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From dry hell to blossoming garden: metaphors and poetry in Soviet irrigation literature on the Hungry Steppe, 1950–1980

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Abstract

This paper explores scientific and popular literature published on irrigation development in the former Soviet Union for its forms of narration. It asks why and how authors writing on irrigation development for a specialized, but also a general Soviet audience chose to alternate between factual prose, and metaphors and poetry. The analysis centers on two passages stemming from Russian-language books published in the Soviet Union in 1957 and 1963, respectively. Both of them describe irrigation development on the Hungry Steppe, a large rolling plain which today is part of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan. The paper starts from the assumption that factual prose is likely to be expected in scientific and popular literature given the dominant perception of irrigation as engineering and prevailing discourses of scientific rationality and technological progress in the Soviet Union of this period. However, findings indicate that metaphors and poetry were an important form of narration for portraying the large-scale transformation of society and nature in scientific and popular literature. The paper argues that they served to reinforce discourses of scientific rationality and technological progress, but at the same time opened up semantic spaces to deconstruct and undermine them.

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Notes

  1. I distinguish these two forms from artistic literature with a belletristic genre of writing.

  2. The empirical material used for this paper was collected during library research in the A. Firdausi National Library of Tajikistan, the Library of the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Tajikistan, the Russian State Library in Moscow (RGB), the Central Scientific Agricultural Library (TsNSKhB), and the library of the Institute of Geography at the Russian Academy of Sciences.

  3. The differing degrees to which metaphors and poetry were used in different types of sources would be a further important question to address, but is beyond the scope of this paper.

  4. The reference book Golodnaya step’. Prirodnye usloviya i sel’skoe khozyaistvo (1970) lists 1626 publications on the Hungry Steppe between 1957 and 1969. At least three reference books (ukazately literatury) provided the interested reader an overview of publications on this theme (Golodnaya step' 1970; Golodnaya step’ 1956; Golodnaya step’ 1957).

  5. For example, the blurb of E. Islamov’s book states that, “The book by E. Islamov will be of interest both for specialists, party workers, organizers of production, as well as for a wide circle of readers” (Islamov 1975, p. 2).

  6. The etymological origins of the name “Hungry Steppe” are unclear. Ian (Matley 1970, p. 331–332) contents that the term originates from travelers’ descriptions, making reference to the difficulty of obtaining water on the caravan route between Tashkent and Samarkand. The term seems to have been well established in Russian administrative documents written after the conquest of Central Asia (see for example Golodnaya step’ 1981, Karavaev 1914). Also Eugene (Schuyler 1876, pp. 226–227) notes in his travelogue that this steppe was named Golodnaya, which he translated as “famished”. The term Hungry Steppe might therefore predate Russian conquest of Central Asia and is possibly a translation to Russian from another language.

  7. A report published in 1914 notes the presence of both nomadic and sedentary Kazak (“Kirgiz” and Uzbek groups, as well as Russian settler communities (Materialy 1914, pp. 17-18). For the 16th–19th centuries, Nazira (Mirzaeva 2011, p. 16) reports Kazak, Karakalpak and Kipchak populations, but also smaller ethnic groups who were nomadic, semi-nomadic or sedentary.

  8. “On the irrigation and reclamation of new lands of the Hungry Steppe in the Uzbek SSR and Kazakh SSR for increasing the production of cotton”, GARF f. 5446. o.90. d.788.

  9. Leonov was familiar with earlier historical accounts on Central Asia, and had published essays on the works of A.F. Middendorf, P.P. Semenov-Tianshanskii and A.P. Fedchenko (compare Srednyaya Asiya 2014).

  10. Retrospectively, the northern part of the Kazakh SSR largely became synonymous with the Tselina written in capital letters.

  11. Today, Guliston is the administrative center of the Syrdarya province in Uzbekistan.

  12. An example for a gulistan is probably the Bagh-i-Gulistan in Shiraz, Iran (Lehrman 1980, p. 136). The term gulistan refers however not only to gardens, but also figures as a toponym for a number of geographical locations in Central and South Asia.

  13. D. Fairchild Ruggles discusses the complex relationship between the paradise myth in Islamic thought and actual garden architecture in Islam. She argues that the four-part division of the garden of the transformation of irrigation canals into a defining element of garden architecture predates Islam. In her understanding, it is “[…] not the form that reflects specific Muslim conceptions of paradise, but rather the description of paradise that reflects a preexisting vocabulary of garden forms (Ruggles 2008, p. 89).

  14. It is important to note that the term “utopian” was pejorative to orthodox Soviet politics. As (Gilison 1975, p. 23) put it, “scientific inevitability” of communist society as the natural outcome of socioeconomic forces, rather than” idle dreams”, were sought for.

  15. Roland (Bleiker 2009, p. 90) cautions that the distinction between metaphors and literal language may be a misleading one. He rightly points out that all speaking and writing is to some extent metaphorical, as no thought can be expressed without some form of representation. Furthermore, while the spectacular images to which we commonly attribute the character of metaphors are more obvious for their political dimension, we might overlook the relevance and even very existence of everyday forms of speaking and writing. The effect of the latter, unspectacular kind might be more subtle, but ultimately even more powerful. Metaphors must therefore be carefully contextualized in their linguistic and narrative context.

  16. For example, Igamberdiev (1969) translates “Hungry Steppe” on the Russian title page with “Mirzachul’” on the Uzbek language title page.

  17. Several possible translations for Mirzachul’ exist. For example, (Igamberdiev 1969, p. 15, 19) refers to the Persian word mrs as meaning as designating “border” or “limit”. Mirzachul’, in this understanding, would translate as “border (-land) of the desert”. Mirzo also denotes a male first name in Arabic and Persian languages, which would translate as the “Steppe of the Prince”.

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Acknowledgements

Funding for fieldwork and writing of this paper was provided by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) in the framework of an Ambizione Grant (2010–2013). A draft of this paper was presented at the Water History Conference 2015 in Delft, Netherlands. The author especially wishes to thank Julia Obertreis for the many fruitful discussions on the subject of this paper. Warm thanks also go to Julie Kurth for her assistance in processing empirical data, to Ekaterina Filep for her help with translations, and to Magali Bonne-Moreau for her support with language editing. I thank Jane Costlow and Arja Rosenholm, as well as the two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and constructive comments on this paper. All possible errors, naturally, remain my own responsibility.

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    Christine Bichsel

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Bichsel, C. From dry hell to blossoming garden: metaphors and poetry in Soviet irrigation literature on the Hungry Steppe, 1950–1980. Water Hist 9, 337–359 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12685-017-0191-4

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