Idris Bazorkin's Evening Prayers

Abstract

"Evening Prayers" is a stand-alone translation from the Ingush writer Idris Bazorkin's novel, Dark Ages (Iz Tmy Vekov, 1963). Bazorkin offers here a deeply human portrait of Ingush life, far from the standard Party approach on topics such as Islam, sex, and indigenous Ingush experience that socialist realism had long enforced.The title of the novel is an ironic reading of the presumption that any Caucasus village must be somehow frozen in medieval social structures. Bazorkin's point was of a different nature: darkness could fall even during enlightened times and was an artifact of timeless struggles among men and women acting in a world made by themselves and by other.

Keywords: Post-Soviet, Literatures of the Caucasus, Postcolonial, Ingush, Chechen