The Devils' Dance

Two Uzbekistans held in one mind. In 1938 the writer Abdulla Qodiriy is taken to the NKVD prison in Tashkent during Stalin's terror, and in his cell he builds, sentence by sentence, an unwritten novel about the last khans of Kokand and the poet-queen Nodira. The map runs from the old city of Tashkent down some two hundred and thirty kilometres to the Ferghana Valley, where the nineteenth-century strand plays out in Kokand, Margilan and Ferghana.

Abdulla Qodiriy

The old city of Tashkent

Tashkent, 1938

The frame of the novel opens in the old town of Tashkent, the warren of mud-brick mahallas and bazaars around Chorsu where the writer at its centre had his life before the terror. From here he is taken away, and the whole nineteenth-century story he carries in his head belongs to a man who began in this city.

The 1938 strand

explicit The old city of Tashkent, where Qodiriy lived and was arrested, is real and named; sited at Chorsu, the historic heart of the eski shahar, as a representative point for the labyrinth of mahalla lanes.

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Abdulla Qodiriy

The NKVD prison, Tashkent

Tashkent, 1938

Most of the frame narrative unfolds inside a crowded prison cell in Tashkent, where the writer is held during the purges of 1938. Unable to set anything on paper, he composes his last novel in his head, cellmate by cellmate, while interrogations grind on around him. The terror was real: he was shot that October.

The 1938 strand

inferred The prison is real but the specific cell is not documented for the map; sited representatively in the old city of Tashkent, close to Tashtyurma, the tsarist-era jail the Soviet security services used during the terror.

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