Interview: Breaking the Monolith of Russian-Language Culture

Abstract Hamid Ismailov is a prolific multilingual author, having written articles, stories, books of poetry and many novels in Russian, Uzbek, and English. He translated Uzbek classics into Russian, and Western and Russian literature into Uzbek. He also worked from Farsi into Russian. He was born into an Uzbek family in Tokmok, Kyrgyzstan, in 1954. He was educated in a Soviet secondary school and then military college. As a child, he read classical poetry and One Thousand and One Nights to his grandmother, who brought him up from the age of twelve. As an adult, Ismailov lived in Tashkent and then in Moscow where he championed Uzbek literature for the Writers Union. In 1992, he was forced to leave Uzbekistan because his poetry was found to be too “decadent,” but he later returned. In 2017, he was deported from Tashkent airport. His novels are still banned in Uzbekistan. After moving to western Europe, he lived in France for a short period of time and then moved to England where he worked at the bbc for twenty-five years. He was the first bbc Central Asia correspondent. In May 2010, he was appointed bbc World Service Writer-in-Residence and continued in this position until 2014. He currently lives in Prague. Natasha Rulyova studied Joseph Brodsky’s bilingualism and self-translation. She is now working on a project on Russophone Literary Diversity. She discusses with Ismailov his literary multilingualism, translation, postcolonial writers’ stereoscopic vision and his mission to diversify Russian-language culture. This written interview is based on Rulyova’s conversation with Ismailov, which took place online in English as part of the series “Natasha Rulyova’s Conversations with Russophone Authors,” co-organized with Pushkin House, London, on October 24, 2023 (available on the Pushkin House YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXZSGoEx03U ).