Where Russia’s Declinist Rage Isn’t Enough

The novel Jamilia tells the story of a free-spirited woman trapped in a passionless marriage who is suddenly awakened by the arrival of a mournful, lonely outsider who touches something in her soul. Set in Kyrgyzstan, it achieved a degree of fame in the West after it was praised by the French poet Louis Aragon as “the most beautiful love story in the world.” But there is a darkness to the story as well, a suggestion of violence and control, of forced marriage and a sapping of the human spirit when it is not free.

Woven throughout the novel, published in 1957, is an ambiguity—both about Jamilia, the protagonist, and the society she inhabits; one that is a loyal part of the Soviet Union but with its own connections and feelings for a past distinct from Russia. Jamilia, like Kyrgyzstan, is part of a wider family, but an outsider within it; a woman with passions and desires beyond those imposed upon her in a marriage whose circumstances are left intentionally vague—the reader doesn’t learn whether it was ever of her own choosing.