Boris Chukhovich is a scholar in the research groups Le soi et l’autre, UQAM, Poexil, University of Montreal, and LAMIC, Laval University – Musee d’art contemporain de Montreal. He is also the Curator in chief of the Musee d’art centre-asiatique.

«FRIENDSHIP, LOVE, ETERNITY» USTO MUMINA.
(Quotations from the manuscript are published from the sanction of the author. All rights of use of the given text belong to his author. Any reproduction of the given text, including reproduction by electronic ways, is illegal without the written sanction of the author. The author also reserves the right to withdraw the text from the present virtual resource)
(In an English part of a site of quotation are published with significant reductions).

Part 1.

Zeal with the Pomegranate (1923)

This painting is a complex construction of ten images, arranged around an eleventh central image.  The ten framing images correspond to ten different episodes that altogether paint a life of the saints (similar to icons, medieval stained-glass panels, or frescoes).  The ten images can be reconstructed in ten acts.  They are as follows:

Scene 1: The urban square
Two young men are meeting in the square.  One is dressed in a ruby-colored jacket and a dark-terracotta dressing gown and is carrying a tray with pomegranates on his head.  Another is dressed in a dark-blue chapan (Uzbek traditional dress), a satin jacket, and an amber colored head wrap.  He’s come to a halt.  The pomegranate salesman hands out a pomegranate to the young man in the amber head wrap.  An old man in a yellow-white striped chapan stares disapprovingly.

Scene 2: The country garden
Rugs are spread out on the green grass; six young men are sitting on them.  One of them is playing a tambourine; the others are clapping out a rhythm.  A dancer is dancing in front of them.

Scene 3: The uninhabited green meadow in the country garden
Two young men in white robes are sitting on a rug.  One, in a gold head wrap, is playing on the tambourine.  The second, in an amber head wrap, is listening to him, infatuated.

Scene 4: The garden before the bathing pavilion
A green hill with a mosque dome growing above it is rising behind the pavilion.  A rug is spread out on the grass; on it is a young man in slumber.  He is having a dream.

Scene 5: The dream of the young man
Inside the bathing pavilion, someone is splashing around in the pool.  The bather left his gold head wrap by the poolside.  The water from the pool rises in streaks of steam.  Another young man, hidden on the roof of the pavilion is watching the bather.  He is wearing an amber head wrap. 

Scene 6: The uninhabited country garden
A rug is laid out on the grass; two young men are sitting upon it.  We have seen these two characters before and can recognize them by the dark-blue dressing gown, satin jacket, and an amber head wrap of one, and the gold head wrap of the other.  Underneath the white dressing gown of the second, you can see a dark-terracotta cover and a scarlet jacket.  It is the same garment worn by the young man with a tray of pomegranates in the first scene.  Judging by the content of the following scene, this episode seems to be a proclamation of love between the two lovers.  Each young man has a cage with a bird inside it.  The first holds the cage in his hands while the second has placed it on the ground in front of him.  The cage held by the first man is empty; his collocutor is holding its inhabitant trying to demonstrate how to feed water to the bird from his mouth.  The first young man looks slightly embarrassed.

Scene 7: Ibid (same characters as in the previous scene)
The birdcages are left on the ground.  The two lovers embrace.

Scene 8: Stairs before the mosque
An old mullah is sitting in the center; a massive book is opened in front of him.  Two young men are positioned along the sides: one is wearing a dark-blue dressing gown with an amber head wrap, the other a gold head wrap.  The first young man has his head inclined to the ground; he dares not look at the mullah.  The second directly faces the mullah, listening to his speech.  Judging by the following scene, the discussion seems to concern the religious and social legitimation of the young men’s relationship together.

Scene 9: The court of a private house with a festive dastarkhan (Uzbek table for eating)
Two young men are sitting in the center of the dastarkhan with a symbolically combined niche placed behind them.  Their six friends, who participated in the “zeal”, are around the dastarkhan also.  Outside of the yard there are old men in long chapans on one side, and a woman in parandja on the other.  Their poses imply both condemnation and surprise.

