Rewriting the Nation in Modern Kazakh Literature

Elites and Narratives

Diana T. Kudaibergenova

*Shortlisted for the 2018 Book Award in Social Sciences of the Central Eurasian Studies Society*

Rewriting the Nation in Modern Kazakh Literature is a book about cultural transformations and trajectories of national imagination in modern Kazakhstan. The book is a much-needed critical introduction and a comprehensive survey of the Kazakh literary production and cultural discourses on the nation in the twentieth and twenty first centuries. In the absence of viable and open forums for discussion and in the turbulent moments of postcolonial and cultural transformation under the Soviets, the Kazakh writers and intellectuals widely engaged with the national identity, heritage and genealogy construction in literature. This active process of national canon construction and its constant re-writing throughout the twentieth century will inform the readers of the complex processes of cultural transformations in forms, genres and texts as well as demonstrating the genealogical development of the national narrative. The main focus of this book is on the cultural production of the nation. The focus is on the narratives of historical continuities produced in the literature and cultural discontinuities and inter-elite competition which inform such production.

The development of Kazakh literary production is an extremely interesting yet underrepresented field of study. Since the late nineteenth century it saw a rapid transformation from the traditional oral to print literature. This brought an unprecedented shift in genres and texts production as well as a rapid growth of the ‘writing’ class – urban colonial and first generations of Soviet intelligentsia. Kazakh literary production became the flagman of republic’s rapid cultural modernization and prior to the World War II local publishing industry produced up to 6 million print copies a year. By the 1960s and 1970s – the golden era of Kazakh literature, the most read literary journal Juldyz sold 50,000 copies all over the country. Literature became the mass provider of knowledge about the past, the present and of the future of the country. Because “Kazakh readers were hungry to find out about their pre-Soviet past and its national glory” national writers competed in genres, styles and ways to write out the nation in prose, poems, essays and historical novels.

Lexington Books

Pages: 298 • Trim: 6¼ x 9⅜

978-1-4985-2829-0 • Hardback • February 2017 • $123.00 • (£95.00)

978-1-4985-2831-3 • Paperback • September 2019 • $50.99 • (£39.00)

978-1-4985-2830-6 • eBook • February 2017 • $48.00 • (£37.00)

Series: Contemporary Central Asia: Societies, Politics, and Cultures

Subjects: History / Asia / Central Asia, Literary Criticism / Modern / 20th Century, Literary Criticism / Modern / 21st Century, Social Science / World / Asia, Social Science / Culture

Rewriting the Nation in Modern Kazakh Literature

Elites and Narratives

Hardback

Paperback

eBook

Summary

*Shortlisted for the 2018 Book Award in Social Sciences of the Central Eurasian Studies Society*

Rewriting the Nation in Modern Kazakh Literature is a book about cultural transformations and trajectories of national imagination in modern Kazakhstan. The book is a much-needed critical introduction and a comprehensive survey of the Kazakh literary production and cultural discourses on the nation in the twentieth and twenty first centuries. In the absence of viable and open forums for discussion and in the turbulent moments of postcolonial and cultural transformation under the Soviets, the Kazakh writers and intellectuals widely engaged with the national identity, heritage and genealogy construction in literature. This active process of national canon construction and its constant re-writing throughout the twentieth century will inform the readers of the complex processes of cultural transformations in forms, genres and texts as well as demonstrating the genealogical development of the national narrative. The main focus of this book is on the cultural production of the nation. The focus is on the narratives of historical continuities produced in the literature and cultural discontinuities and inter-elite competition which inform such production.

The development of Kazakh literary production is an extremely interesting yet underrepresented field of study. Since the late nineteenth century it saw a rapid transformation from the traditional oral to print literature. This brought an unprecedented shift in genres and texts production as well as a rapid growth of the ‘writing’ class – urban colonial and first generations of Soviet intelligentsia. Kazakh literary production became the flagman of republic’s rapid cultural modernization and prior to the World War II local publishing industry produced up to 6 million print copies a year. By the 1960s and 1970s – the golden era of Kazakh literature, the most read literary journal Juldyz sold 50,000 copies all over the country. Literature became the mass provider of knowledge about the past, the present and of the future of the country. Because “Kazakh readers were hungry to find out about their pre-Soviet past and its national glory” national writers competed in genres, styles and ways to write out the nation in prose, poems, essays and historical novels.

