The Surprising Letter
While sifting through the family archive one spring day, I found a letter. The envelope, yellowed with age, bore an address in elegant calligraphy.
The «where» line read: “the city of Stalinabad, the Union of Soviet Writers,” and the «to» line, simply, “Pairav Suleimani”— my grandfather, a renowned Soviet poet. The letter was sent from Sukhumi, then the capital of Abkhazia within the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic, by a certain Al. Uflyand. The most startling detail was the postmark: I could barely make out the date 05/29/1957. This, naturally, astounded me because my grandfather died in 1933.
Within the envelope, I found two decrepit sheets of typewritten text:
«Greetings, dear Pairav,” began Uflyand, “in my photo album there is a photo of two young Soviet poets, that is, you and me, sitting unceremoniously and serenely on the steep wall of the pool Lab-i Hauz in old Bukhara. On the back of the card there is a date–May 22, 1931, just think, my dear friend, the shutter of the camera clicked exactly 26 years ago!»
Uflyand then inquired about Pairav’s personal life, career and creative successes, wrote briefly about his own achievements and in particular mentioned collections of fables, poems and translations. At the end of the letter, he reported that his stay at the Sukhumi sanatorium was ending and he was returning home to Moscow. Presumably in June, he would go on a creative business trip to Stalinabad, where he hoped that during a personal meeting they would remember the past and discuss, among other things, the possibility of translating Pairav’s works into Russian and he would offer Pairav to translate his texts into Tajik.
In the 1950s, the so-called «Оттепель» (“Ottepel,” or the Thaw) began in the USSR—a time of change in all spheres of society, and many people began to restore the lost connections that were interrupted in the harsh and dangerous Stalin-era ’30s, defined by a period of mass arrests, executions, and exiles. (Stalin himself died in 1953.) This letter might well be one such case: Uflyand, possibly under the impression that his old comrade, a celebrated poet, was still alive and thriving in his 60s, reached out to him. He likely imagined that Pairav had become an author of a number of books and collections of poems, a laureate of prizes and awards, an influential employee of the Union of Writers of Tajikistan, surrounded by friends, students, and comrades.
But life turned out differently. In June 1933, two years after the photograph mentioned in the letter was taken, 34-year-old Pairav was dying in a hospital bed in the infectious diseases ward of a hospital in Samarkand. Nearby were his wife Mukhabbat, daughters Gulchekhra (my mother) and Lola, brother Yahyo and sister Sarvar, who had arrived from Bukhara.
Perhaps, in the poet’s inflamed and fading consciousness, strange images, epithets and metaphors arose and lined up in a row…these lines, united by rhyme, turned into farewell verses that the poet took with him to the grave.
Pairav’s Life and Legacy
My mother Gulchekhra Sulaimoni—the People’s Poet of Tajikistan, laureate of the Rudaki Prize, and member of the revision commission of the Writers’ Union of the USSR—responded to the letter and enclosed a collection of Pairav’s poems. Here is what Uflyand could have learned from the book’s preface:
Pairav Sulaimoni was born on April 15, 1899 in Bukhara in the family of a noble merchant and entrepreneur, who was connected by trade interests not only with the cities of Central Asia and Persia, but also with St. Petersburg and Moscow firms. This is how Pairav wrote in a short autobiography about his family tree: «… my paternal grandfather was from Iran, from the city of Mashhad, a Jew who was converted to Islam, in his homeland he was an «attorchi»–a seller of perfumes, spices and medicines, he was engaged in healing, which is why he was nicknamed «hakim»–a doctor.» (Soviet writers. Autobiographies. Moscow, Fiction 1966, volume 3)
The future poet received his primary education in the madrassas of Bukhara and Merv. In 1916-1917, he studied at the Kagan Russian School. After the revolution and the formation of the Bukhara People’s Soviet Republic, he was sent as the second secretary to the representative office of the BPSR in Kabul from 1921-22, where he was able to communicate with his uncle, the famous educator Khoshim Shoik.
After returning from Afghanistan, Pairav took up literature professionally, wrote poetry, worked as an editor and translator at a state publishing house, and joined the Writers’ Union of Tajikistan.
Pairav entered the literary path at the age of 15. In his early poems of 1916-1919, all the canons of traditional poetry were observed, the order of images is completely subordinated to the rhetorical system of traditional Tajik lyrics.
A cardinal turning point in Pairav’s work occurred after the revolution in Bukhara. On September 2, 1920, the very same day that the Red Army captured the Emirate of Bukhara, he wrote his famous poem «On the Occasion of the Bukhara Revolution.» This marked the beginning of a new stage not only in the ideological and thematic, but also in the artistic and aesthetic aspects of his creative quest. Not only the poetic genre forms and the system of images of Pairav’s lyrics were subject to change, but also his worldview, and the range of his artistic and socio-political quests expanded.
His love poems were updated in form and content—colorful, dynamic and possessing great emotional power. One after another, poems on domestic and international themes began to appear, the so-called ladder-like poems, representing a reform of poetic metrics—a completely new phenomenon in Tajik poetry of the 1920s.
In his anthology book Examples of Tajik Literature (1926), the founder of new Tajik literature, Sadriddin Aini, included poems by Pairav, prefacing them with the words: “Pairav is in love, he writes love poems from the depths of his soul… he has also written revolutionary poems…” (p. 236)
During his short life, Pairav was able to become the initiator of artistic research of many themes: freedom and equality, the struggle of the peoples of the world against colonialism, the enlightenment of women in the East, hypocrisy and obscurantism, which were widely developed in the following decades in the works of many Tajik Soviet poets.
Pairav Sulaimoni died on June 9, 1933 in Samarkand and was buried in the Khazrati Khizr cemetery.
The ‘Crystal Hands’ Book Project
In 2019, to commemorate the 120th anniversary of the renowned poet Pairav Sulaimoni (1899-1933), the Rudaki Institute of Language and Literature of the Academy of Sciences of Tajikistan and the Aini Literary Foundation decided to publish a new edition of his collection of lyrical poems Crystal Hands. I was invited to create illustrations for the future book and also contributed as an editor.
Working on Crystal Hands involved close collaboration with both the staff of the Institute of Language and Literature and the Ayni Foundation. This project allowed me to rediscover familiar poems, and the invaluable experience gained allowed me and my son, Ozar, to create 12 illustrations. Each illustration reflects one of the collection’s poems, and I hope, conveys its symbolic depth. The book was published in Turkey, boasting a classy quality that garnered positive reviews
The book launch was held at a scientific conference celebrating Pairav Sulaimoni’s 120th anniversary, held at the Institute of Language and Literature of the Academy of Sciences in Dushanbe in July 2019. The event featured reports and speeches, and was attended by a diverse group of writers, art historians, scientists, students and poetry lovers. The excellent organization of the event, the high caliber of the scientific reports, and the publication of Crystal Hands collectively underscore the careful and attentive attitude towards the work of Pairav Sulaimoni in Tajikistan.
Suleiman Shlomo Sharifi is a Tajik artist with Bukharian-Jewish roots, born in 1958 in Dushanbe. The grandson of renowned Tajik poet Pairav Suleimoni, Sharifi works across contemporary art mediums including painting, video, photography, book illustration and text. He illustrated and edited the 2019 edition of Crystal Hands, published in honor of Suleimoni’s 120th anniversary. Since 1999, he has been a member of the International Confederation of Artists.