Contemporary Kazakh literature

Kazakh Language history

Kazakh, also known as Qazaq and by various other names, is a language that is Turkic and is related closely to Karakalpak and Nogaj. Kazakh language is agglutinative language. It uses vowel harmony. The speakers of this language are spread over a large territory from the Ural Mountains to Tian Shan Mountains. The Kazakh language is Kazakhstan’s official language where nearly 10 million individuals speak the language. Over a million Kazakh speakers live in the autonomous region of Xinjiang Uyghur of China. According to the Russian Census of 2002, Russia has over 560,000 speakers of Kazakh. Sizeable portions of Kazakh speakers also live in Mongolia, in Uzbekistan, in parts of the earlier Soviet Union, a few parts of Central Asia, in Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan. Some speakers can also be found in Germany, where they immigrated during the 70s from Turkey.

History of Kazakh

In Kazakhstan, the two official languages are Kazakh and Russian. Kazakh belongs to the northestern Turkic language subgroup of Nogai-Kipchak group. The language is influenced heavily by Mongol as well as by Tatar. The Kazakh language was written first during the 1860s with the Arabic script. The Latin script had been introduced later in 1929. Stalin decided in 1940 to unify the Central Asian written materials with the materials of Slavic rulers through a modified Cyrillic form. In the year 1992, an alphabet based on Latin was once again discussed but was not considered any further because of the high costs involved in the process.

Kazakh language became the state language first during the Soviet period. At the time, few Russians gave thought to the idea that they would require Kazakh to retain employment or to serve in armed forces or have children enter a university. Less than 5% of the Russians at the time spoke Kazakh. However, most Kazakhs were able to speak Russian at the time. Because of the separation between Kazakhstan and Russia after independence, the Russian nationalist objections and sentiment to discrimination between the official languages have increased, mainly in the north since Russians have increasingly felt the threat that Kazakh may become the only legal language of the state. In the meantime, the Kazakhs have defended the superiority of Kazakh language strongly. However, even the natives are far from being uniform in the language. As per a few estimates, around 40% of the local Kazakhs are not fluent in the Kazakh language. For business and other dealings, Russian is the standard language to be used.

Even people who are quite fluent with the language find it very difficult to work with in certain areas such as business, science and administrative settings since it has largely remained a kitchen language during Soviet times. It has never developed to become a technical, modern vocabulary. There has also not been any widespread translation of popular or technical literature in the Kazakh language. Therefore, Russian remains the main world language for most natives. President Nazarbayev also defended the idea of making the Kazakh language the only official language stating that after several years of Russification, the survival of Kazakh was endangered. The practical nature of Russian language can also be seen in schools. Although efforts have been made to increase the number of schools teaching Kazakh as the primary instruction language, Russian continued to dominate during the mid 90s. In the year 1990, almost double the number of schools taught in the Russian language than Kazakh. Though institutions of high learning today show a stronger bias towards Kazakh students, the Russian language still remains the main instruction mode for most subjects.

In Kazakhstan, the problem of languages is the most contentious and politicized. The unpredictability of the language problem has also been increased by the controversial proposals of Russia, starting in 1993. One of the proposals was that the Russians living in Kazakhstan should be given dual citizenship. Though the policy was rejected by Nazarbayev, the controversy of language propelled him to postpone the deadlines for implementing laws that make Kazakh the only official language. Therefore, it is not likely that all adult non-Kazakhs would have to learn the Kazakh language. However, because of the demographic trends, it is possible that the coming generation may have to learn the language. The prospect generates much discomfort in the population that does not speak the language. The constitution of 1995 doesn’t provide the Russians dual citizenship. However, it also alleviates the concerns of Russians by declaring Russian to be the official language. This status means that the Russian language will continue to be used as the main communication language for several ethnic Kazakhs and it would also be acceptable for the schools as well as the official documents to use it.

Writing system

Kazakh today is written using the Cyrillic alphabet in Mongolia as well as Kazakhstan. In china, over a million speakers of the language use a script derived from Arabic that is similar to the one that is used for writing Uyghur. The oldest remaining written records for the language that was related closely to Kazakh had been written in Orkhon script. Even though it is not really believed that these varieties were the direct predecessors of the language. Modern Kazakh language has been historically written with various versions of Arabic, Cyrillic and Latin scripts. In the year 2006, Kazakhstan’s president Nursultan Nazarbayev raised the topic of the use of Latin alphabet officially for Kazakh script instead of Cyrillic alphabet.

