"A City with Two Lifetimes": Urban Poetics of Early Soviet Stalinobod

Abstract.At the beginning of the20thcentury, Dušanbe was only a small rural settlement in ruins. However, in 1924, it was designated as the capital of the Tajikistan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, which was part of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic until 1929, when it became independent. The city then became the Soviet capital known as Stalinobod from 1929 to 1961 and underwent rapid urban expansion, becoming a political and intellectual hubin Central Asia, the Persian-speaking world, and the Soviet Union. This paper explores how therapid and deep urbanizationof early Soviet Dušanbe profoundlyinfluenced the literary production of the time, and how the textualization of the city was coeval with the city’sbirth. By analysing a selection of poemswhere the transformation of the once mud-walled village into a capital city is depicted, in particularKučai Lenin(“Lenin Avenue”) by Boqi Rahimzoda, theodes by Muhammadjon Rahimi, Dušanbe(“Dušanbe”) and Dar borai Dušanbe(“About Dušanbe”), and Sarvar’s Rubojjot(“Quatrains”), this study examines the interplay between literary texts and the urbanizationof Stalinobod/Dušanbe, underlining how literature serves as a meanto read the urban history of a city in transformation, and as a vehicle to express modern ideas in the framework of a deeply changing Tajikistan.Keywords:Tajik literature, Persian literature, Stalinobod, Dušanbe, urban history.