The name of the Azerbaijani writer Akram Aylisli became familiar to English-speaking readers in 2018 with the publication of Katherine E. Young’s translation of his novella “Stone Dreams.” It appeared in the book Farewell, Aylis, on the wings of a political controversy connected to the earlier Russian-language publication. In fictional form, Aylisli broke with the political ideology and accepted dogma of his country by addressing the entrenched conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia, humanizing characters on both sides of the border, and offending Azerbaijan’s political elite in the process. The writer was stripped of the honors he’d earned during his long and illustrious literary career, and his books were not only banned in Azerbaijan but also subjected to staged burnings.

Aylisli turned eighty that year (he’s now eighty-six), and his courageous novella marked a peak in a long career shaped by resistance to totalitarianism. Young’s most recent translation, of his breakout book, People and Trees, affirms his early talent for creating art aslant to ideology, and allows us to marvel at the lifetime achievements of this perspicacious and charismatic writer. (A personal disclaimer: After reviewing Farewell, Aylis, I recommended that Young translate this earlier novel, and I’m delighted at the result.) Written in Azeri, the novellas comprising this book were translated to Russian by Tamara Kalyakina and serialized in a top USSR periodical, Druzhba narodov, from 1966 to 1968. In 1971, the publishing house Izvestiya distributed the book version across the Soviet Union and in translation in the countries of the Communist Bloc. Reading it now in Young’s English translation, I marvel at the degree of covert and overt criticism of the Soviet Union that Aylisli packed into this work.

The book consists of three novellas and one short story narrated by Sadyk, a young boy growing up in a mountain village in Soviet Azerbaijan. Sadyk’s mother died in childbirth, leaving him in the care of his father, Nadzhaf; his grandmother; and his aunt, Medina. While Sadyk narrates the story, he is not the protagonist of this book. His gaze and curious attention are directed less at himself than at the adults—his aunt, in particular—who reign over his world. Medina had been a talented student at school, so much so that when Sadyk eventually starts the first grade, his teachers still remember her. Unfortunately, we’re given to understand that namus, the strict traditional moral code that this rapidly modernizing society still expected women of the Caucasus to observe, did not allow her to pursue her studies. Instead, her brother married her off to a man whom she hates, Mukush.

The first novella of the book, “Tales of Aunt Medina,” is structured around Medina’s relationship with her husband. In Young’s sensitive translation, the opening sections of the novella instantly place us in a different world, where children go “bare-bottomed” until the age of five or so, when they are given “pantaloons”; and while the adults are at work, the children remain “locked in for the whole day.” Only after we’re firmly established in Sadyk’s point of view do we start to understand that the year is 1941, and that World War II serves as an important plot element. The men of the village are disappearing one by one, drafted by the Soviet authorities into battle against Germany.

First to go in Sadyk’s family is his father, after which Sadyk moves into his aunt’s household. He notices how repulsed Medina is by her husband and how, once in a while, she gets a black eye. Every night Medina makes two beds: one for little Sadyk and herself, and the other for Mukush. Sadyk observes that Mukush wants to sleep with Medina, but his aunt shrinks from him, until one night “Mukush pretended not to see my glance, turned his back, went up to Aunt Medina, and pulled the cover off her.” The child’s perspective allows the reader to witness this young woman’s life with a tenderness she’s unlikely to give herself, and though the adult Sadyk’s storyteller’s voice rarely interjects into the narrative directly (“I still remember”), the reader is always conscious of the adult author structuring the child’s narrative and directing our attention to things that young Sadyk doesn’t yet understand. The episode with Mukush ends with Sadyk telling us, “I was frightened and screwed my eyes shut . . .” After the ellipsis, where, presumably, a rape happens, Sadyk continues: “Then he left. The next day when Mukush took off his dirt-stained shirt, I saw bluish bite marks on his shoulders.”

Young’s choice of words in this passage—“screwed my eyes shut”—is impeccable. “Screwed” is a slightly offbeat word in this English phrase and gives a contemporary reader a momentary pause while simultaneously hinting at a colloquial phrase for sex, directing our attention to the act that’s not named in the original. The Russian version is opaque; literally translated, the phrase means “squeezed my eyes shut,” but adult Soviet readers were well trained to read between the lines. Young is skilled at deftly highlighting and pointing our attention to significant passages. To remove any question that one of the main subjects of this novel is sexual and domestic violence, Aylisli spells it out in a later passage. Later on, when Mukush is drafted, Medina invites her friend Merdzhan to stay with her and Sadyk. She opens up to Merdzhan about her marriage, and Sadyk remarks: “The meaning of the incomprehensible newspaper phrase ‘they rape women’ came to me, although I had thought before that rape was only committed by the fascists they wrote about in the newspapers; I hadn’t known that it was also done after a wedding feast where music thundered . . .”

This is an astonishing comment to find in a novel published in the Soviet Union, since it includes a direct comparison between the behavior of a Soviet solider and the fascists. The KGB famously confiscated Vasily Grossman’s novel Life and Fate, in part for a similar comparison. The censor may have allowed this phrase because it is framed as the perspective of a young child; children’s speech wasn’t expected to carry truth.

So it is through the child’s eyes that we see Medina’s struggle for independence. From the beginning, she doesn’t accept the role of victim, fighting with her husband and her brother, who had apparently sold her into marriage against her will (“I was driven into this filthy house with blows, may it fall into ruin! You ruined my life, you monsters! Nadzhaf sold me! Sold me!” Medina yells at Mukush during one of their fights.). Once both are drafted into the Red Army, she leaves Mukush’s house and moves, with Sadyk, back to her brother’s house; according to the local custom, this was akin to divorcing her husband. At the end of “Tales of Aunt Medina,” news comes that WWII has ended, which means that the men will be coming home. Medina puts her foot down. “I won’t go back to that [Mukush’s] house. I won’t go back!” Sadyk pauses there to reconsider his portrait of her: “I suddenly understood that I’d been mistaken—she wasn’t small at all. On the contrary: she’d grown even taller.”

