At Electric Lit Melody Nixon has The Peripheral Writer: An Interview With Hamid Ismailov -- a rare Central Asian author whose works are available in English, including The Underground, just out from Restless Books (see their publicity page, or get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk); I have a copy and should be getting to it.
His reading-experiences are interesting:
His reading-experiences are interesting:
I knew the Soviet life well, to the extent that I was fed up with it, so I was reading more and more Western literature. But gradually, moving to the West, I was more and more carried away by my own literature: Soviet literature, historic literature. The further I moved towards the West, the more I liked the old literature of my own country; and when I say my own country that includes Russian literature as well.He also argues that there's a: "hegemony of World Literatures -- by which I mean, the two or three literatures that run the world. English, French, and maybe partly Spanish literature", and that:
I know writers who are extremely powerful that we as human kind should be proud of. But nobody knows them because they belong to small nations: Georgians, Armenians, Tajiks, and so forth. Ion Druţze the Moldavian writer. Otar Chiladze from Georgia. Meša Selimović the Bosniak writer. They are world-class writers.I'm pleased to note that two of the three are under review at the complete review (and that they are indeed world-class): Otar Chiladze (Avelum) and Meša Selimović (Death and the Dervish and The Fortress). (Ion Druţă is a more difficult proposition -- that Moldavian Autumn-collection is not easy to find (try to get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk).)