Toward a Theory of Second-World Literature: The Case of Sadriddin Aini’s Reminiscences

Sadriddin Aini (b. 1878), the “founder of Soviet Tajik prose,” published his final literary work, Reminiscences (Yoddoshto) in 1949.[1] A poet, essayist, literary critic and fiction writer, Aini produced a large and varied body of work from the years just preceding the Revolution’s arrival in Central Asia up to his death in 1954. Writing in the Persian vernacular of the Ferghana Valley, where he was raised, he helped to create and codify Tajik as a literary language that could give expression to “the dizzyingly rapid changes that in a single generation . . . swept [Central Asia] from the Middle Ages into the twentieth century” (Perry and Lehr, introduction to The Sands of Oxus, 7). While much of Aini’s oeuvre is autobiographical in theme, Reminiscences is Aini’s only non-fiction work devoted explicitly to his own life. Spanning four volumes, though the later ones are unfinished, the work sketches Aini’s childhood and youth in the pre-Soviet Emirate of Bukhara, his experiences as a young man during the Bolshevik Revolution in Central Asia, and his education in both traditional Islamic scholarship and contemporary Soviet and Central Asian politics. Here I focus on the first volume of Reminiscences, which chronicles Aini’s childhood and the conditions of life in the Bukharan Emirate in the years before Soviet socialism. In reappropriating and blending multiple imperial ideological and literary aesthetic norms, Aini produces an exemplary work of what I call “second-world literature,” a term chosen to acknowledge both the Soviet, or Second World, context out of which the work arose, as well as the synthetic and mediating qualities of literature situated geopolitically and geopoetically—that is, in a geographically and world literary liminal space—between the First and Third worlds.

Aini was a mediator and a synthesizer or sorts. One of his major projects in the Reminiscences consists of squaring the two educational modes most important to his cultural and moral development. At first glance these two educations, which young Aini experiences on parallel timelines in the Reminiscences, seem nearly diametrically opposed—one religious, antiquated, and ritualized; the other secular, future-oriented, and bound up with the shifting ideologies and identities of the early Soviet Union. However dissimilar they may be in orientation and aim, though, Aini’s dual educations are also complexly entangled, and his autobiographical attempt to resolve the differences between them gives the Reminiscences its modern, even modernist, character.

Aini’s first, more traditional education was in the maktab and madrassa system of the wider Muslim world. In the traditional schools of Bukhara he learned Arabic as well as classical Persian, a regional prestige written language which bore an imperial past of its own and which contributed directly to the literary Tajik, which Aini would almost single-handedly develop from the local Persian vernacular. The formal Persian of Aini’s youth was the lingua franca of what has become known in Western scholarship as the Persianate world. In recent years the Persianate has been theorized as a pre-modern form of cosmopolitanism, with the Persian language serving as a primarily written language which standardized schooling, bureaucracy, and artistic literature across a swath of territory stretching from the Balkans to Western China, and incorporating many distinct polities, from the ninth to the late nineteenth century. This Persian was bound up with the institutions of governance and administration of early modern Eurasia: its long association with organized institutions “incrementally transformed [it] into a learned second language rather than a written mother tongue.”[2] Aini came of age just as this Persianate world was in decline, though he was in Bukhara, where Persian, in addition to retaining its status as a vernacular language, “remained the dominant bureaucratic language” among ruling elites through the first two decades of the twentieth century (Green, introduction to The Persianate World, 42). In the early years of Aini’s literary career Persian was present and in wide usage as a written language, but it was associated chiefly with the quickly crumbling political regime of earlier centuries. As a retrospective on this period of intense and quick social change, the Reminiscences represents the old system as both foundational for young Aini and outmoded. In many ways, it is an ideology which the young protagonist must unlearn.

A second, newer educational model—and one which was, in the early twentieth century of Aini’s youth, directly in conflict with the older formation described above—was developed by a loose-knit movement of Central Asian modernizers and reformers called the Jadids. This movement was explicitly focused on education and its major bases of operation were a network of “new method” schools whose curricula included European-style courses in natural and physical sciences alongside a re-envisioned form of Islamic education, and whose pedagogical methods also diverged notably from those of the maktab and madrassa system.[3] The Jadids and their schools had far-reaching effects across Central Asian society in the years just before the arrival of the Soviet Union. Among other things, they brought into focus such concepts as modernity and tradition, forging new ways of imagining Central Asia that “[made] it possible to conceive of tradition as tradition.”[4] The conquest of much of Central Asia by the Russian Empire in the late nineteenth century brought Central Asian intellectuals into contact with both colonial subjugation and European thought and technologies, both circumstances which would change how they conceived of their own cultures and societies. The philosophical and political outlook of the Jadids was therefore “a response to Russian rule,” but not solely a nationalist reaction to imperial incursions, and “its most constant feature was a ruthless critique of Muslim society” (Khalid, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform, 81). Out of this social critique a new Central Asian worldview grew, in the intellectual generation just preceding Aini’s. One of the major shifts it occasioned was to fundamentally redefine concepts like education and literature, making these sites of contestation between traditionalist and reformist camps into important aspects of Central Asian modernity.