Medina’s fight for independence continues in the second novella in the book, “The Tale of the Pomegranate Tree.” Her neighbor, Yakub, returns from the war and finds Medina living in her brother’s house. He then begins to pursue her in a manner that compromises her honor and standing in the village. In her book Azeri Women in Transition, the scholar Farideh Heyat explains the particular “Soviet-type modernization” that affected women’s lives in Muslim societies. While women were expected to work outside the home, cultural norms around namus and community expectations of women’s “modesty” tended to restrict their employment.

Pursued by this unwanted suitor, Medina is forced to leave her village, and travels to find work in a regional center, where she and Sadyk move in with Merdzhan, who has stepped far enough outside of communal norms as to be called “a whore” by all the neighborhood boys. The author and literary critic Chingiz Guseinov, in his 1988 book This Living Miracle [Этот живой феномен], commented that when People and Trees was published in Azeri, Soviet Azerbaijani censors found Aylisli’s usage of the word “whore”—even if said by silly boys—unacceptable in application to an Azerbaijani woman and softened it to “a bad woman” and altered passages to obscure Merdzhan’s and Medina’s love interests. Guseinov himself critiqued Aylisli for being “not explosive enough,” “too quiet, in the traditions of Azerbaijani prose,” and not fully allowing Medina to follow her own desires or escape her narrow upbringing. Medina does entertain a number of different suitors, including a passing Uzbek solider with whom she falls in love, but instead of running off with any of them—as would make for a stronger socialist-realist novel, according to Guseinov—she chooses to focus on Sadyk’s future. Aylisli’s Medina is not a hero in the traditional sense, a maker of her own fate, but a complex one, balancing her independence with her commitment to her family, land, and village.

This very commitment to kin (instead of to the Soviet system as a whole) could be deemed too proprietary and, because of this, branded “reactionary” and “retrograde,” not only in literary circles but also in the wider ideological landscape. In the third novella, “People and Trees,” Sadyk’s narrative focus moves from Medina to the story of a soldier returning from WWII who wants to improve the quality of life in his own village. Uncle Elmurad returns home three years after the war ends, having been to “a place called Europe” that he found exemplary by comparison. “He said that there was even the kind of country where housewives leave a container and money for milk on the porch at night; the milkman comes in the morning and pours out the right amount of milk, takes the money, and goes on his way—those are the kinds of miracles that exist in the world.”

Uncle Elmurad decides to reform his village, going after people stealing fruit from the collective farm and striving to ensure better crops, as well as to provide food for the workers while making sure that nobody in the village goes hungry. His improvements succeed so well that he attracts the attention of regional Communist authorities. The district’s agricultural department decides to merge the village’s mountain apricot farm with the valley’s larger collective onion farm, and a series of brutal meetings are convened, during which Elmurad is publicly humiliated and comes close to being arrested for that particularly Soviet crime of prioritizing the good of his own village over the abstract socialist good.

Aylisli’s criticism of the Communist party’s policies in “People and Trees” would have been inconceivable in print before Stalin’s death in 1953 and the beginning of the Khrushchev “thaw” that, in 1962, allowed the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which addressed the horrors of the gulag system. Aylisli was bolstered not only by Solzhenitsyn’s work but also by his peers, a group of Soviet writers that in the 1970s became known for their “village prose,” describing the effects of collectivization on Soviet rural communities. And yet, while writers including Valentin Rasputin and Vasily Shukshin tended to idealize rural life, Aylisli certainly did not. At the end of “People and Trees,” Medina finally agrees to marry Yakub, the man from whom she ran away in the earlier section of the book, and while he does have his redeeming qualities—he’s a good worker and cares for Sadyk—it is clear that she’s doing this mostly because she’s tired of fighting. “She’d had to walk a long time under the grapevines until she found the strength to say these words. Words that meant just one thing: ‘I’ve agreed to marry Yakub.’ It was a good thing she finally said them. She said them and grew calm . . . ”

Sadyk understands her gesture as sacrifice, and he understands his part in the bargain. The marriage will allow Medina to have some money to send Sadyk to Baku to study, and at the same time for herself to stay in the house in the village, without becoming a burden to her adopted son. In the final story of the book, “The Tale of the Silver Tweezers,” which serves as a short coda to the trilogy, we see Sadyk grow up and settle in Baku, visiting his village occasionally. This information is provided very quickly and buried within a larger allegorical story, with the mood of a fairy tale, about Sadyk’s earliest childhood and the tweezers that his grandmother lost shortly before her death, which magically reappeared several years later in an old garment. Sadyk’s future pulls him and his peers into a larger world—many of his friends end up settling in Baku and Moscow—and it also leaves him forever divided and grieving for the village world that he’s leaving behind. “A person who grew up here by this spring can’t possibly go away forever: sometime, he has to return.”

This village is far from perfect, and the people who live there are far from perfect, but it is his village and they are his people. And so Aylisli returns to it in his work and imagination—even if he is banned from returning in person—and against all odds. Through his eyes, and thanks to the passionate and tireless work of Young, we have the privilege of becoming acquainted with the intimate rituals of the villagers, and witnessing the cracks in the Soviet project of modernization, which took so much agency from the villagers. This work has the power to transform a reader’s understanding of the world and the lasting impact of stories, while also telling a captivating and heartbreaking tale.

People and Trees by Akram Aylisli, translated by Katherine E. Young (Plamen Press, 2024)

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