When the book was handed to me, I didn’t know where to begin. Its two hundred oversized, glossy pages were filled with beautiful but impossibly foreign illustrations, men and women from a time and place I couldn’t really pinpoint. It cast a powerful spell: everyone who came to my house noticed the bright orange cover, picked up the book, and disappeared for twenty minutes or so. “Can I borrow this?” they’d ask me without looking up. When it came time for my own disappearing act, it was the first few sentences that pulled me in:
We first came across Molla Nasreddin several years ago on a cold winter day in a second-hand bookstore near Maiden Tower in Baku. It was bibliophilia at first sight. Its size and weight, not to mention print quality and bright colour, stood out suspiciously amongst the more meek and dusty variations of Soviet brown in old man Elman’s place. We stared at Molla Nasreddin and it, like an improbable beauty, winked back at us.
The book is “Molla Nasreddin: The Magazine that Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve,” and its subject is the aforementioned Molla Nasreddin, a “satirical Azeri periodical” published in the first three decades of the last century in Azerbaijan and “read across the Muslim world from Morocco to Iran.” Nasreddin is a traditional character dating back to the Middle Ages in Central Asia, and he served as the magazine’s unifying figure. The book, which gathers some of the best images and guides the reader through their cultural nuances, is a project of the international artists’ collective Slavs and Tatars, who describe themselves as “a faction of polemics and intimacies devoted to an area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China known as Eurasia. The collective’s work spans several media, disciplines, and a broad spectrum of cultural registers (high and low) focusing on an oft-forgotten sphere of influence between Slavs, Caucasians, and Central Asians.”
Molla Nasreddin was revolutionary in many ways. In an era and a region where free speech wasn’t particularly encouraged, its authors boldly satirized politics, religion, colonialism, Westernization, and modernization, education (or lack thereof), and the oppression of women (Azerbaijan was surprisingly progressive on women’s issues at the time, granting women the right to vote in 1919—a year before the United States). And with the majority of the population at the time illiterate, the magazine was a careful and clever blend of illustrations and text. And the text itself might be the most interesting of all: it was written in Azeri Turkish, rather than Russian, the language of their colonizers. The book’s editors had the unenviable task of sorting out the text: the Azeri alphabet, written with Arabic characters for nearly a millennium, was Latinized by Lenin in 1928, Cyrillicized by Stalin a decade later, and returned to Latin following the fall of the Soviet Union.
Slavs and Tatars will be touring the world with the book and accompanying art installations for the rest of the year: Vienna now, Art Basel, in Switzerland, in June, Munich in August, Brazil in September, Minsk in October, and Stuttgart in 2012. You can look at a few sample images from the book below.
Accompanying the first image: “A son is born.” The second: “A daughter is born.”
“Listen, people who get a contemporary education want us to forget our old, pagan beliefs,” the caption reads. “Do not allow this to happen under any circumstances!”
“Eastern European and Asian deputies who don’t know this is a trap,” reads the caption. “The trap is labelled ‘the game in Eastern Europe and Asia.’”
“Son, hit your mom and I will admire you.”
“While the Russians, Ottomans and Serbians lounge in the background,” the editors write, “Austria tries to capture Albania but make it seem as if it fell on its own.” The caption reads: “Austria: ‘We need to be very careful shaking the tree so that the apple falls itself.’”
“A strongman stands in front of the oil workers and boasts: ‘No one is able to beat me and yet, no one hires me.’ The boss answers, in Russian, ‘It doesn’t matter, there isn’t any work anyhow.’”
“A member of the Young Turks leads old clerks and members of the Ottoman Empire’s security apparatus away by a leash.” “Enough!” he tells them. “You’ve ruled us for 32 years.”
“It doesn’t hurt to always bear arms…as it is necessary for both praying and for fighting.” The editors note slyly: “Yet another position upon which fundamentalist Muslims and Evangelical Christians could get together and share best practices.”
The captions for the left and right pages, respectively, are “According to the book, the world of the devil,” and “According to the book, the world of believers.” “With the bicycles, cars, bridges and buildings, the world of the devil is modern and developed,” the editors write. “The world of believers is full of ethereal illusions and idleness.”
“Listen, son, go buy a copy of Molla Nasreddin but don’t tell anyone.” “In a show of bravado,” the editors write, “the illustration demonstrates that despite the religious establishment’s disapproval of Molla Nasreddin, the clerics still read it, if secretly.”
“A biting critique of the role of clerics in the newly formed Iranian Majles (Parliament): the ‘Sina’ (literally: chest) refers to the self-flagellation of the Shi’ite Ashura-Tasua ceremonies.”
“For reasons beyond our control, this page is empty.”
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