By the time Aini was writing, already firmly in the early Soviet period, he had to reconcile the competing parts of a literary heritage which included the Persianate past, the Jadids’ pre-revolutionary critique of that already historical past, and the precepts of Soviet nationalities policy. Among other things, Soviet policies designated a national language for every distinct ethnic group—Aini’s official ethnic language therefore became Tajik, a dialect which his writing helped to codify and stabilize.[5] Aini therefore built the foundations of a national literature which was viable in the Stalin-era Soviet world on the already existent structures of regional educational and linguistic norms. But the relationship between his pre-Soviet education and his developing Soviet-era political awareness is uneasy throughout the Reminiscences, and Aini articulates the links between past and present only in circular, dependent constructions, as in his own introduction to the work:

Autobiography always seemed to me more difficult than writing fiction, so I put it off until such time as I was more experienced. Because, just as no-one can fully appreciate life today—Soviet socialist life—unless he has actually experienced the old days, so too no-one who has not truly experienced life under the Soviet socialist system—especially literary life—and made this lifestyle truly his own, can realistically describe life as it was under out-and-out feudalism. (Aini, The Sands of Oxus, 29)

Here Aini weaves the past with the present, making the meaning and interpretation of each contingent on the experience of the other. From the standpoint of the social and cultural transformations which ran parallel to Aini’s life, this introductory remark establishes the core issues of the Reminiscences—history, tradition, education—as modern concepts, dependent upon a knowledge of as well as self-conscious separation from the past. From the standpoint of literary genre, Aini uses the dependence on the past to link autobiography’s typical retrospective gaze with socialist realism’s future-oriented focus on progress.

Of course, the past for Aini was not only Central Asian traditional elites and their Jadidist interlocutors. It was also the experience of his native Bukhara’s assimilation into the Russian Empire, a process which was ongoing until the arrival of Soviet power in the region. The question of the Soviet Union’s relationship to the Russian Empire, especially regarding the administration of non-European Soviet territories, is vexed. A still developing line of thinking suggests, following David Chioni Moore’s argument for the inclusion of post-Soviet spaces in the general realm of postcolonial scholarship, that the Russian center/“ethnic” periphery imperial relations established in the nineteenth century continued through Soviet cultural, if not economic, policy.[6] Others have argued that Soviet policy toward the non-Russian nationalities of the USSR, and in particular the development of national literatures, as part of an anti-imperialist internationalism which would ultimately serve as one of the bases for postcolonial critique.[7] A literary genre-based reading Aini’s Reminiscences as a Soviet text can support either conclusion. On one hand, the text mirrors Frederic Jameson’s now infamous observation that hero’s narrative in third-world literature always allegorizes the development of the nation.[8] The developments which young Aini undergoes in the first part of Reminiscences are in fact easy to map onto the national allegory model: the writer’s adolescence coincides neatly with revolution, his arrival at adulthood with the birth of the Tajik nation. But, leaving aside for now fact that Jameson’s assesses the state of Third World literature when Tajikistan belongs more properly to the socialist Second World, Reminiscences can also be read as another type of allegory—namely, the young protagonist’s arrival not at a sense of national consciousness, but class consciousness.