The Kazakh language has a vowel harmony where some of the words of foreign origin, especially Arabic and Russian are exceptions. The language also has a system similar to Kyrgyz of rounding harmony. However, this system is not as strongly applied and is also not reflected in orthography. The Kazakh language can express various combinations of mood, aspect and tense with the use of different verbal morphology and even through an auxiliary verb system. Several of these can be considered as light verbs. To provide an example, in Kazakh, the present tens has different information based on whether the basic tense morphology is used or if one of the verbs is used in the sentence.

Kazakh literature, the body of literature, both oral and written, produced in the Kazakh language by theKazakh people of Central Asia.

The Kazakh professional bard once preserved a large repertoire of centuries-old poetry. In the mid-19th century, for example, a bard might recite a number of works attributed to such 16th- and 17th-century bards as Er Shoban and even to such 15th-century bards as Shalkiz and Asan Qayghı. These works have no independent documentation, but they differ significantly in style from the poetry of the 19th century and therefore may include some features of early Kazakh poetry. In addition, some of the bards of earlier centuries—such as Dosmombet Zhıraw, who is reputed to have visited Constantinople (Istanbul) in the 16th century—were apparently literate. When Kazakh poetry began to be written down in the second half of the 19th century, these works—which included didactic terme s, elegiac tolgaw s, andepic zhır s—were rarely anonymous but instead were closely identified with the bards of the recent or more distant past who had composed them, although the circumstances of their creation remain obscure. Among the classic Kazakh epics known from the 19th century are Er Targhın and Alpamıs.

By the 17th century, if not before, there had emerged two types of professional bards: the zhıraw and the aqın. These were primarily—though not exclusively—male professions. The zhıraw performed both the epic zhır and the didactic tolgaw and terme. Prior to the later 18th century, when Kazakhs began to lose their political autonomy, zhıraw s were sometimes advisers to sultans and khans, which granted them high social status. The aqın was an oral poet who competed with other aqın s, usually of different clans, at weddings or other celebrations; these competitions centred on improvised songs (also called terme s). While the zhır was the province of the zhıraw, the improvised song had stylistic variants that could be performed by either professional. Songs that praised a host, poetry, or a musical instrument, for example, were performed by both zhıraw s and aqın s.

Among the earliest Kazakh bards whose historical existence has been established is Buqar Zhıraw, an adviser to Ablay Khan, an 18th-century ruler of the Middle Horde. Other bards of the 18th and early 19th centuries are Shal Qulekeuwlı and Kötesh Rayımbekuwlı. During the 19th century several powerful bards, including Makhambet Istemisov and Shortanbay Qanauwlï, chose as their theme the diminution of the Kazakh way of life under increasing Russian pressure. Among the western Kazakhs of the Little Horde, this oral literary development reached its culmination in the second half of the 19th century and in the early 20th century in the works of Bazar Zhıraw, who combined the didacticism of the zhıraw with the quick wit of the improvising aqın. Bazar’s poetry frequently treats such issues as the types of behaviour that are appropriate to different stages of life; the responsibilities of different social classes; the opposition of heroism and cowardice, of contentment and greed, and of wisely employed speech and idle boasting; the consequences of success and failure; and the nature of literary language, a perennial Kazakh theme. Bazar’s long-lived contemporary Zhambul Zhalayev—who died in 1945, nearly a century after his birth—brought the oral aqın style into the Soviet era.

Kazakh oral poetry of the 19th century displays breadth and diversity unmatched by any other Turkicoral literature. The Kazakh literary concept of humanity is founded upon a complex interdependency of the natural and the human realms that is expressed through numerous metaphors dealing with animal life and the forces of nature. A didactic element is important in these works, but its basis is essentially human; religious models may appear, but they are one model among others and do not claim the absolute priority that they do in the literatures of other Muslim Turkic peoples.

