From the house of Allah to the Stalin’s world : some remarks on bestseller novel "Zuleikha opens her eyes" by Guzel Yakhina

The paper identifies the problem of breaking ties with the Muslim tradition in the USSR reflected in the award-winning contemporary Russian novel of 2015. The text is the literary debut of the screenwriter Guzel Yakhina. Yakhina’s work is one of the next moving literary comments to the Stalinist repressions of the 1930s. Here though, for the first time, the perspective of a woman from a traditional Muslim environment is clearly shown. The main purpose of the paper is to draw attention to motives of the cultural and heroic transformation of the main character. The author of the novel refers to the past of her Tatar family, and in particular to her grandmother’s experience from the period of dekulakization campaign of Soviet village in the 1930s. To give to the narrative the Tatar flavour, Yakhina introduced many original Tatar words into the text, adding a special glossary at the end of the novel. The main motif of the book is the story of Zuleyka Valieva, a young Tatar woman who, as a result of unfortunate circumstances, starting with the murder of her husband Murtaza, gets into the convoy of displaced people led by commandant Ignatov. Her tragic situation is complemented by a surprising pregnancy and then uncomfortable childbirth among strangers in the place of resettlement. The most interesting context, in the opinion of the author of this analysis, is to draw attention and to show the spiritual and religious transformation of Zuleyka, facing new life circumstances. A woman from a conservative Muslim home, living with a traditional family immersed in Muslim customs, facing tragic experiences on the way to the place of resettlement begins to revise her religious beliefs. Zuleyka is saved from a sinking barge by her persecutor Ignatov, and in a settlement on Angara river she gives a birth to a child of her dead husband. Here also she becomes more independent, interacts with the co-inhabitants of Semrog, grows up and becomes aware of her situation The momentum of her transformation is the passionate, forbidden and subconsciously rejected love for commandant Ignatov. Zuleyka gradually gets rid of her religious commitments and habits. She moves away from Allah, she prays less and less, and the circumstances of her life i.e. lack of inhibitions and independence begin to undermine the foundations of her religious beliefs and customs. We understand that Zuleyka is a symbolic character representing small Muslim nations of the Stalinist USSR. The background of her specific religious conversion and intellectual maturity is the Soviet state ideology and Joseph Stalin himself