That distinction is borne out in the work’s generic complexity. Prominent scholars of Aini John Perry, Rachel Lehr and Jiri Becka concur that, while the Reminiscences foregrounds certain autobiographical features, it is generically difficult to classify. Says Becka, “the protagonist of the novel, the author himself, is pushed back to a secondary position and does not appear frequently and clearly. We get to know his ideas rather than how he was living and what he was doing” (Becka, Sadriddin Ayni, 53). Perry and Lehr unequivocally call the work an autobiography but worry that Soviet ideological requirements have occluded its message. “Just how “original” or “genuine” was Aini?” they ask, “And how do we know?” (Perry and Lehr, introduction to The Sands of Oxus, 4). The question of the book’s political underpinnings—whether they are sound or suspect, whether we can uncover them—belies another, more strictly literary question, which has to do with narrative and what drives the narrative of Aini’s youth forward. Is the story he tells one of personal, subjective development? Or does he instead describe a collective experience focalized through the character of his childhood self—a proper allegory? If the answer is “both,” Jameson’s point about the politicized, nationalized literary subject would seem to apply and, therefore, situate the Reminiscences among third-world literature and the Soviet Union, by extension, as an imperial power. I contend that a third way is possible, in which Aini’s texts maintains some differentiation between the personal and the political even as it interweaves those categories, as it does the Soviet present and the Bukharan past. I further argue that we read Aini’s Reminiscences as a representative second-world text—a category which, though it may bear ideological burdens of its own, can stand apart from a binary colonizer-or-colonized view of history and literary production.

The “third way” of second-world literature is evident in literary form, complicating the Jamesonian notion that content is local but form imported from, or imposed by, the novel-centric literary cultures of Western Europe and the Anglophone world. If we understand Soviet Moscow as a metropole, and the precepts of the Soviet Writers’ Congress as the authority on socialist realist form that Moscow would export to its peripheries, Aini’s writings do bear some resemblance to Jameson’s definition of third-world colonial literature.[9] It’s a big “if,” and the question, which I won’t address fully here, of the mechanisms by which the Soviet literary elite fostered its vision of socialist literature outside of the European Russian regions of the Soviet Union is complex. As Samuel Hodgkin has pointed out, Persian literature within the Soviet context makes a particularly interesting case because it was “the only language to feature simultaneously in the canons of Eastern classics, oral folklore, and, in its Tajik dialect, as a Soviet national literature” (Hodgkin, “Lāhūtī: Persian Poetry,” 24–25). Aini was aware of the somewhat unusual status of Persian in the context of Soviet literature and burgeoning connections between the second and third worlds. Abbas Amanat names Aini as one of several “cultural and political figures of the twentieth century [who] . . . were conscious of transnational Persianate ties. . . . It was as if they sketched a common cultural space that was waiting to be defined but soon to disappear under the weight of territorial nationalisms and identity politics.”[10]

That common cultural space does not fit neatly into theories of either first-world or second-world literature, though it draws on the historical dynamics which created both. Nor is it merely a cultural synthesis of center and periphery. It resembles instead what Alexander Jabbari, theorizing the writing of Persian language literary history in British India, calls Persianate modernity. This literature was not “simply invented in Europe and then exported to Asia, where it would be imitated by local scholars. Instead [it] developed in dialectical relationship between Persianate litterateurs and European Orientalists.”[11] I discuss Aini’s European influences in more detail below, but for now will simply note that Aini’s work, too, arose out of a relationship, in some ways highly mediated and in others direct, between European and Persianate litterateurs. Part of that relationship came to Aini via the Jadids and their encounter with the Russian Empire. The other part, which was specific to Soviet modernity, Aini embodied himself. The fleeting Persianate transnational space also bears some resemblance to Edward Soja’s concept of the Thirdspace. Not merely the synthesis of material space and conceptual space, Thirdspace, which is real in both material and imaginative senses “introduces a critical “other-than” choice that speaks and critiques through its otherness.”[12] Implicit in that otherness is a critique of imperial modernity and of antipathy to imperial modernity, neither of which, for Aini, are sufficient conditions for the construction of his literary world. What I term second-world literature, then, is also a critical stance which assumes the global as an operative concept, but suggests that the space where center and periphery lock horns is too narrow a conception of the term—in Lydia Ng’s phrasing, “the global betrays the imperial logic it has inherited.”[13] Following the assertion from the Multilingual Locals and Significant Geographies Project that “'the world' is not a given but is produced by different, embodied, and located actors,” the remainder of this essay explores the “'other-than' choice” of Aini’s Reminiscences and, by extension, of the particular located, embodied modernities of second-world literatures.[14]

Aini, as a writer of Soviet Persian prose, weaves a pre-Soviet Persian canon with local folklore, while also hewing consciously to foundational tenets of socialist realist prose. Take, for example, Gorky (whom Aini claims as a major influence in the prologue to the Reminiscences) asserting in 1934 that “[t]he principal theme of European and Russian literature in the nineteenth century was personality in antithesis to society, the state and nature” while under Soviet socialism “[o]ne thing only is demanded of personality: Be honest in your attitude to the heroic work of creating a classless society.”[15] Reading Aini through this lens might provide an answer to Becka’s critique that the protagonist of the Reminiscences is absent or obscured—if the socialist realist literary personality is as perfectly aligned as possible with the interests of a classless society and governing state, perhaps the individual personality would recede into the background, replaced by the ever-expanding collective entity that was the working class. On the other hand, the Reminiscences’ engagements with socialist realism are obvious to those of us trained, like Jameson, to excavate literary heritages with roots in European culture; its other heritages may be equally evident to readers whose sphere of knowledge extends beyond the European.

