Project manager, translation, footnotes, and comments by Gulshat Safiullina

© Tatarstan Book Publishing Company, 2019

© Eniki, A. N., Estate and Family of, 2019

© Safiullina G. R., compilation, translation, 2019

Dr. Gulfiya Gaynullina was born in the village of Izh Bubi, famous for its madrasah that was founded by Badrulbanat and Gabdelgalyam Nigmatullins, and directed by brothers Izh Bubi – Gubaydullah and Gabdullah, whose sister Mukhlisa Bubi was the first and the only female Sharia judge.

In 1991 Golfiya Gaynullina entered the Tatar Philology and History Department of Kazan State University, where later she wrote her PhD thesis on the Tatar Literature of the second half of the 20^th century. Her articles focus on the books of Amirkhan Eniki, Ayaz Gylazhev, Mohammat Makhdiev.

Since 1998 she has lectured on Tatar literature at Kazan Federal University.

The Writer who Changed Tatar Imagination

The power of a personality is the possibility to change the melancholic existence and flow of life with one`s thoughts and position. The Tatar lifestyle and Tatar mentality were formed under the influence of Gabdulla Tukay, Dardemend (Zakir Ramiev) and Amirkhan Eniki.

Amirkhan Eniki was born on March, 2 in 1909. His father bought a Qur`an before Amirkhan was born and made a wish that eventually came true: «Let my child who will soon to be born live long and become an educated person». Later the writer himself would say: «…It is not difficult to become an educated man, a scholar, even a writer, but it is very difficult to be a real person. If your talent and will allow you to write, don`t think about fame, think about your reader. Write about what you know and believe, and the reader will believe you».

Amirkhan Eniki was a representative of the Tatar intelligentsia, the educated and the enlightened individuals, as all his life he was devoted to such people: «I saw educated scholars of the past, for instance, Zhamal Validi, Gali Rakhim, Fatikh Amirkhan. Sagyit and Sharif Suncheyler were very close to me. They were very well educated, with exquisite manners and good speech. […] An educated person should possess not only a pleasing appearance, but also a beautiful soul».

If it hadn`t been for the creative works of Amirkhan Eniki, Tatar literature would be quite different now. The changes in Tatar literature that are happening now were launched by the prosaic works of Amirkhan Eniki during a time of war. «Last Book» (Соңгы китап) is an autobiographical work in which the author tells about his way in the world of literature, how he became a writer. He describes his attitude toward writing with the following words: «Writing is honourable work».

In the short stories written during the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945 Eniki brought back many devices of Tatar literature that were particular to it in the beginning of the 20^th century. «Child» (Бала), «Mother and Daughter» (Ана һәм кыз), and «For One Hour Only» (Бер генә сәгатькә) became the favourite books of Tatar readers. In the naser style prose «Poppy Flower» (Мәк чәчәге) that was written in 1944, the author inspired Tatar literature with a new wave. In the 1950–1960s, when, according to the author ‘it was easier to breathe’, the novels «Swamp Flower» (Саз чәчәге), and «Haze» (Рәшә) were published, the latter was translated into Russian, and with its main character Zofer Sabitov it was a groundbreaking work for national literatures.

In the 1960s Amirkhan Eniki managed to retrieve and implement national traits for Tatar prose. In such a complicated epoch he raised the problems of life of a nation, the loss of native language, the loss of respect for roots and native land, the loss of old customs and traditions, and the change of moral values – all these peripeteia are discussed in his works «Untold Will» (Әйтелмәгән васыять), «Native Land» (Туган туфрак), and «Memories of Gulyandam Tutash» (Гөләндәм туташ хатирәсе) – indeed, through these books the bell tolls.

«Memories of Gulyandam Tutash» (Гөләндәм туташ хатирәсе) immortalizes the first professional Tatar composer, the founder of the new genre of Tatar musical drama Salikh Saydashev. The novel sounds like a Tatar song from beginning to end.

Amirkhan Eniki wrote articles and reviews on works of Gabdulla Tukay, Galimjan Ibrahimov, Khadi Taktash, Naki Isanbat, Khasan Tufan, Akhmet Fayzi, Karim Tinchurin. In his published articles Eniki writes: «In the Tatar region first was the Enlightenment, and later the Jadidism movement appeared. Our literature and theatre were born. New publishing presses start printing books in Tatar, Tatar newspapers appear one after another. Shihabutdin Marjani, Kayum Nasyri, Galimjan Barudi, and Zhamal Validi are engaged in this significant activity. Progressive activity of Ibrahim Teregulov, Yosuf Akchura, Sadri and Hadi Maksudi also begins here. And our beloved poets Ishaki, Tukay, Amirkhan, and Zhamal are also part of this luminescent and restless region».

The creative works of Amirkhan Eniki create belief, love, and feeling. They make the reader fall in love with Tatar literature. Once a reader becomes acquainted with the works by Amirkhan Eniki it is impossible to stop reading them. The words of the sage, thoughts and observations amaze, influence, and cleanse the soul. This volume of Amirkhan Eniki stories and novels is one of favourite books of the first President of the Republic of Tatarstan, State Counsellor of the Republic of Tatarstan Mintimer Sharipovich Shaymiev. The publication of this book was supported by his initiative. We continue to be indebted with all our respect and gratitude to Mintimer Sharipovich Shaymiev and the assistant of the State Council Advisor of the Republic of Tatarstan – Nursoya Nurullovna Shaydullina for the opportunity to publish the selected works of Amirkhan Eniki in Russian and English languages for future generations.

