Turkish Literary Traditions in the Development of Modern Uzbek Poetry

Abstract

In this context, Ottoman Turkish literature, particularly the poetics of protest, patriotism, and social critique, emerged as an important point of reference for prominent Uzbek poets like Abdulhamid Cho‘lpon and Abdurauf Fitrat, who engaged selectively with the form, meter, language, and ideological positioning of their Ottoman counterparts and rethought them, rather than imitated them. Although Turkic literary interconnections have been noted repeatedly, the specific processes by which Turkish literary traditions impacted the emergence of a modern Uzbek poetic consciousness have been rarely if ever systematized. The aim of this study is to locate and investigate the aesthetic, ideological, and poetic aspects of the Ottoman Turkish impact on modern Uzbek poetry based on a comparative text analysis. The analysis reveals how converging thematic tropes, symbolic strategies, and modes of protest representation shaped by shared historical experiences and a common hope for national liberation, as well as similar responses to social injustice resulted in both synchronicity and, dialectically, in the writerly intertext, as seen in Cho‘lpon’s creative and critical engagement with Tevfik Fikret. The article illustrates how Turkish literary traditions galvanized modest aesthetic assimilation, in a manner that supported the goals of poetic modernization without threatening the salience of national particularity. This discovery elucidates how the transnational Turkic literary interaction helped move Uzbek poetry to a new stage of development and deepens discussions of the wider comparative literature and the cultural transfer during the epochs of modernization.