This is imbrication of multiple literary heritages, and their various associations with empire, tradition, liberation, and modernity, are expressed most clearly through the spatial poetics of Aini’s Reminiscences. The narrative portion of the Reminiscences begins with a focus on physical setting, divisions of living space, the proximity of neighbors and the town, but not on the child subject in any direct way. Here are the childhood narrative’s opening lines:

The house had a fairly large yard enclosed by a high mud-brick wall, except on the south side, where there was an orchard and kitchen garden separated from the neighboring fields by a lower wall. The east side of the wall adjoined the neighbors’ house, the west side was next to the fields, and the north, in which was the entrance gate, ran alongside the main street of the village. (Aini, The Sands of Oxus, 37)

In the Tajik original that emphasis on the primary role space plays in mediating relationships between individuals is evident even in the construction of Aini’s sentences. The first words of the Tajik read “Yak havlii yak daraja vase” (A yard, somewhat wide), emphasizing not only the yard and its physical dimensions, but a lack of specificity about the relationship between the yard and the narrator—the first word, “yak,” and the ending on “havli” grammatically marks the yard (havli) as indefinite, not necessarily specifically related to Aini or his family.[16] The closest the narrator comes to revealing either his own identity or a sense of property is through an apparently incidental reference to the neighbor’s house (“in havli ba havlii hamsoya . . .”) [this house and the neighbor’s house… (Aini, Yoddoshtho, 9). Thus, a certain sense of collectivity inheres in this narrative and precedes the development of any characters, the subject or others.

Nevertheless, this opening setting turns out to be the setting for Aini’s personal development in addition to being a demarcation of collective space. After a few pages of thorough description of the entire family compound, the narrator turns to another topic—his memory. “The first memory I have of this yard was on a day when the south building and sufa were full of men and the north building was full of women” (Aini, The Sands of Oxus, 38). The fact that, in the original Tajik, the first words of the narrative portion of Reminiscences is “a yard” heightens the sense of the yard as the setting not just for Aini’s childhood narrative but for his adult memory. So when Aini writes “Dar ruze, ki man avvalin bor in havliro ba yodi khud giriftaam,” (On the day in which I took for the first time this yard into my own memory),” it feels as if the chapter starts over yet again, this time within Aini’s memories of his own childhood, at which the narrator arrives only after detailing the physical spaces of his childhood (Aini, Yoddoshtho, 10).

That emphasis on the physical space of life may have to do with a development in Persianate Central Asian literature which had been underway for several centuries before the Soviet revolution. Most visible in tazkira, an ancient genre of compilations of biographical facts and representative verse from poets working in Persian and Arabic, the 15th and later centuries saw a shift in focus away from the “glorious past” toward “the events of ‘real life’ and the introduction of elements of realism and reminiscences drawn from current developments and conditions . . . as opposed to canonical poetic descriptions.”[17] Then, too, although Aini claims Gorky as a major influence, and models the name of his autobiographical work after Gorky’s, in a formal sense he is equally indebted to the autobiographical writings of one of his mentors, Sharif-jan Makhdum-i Sadr-i Ziya. Ziya was at the very center of the literary world of pre-revolutionary Jadids in Bukhara, an outspoken reformer and critic of the Emir of Bukhara. He was one of young Aini’s teachers and a supporter of Aini’s literary and political work. Ziya’s memoirs are less stylistically cohesive than Aini’s—they blend verse and prose, attempt to give accurate accounts of history as well as contemporary politics, and compile lengthy quotes from other literary production of the time. In style, they very much resemble the tazkira. But unlike the traditional tazkira, which tends toward individual character development and the crafting of a personal narrative of its poet-subjects, Ziya’s writings develop both personal and collective, historical narratives.

