Night and Day (1934), an unfinished dilogy by Uzbek author Abdulhamid Sulaymon o’g’li Cho’lpon, gives readers a glimpse into the everyday struggles of men and women in Russian imperial Turkestan.
More than just historical prose, Cho’lpon’s magnum opus reads as poetic elegy and turns on dramatic irony. Though Night, the first and only extant book of the dilogy, depicts the terrible fate of a young girl condemned to marry a sexual glutton, nothing is what it seems. Readers find themselves questioning the nature of Russian colonialism, resistance to it, and even the intentions of the author, whose life and the second book of his dilogy, Day, were lost to Stalinist terror.