Bookvica

[BASHKIR LANGUAGE]

Item #342

Bulat. Allasyz Kuly [i.e. Godless Humor]. Ufa: Bashgiz, 1930. 93 pp. 18x12,5 cm. Original illustrated wrappers showing two laughing faces tearing up the page from Quran. Owner’s signature on the title page, minor rusting of the staples, tear of the rear wrapper, couple of spots in the texts, otherwise very good.

Very rare. One of 5000 copies printed. In Bashkir language.
In pre-Revolutionary times Islam was a leading religion of the region of Bashkiria. The fight against the religion started by Soviet state targeted Bashkiria as well. It’s known that in the early 1920s 2414 mosques were active in the republic while by 1934 the number dropped to 323.

The party was creating the ‘anti-religious’ clubs over the republic, called ‘The friends of Bezhbozhnik magazine’. Usually those groups didn’t differ muslims from christians but this particular publication has targeted Islam. It contains poems and feuilletons ridiculing the clergy and the followers of the religion. The book has been printed in latin characters, this version of Bashkir script existed for only 10 years, from 1930 to 1940. Traditionally from the Middle Ages Bashkir people used Arabic graphics for their language, but by the 1920s this script was created, using Janalif (a unified in 1926 script for all Turk languages of the Union). In 1939 the decision was made to change all the scripts of Soviet languages to Cyrillic characters, and in haste a new Bashkir script was created that remains till today.

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