Aini transforms these local influences into a thematically Soviet narrative. For Ziya and the earlier generation of Jadids, giving an accurate account of the conditions of the recent past and the present was in itself an ideological intervention.[18] Aini goes a step further, presenting not only “out-and-out feudalism” the way it was, but also the spaces of his childhood and youth as ready for Soviet socialism. And in this way, he participates in a project that, through Gorky, opens onto a double-pronged Western European lineage of literary writing about the relationship between the individual subject and history: on the one hand, the development of Socialist Realism as the literary style of the Stalin-era Soviet Union; and, on the other, a Russian and more broadly European tradition of writing about one’s own childhood which reaches back to Saint Augustine. If Gorky’s major project in his reminiscences was describing the passage of his life and his own development without the standard bourgeois markers of personal development, Aini takes up something of the same goal, detailing his first experiences in his village school and entrance into madrasa in Bukhara, as well as the deaths of his parents.[19] However, much of the narrative thrust of Aini’s Reminiscences comes not from the narrator developing a sense of himself from a unique combination of meaningful personal experiences, but instead from the narrator deducing lessons about society and his place in it from particular but rather mundane experiences.

I take as an example one section of the Reminiscences entitled “The Mirakoni Khojas’ Banquet,” set during a long middle section of the book in which young Aini is living at home and attending his village school. In this passage, young Aini’s father tells him a story about a banquet at which members of the local aristocracy act pompous and foolish:

At that time, I had no inkling that this tale of my father’s was distinctly exaggerated. When I was older, I realized that this description of khojas’ table manners was not literally true, but I was convinced nevertheless, from my own experience, that it corresponded in large measure to the mindset of the petty aristocracy of the time. At any rate, this fake reminiscence of my father’s made such an impression on me that I recognized the hollowness and foolishness of aristocratic pretentions even before I learned of them at first hand. (Aini, The Sands of Oxus, 162)

These kinds of realizations are typical of Aini’s Reminiscences. He reproduces his father’s tale in detail and with enough irony that its own ideological stance is clear, while modeling the kind of political consciousness that Aini as a very young child was prepared to grasp. The book’s lessons become more complex and nuanced as Aini matures and the Reminiscences progresses. Early on, when Aini is still very young, the morals or quips at the ends of sections are more like observations and Aini leaves out the stakes or an explication of the pedagogical value of his experiences. After Aini has spent a season in school, for example, his father exhorts him to progress as far as he can in his education, but to avoid the lazy self-aggrandizement of imposters. Aini takes the advice to heart: “I came to despise the big turbans of the would-be scholars, and likewise acquired a horror of idleness” (115). But it is not until after Aini has grown up significantly and has travelled outside of his villages and seen something of the world that he begins to articulate both the lesson and its effect on his subsequent life. In the case cited above, when Aini learns to “recognize the hollowness and foolishness of aristocratic pretentions,” there are two embedded lessons (162). One concerns young Aini’s development of class consciousness; the other, his ability to interpret others’ narratives. Here, a younger Aini successfully apprehends his father’s social commentary based on an exaggerated tale, while a slightly older Aini comes to understand his father’s rhetorical tactic as well. As evidence of the subject’s increasing sophistication as a crafter of narrative himself, Aini presents both types of lesson to his audience simultaneously.

We might read the Reminiscences, then, as a kind of bildungsroman, in which the protagonist achieves dual integrations into his society. One, of course, is Soviet socialist integration. In these childhood reminiscences, Aini has as yet had no contact with either socialism or Russians, but his burgeoning distaste for the hypocrisy and affections of the local ruling classes surely positions him well to receive the Bolshevik Revolution when it reaches the Emirate of Bukhara. The second integration has to do with Aini’s ability to employ and manipulate narrative, including personal narrative, as a literary tool. This is the realm in which his autobiographical venture seems most clearly indebted to the arc of Western literature through its relation to the particular lineage of the childhood narrative.

Theories of the Childhood are mindful of the fact that, though childhood narratives are close in form and content to autobiographies, they focus on the experience of the child subject, which differs vastly from adult experience. Childhood narratives thus have a built-in tension between the (child) subject of the writing and the (adult) writing subject. Richard Coe defines the childhood genre as the narration of a specific kind of developing awareness in the autobiographical subject:

