The Devil's Dance

Winner of the EBRD Literature Prize 2019

On New Years' Eve 1938, the writer Abdulla Qodiriy is taken from his home by the Soviet secret police and thrown into a Tashkent prison. There, to distract himself from the physical and psychological torment of beatings and mindless interrogations, he attempts to mentally reconstruct the novel he was writing at the time of his arrest - based on the tragic life of the Uzbek poet-queen Oyhon, married to three khans in succession, and living as Abdulla now does, with the threat of execution hanging over her. As he gets to know his cellmates, Abdulla discovers that the Great Game of Oyhon's time, when English and Russian spies infiltrated the courts of Central Asia, has echoes in the 1930s present, but as his identification with his protagonist increases and past and present overlap it seems that Abdulla's inability to tell fact from fiction will be his undoing.

The Devils' Dance brings to life the extraordinary culture of 19th century Turkestan, a world of lavish poetry recitals, brutal polo matches, and a cosmopolitan and culturally diverse Islam rarely described in western literature. Hamid Ismailov's virtuosic prose recreates this multilingual milieu in a digressive, intricately structured novel, dense with allusion, studded with quotes and sayings, and threaded through with modern and classical poetry.

With this poignant, loving resurrection of both a culture and a literary canon brutally suppressed by a dictatorship which continues today, Ismailov demonstrates yet again his masterful marriage of contemporary international fiction and the Central Asian literary traditions, and his deserved position in the pantheon of both.

About the Author

Hamid Ismailov is an Uzbek writer who was forced to flee Uzbekistan in 1992 due to what the state dubbed ‘unacceptable democratic tendencies’. He came to the United Kingdom, where he took a job with the BBC World Service. His works are banned in Uzbekistan. Several of his Russian-original novels have been published in English translation, including The Railway (Vintage, 2007) ,The Dead Lake, which was long listed for the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and The Underground (both Restless Books). The Devils’ Dance was the first of his Uzbek language novels to appear in English, and won the EBRD Prize in 2019.

About the Translator

Donald Rayfield is professor of Russian and Georgian at Queen Mary University of London. He is an author of books about Russian and Georgian literature, and about Joseph Stalin and his secret police. He is also a series editor for books about Russian writers and intelligentsia. He translated Georgian and Russian poets and prose writers.