Tashkent: On the sunny side of a lost city8 min read
Some books are remembered for their memorable characters, dialogue, or narrative arc. Others survive because they perfectly capture a time or a place. Dina Rubina’s On the Sunny Side of the Street (На солнечной стороне улицы, 2006) belongs to the second category. It is one of the great literary portraits of Tashkent: a city of courtyards, bazaars, aryk canals, Soviet apartment blocks, Uzbek families, Jewish households, Russian evacuees, petty criminals, artists, teachers and provincial geniuses. Rubina does not write Tashkent as a postcard or as an exotic backdrop. She writes it from inside its noise, dust, heat, humour and cruelty. The result is a book that feels less like a novel about a city than like a city speaking through a novel.
From wartime hunger to artistic vision
Published in 2006, On the Sunny Side of the Street is one of Dina Rubina’s most important works. The title refers to the jazz standard On the Sunny Side of the Street, but its apparent brightness is deceptive. The novel is full of sun, colour and comedy, yet it is also built on trauma: the Second World War, the siege of Leningrad, evacuation, poverty, Soviet violence, crime, abandonment and the damage parents pass on to their children.
The book follows two intertwined lives. The first is that of Katya Shcheglova, a girl evacuated from besieged Leningrad to Tashkent during the war. Like thousands of real evacuees, she arrives in Central Asia half-starved, uprooted and marked by catastrophe. Tashkent saves her life, but not her innocence. Katya grows into a brilliant, hard, manipulative survivor, a woman who understands the informal economies of Soviet life better than its official morality. She becomes involved in currency speculation, shadow trade and more serious forms of crime. Rubina never turns her into a simple villain, however; Katya is cruel, but she is made out to be a product of hunger, loss and the brutal self-education demanded by survival.
The second story is that of Katya’s daughter, Vera. If Katya lives by cunning, Vera survives through her vision. Neglected and emotionally wounded, she nevertheless discovers an artistic gift. Her life takes her into Tashkent’s bohemian circles – into painting, love and art. The tension between mother and daughter is the emotional core of the novel. They are bound by blood, but almost incapable of tenderness. Katya has survived by hardening herself against the world while Vera survives by seeing beauty in it.
Rubina’s great achievement is that she does not separate private fate from urban history. The lives of Katya and Vera are inseparable from the city around them, which takes on the function of a machine that receives evacuees, feeds, educates and shelters them, before corrupting and sometimes destroying them. On the Sunny Side of the Street is therefore both a family story and a civic biography.
Mapping a vanished Tashkent
For readers who know today’s Tashkent, one of the most powerful aspects of On the Sunny Side of the Street is its portrait of a city that has largely disappeared. Rubina’s Tashkent is not the capital of glass towers, new boulevards, polished parks and monumental state architecture. It is the older, hybrid city that existed between imperial Turkestan, Soviet modernization and local mahalla life.
This lost Tashkent is made of very specific places. Rubina evokes Alaysky Bazaar, one of the city’s best-known markets, not merely as a place of commerce but as a social theatre. In the older Tashkent of the novel, the bazaar is a world of voices, bargaining, smells, rumours, illegal deals, food and fabrics. It belongs to a city where public life is negotiated face to face. The Alaysky Bazaar still exists today, but it has been modernized and regularized. Its older texture, the mixture of Soviet disorder, informal trade and neighbourhood intimacy that Rubina evokes, is much harder to find.
Alay bazar, Tashkent, photo credit: Mathieu Lemoine
The same is true of Sheikhantaur. In Rubina’s literary geography, Sheikhantaur is not only a historical district but a remnant of old Tashkent, with its religious memory, narrow urban fabric and layered past. Today, the Sheikhantaur mausoleum complex remains an important historical site, but the wider urban environment around it has changed dramatically. Much of central Tashkent has been widened, rebuilt, redeveloped or absorbed into the logic of a modern capital. The city of low houses, courtyards, trees, gates and semi-private neighbourhood life has been pushed back by wider roads, new administrative buildings and skyscrapers.