The publication of this edition is not only to show respect to a great writer, but to present a Tatar philosophy of life to a wide range of readers. The sorrows, thoughts and ideas that were created by the pen of the master could make the reader think, muse and appreciate life in its beauty again.

Dr. Gulfiya Gaynullina

Dr. Edward Ed. Lazzerini earned the doctorate from the University of Washington in Imperial Russian history, with a focus on Turco-Islamic populations. His most recent academic position was with Indiana University, from which he retired in 2018 having served with the Department of Central Eurasian Studies and directing both the Sinor Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies and the Inner Asian and Uralic National Resource Center. Much of his research continues to focus on the relationship фbetween belief and knowledge in Eurasian commentary traditions – principally within the framework of the Russian Empire – and the impact of modernity on those traditions. Of particular interest is the fate of Islam as adhered to by Turkic peoples in the Volga-Kama, Black Sea, and Caucasus regions between the mid-eighteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The beauty of motherly ways: a preface

Amirkhan Nigmetzianovich Eniki (1909–2000) was a man of many literary talents, the sort of person who grows up in a small village from the midst of his indigenous popular culture, in this case Tatar and Islamic. Cultures around the world cherish such individuals for their ability to express poetic and narrative imaginings in the colloquial language close to the people, to write with gentle humor but not sarcasm, and expose the traits common to daily life. Tatar writers with this ability and calling were inspired by the modern poet Gabdulla Tukay (1886–1913), who led the way in the early twentieth century to forge a legacy that spoke to Tatars through their ethno-religious identity, thereby assisting in laying the foundation of Tatar nationalism.

The early years of Eniki’s life passed through a tumultuous era unfolding under the impact of the First World War, two revolutions in 1917, a Civil War, and all of the great and small events that accompanied the transition from the Russian Empire to the USSR through 1923. For several decades thereafter, he was unable to totally focus on literature, but held various jobs, continued his education, taught, and served in the Red Army during World War II, not to be decommissioned until 1950. The war and its consequences had an enormous, negative impact on him that he tried to ease by developing a writing career in the post-Stalin 1950s. In 1953, the year in which Stalin died, Eniki became, finally, a professional writer.

Of immense importance to the development of Eniki’s intellectual and social worldview was the impact of modern influences from Europe and Russia on the latter’s Muslim communities beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century. These gave rise among Turkic intellectuals to a movement called jadidism which grew to envision a world different from any known before. It would be a new world underpinned and shaped by new methods (usûl-i jadid) that initially focused on language pedagogy and schooling for Muslim children but quickly expanded to include economic theory and development, gender relations, social organization, and cultural production, along with the many institutional paraphernalia that ultimately make up a society, its operative principles, behaviors and sensibilities, and its defining discourse. In sum, jadidism for Russia’s Tatar Muslims was modernity.

The short story that this Preface introduces is entitled «Beauty» (Матурлык, 1964), and is ostensibly composed by «an educated old man» who recalls it easily from his youth despite the ordinary setting, characters, and content. It is not a romance from the author’s life, yet is deeply biographical in spirit; it is not a tale of riotous joy, but one inspired nevertheless by a deep recognition of what beauty can truly mean. It has nothing to do with a bewitching woman, but with one who is quite elderly, disfigured, but simply beautiful in the most important motherly ways.

We only learn about this woman and her special beauty toward the end of the story, after three young male friends, one of whom is her son Badretdin, arrive at the latter’s home from the district medrese where they studied. Badretdin is described as a wonderful, thoughtful, and caring young man, «strange, mysterious, and nice,» whose extreme poverty, described in exquisite detail, worries him not for its immediate personal consequences but for the burdens it places upon his family. The narrator, however, is nothing but astonished that his friend is not embarrassed by his life’s circumstances, and even more so by the unattractiveness of his mother, who tries to hide her disfigured face when Badretdin insists that she join him and his friends for tea.

The absence of external beauty, however, proves meaningless in face of the deep reservoir of internal beauty that overflows from mother to son. Recognition of this truth leaves the narrator shaken and changed forever, and offers a lesson to all in keeping with the English idiom to never judge a book by its cover!

While these features of the story are central to its development and meaning, so too is the impact of jadidism in the lives of the three boys who are shakerts studying in a regional medrese. They are described by the author as caught up in a movement focused on such intellectual and literary figures as Ramiev and Tukay. The new writing, not just belles-lettres but expanding non-fiction, had thoroughly enlivened these and many other students in schools that traditionally trained members of the Islamic clerisy in purely religious subjects but which were now undergoing significant reforms affecting the character of the curricula so as to include a broad range of secular subjects. As the author writes, literature had «turned into something like bread» or put another way, was a «disease» consuming the human spirit. In our three heroes we can see hints of the growing tension between traditional and modern society, but for the moment, whether listening to larks filling the sky with sound, or to the message of the cuckoo bird to remember something «very important,» or to the poetics of Badretdin attempting to share life’s philosophy, those tensions were still far in the background.

Dr. Edward Ed. Lazzerini