Cultural Anxiety and Gendered Trauma: A Psychological-Literary Reading of Abdulla Qodiriy's Oʻtkan kunlar

Abdulla Qodiriy's Oʻtkan kunlar (1922–1926), widely recognised as the first Uzbek novel, has traditionally been read through the lenses of national historiography and literary stylistics. This article proposes a complementary, interdisciplinary reading that brings psychological trauma theory to bear on the text. Drawing on Judith Herman's stage model of trauma and recovery, Cathy Caruth's concept of belated and unclaimed experience, and postcolonial revisions of trauma theory by Irene Visser and Stef Craps, the study conducts a qualitative thematic analysis of the novel's political and domestic plotlines. Findings suggest that Oʻtkan kunlar encodes two interlocking registers of suffering — a collective, political trauma tied to the disintegration of the Kokand Khanate on the eve of Russian conquest, and a chronic, gendered trauma rooted in the institution of polygamy and the seclusion of women. The novel's characteristic narrative devices, particularly its didactic narrator and its deliberate withholding of information, are shown to produce effects that parallel what Western trauma theory calls belatedness and unspeakability, suggesting that such structures can arise independently within a Central Asian oral-narrative tradition rather than being exclusively Euro-American literary inventions. The article argues for the value of trauma theory as an interpretive tool for early twentieth-century Uzbek prose while cautioning against uncritical transplantation of a Western clinical vocabulary onto a colonial-era Central Asian text.