A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

244 A history of Inner Asia
the final four years of his life.To him, Samarkand with its surroundings
must have been an essentially Tajik city, as was probably Bukhara,
whereas Dushanbe may have seemed but a paltry provincial town in
comparison with those historic centers of Central Asian civilization.It
is not known whether he ever uttered a word of disapproval at the time
of the razmezhevanie or later, but he would surely have been delighted if
Moscow had allotted Samarkand and Bukhara to Tajikistan as enclaves
under the republic’s jurisdiction.Moscow, in turn, should have been glad
to possess this special form of gerrymander as a fail-safe barrier against
an effective pan-Turkic front.It had the means to create it, yet it didn’t.
Sheer oversight may have been the cause, but then Moscow may also
have drawn the line here and decided that these enclaves would cause
too much confusion.(Another way would have been simply to attach the
entire course of the Zarafshan to Tajikistan, treating the Uzbeks there
as a minority; this would have dealt a still heavier blow to the goals of
Pan-Turanism.)
It may be worthwhile to mention a few of Ayni’s works.In 1920, he
published in Turki Bukhoro inqilobi tarikhi uchun materiallar, “Materials on
the history of the revolution of Bukhara,” in other words, of the fall of
the emirate and establishment of the People’s Republic of Bukhara; in
the following year came out his Bukhoro Manghit amirligining tarikhi,
“History of the Manghit emirate of Bukhara,” again in Turki.In 1926
Ayni published an anthology of Tajik (i.e. Persian) literature, Namunahoi
adabieti Tojik, and in the 1930s and 1940s a number of studies of Persian
and Chaghatay literary figures such as Firdawsi, Rudaki, Khujandi,
Vasifi, and Navai.Meanwhile he never ceased writing chiefly political
poetry, combining the time-honored Persian tradition of court poets
with one of his principal activities, politically engaged journalism.An
illustration of that is the quaint “Freedom March,” a poem in Turki
(Marsh-i hurriyat) and in Farsi (Surud-i azadi), composed in 1918, to be sung
to the tune of the Marseillaise.
Writing poetry was of course an avocation of most educated Iranians,
and writing scholarly and historical prose too had a long tradition.
Belletristic prose, on the other hand, was all but non-existent, and here
Ayni’s contribution was fundamental, for with his short stories, novels,
and a lengthy autobiography he laid the foundations of this genre in
both Tajik and Uzbek literature.Almost without exception, the theme
of these works was the Farsi and Turki-speaking society of Bukhara in
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.In 1934 Ayni published
what is considered his best novel, “Slaves,” simultaneously in Tajik