The Devils' Dance Quotes

“You’ll spend the new year wherever you spent New Year’s day, as the Russian proverb goes.”
― Hamid Ismailov, The Devils' Dance

“At first Abdulla attributed Vinokurov’s brutality to the fact that he was a Russian, but he then recalled that among the men who searched his house there had been an interrogator who spoke Uzbek like a Tatar, replacing all his ‘j’s with ‘y’s.”
― Hamid Ismailov, The Devils' Dance

“This Uzbek novel gives the reader two for the price of one. The ‘frame’ novel is documentary fiction, a reconstruction of the last months of its main protagonist, the writer Abdulla Qodiriy, as he spend most of 1938 in an NKVD prison during Stalin’s Great Terror, in which three quarters of a million innocent citizens were shot, and several million sent to be worked to death in the Gulags. In Uzbekistan, as in other republics of the USSR, the terror was even worse than in Moscow, for it virtually eliminated, on spurious charges of spying and counter-revolution, not just the Communist Party and local government elite, but much of the country’s intelligentsia and trained professionals.”
― Hamid Ismailov, The Devils' Dance

“Only the strongest recite the shahada, say farewell to those around them, and then stride off towards the exit and are transfigured, into the dark. All those who are left behind either recite their prayers or weep quietly. Or sit together, unable to settle down and go back to sleep until morning comes. Everyone knows the fate of those who are taken out at that early hour.”
― Hamid Ismailov, The Devils' Dance