#aylis

Following the publication of “Stone Dreams” in a Russian magazine, and likely as a result of a direct command of Azerbaijani leadership, Aylisli tells us, his fellow villagers, each of whom he knew personally, staged and videotaped a bonfire of his books. Aylis was no longer his, he laments in the essay, and would never be his again. But the morning after watching the video of the book burning, he was rejoicing. “The Aylis taken away from me that day by the potent hand of the authorities hadn’t been my Aylis for a long time already. It was their Aylis: without God and without Memory, without History, and without a Biography.”

Read Olga Zilberbourg’s analysis of Akram Aylisli’s “Farewell, Aylis,” which reckons with decades of Soviet violence and oppression in Azerbaijan. 

Aylis, the Sun Goddess, was an angry goddess, burning away the clouds that might have brought much-needed rain.