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Chingiz Aitmatov - The Man Who Changed The Things
by Elena Knapp, PDS Assistant
Chingiz Aitmatov, 79, the famous Kyrgyz author and former diplomat, died in a clinic in Nuremberg, Germany, on June 10th, 2008. Chingiz Torekulovich Aitmatov, the most known of non-Russian writers of the Soviet period, courageously tested the limits of censorship in the Soviet Union and advocated the preserving of the religion, cultures, traditions, and languages of non-Russians in the FSU.
Chingiz Torekulovich was born in 1928 in Kyrgyzstan, a small and beautiful mountainous country in Central Asia, to a bilingual Kyrgyz-Tatar family. It was a period of a painful transformation of a remote area of the Russian Empire in Central Asia into a Soviet republic. His parents were true products of the Soviet system. Aitmatov's mother joined the Young Communists League and was an active member of the total illiteracy liquidation movement and fought for women's right against old Islamic tradition and rules. His father, one of the first Kyrgyz Communist leaders, was charged with "bourgeois nationalism" and was executed in a political prisoners' camp in 1937, the opening year of the bloody and severe repressive epoch of Stalin. Aitmatov found his father's grave only in early 1990s.
Chingiz Aitmatov represented the post WWII generation of writers. After graduating from Maxim Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow he worked as a newspaper editor and correspondent. His literary fame came in 1958 with the publication of the classical love triangle story Jamilia. Louis Aragon called it "the world's most beautiful love story".
Probably, the best known to the Western readers is Aitmatov's novel The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years published in 1980. A story of one day in the very hard life of simple people under the soviet system and the conflict of a unique ancient culture and deeply rooted traditions with the efforts of the communist regime to generalize a homogeneous "soviet person." Among with others works it gave a great momentum to the talk about national identity and sovereignty.
His other significant novel The Place of the Skull (The Scaffold) published in 1986 was considered a triumph of glasnost. I personally remember that time as one of a total feeling of hope and winds of changes blowing all over the Soviet Union. Aitmatov's books and activities proved to us that a single man could change things. His name was a symbol of courage for many.
Chingiz Aitmatov became one of the leaders of the perestroika movement and was elected to the Parliament. He became a cultural adviser to Mikhail Gorbachev and entered the diplomatic field as first the Soviet and then the Russian ambassador to Belgium. After the break of the USSR and following independence of Kyrgyzstan Aitmatov also served as Kyrgyzstan's ambassador to Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg and France, UNESCO, the European Union, and NATO. Political work left little space for literature. His last award-winning novel When Mountains Fall (The Eternal Bride) was published in 1994. Up until his last days Aitmatov was a member of the international editorial board of Foreign Literature Journal in Moscow, which has been a navigator of the world culture for generations of Russian and FSU intellectuals. His final deadly illness attacked while he was working on a film in Russia.
Aitmatov's works were translated into more than 170 languages and according to UNESCO he was among the most read contemporary authors. Besides Soviet-era awards Aitmatov received among others the Gold Olive Branch of the Mediterranean Culture Research Center, the Academy Award of the Japanese Institute of Oriental Philosophy, and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature. During the recent meeting of TÜRKSOY that took place last May in Ankara a suggestion was made to nominate Aitmatov for the Nobel Prize in Literature. TÜRKSOY is an international organization of Turkic-speaking countries and regions, including Turkey, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, northern Cyprus, Altai, Bashkortostan, Tatarstan, Sakha, Khakassia, Tuva and Gagauzie.
Chingiz Torekulovich Aitmatov is buried in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, next to his father at Ata-Beyit (Father's Graveyard), the memorial cemetery to the victims of Stalinism that he helped to found.
Below please find a list of books related to Chingiz Aitmatov. For your convenience, this list is also available in a MS Excel spreadsheet. click here.
DAY LASTS MORE THAN A HUNDRED YEARS
• EDITOR: TR: FRENCH, JOHN
• PUBLISHER: INDIANA UNIV PRESS
• $19.95 PAPER (352)
• ISBN-13: 9780253204820
• B&T YBP
JAMILIA
• EDITOR: TR: RIORDAN, JAMES
• PUBLISHER: TELEGRAM BOOKS
• $11.95 PAPER (196)
• ISBN-13: 9781846590320
• B&T YBP
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