Tashkent buildings, photo credit: Mathieu Lemoine
Telman Park, another place associated with Rubina’s Tashkent, also belongs to a vanished Soviet map of the city. Like many post-Soviet urban spaces, parks have been renamed, reconstructed or functionally transformed. What matters in the novel is not only the park itself, but the way such spaces structured childhood, courtship and everyday life. Soviet Tashkent was full of named parks, cinemas, clubs, courtyards and tram routes that acted as emotional coordinates. A person’s biography could be mapped through them. In today’s city, many of those coordinates have been erased or overwritten.
Kids playing in Tashkent, photo credit: Mathieu Lemoine
Then there are the less official places: courtyards with kurpachi blankets laid out for guests, houses organized around shade and water, aryk canals (nearly ubiquitous in Central Asia) running along streets, balconies and back rooms, shared apartments, artists’ studios, school corridors, sewing workshops, communal kitchens and the improvised spaces where Soviet citizens survived beyond the state’s planned economy. These places are harder to pinpoint on a map, but they are central to the novel and can still be found in present-day Tashkent. They represent a form of urban life that modernization has tried to replace, yet never fully managed to erase.
Rubina’s Tashkent is also lost because its people have scattered. The city she describes was multilingual and multiethnic in a very particular Soviet-Central Asian way. Uzbeks, Russians, Jews, Tatars, Koreans, Ukrainians, Armenians and evacuees from across the USSR lived in proximity, sometimes intimately and sometimes uneasily. Russian was the shared language of much of the novel’s social world, but it existed alongside Uzbek words, local customs and Central Asian rhythms of life. That world has changed. Since independence, emigration, state-building, language policy and generational change have altered the city’s cultural balance. The Russian-speaking Tashkent intelligentsia to which Rubina belonged has not disappeared entirely, but it no longer occupies the same social position.
Amir Temur Square, Tashkent, photo credit: Mathieu Lemoine
Anyone who wants to understand Uzbekistan should read this book because the country is something more than its modern monuments, borders and state institutions. The book preserves a memory of Tashkent that is no longer fully visible in the city’s streets. Many of the people who knew that world are gone. Many of the houses have been demolished. Many of the words, smells and social codes have faded. But it shows how literature can capture and hold in place what urban redevelopment would otherwise do away with.
A difficult place in Uzbekistan’s literary memory
Rubina occupies an unusual place in Uzbekistan’s literary memory. She was born in Tashkent in 1953, studied at the Tashkent Conservatory, published early in Soviet literary journals, and became one of the most famous Russian-language writers to emerge from Uzbekistan. For many Russian-speaking readers from Tashkent, she is not simply an émigré writer. She is one of the great chroniclers of their city.
Uzbek readers who grew up in the Russian-language cultural space often recognize in her prose the atmosphere of the city of their childhood or their parents’ generation. But on another level, she does not fit neatly into the national literary canon of independent Uzbekistan. She writes in Russian, from outside the country, about a Soviet and multiethnic Tashkent that is not always aligned with the country’s contemporary narratives of self. Her Tashkent is affectionate, but also unruly, Jewish, Russian-speaking, criminal, bohemian and deeply Soviet. That makes the novel important as a document of memory, but also somewhat difficult to domesticate into a simple national story.
Why this novel still matters for understanding Uzbekistan
To understand Uzbekistan, one must read more than policy papers, election reports and development strategies. One must also understand memory, mahalla life, language, food, social hierarchy, informal economies and hospitality. On the Sunny Side of the Street offers all of this.
The book does not explain Uzbekistan in a didactic way. It does something better: it shows how Tashkent felt to people who lived inside one of its most transformative periods. It shows the city as a refuge during the Second World War, when evacuees from the western Soviet Union arrived in Central Asia and were absorbed into local homes and institutions. It shows the moral ambiguity of Soviet life, where official ideology coexisted with black markets, favours and fear.
On the Sunny Side of the Street should therefore be read not only as a novel by Dina Rubina, but as an archive of a vanished Tashkent. For foreign readers, the novel is especially useful because it breaks the usual clichés about Uzbekistan. This is not the Uzbekistan of turquoise domes, Silk Road brochures and ostensibly timeless oriental beauty. Nor is it the Uzbekistan of authoritarian politics and a difficult post-Soviet transition. It complicates the country, and that is precisely why it matters.