[T]he Childhood, considered as a literary form, is closely allied to a number of other recognized genres. It has, obviously, direct affinities with the Bildungsroman; between the two, however, there is a fundamental difference. The Bildungsroman relates the development or “formation” [Bildung] of the hero (who may, or may not, be identifiable with the author) from the point of his first full awareness of himself as an individual to a concluding point of his final and positive integration into the society of which he is a member. The Childhood, by contrast, narrates the development of the hero (who specifically is to be identified with the author) from a point of nonawareness to a point of total awareness of himself as an individual, and particularly as a writer and as a poet, who will produce, as evidence of his mature poet-identity, the Childhood which he has written.[20]

This pattern resonates on a number of levels with the coming-to-awareness set forward in Aini’s own reminiscences. It might indeed be an apt characterization to say that his Reminiscences encompasses and describes Aini’s journey to a “point of total awareness of himself as . . . a writer.” But Coe’s formulation resonates with Aini’s project on another level—that of the relationship which an autobiographical work posits between the past, present, and future not only of the writing subject, but of the subject’s milieu. The writer’s “point of total awareness of himself . . . as a writer . . . who will produce . . . the Childhood which he has written” melds past with future as seamlessly as does Aini’s opening justification for his own Childhood:

just as no-one can fully appreciate life today—Soviet socialist life—unless he has actually experienced the old days, so too no-one who has not truly experienced life under the Soviet socialist system—especially literary life—and made this lifestyle truly his own, can realistically describe life as it was under out-and-out feudalism. (Aini, The Sands of Oxus, 29)

The difference, of course, is that Coe describes the temporality of an individual subject, where Aini’s opening words are already imbued with a sense of collective experience.

That difference then returns us to Jameson’s hero as national allegory—an interpretation of the Reminiscences which we should not ignore. Alongside this allegory, though, Aini’s childhood narrative contains deeper, and thicker, literary heritages, a fact which is erased by a national narrative beginning at the point of Soviet-Bukharan contact, whatever we may think of the political and potentially colonial power dynamics of that exchange.[21] In this framework, “second-world” signifies not only the Cold War-era ideological division of the global space into three categories, but also a literary space and a mode of cultural production which acts as medium between other spaces and other forms, one constituted by a narrative not only of oppression and resistance, but also of multiplicity. Texts like the Reminiscences, which cannot be reduced to one linear heritage, and whose representations of space refuse to align easily with any one political reality, require a representational mode which can accommodate Aini’s Bukhara, his childhood, his personal memories, and the Persianate, Jadid, and Soviet worlds.

Within Aini’s lifetime, his native Bukhara was a part of the Emirate of Bukhara, which itself had become a protectorate of the Russian Empire a decade before his birth; the People’s Republic of Bukhara; and eventually the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. Aini’s homeland, and the specific places which contained his life, was a historically central node in the Persianate world, itself not an imperial formation but another form of linguistic and cultural hegemony which linked regions as distant as northern India and the Balkans; a distantly managed periphery of the Russian Empire; a locus of the anti-imperial, Muslim reformist Jadid movement; and, finally, an exclave of Persian speakers in the otherwise Turkophone Uzbek SSR. Aini’s portrayal of this rich, layered past—and his representation of a young man coming to as full an understanding as possible of that stratification—was made possible by both Jadid and Soviet modernity, models which in many ways, especially in the tumultuous 1920s, competed with each other for cultural supremacy in Central Asia. It was these ideologies which allowed Aini to understand the past as historical, and it was their attendant literary aesthetics, all of which privileged realism, which allowed him to represent the past as past and the present as an emergence from that past. Whereas Western European modernism has been characterized by its rejection of realism and embrace of abstraction, Aini’s break with the past wasn’t expressed through abstraction. In fact, because so much of Aini’s literary stance was oriented around the Persianate world, its collapse, and the Jadids’ critique of it, prose realism was itself an innovative break with tradition. At the same time, his exploration of selfhood and his representation of the development of class consciousness fit well with the requirements of Soviet literature of the 1930s. It is impossible to say whether Aini’s Reminiscences are an authentic expression of a multifaceted literary heritage, a multiply determined expression of the conditions of his literary production, or simply the expression of what was necessary in order to avoid repression. In some sense it doesn’t matter—an indeterminate and always “other” second-world literature is capacious enough to encompass all possibilities of the political significance of the work. But it is important to note, too, that second-world literature is necessarily a modern, if not necessarily modernist, literature, an outgrowth of a global space defined by the rise and fall of European imperialism, but comprised of locales with their own specific imperial encounters. For Aini, those imperial encounters produced literary aesthetics and cultural knowledge which, though they differed in form from the modernism of Western Europe, nonetheless afforded him the distance from his Persianate pasts—deep and more recent—to make them new.