What is the connection between art and love? Is it just through romantic era paintings and nude modeling, or can art pluck the love string deep inside the heart? Chingiz Aitmatov, known throughout Kyrgyzstan as one of the great writers, and later diplomats of the republic, explores this question in his novella Jamila, first published in Kyrgyzstan in 1958. As one of his first published works, Jamila is heavily influenced by Aitmatov’s personal experiences living through a time of transition. Aitmatov witnessed and endured Sovietization and collectivization first hand in a rural town in one of the far out republics of the USSR. Born in a mixed Tatar and Kyrgyz family, Aitmatov has a lot to draw on.
Aitmatov shares his interpretation of his multi-ethnic, metamorphosing experience through a character named “Jamila” (Жамийла in Kyrgyz), and her love story on a communal farm in the mountainous range of Western Kyrgyzstan. His personal encounters shaped his understanding of happiness, beauty, tradition, and love. All of this comes out in his breakthrough novella Jamila. He combines the universality of contemporary Soviet realism with the mysticism and mythology of traditional romantic writing. Throughout the novella, he employs motifs and themes often touched on (but not emphasized) in Soviet writing, such as coming of age, respect of art and nature, and a contrast between tradition and honor. All of this variety is the perfect recipe for a unique love story connected through the ties of family, independence, and art.
We follow the story of Jamila, a young woman whose husband has been sent off to fight in the war of the century: The Great Patriotic War, or World War II. She lives with her extended family — or rather, her husband’s extended family — on a communal farm. Because of the war, her duties and those of the other women and children have extended outside of the house into the farm. This is the first aspect of the story that explores the rapid degradation of traditions due to the changing Kyrgyz situation in the Soviet world. Aitmatov challenges tradition through a positive, almost feminist relation to these changing familial and labor relations.
What creates a twist in the format of the story is that it is not told through the point of view of Jamila herself, but of Seit, her kichine bala, her younger brother in-law. This perspective creates a tainted (as all are) frame of reference of the story, as we hear it through a teenager’s mind, especially one who admires and loves his older sister. That the story is recounted by a child parallels the youth of the Kyrgyz nation and its experiences in the ever-changing, experimental Soviet sphere. It is difficult to say anything with certainty, except universal personal feelings such as hope, love, disappointment, and hate, all of which Seit comes to understand throughout the story.
The contention of the story begins when Daniyar, a wounded soldier returning from the front lines, finds the village he was born in: Seit’s village. Aitmatov develops Daniyar’s secluded character purely through Seit’s various and easily malleable emotions and observations. He is an outsider, independent, a quiet but skillful worker in the fields. He is a djigit, not a real man in Seit’s eyes. Aitmatov wants the reader to look past Seit’s shallow viewpoint to see that Daniyar is the paragon of the romantic hero. Aitmatov creates a scene that encourages the reader to dissect this new character and disregard Seit’s jealousy — to sympathize with his situation and understand his creativity and passion. This is especially encouraged in their journeys together.
The families of course do not have to produce sustenance only for themselves, but they must also feed the Soviet Union. However, as they are located so remotely, their journey to deliver grain is more than a walk down the street, each delivery is a day’s ride on horseback. As is common in Russian stories (see: Maybe Esther and The Blizzard), the journey itself is the center of the story. Seit, Jamila, and the outsider Daniyar ride together with hundreds of pounds of grain for dispersal throughout the Union. Though Seit’s jealousy — and thus distortion — aggregates on these rides, the reader’s own journey into understanding Daniyar and Jamila begins.
This is where Aitmatov brings the love story together. Daniyar sings the most beautiful song anyone has heard. There are no words to describe it. He uses our interpretations of Daniyar, of whom we had only heard the negatives through Seit’s impressions, against us. He forces us to look past Seit’s observations into Daniyar’s heart. Through careful wording and playing with the story’s tense, Aitmatov presents a new version of Daniyar for the reader, and later for Seit himself. Seit’s future self (the one actually remembering and telling the story) recounts, “I was most amazed by the passion and fire of the song… I cannot determine whether it was the voice alone or something bigger, something that came from the soul, something capable of arousing the same emotion in another, capable of bringing to life one’s innermost thoughts.” He uses Daniyar’s multicultural heritage to demonstrate the beauty in his part-Kazakh, part-Kyrgyz song. He sings of nature, of love, and of life itself — the reader can assume that for him they are all one in the same. Seit’s astonishment and admiration of Daniyar and his song just demonstrate how powerful it was.
However, Seit was not the only one affected. This is the turning point in the novella — it is no longer a story about Seit, but about Jamila. Still through Seit’s eyes, we watch her journey and her internal struggle between tradition — sticking at the communal farm with her husband’s family — or following her heart that yearns for Daniyar.
From labor and collectivization, to love and art, Jamila uses internal and external conflicts within the whole cast of characters to portray greater metaphorical questions. As a love story, a treatise on morality, and a deep dive into the mind of a teenager, Aitmatov covers it all wonderfully in Jamila.
