An irascible matriarch is reluctant to entrust a mysterious heirloom to her great-granddaughter. Intergenerational superstitions imperil a daughter’s chance for education and a career. The loss of a mother-in-law’s gift causes a woman to wish her own son dead. A woman left with the task of calming her mother resents her sister’s flight from domesticity to Nepal.

Inheritance has historically been the privilege of men, passed from father to son and validated by name and fortune. With little sentimentality, the four stories collected here reveal the less obvious objects, qualities, and complexes imparted by matriarchs to their loved ones, and the tremors of matrilineal inheritance felt through generations. This birthright, holding the power to terrorize and inspire, pushes the stories’ characters out of the family fold—but they can only stretch so far on the matrilineal tether. When we discussed themes for this collection, the word “unsettling,” which we chose for the title, seemed particularly well-suited to communicate the uncanny power of inheritance (“unsettling” read as an adjective) alongside its liberating potential (“unsettling” as a verb—a kind of unseating of historical dos and don’ts). Traveling through contemporary Croatia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and Uzbekistan, through rural and urban landscapes, these stories depict the consuming, at times vital, at times sinister influence of women on those closest to them.

The female protagonists powerfully drawn by authors Marina Gudelj, Lira Konys, Leyla Shukurova, and O‘tkir Hoshimov traffic in gossip, hazy memory, visions, and family legend—narratives not trusted by societies deeply invested in institutions and records, from matrimonial agreements and public rituals to reference letters, certificates of authenticity, photos, and visas. In their dependence on “hearsay” and other unofficial forms of communication, these stories create a radical sense of instability. In the conclusion to “Mamali,” the narrator tries to sympathize with her domineering mother by imagining her as a young woman, envisioning a face much like her own. But even this bond of resemblance is weakened by a lack of evidence: “There are no photographs of her at that age,” she reflects. “Nor of me.” In place of more concrete forms of proof, rumors and grudges persist in the shadows, acting as the vectors by which the stories unravel. The “talk” within these stories is a distinctly feminine mode of communication that connects women to their kin but can quickly become corrosive.

Material objects act as the vessels for matrilineal legacies, good and bad. In “Shakharbanu’s Curse,” the object is an ominous necklace passed down through the women in the family. The women chosen to safeguard it become angry and arrogant, thus failing to fully conform to traditional female roles. In Hoshimov’s piece, the central object is a golden earring misplaced by the narrator’s mother. A gift from her own mother-in-law, its loss plucks at the tensions between the family’s women and initiates cascading misfortunes for its owner and her son. It comes to represent all of her crushing duties and responsibilities as a kelin (bride and daughter-in-law) and community member, and her perceived inadequacies in those roles. In “Nepal,” the interference of a variety of media—phone calls, texts, notifications, emails—conveys a line of tension in the relationship of two sisters and their frayed relationship with their mother. The stories are their “talk,” which ensnares objects in all their materiality and makes it unexpectedly hard to speak around them.

Born in Split, Croatia, Marina Gudelj belongs to a new generation of writers across the former Yugoslavia. Filling her work with Dalmatian forms of Croatian language and culture, she has anchored her short stories and microfiction in a place seen as anything but edgy and fast-paced. In “Nepal” (2020), a sharp microstory characteristic of Gudelj’s collection Phantom Pain, Ana and her loved ones reel from the news that her sister has left her sleepy Dalmatian coastal town for Nepal. Contemporary documentary forms themselves prove catching as alternative objects of inheritance—be it a film or an image on the internet or the narratives we tell about our lives and the kind of people we perceive ourselves to be. It’s an entirely contemporary story that rings with modern technology in supporting roles: there’s the phone and the television, the dishwasher and the refrigerator.

