Lenin Via Cavid

Abstract

This essay reflects on postcolonial and recent Marxist scholarship by way of the work of the Azerbaijani playwright Hüseyn Cavid (1882–1941), who wrote some of the most untimely plays of the revolutionary period in the Caucasus. Thematizing revolutionary figures from the Islamic past, these works included among others the verse play Şeyx Sәnʿan (Sheik Senan), serialized between 1915 and 1916 and dramatizing the life of a legendary twelfth-century Sufi; a 1918 adaptation of Faust entitled İblis (The Devil); and a 1922 play entitled Peyğәmbәr (The Prophet) dramatizing the Prophet Muhammad's revelation and the spread of Islam. In a reading of Cavid in relation to V. I. Lenin's writings on the ‘East’, I argue that Cavid supplements Lenin, offering a kind of ‘revolutionary subject of the heart’ and an alternative to the Leninist revolutionary subject of self-determination generalized through the Caucasus in the early twentieth century. Where the Leninist imagination encountered its limit in grounding itself in the sovereign auto-generative subject of the European Enlightenment, I argue, and in positing a communist common as an amalgamation of autonomous discrete national units, Cavid's theatre, which I describe as ‘afformative’ (in Werner Hamacher's sense of that term, denoting an ‘event of forming, itself formless’), dramatized an irreducible other-determination, paving the way for another, unrealized heteronomous common and communism grounded in alterity. If the spectre of Soviet communism haunts our postcolonial, postcommunist present, I would suggest that this is precisely so that we might learn, from its heterogeneous, plurilingual legacy, how to imagine a new, unrealized communism grounded in alterity.

• Caucasus
• Cavid, Hüseyn
• communism
• Lenin, V. I
• self-determination
• Soviet East
• Sufism

Acknowledgements

Research for this essay was conducted during the summer and fall of 2012 while I held a Social Science Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship for Transregional Research: Inter-Asian Contexts and Connections and a Penn State Institute for the Arts and Humanities faculty residency grant. Versions of this essay were presented at Pittsburgh University in March 2013, Stony Brook University, SUNY in January 2014, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in March 2014. I thank the members of the audiences at these events, as well as two anonymous readers of an earlier version of this essay, for their questions and comments.

Notes

1 Lenin's reliance on an analogy between theatre and revolution differs from that of Marx in The Eighteenth Bruimaire of Louis Napoleon, writing of ‘the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.’ For a valuable close reading of Marx's own theatrical analogy, see Ryan (2012).

2 Cavid's other prose and poetic dramas include Uçurum (Precipice), a 1919 tragedy narrating the disintegration of an elite Ottoman family under the spell of European influence; Topal Teymur (Tamerlane), a 1925 play dramatizing the Battle of Ankara that took place between the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid I and the Turco-Mongol ruler Tamerlane in 1402; Seyavüş (Siavash), a 1933 play dramatizing the life of Siavash in Shahnameh for the millennium celebration of Ferdowsi; and İblisin İntikamı (Satan's revenge), a 1936 follow-up to İblis about the rise of fascism in Europe.

3 Balibar is careful to note that ‘Certainly the a priori of a philosophy of history (expressed particularly in the perspective of a world communist revolution that [Lenin] constantly maintained) never disappeared. But at the price of an extreme tension, this coexisted and sought linkage with a strategic “empiricism”, an “analysis of concrete situations” that assumed incorporating into the concept of the revolutionary process the plurality of forms of proletarian political struggle (“peaceful” and “violent”), and the transition from one form to another (hence the question of the specific duration and successive contradictions of the revolutionary transition’ (2007, 211).

4 A positivist empiricist epistemology developed at the end of the nineteenth century by the German philosopher Richard Avenarius and the Austrian scientist and philosopher Ernst Mach, empirio-criticism offered a monistic worldview asserting the continuity of physical bodies and thought. For a useful historical account of Russian Marxist debates around empirio-criticism, see Kelly 1981.

5 The Lacanian act, Žižek explains, authorizes itself in itself, against a social order mediated by pure symbolic law and the normalized violence of its ‘obscene superego supplement’.

6 For a Turkish translation of the ‘Appeal’, published in the newspaper Yeni Dünya (New World), an official publication of the Central Commissariat of Muslim Affairs in Inner Russia and Siberia (Muskom) edited by the Ottoman Turkish communist Mustafa Suphi, see Lenin and Stalin (1995). For a detailed analysis of the phrase ‘tayin-i mukadderat’, see Ertürk (2013).

7 Typographic emphasis in Lenin's text, combining italic and bold type with letter spacing, is reproduced as it appears in the edition cited.

8 Cheah describes Lenin as a transitional figure who ‘widen[ed] the small foothold opened by Marx's tactical support for nationalism’, adding that ‘decolonizing nationalism flourished in this opening’ (212). Cheah's analysis of Lenin does not, however, account for the Hegel notebooks, or for the important shifts in Lenin's thought about national liberation movements before and after the war.

9 Other important work on Soviet nationalities include Martin (2001) and Hirsch (2005).

10 Lenin earlier quotes Mach's phrase ‘die Kosten einer Spukgeschichte bestreiten’, translating it as ‘zashchishchatʹ kakuiu-libo chertovshchinu’ or ‘defend ghost-stories’. ‘Chertovshchina’, meaning ‘devils, demons, devilry’, renders ‘Spukgeschichte’ or ‘ghost-story’ here and throughout.

11 Üzeyir Hacıbǝyov had produced an opera entitled Şeyx Sәnʿan in 1909, then burned its scores following harsh criticism of its portrayal of a transcultural marriage between a Muslim sheik and the daughter of a Christian swineherd. Like his other musical comedies and operas, Hacıbǝyov's version of Şeyx Sәnʿan emphasized the limits of traditional gender and marriage structures (Khalilov and Khalilov 1995).

12 Unless otherwise noted, all translations from this text are my own.

13 Sәnʿan is also asked to burn the Quran, but upon hearing that the Quran includes the names of Jesus and Mary, the priest changes his mind.

14 For an insightful discussion of the abject in relation to the figure of the qalandar, which has influenced my reading of Şeyx Sәnʿan, see Ewing (1997, 217–220).