“PLEASE FORGIVE ME, but I will speak a bit nationalistically.” She is very amusing, this pugnacious Azerbaijani girl, who on the one hand knows that nationalism is a forbidden fruit and on the other cannot resist the temptation. We are standing over a relief map of Central Asia, and she wants to show me how great Azerbaijan once was (this is what she regards as a bit of nationalism). I tell her that her desire to present to me the Great Yesterday is a universal impulse in today’s world. Wherever one goes, in each country people will boast about how far their ancestors had once reached. People seem to need this awareness, perhaps more and more as time goes on. I tell her that there must be some law of compensation at work here. The world once used to be roomy, and if some nation suddenly felt that it had to expand, it could go quite far in this expansion. Consider the impressive expansion of the Romans. Look at how magnificently the Mongols expanded themselves. How the Turks did. Can one fail to marvel at how the Spaniards expanded themselves? Even Venice, so small, after all, but what successes in expansion.
Today expansion is difficult and risky, as a rule broadening ends in narrowing, and that is why nations must satisfy the instinct for breadth with a feeling of depth, which means reaching into the depths of history to demonstrate their strength and significance. It is the situation in which all small nations that value peace find themselves. Fortunately, if one looks at the history of humanity, it turns out that every nation, in one epoch or another, has had its period of swelling and broadening, at least one patriotic spurt, which today allows it to preserve a certain — admittedly relative — psychic balance among the rest of mankind.
I don’t even know this Azerbaijani’s name. Girls’ names always mean something here, and parents attach great importance to the choice of a name. Gulnara means “Flower”; Nargis is “Narcissus”; Bâhar is “Spring”; Aydyn is “Light.” Sevil is a girl with whom someone is in love. After the Revolution, Valery tells me, they started giving girls’ names that celebrate the modern inventions now making their way to the countryside. So there are girls with the names Tractor, Chauffeur. One father, apparently counting on tax reductions, called his daughter Finotdiel, which is an abbreviation of the name of the Office of Finance (Finansovyj Otdiel).
So I stand with the nameless Azerbaijani over the map of Asia and look at how great Azerbaijan once was. It stretched from the Caucasus to Tehran and from the Caspian Sea to Turkey. Soviet Azerbaijan represents only the smaller part of that other, earlier Azerbaijan. The rest lies in Iran. The majority of Azerbaijanis, around 4 million live there, and in the Soviet Union around 3.5 million.
In the past Azerbaijan was more of a geographic and cultural concept than a political one. There never really was a centralized state of Azerbaijan, and in this its history differs from that of Georgia and Armenia. It differs in other respects, as well. By way of the Black Sea and Anatolia, Georgia and Armenia maintained contact with ancient Europe, and later with Byzantium. They received Christianity from there, which created within their territories a resistance to the spread of Islam. In Azerbaijan the influence of Europe was weak from the onset, at best secondary. Between Europe and Azerbaijan rise the barriers of the Caucasus and the Armenian Highland, whereas in the east Azerbaijan turns into lowlands, is easily accessible, open.
Azerbaijan is the threshold of Central Asia.
The dominant religions are, first, Zoroastrianism, then Islam, but when I read Sketches from the History and Philosophy of Azerbaijan by the Eight Authors, I am astonished at how many heretics, apostates, atheists, sectarians, dissenters, mystics, pit dwellers, and hermits found shelter and a pulpit here. For Azerbaijan had Matazalites, Batists, Ismailis, Mazdakites, Manichaeans, as well as Monophysites, fire worshipers, Bedtashites, Nugdavites, also Sufis, Hurramites, the Pure Brethern, and Hurufites — known as mystics of the numeral — Serbedites, Kadirites, and Sunnis. In relation to the cosmopolitan centers of the East, this region must have been considered part of the deep provinces, a place of asylum and survival, although this was not always true: in 1417 the heretical philosopher Imadeddin Nezimi is skinned alive here, and several years before that, the leader of the Hurufites, Shichabedin Fazlullach Naimi Tebrizi Azterabadi al-Hurufi, dies in Azerbaijan at the hands of the Muslim inquisition.
The disciples of this martyr, the Hurufites — mystics of the numeral, cabalists, and diviners — believed that the origins of the universe could be comprehended in terms of the figures 28 and 32. Using these numerals one can explain the mystery of each thing. It was the Hurufites’ belief that God expressed himself through beauty: the more beautiful something was, the more God manifested himself in it. Beauty was their criterion for valuating the phenomenal world.
They searched for God in the human face.
Although Muslims, they saw God in the faces of beautiful women.
There was in the twelfth century an Azerbaijani poet of world renown named Nezāmī. Like Kant, Nezāmī never left his native city, which was Gandzha, today’s Kirovabad. Hegel said of Nezāmī’s poetry that it is “soft and sweet.” “At nights,” Nezāmī writes, “I extract shining pearls of verses, scorching my brain in a hundred fires.” His remark that “the surface of the word should be vast” is wise. Nezāmī was an epic poet and a philosopher who occupied himself with logic and grammar, even cosmogony.
From one side pressed upon by Turkey, from the other by Persia, Azerbaijan was unable to secure its autonomy. A series of principalities did in fact exist here, but their significance was local. For many centuries Azerbaijan was a province of Persia. In the years 1502–1736, Persia was ruled by the Safavid dynasty, which is of Azerbaijani descent. Under this dynasty Persia experienced years of glory. But the Azerbaijan language belongs not to the Persian group, but to the Turkic. Few realize that the Turkic constitutes the largest language group in the Soviet Union. Uzbeks, Tatars, Kazakhs, Azerbaijanis, Chuvashes, Turkmen, Bashkirs, Kirghiz, Yakuts, Dolganes, Karakalpaks, Kumites, Haguzites, Tuvinians, Uighurs, Karachai, Chakasites, Chulites, Altays, Balashites, Nogai, Turks, Shirtes, Karaites, Crimean Jews, and Tofals are all Turkic speakers. An Uzbek and a Tatar, a Kirghiz and a Bashkir, can speak to one another, each in his own language, and understand one another well.
IN THE EVENING, Nik-Nik orders me to climb high up in a tower.
From the tower I will be able to see how the Oil Rocks shine, and Nik-Nik says that I cannot leave until I have seen this. The tower stands in the middle of the sea, the sea is black, although it is called Caspian, and I am climbing up to heaven on stairs that creak because they are made of wood, the whole tower is made of wood nailed together, it reaches to the stars, and although the wind rocks it like a stalk, it stands, gniotsa nie lamiotsa (it will bend but it won’t break), so on this tower I am climbing up to heaven, it is dark here, actually it is black like the sea, we are walking into tar, I prefer not to look anymore, I would like to stop, enough is enough, but I can hear Nik-Nik going farther, so I go too, into the darkness, into the abyss, into the chasm. Everything is becoming unreal, because I can no longer see anything, meaning that I can see only this thing of wood around me, rough, unplaned, as if hairy, a piece of raw wood wedged into the sky, in an utterly gratuitous place, jutting out in the darkness, improbable, abstract.