“Shakharbanu’s Curse” (2013) is a story deeply informed by the spiritual culture of the Kazakh people. “Kokqasqa,” which in the original is used as an attributive noun rather than a name, is a term for a gray horse with a white blaze on its forehead, often chosen to serve as a sacrifice to gods. In Turkic mythology, an animal with a white (the color of the sun) or gray (the color of the sky) coat was seen as a mediator between the realms of the dead, the living, and the eternal, and its slaughter was the fastest and surest way for a plea to reach Tengri, the Sky God of the Turks, and later, the Allah of the Muslims. According to Kazakh mythologist Serikbol Qondybai, in some Asian cultures sacrificial horses were also believed to transport the souls of the dead between the lower, middle, and upper worlds. Over the centuries, the association of the color white with the sacred and transcendent led to the preferential treatment of the ruling elite, especially the families of the Kazakh Töre lineage, descended from Genghis Khan and known as “ақ сүйек” or “white bone” (in modern Kazakh, this term is used more broadly to mean members of the upper class), as well as of rich and light-skinned people in general. But neither a noble status nor “egg-white” skin saved women from unwanted marriages or mistreatment. In “Shakharbanu’s Curse,” an opaque story of a great-aunt’s tragic fate transforms into a mythical tale of female ire embodied in a material object. While the women who pass on this tale remain ambivalent about their class affiliation, they seem to know that to reclaim her freedom and dignity, a woman must make use of ploys and realms that skirt or subvert her physical, male-dominated reality.

Leyla Shukurova’s “Mamali” (2023) takes place in the Soviet Azerbaijan of the late 1970s and early 1980s. As in the other nations of the Caucasus and Central Asia, literature played a significant role in the fight for women’s rights in Azerbaijan. In 1918, during its brief period of independence from both the Russian and Persian empires, Azerbaijan became one of the first countries in the world to introduce women’s suffrage. Under Soviet influence, the struggle against religious and patriarchal power structures continued and was often dramatized in literature, such as the 1928 play Sevil by Jafar Jabbarly. (It is said that many women cast off their veils in the city theater after seeing it.) A statue of Sevil named “Statue of a Liberated Woman” still stands in the center of Baku. Meanwhile, outside the capital, women’s lives were slower to change. The setting for “Mamali” is a town in the historically more conservative southern region of Azerbaijan. Though by the late Soviet period religious conservatism had been mostly wiped out, societal prejudices toward women persisted. “Mamali” depicts not only the generational conflict between a daughter and her vindictive mother, but also the opposed national impulses of women’s emancipation and repression inherent in the culture. Yet another duality exists within the story’s rational protagonist, who is shaped and protected by the very village superstitions she rejects. In frightening visions that surface throughout the story, the cryptic fatalism of her upbringing (and psyche) clashes with hopeful promise.

The least contemporary of the four stories, “The Golden Earring,” is a chapter from O‘tkir Hoshimov’s popular memoir Dunyoning ishlari (Earthly things, 1982). Set in the years directly following World War II, Dunyoning ishlari is a linked collection of semi-fictionalized recollections—what today might be called autofiction. From superstition to neighbor drama, its setting has all the trappings of a remote village but is in fact a mahalla (neighborhood) in the capital’s old city. As in “Mamali,” the lack of definition between city and countryside erodes socialist narratives of progress—even in Tashkent, the “showcase city” of Soviet Central Asia, there are few signs of modernization or women’s emancipation. With residents of the mahalla waiting (often in vain) for husbands and fathers to return from the front, the world of Dunyoning ishlari is eerily devoid of men—female-led, but still markedly patriarchal. Women, especially the narrator’s mother, shoulder the burden for all, and must rely on local practices and connections to survive. Fittingly, the story’s emotional climax comes during the kelin salom (bride’s greeting) at a neighbor’s wedding, when the ostracized mother must reintegrate herself into the only community she knows. With Dunyoning ishlari, Hoshimov took up a canonical Russian Soviet genre that traced a young man’s growth alongside Soviet achievements, but upended the genre’s conventions by foregrounding women’s lives and by crafting a recursive narrative that was truer to the chaotic atmosphere of the postwar years.

“The Golden Earring” is also a document of a lost world: in 1966, most of Tashkent, including half the old city, was razed by an earthquake and rebuilt in Soviet style. But like all of the stories in this collection, it commemorates familial lines that no act of god or nature can shake loose. It becomes clear that for the characters in these narratives, the only way out is through.

This feature is presented by the founders of Turkoslavia, a collective of literary translators united by a shared interest in Turkic and Slavic languages, and their many overlapping traits and histories which witness the porousness of nationalized borders. Turkoslavia publishes a biannual journal of poetry and prose that gives exposure to brilliant but often underrepresented authors writing in lesser translated languages. To learn more about the collective’s work, visit: www.turkoslavia.com.