ABSTRACT
Chapters 6 and 7 are dedicated to the significance of literature in Central Asia under the Russians and a simultaneous, further examination of Truth, of the empty space that lies before and beyond the last word of the last sentence in a very long Russian novel. This section examines and intertwines two issues disconcertingly close to a truly revelationary senselessness: Russians telling Uzbeks what Russian literature “is” plus the secondary, related conundrum in that same language of what Uzbek literature was and could be. Not only was this a procedure of aesthetic and philosophical colonization, but part and parcel of the Soviets’ own (ongoing) attempts to convince themselves that Socialist Realism was furthering a nineteenth-century heritage of great Russian prose. Several aspects of this multifaceted practice will be scrutinized, starting with the manner in which Russian classics from the Golden Age of realism were marketed in the region.
