"A City with Two Lifetimes": Urban Poetics of Early Soviet Stalinobod

Abstract

At the beginning of the century, Dushanbe was only a small rural settlement in ruins. However, in 1924, it was designated as the capital of the Tajikistan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, which was part of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic until 1929, when it became independent. The city then turned into the Soviet capital known as Stalinobod from 1929 to 1961 and underwent a rapid urban expansion, becoming a political and intellectual centre in Central Asia, in the Persian-speaking world and in Soviet Union. This paper explores how the fast and deep urbanization of early Soviet Dushanbe profoundly influenced the literary production of the time and how the textualization of the city was born with the city itself. By analysing a selection of poems where the transformation of the once mud-walled village into a capital city is depicted, in particular Kučai Lenin (‘Lenin Avenue’) by Boqi Rahimzoda, the odes by Muhammadjon Rahimi, Dushanbe (‘Dushanbe’) and Dar borai Dushanbe (‘About Dushanbe’), and Sarvar’s Rubojjot (‘Quatrains’), this study examines the interplay between literary texts and the urbanization of Stalinobod/Dushanbe, underlining how literature serves as a leans to read the urban history of a city in transformation, and as a vehicle to express modern ideas in the framework of a deeply changing Tajikistan.