Chinghiz Aitmatov


Chinghiz Torekulovich Aitmatov was a Kyrgyz author who wrote mainly in Russian, but also in Kyrgyz. He is one of the best known figures in Kyrgyzstan's literature.

Life

He was born to a Kyrgyz father and Tatar mother. Aitmatov's parents were civil servants in Sheker. In 1937, his father was charged with "bourgeois nationalism" in Moscow, arrested, and executed in 1938.
Aitmatov lived at a time when Kyrgyzstan was being transformed from one of the most remote lands of the Russian Empire to a republic of the USSR. The future author studied at a Soviet school in Sheker. He also worked from an early age. At fourteen, he was an assistant to the Secretary at the Village Soviet. He later held jobs as a tax collector, a loader, and an engineer's assistant and continued with many other types of work.
In 1946, he began studying at the Animal Husbandry Division of the Kirghiz Agricultural Institute in Frunze, but later switched to literary studies at the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow, where he lived from 1956 to 1958. For the next eight years he worked for Pravda. He joined the Soviet Communist Party in 1959, at the time of de-Stalinization, and later was a member of the Supreme Soviet. He endorsed the glasnost policies of Mikhail Gorbachev.
By 1990 he fulfilled a number of board and administrative positions including on the Supreme Soviet's Committee for Culture and National Languages and the Union of Soviet Writers.
He was a member of the jury at the 2nd Moscow International Film Festival, in 1961; at the 7th Moscow International Film Festival, in 1971; and in 2002 was president of the jury at the 24th Moscow International Film Festival. In 1994, he was a member of the jury at the 44th Berlin International Film Festival.
On 16 May 2008, Aitmatov was admitted with kidney failure to a hospital in Nuremberg, Germany, where he died of pneumonia on 10 June 2008 at the age of 79. Aitmatov's remains were flown to Kyrgyzstan, where there were numerous ceremonies before he was buried in the village Koy-Tash, Alamüdün District, Chüy Region, Kyrgyzstan, on the Ata-Beyit cemetery, which he had helped to found and where his father most likely is buried.
His obituary in The [New York Times] characterized him as "a Communist writer whose novels and plays before the collapse of the Soviet Union gave a voice to the people of the remote Soviet republic of Kyrgyz" and adds that he "later became a diplomat and a friend and adviser to the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev."

Literary career

Chinghiz Aitmatov belonged to the post-war generation of writers. His output before his well-known work Jamila in 1958 was not significant. Aitmatov's first two publications appeared in 1952 in Russian: "Газетчик Дзюйо" and "Ашым". His first work published in Kyrgyz was "Ак Жаан". Two other short novels from that period are "Трудная переправа" and "Лицом к лицу". But it was Jamila that came to prove the author's work. Seen through the eyes of an adolescent boy, it tells of how Jamila, a village girl, separated from her soldier husband by the war, falls in love with a disabled former soldier staying in their village as they all work to bring in and transport the grain crop.
1980 saw his novel The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years; his next significant novel, The Place of the Skull, was published in 1987. The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years and other writings were translated into several languages.
Aitmatov's art was glorified by admirers. But even critics of Aitmatov mentioned the high quality of his work. Aitmatov's writing has some elements that are unique specifically to his creative process. His work drew on folklore, not in the ancient sense of it; rather, he tried to recreate and synthesize oral tales in the context of contemporary life. This is prevalent in his work; in nearly every story he refers to a myth, a legend, or a folktale. In The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years, a poetic legend about a young captive turned into a "mankurt" serves as a tragic allegory and becomes a significant symbolic expression of the philosophy of the novel.
His work also touches on Kyrgyzstan’s transformation from the Russian empire to a republic of the USSR and the lives of its people during the transformation. This is prevalent in Farewell, Gyulsary! Although the short story touches on the idea of friendship and loyalty between a man and his stallion, it also serves a tragic allegory of the political and USSR government. It explores the loss and grief that many Kyrgyz faced through the protagonist character in the short story.
A second aspect of Aitmatov's writing is his ultimate closeness to our "little brothers" the animals, for their and our lives are intimately and inseparably connected. The two central characters of Farewell, Gyulsary! are a man and his stallion. A camel plays a prominent role in The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years; one of the key turns of the novel which decides the fate of the main character is narrated through the story of the camel's rut and riot. The Place of the Skull starts off and finishes with the story of a wolf pack and the great wolf-mother Akbara and her cub; human lives enter the narrative but interweave with the lives of the wolves.
In 1963, Aitmatov was honored with the Lenin Prize for the compilation "Повести гор и степей" which had been published earlier that same year containing the four novels "Джамиля", "Тополек мой в красной косынке", "Верблюжий глаз" and "Первый учитель". This collection in Russian should not be confused with the 1969 collection in English titled as well "Tales of the Mountains and Steppes" which is a different compilation containing the three novels Jamila, Duishen and Farewell, Gyulsary!. He was later awarded a State prize for Farewell, Gyulsary!.
Some of his stories were filmed, like The First Teacher in 1965, Jamila in 1969, and several times To Have and to Lose.
As with many educated Kyrgyz, Aitmatov was fluent in both Kyrgyz and Russian. As he explained in one of his interviews, Russian was as much of a native language for him as Kyrgyz. Most of his early works he wrote in Kyrgyz; some of these he later translated into Russian himself, while others were translated into Russian by other translators. From 1966, he was writing in Russian. By the mid-1990s, as his reputation in Kyrgyzstan was well established, Russian critics attacked him and his 1995 novel Tavro Kassandry --unfairly, according to literary critic Keneshbek Asanaliev, who commented that Aitmatov's Kyrgys detractors simply reprinted an attack piece by Russian critic V. Bondarenko. The latter also claimed that Aitmatov was anti-Russian, a claim that Asanaliev ridicules.