Scene 10: The green cemetery
A dual grave with a lantern is in the center.  In the background, there is a semicircular green hill, “the stairs of sinners” and blue cupolas of Shah-i-Zinda, are seen distinctly upon it.

By “zeal” Mumin evidently understands the second scene, which represents a collective performance of the ritual music and dance.  In the Russian language, “Zeal”, implies a performance of a specific ritual by a group of people with a purpose of driving themselves into ecstasy.  At the beginning of the twentieth century, certain Russian sects practiced a similar ritual with the use of whips.  In the context of the Central Asian tradition, the ritual applied to sacred acts performed by the Sufis.  In this particularly case however, it is not the act of Sufis, but rather the dance of the Bacha dancers that is implied.  Polovsov once witnessed and later described this phenomenon in his memoirs: “In a room, but more often in a garden or a backyard, a space is cleared and covered in rugs for a performance.   The rugs are often covered with specific thick, homogenously colored mats.  The bare feet of the dancers and the intricate movements, with which they move, become sharper and easily distinguished upon the white, gray or raspberry colored surfaces of the mats.   The audience is assembled all around the performance area, with their legs crossed, and only leaving one small corner for the musicians and a stack of warm, perishing coals that the musicians use from time to time to heat the stretched and the softened surface of the tambourines in order to tune them.  […] The first dancer steps out on his tiptoes and begins to circle around the performance area cleared for the dance.  He glides with short and rhythmical steps, with his hands on his hips; then he stops at the center and begins to bend forward, curve, circle and jolt his body precisely when the “white” man least expects it.  At that point, a second dancer follows, then the third and so on, until about half a dozen dancers or more join each other in an eccentric grace.  At first, their movements appear to be more improvisational, but little by little one can clearly distinguish the rules of this ancient and intricate art, recognizing that nothing one sees is random and that everything is performed according to tradition full of intricacy and meaning.”  The second scene of the “Zeal” captures the moment when the first dancer comes out in front of the audience to the rhythm of the tambourine; note that the musician is positioned among the cheering audience and not in a separate place.

And finally, the central element of the “Zeal” is the portrait of a young man sitting in white robes.  We recognize this previously seen character by the distinct golden head wrap.  This scene compels us to crave and see his fantasy come to life: his dreams of life, love, and death.  But all he has in his hands is a pomegranate that’s slightly cut open.  The image once again evokes an interesting tug of war between reality and fantasy, a game that takes a perceiver into a territory that explores the themes touched upon in the episode “the dream” (in which the boy hidden on the roof watches the bather).  The episode of “death” and the “dual grave with a lantern” appears to be another fantasy, because only a living human being can conjure a vision of himself dead.  The first episode “the offering of the pomegranate” however, can be either imaginary or a real memory, because the pomegranate cut open by the young man is real.  It is also possible that as he was cutting open the pomegranate, the action restored certain memories in his mind, upon which he may have fantasized taking them to alternative endings.  (All these possibilities are one of many interpretations and variations of the given images, we will move on further however).
   

The episodic painting of the “Zeal”, can be directly correlated to another painting “When I saw Samarkand”, as well as “Friendship, Love, Eternity”.  The meeting with the opal-eyed stranger, a newborn feeling, death, cemetery, a dome, a green hill – these painted coincidences cannot be accidental.  Let’s not forget that certain episodes of the “Zeal”, such as the bathing in the pavilion beneath the green hill with a dome sticking out from above it, or the meeting of the lovers in the meadow of a countryside garden have been explored by the painter in other separate works.  If most of this is a fantasy, it can be traced to one crucial moment captured in the episode of “the meeting”, which acts as a connecting dot to reality and frames all of the related paintings.  This allows us to hypothesize about the life and the events of Usto Mumin in his first few months in Samarkand.