Author: Kurban Said
Translator: Sang-won Lee
Publisher: Jisik-eui Sup
384 pages | 128 * 188 * 30 mm /404g
| Important! Please read before you order! |
| >>>This book is written in Korean only. |
About This Book
As is true of all great literature, Kurban Said's Ali and Nino has timeless
appeal. Set in the years surrounding the Russian Revolution and the rise of the
Soviet Union, Said's tale of an Azerbaijani Muslim boy in love with a Georgian
Christian girl is both tender and disturbingly prescient. The novel, first
published in 1937, begins as Ali Khan Shirvanshir is finishing his last year of
high school:
We were a very mixed lot, we forty schoolboys who were having a Geography lesson
one hot afternoon in the Imperial Russian Humanistic High School of Baku,
Transcaucasia: thirty Mohammedans, four Armenians, two Poles, three Sectarians,
and one Russian.
The multi-ethnic Baku, it seems, stands at a crossroads between West and East,
and, as the smug Russian professor informs his pupils, it is their
responsibility to decide "whether our town should belong to progressive Europe
or to reactionary Asia." For Ali Khan Shirvanshir there is no doubt--he belongs
to the East; his beloved Nino, however, is "a Christian, who eats with knife and
fork, has laughing eyes and wears filmy silk stockings."
Far away, to the West, there are rumblings of war. When the Russian Revolution
begins, Ali Khan chooses not to fight; the Czar's fate is of little interest to
a Muslim living in far away Transcaucasia. But the young man senses that
another, greater danger is gathering on his country's borders--an "invisible
hand" trying to force his world into new ways, the ways of the West. He assures
his worried father that, like his ancestors, he is willing to die in battle, but
at a time of his own choosing. In the meantime, he courts Nino and eventually
marries her in the teeth of scandal and opposition. This union of East and West
is at times a difficult one as Ali Khan finds himself lured further and further
into European ways. When Soviet troops invade, however, he must choose once and
for all whether to stand for Asia or Europe.
One of the many pleasures Ali and Nino offers is Kurban Said's lovingly rendered
evocations of Muslim culture. Another is his compassionate portrait of the
protagonists' difficult but profound relationship. Modern readers coming to this
novel in the wake of the fall of Communism, outbreaks of sectarian violence, and
the rise of religious fundamentalism will find disturbing parallels in its
cautionary chronicle of cultures colliding and a way of life brutally destroyed.
In the end, however, it is not historical accuracy, but rather the charm and
passion of the title characters that lifts Said's only novel into literature's
highest ranks.
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