"They said the black sheep would bear the burden of plenty, / But seeing how fat the black sheep was, they devoured it..."

An art critic living in Europe quoted these lines from a protest song he had recently discovered.

Why did the Turkmen translation of a poem written in January 1847 by Sándor Petőfi—the Hungarian poet who urged his people to break the chains of servitude—suddenly transform into a unique rallying cry across Turkmenistan?...

Reflecting on Farid Tukhbatullin’s debut book published in Switzerland, a Western-based Turkmen exile made a striking observation: while fate guided Tukhbatullin from environmental activism into human rights advocacy—and ultimately toward what Soviet parlance termed the "engineering of the human soul"—hundreds of writers in Ashgabat abandoned that duty entirely, choosing instead to become passive or active sycophants for the nation's successive personality cults...

While sorting through my personal archives, I came across a letter sent from Ashgabat on April 12, 2009. The author—an acquaintance of mine and a writer who had once participated in drafting a blacklist of creative figures, only to later find himself targeted by that very system...

An encounter between an elderly woman and a younger lady waiting in line for a cashier—where the older woman recited one of her poems—prompted me to reflect on the true traditions of poetry and the nature of conformism...

In Turkmenistan, which ranks fourth in the world in natural gas reserves and is one of the most closed and repressive countries, young creators are increasingly turning to the theme of poverty—the issue of destitution that was close to 18th- and 19th-century Turkmen poets...