Details

Lexington Books

Pages: 298 • Trim: 6¼ x 9⅜

978-1-4985-2829-0 • Hardback • February 2017 • $123.00 • (£95.00)

978-1-4985-2831-3 • Paperback • September 2019 • $50.99 • (£39.00)

978-1-4985-2830-6 • eBook • February 2017 • $48.00 • (£37.00)

Series: Contemporary Central Asia: Societies, Politics, and Cultures

Subjects: History / Asia / Central Asia, Literary Criticism / Modern / 20th Century, Literary Criticism / Modern / 21st Century, Social Science / World / Asia, Social Science / Culture

Author

Diana T. Kudaibergenova is research fellow in the Centre of Development Studies at the University of Cambridge and postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Sociology of Law at Lund University.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: National Survival, Alash, and Modern Kazakh Literary Debates
Chapter 2: Self-Orientalization and Re-writing the Narrative
Chapter 3: The Formation of Soviet-Kazakh Literature Canons
Chapter 4: Mukhtar Auezov’s Abai Zholy and the Encyclopedia of the Kazakh Nation
Chapter 5: Nomads/Koshpendiler and the Re-Discovery of the Past: Canonizing Nomadism
Chapter 6: Mukhtar Magauin’s Cultural Archaeology in Soviet and post-Soviet Kazakhstan’s National History and Literature
Chapter 7: Internationalism, Postcolonialism and Kazakh Soviet Literature in the 1960s and 1980s: Anuar Alimzhanov, Satimzhan Sanbayev, and Murat Auezov
Chapter 8: Olzhas Suleimenov and the Un-Bounded Imagination of the Past
Chapter 9: December 1986 and the National Imagination in the Post-Independent Era
Chapter 10: Timeless and Post-National: Gerold Belger’s narration on Kazakhstan

Reviews

. . . this ambitious interdisciplinary study, which also has the virtues of being methodologically rigorous and ideologically unbiased, enriches the debate on the Kazakh nation with an argument strongly grounded in the interpretation of texts. Kudaibergenova’s book represents a clear and concise work that contributes to debates on nation-building in the post-Soviet context and discussions on Soviet totalitarianism, imperialism and postcolonialism. In this regard, it prepares the field for further research on the other republics of the former Soviet Union or other postcolonial contexts.
— Europe-Asia Studies

Kudaibergenova’s project is highly ambitious and covers an impressive breadth of literary history . . . This book accomplishes its primary aim, which is to provide a welcome and needed view into the lives and worlds of twentieth-century writers in Kazakhstan, and will be helpful for scholars of (post-)Soviet literature and nationalisms alike.
— Central Asian Survey

As Kazakhstan undergoes a Kazakh literature revival nearly 30 years after its independence in 1991, the book is a timely and valuable way for readers to become more familiar with the dynamism of the Kazakh cultural landscape over the past 100 years.
— AramCo World

Diana T. Kudaibergenova has written an important book that introduces modern Kazakh literature and issues of Kazakh identity to English-language audiences. She accomplishes this through a careful analysis of selected major works of Kazakh belles lettres. Her study provides a cogent analysis of the relation of works of successive generations of writers to one another and to the political context in which they worked. Readers of this book will be rewarded with an understanding of how Kazakh literati have conceived of and portrayed the history of the Kazakh people and its relevance to the eras in which they wrote. Dr. Kudaibergenova leads the reader up to the present and illustrates the complexity of Kazakhs’ and Kazakhstan’s identity in the post-Soviet era.
— William Fierman, Indiana University Bloomington

Impressively applying methods of cultural semiotics and the sociology of culture, Diana T. Kudaibergenova approaches the ideologies that have been accompanying the complex transformations of Kazakh national identity in a non-ideological manner, combining intimate familiarity with her subject with an objective perspective throughout. This renders her monograph a groundbreaking contribution to the study of modern Kazakh society, particularly regarding the ways in which literary texts shaped national discourses during the Soviet and post-Soviet periods.
— Peter Rollberg, George Washington University

Rewriting the Nation in Modern Kazakh Literature offers a rare glimpse into the world of the ‘writers of the nation’ who, in pursuit of their elitist projects, shaped ‘total readership’ in Soviet Kazakhstan and inscribed the ideals of indigenous history and nationhood. While focused on research and mythology involved in these Soviet projects, it speaks volumes to broader issues and provides important insights to academic debates on totalitarianism, post-colonialism, and national imagination.
— Saulesh Yessenova, University of Calgary

Rewriting the Nation in Modern Kazakh Literature

Elites and Narratives

Diana T. Kudaibergenova

Rewriting the Nation in Modern Kazakh Literature

Elites and Narratives

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