Diplomatic career

In addition to his literary work, Chinghiz Aitmatov was a diplomat who was accredited by 3 countries.
From 1990 to 1993, he was ambassador for the Soviet Union to Luxembourg, but at the collapse of the Union, he was re-accredited by Russia to Luxembourg. Then from 2000 to 2008, he was accredited by Kyrgyzstan to be its ambassador to the European Union, NATO, UNESCO and the Benelux countries, then France.

Awards

Soviet Union

Kyrgyzstan

Other countries

Major works in English translation

  • Jamila / Jamilia
  • * in compilation Tales of the Mountains and Steppes, Progress Publishers.
  • * Telegram Books.
  • To Have and to Lose. in compilation Short Novels, Progress Publishers.
  • Camel's Eye / Camel Eye
  • * in compilation Anthology of Soviet Short Stories, two volumes, compiled by Nikolai Atarov, Volume 2, pp. 54–86, Progress Publishers.
  • * in compilation Mother Earth and Other Stories, Faber.
  • Duishen / The First Teacher
  • * in compilation Short Novels, Progress Publishers.
  • * in compilation Mother Earth and Other Stories, Faber.
  • Mother Earth
  • * in compilation Short Novels, Progress Publishers.
  • * in compilation Mother Earth and Other Stories, Faber.
  • Farewell, Gyulsary! / Farewell, Gulsary!
  • * in compilation Tales of the Mountains and Steppes, Progress Publishers.
  • * Hodder & Stoughton Ltd.
  • The White Steamship / The White Ship
  • * Hodder & Stoughton.
  • * Crown Publishing Group.
  • The Lament of a Migrating Bird. Felixstowe Premier Press
  • The Ascent of Mt. Fuji. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
  • Cranes Fly Early. Raduga Publishers.
  • Piebald Dog Running Along the Shore / Spotted Dog Running Along the Seashore
  • * in compilation Piebald Dog Running Along the Shore and Other Stories, Raduga Publishers.
  • * in compilation Mother Earth and Other Stories, Faber.
  • The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years. Indiana University Press.
  • The Place of the Skull. Grove Press.
  • . Library of Russian and Soviet Literary Journalism, Progress Publishers.
  • The White Cloud of Genghis Khan. Independently Published.
  • The Plaint Of The Hunter Above The Abyss. Atamura Corporation, Almaty, Kazakhstan.