When the truth of life prevails over customs and politics

It's hard to imagine a writer with a more Soviet biography and career than Txinguiz Aitmatov (Sheker, Kyrgyzstan, 1928–Nuremberg, Germany, 2008). The son of a Kyrgyz father and a Tatar mother, he grew up at a time when his country—subjugated to the Russian Empire since the late 19th century—was becoming just another cog in the colossal machine of the USSR. His father, accused of being a bourgeois nationalist, was executed during the Stalinist purges of the 1930s. Nevertheless, Aitmatov prospered: he studied literature in Moscow, worked at Pravda, was widely read and translated into dozens of languages, received the Lenin Prize (the communist Nobel Prize)... More Soviet.

And yet, the short novel Jamila, one of his best-known titles, now available in Catalan in a translation by Marta Nin, is at least dubiously Soviet. It's true that by the time it was published, in 1958, Stalin had already died, and glimmers of light had opened in the totalitarian darkness of the regime. And it's also true that the fact that the novel takes place in an eminently pre-political setting, a more rural Kyrgyzstan during the Second World War, makes it possible to sidestep certain explicit ideological debates. Even so, the patriotic undertone of the work—a declaration of love for the tribe and the land, not the state—the treatment of nature and the characters—poetically pantheistic and humanistic—and the message of the work—which would say that "the truth of life" and freedom are more important than old anti-Soviet prejudices. Or, at least, anti-Soviet.

Like a large-format painting

The plot is both imposing and essential, like a large-format painting that portrays the simple life of men and women, of a community, as it unfolds and evolves within the panoramic magnificence of a landscape that surpasses them but also embraces them, gives them meaning and explains them. It's the third year of the war against the Nazis, that is, 1944, in a remote village in the depths of Kyrgyzstan, where the Islamic faith, the local secular customs, and the state collectivization now all at the service of the war effort coexist in forced harmony. Since most of the men are on the front lines fighting the Nazis, the hard work of gathering the grain, putting it in sacks, and transporting it by cart to the train station falls to the women and children. The two protagonists of the novel are, precisely, a young woman, married but with her husband in front, and a young boy, the narrator and the brother-in-law (although family ties are complex and the author explains them in detail) of the woman.

The appearance of Daniar, a stranger who has been to the front and returns wounded, changes everything. The eternal and stable world of the immense steppes, the endless skies, the valleys, rivers, and mountains that always remain as they are, is suddenly enriched by the forbidden love between a man and a woman. Through the innocent yet perceptive eyes of his narrator, Aitmatov tells us this with the agility of an ancient storyteller and the sensitivity of a poet who has more faith in the epiphanies of the heart than in clan laws and taboos and the doctrines of politics.