they look elegant, romantic and mysterious while riding nimbly their best horses. And of course, the protagonist makes a fine figure, not only in his uniform of a Russian officer, but also in the dark romantic shirt he dons after his return to the mountains. The Caucasian history is made of war, love, romanticism, and rebelry when the sister of a killed officer runs away from her brother mountain grave right into the arms of her lover, who is a friend and and enemy all in one. Even Imam Shamil is full of dignity, yet emotional when he is given the chance of visiting the classroom where his son had learned it all, and discovers an engraving of a Caucasian bird in full flight he had made with a knife in the corner of his desk. By school, love, honourable death, and the rustling of silk, this is how empire has been made in this movie. The sordid side is entirely omitted. And of course, this purified vision, however attractive, is deeply false.
But let's come back to Michalkov. “The Twelve” is a sort of trial movie quite in the old, American tradition of the 1950s ("Twelve Angry Men"). The jury called for the case of a teenage Chechen orphan, accused of having murdered the Russian officer who adopted him, is quite a make-shift one, and for some reason, they meet in a disaffected gym hall rather than a real court of justice. I believe that this is exactly the main topic of this movie: the cultural presence of mercy (inscribed in the Orthodox Christian affects) and the cultural absence of justice, in the modern sense of the term. During all those years of Soviet rule, the accusation was essentially consubstantial with condemnation, and the summary judgments were pronounced in all sorts of improvised circumstances. This is why the newly established "Twelve", copied from the American system, go to great lengths to establish the truth. Evidently, it was not the boy who killed the demobilized soldier. The proofs point out to a group of gangsters who were simply interested in evacuating the flat occupied by the officer and his adopted Chechen boy.
Apparently, it is the intimate knowledge of the Caucasus that helps the jurors to establish the truth. Yet there is something tortuous in the logic they follow. They remark that a Chechen would never shout "I will kill you" - and such is the deposition of one of the neighbors; this is how they reach the conclusion that something must be false in the presented sequence of events. A strange knowledge indeed, more like one of those colonial stereotypes about the barbarians of the mountains who attack and kill like tigers, quickly, efficiently, and without a warning.
Another memorable scene concerning the limitations of that intimate, yet insufficient knowledge of the Caucasus is a dance, the terrible Caucasian dance the boy performs in the prison; not to entice his anger and aggression, but to keep himself warm in a cell without any heating.
Later on, I saw many war movies about various Russian Ramboes and humble border patrols preventing disasters that might be born in the region. Many of those movies in which blood splashes from the screen right into the viewer's own cozy room. But there is one of those I remember for that typically Russian understanding of humanness and mercy, that finally capitulates in front of the existential absurdity. It is Пленный (Captive), a 2008 war movie directed by Aleksei Uchitel. It is about two Russian soldiers leading a Chechen prisoner, a teenage boy, through the mountains to exchange him against one of their own, a Russian soldier held captive among the Chechens. As they roam their endless way through the wilderness, and save their captive from drowning in a mountain stream, a flimsy closeness starts to build up among them, and mercy, since they even give the boy a spare pair of socks of their own. Oh, how good they treat him, compared to the flashes showing the parallel misery and humiliation of the Russian captive among the Chechens. Certainly, one can see how they are truly the supreme civilization, the Russians, how they are gentle and humane. But at a given moment, hiding in a thicket, they spot a larger group of Chechen insurgents. Overwhelmed by fear, they end up strangling the boy to prevent him from shouting. Both sides lose: the boy is dead, the Russians are not able to exchange him against their colleague; they fail their mission. Also, the Russian concept of humanness, the foundation of their sense of moral superiority, collapses.
And yet another Russian movie I saw was "The Prisoner of the Mountains", a Sergei Bodrov's 1996 war drama based on an 1872 novella of Tolstoy, Кавказский пленник, transcribed into the reality of quite a recent conflict. It is deep, touching, as it shows both that old imperial vision of savagery attributed to the colonized nation and precisely the "savage", primordial values, if I may say so, such as the respect for a mother (it is only a mother that might come to intercede in favor of the war prisoner, but the problem is that the soldier in question has been brought up in an orphanage; he cannot write home for help). In any case, the final mercy is obtained, as I've understood, by a female intercessor (the old father's only remaining daughter, who fell in love with the Russian). Who would expect that from those ruthless macho warriors? And yet they also have their ways of being civilized, they also know forgiveness. Shorty speaking, a truly complex story, standing for values across the cultural divide.
But where is the Chechen narration about themselves?
Yes, finally I found it. Приказано забыть (Ordered to Forget), a 2014 movie directed by Hussein Erkenov, tells the story of the tension between the Soviets and the Chechens, ending in the great deportations of 1944. The narration is framed in female memory. A son takes his mother and his little son to the native mountains, still a closed zone. In their expensive car, they leave the modern Grozny with its skyscrapers and its big mosques. Yet there is a checkpoint on the road, and from that point on, they can only continue on foot. So they go, back into a history of a family, of a community, of a country. Back in the time of wolves and horses, and agile dzhigits in big, hairy papakhas made with karakul sheep skin. Yet soon this world finds its end in a difficult mass deportation, as the lorries carrying the local population slip into Caucasian abysses. And finally, confronted with the logistic inability of his troops, the Soviet colonel gives the order to burn the Chechens right on the spot, in a barn where they stayed for the night. Only a little boy escapes the massacre, yet he will always claim to have died on that day, in that burning barn. This is why two dates of death are written on his grave. "Does it sometimes happen like this, to die twice?", inquires his little grandson in the final scene of the movie.
And what comes to me, absurdly and out of context, to resume the Chechen destiny is a little quotation from Voznesensky:
Живешь — горишь.
Kraków, 8.02.2022 - 5.02.2024.