In the middle of the 19th century, by which time the Russian conquest of Kazakhstan had largely been completed, two new factors began to influence Kazakh literature: members of the tribal aristocracy began to collect Kazakh folklore and oral literature, and, under the influence of the West, the first Kazakh written literature began to emerge. Chokan Valikanov, Ibray Altınsarın, and Abay Qunanbaev (Abay Ibrahim Kunanbay-ulï)—all of whom were writing during the mid- and late 19th century—mark the beginning of a new and essentially modern self-consciousness among the Kazakh intelligentsia. Valikanov was the first Kazakh to receive a full Russian education, and he was befriended by the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky. A descendant of high-ranking Kazakh nobility, Valikanov also intensively researched Kazakh antiquities and opposed the penetration of Kazakhstan by orthodox Islam via the Russian Tatars. The poetry of Abay marks the beginning of modern Kazakh literature. Abay was an aristocrat rather than a professional poet, and he learned Russian, Chagatai, and Persian. Early in his life he rejected Islamic civilization as a model for the Kazakhs; he instead urged them to blend their native literary traditions with Russian culture. In his poetic work, he combined Kazakh aqın versewith Russian models, especially the poetry of Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov. He translated Pushkin’s poetry into Kazakh and integrated some of these translations into a musical performance style called enshi, which was more lyrical than that of the aqın or the zhıraw. Abay thus set Kazakh poetry in a new direction that proved very influential during the 20th century.

After 1905, restrictions that had earlier been imposed by Russia on the publication of works in the Kazakh language were eased. Kazakh-language newspapers such as Ayqap, Alash, and Qazaq, each with a different cultural and political orientation, soon emerged. The generation of Kazakh writers active at that time, including Omar Qarashuwlï and Ahmed Bay Tursunov (Aqmet Baytūrsyn-ulï), were chiefly engaged in pedagogic and political activities. The poet Turmaghanbet Iztileyov was executed by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in 1939 for his translations of Persian classical literature into Kazakh.

The outstanding figure of Kazakh literature during the Soviet era was Mukhtar Auez-ulï (Auezov). A graduate of universities in Russia and Uzbekistan, he became a successful scholar, publishing editions of Kazakh epic texts. He began writing fiction while still a student. By the 1920s he had begun to study Abay, who had been a major cultural influence on his own family. This study led to the historical novel Abaĭ (1945–47; Eng. trans. Abai). Epic in scope, it depicts the social environment from which Abay emerged. It is both a moving narrative and a unique document of Kazakh life during the period of the Russian conquest and thereafter, when the Kazakh people were faced with fundamental economic and cultural choices for which their traditional culture had not prepared them.

Contemporary Kazakh literature

In the first decade of the twentieth century a whole pleiade of political thinkers and scholars formed in the milieu of the Kazakh intelligentsia. Well educated, they had played an active part in the stormy events of political life and they left a valuable literary heritage. Figures such as Shakerim Kudaiberdiev (1858-1931), Alikhan Bokeikhanov (1870-1937), Akhmet Baitursynov (1873-1938), Mirzakysh Jumbaev (1893-1938) and others collectively laid the foundations for the new Kazakh literature. Behind each of these names is an interesting creative life, affected by the revolutionary upheavals in Russia and the Kazakh intelligentsia's aspiration towards political independence for Kazakhstan. However, nearly all these lives were cut short because of accusations of nationalism and because of political repression, and they were expunged from the records by censorship until the end of the 1980s.

The literary figures Seifullin, Jansugurov and Mailin also perished as a result of political repression, but were rehabilitated post-humously in the 1950s and came to be acknowledged by Soviet literary critics as founders of Kazakh Soviet literature.

The author of some beautiful lyric poems, Saken Seifullin (1894-1938), would sincerely welcome the new way of life, guiding the hero of his poem Kokshetai away from images of his poem Kokshetai away from images of folk legend and past events towards new realities, and dedicating the songs 'Path to Happiness' and 'Red Falcons' to the new order. His historical documentary novel 'A Difficult Path, a Hard Transition' was also dedicated to revolutionary events happening in Kazakhstan. Another outstanding poet, Ilias Jansugurov (1894-1938), painted colourful pictures of folk life, using the imagery of ancient poets in his The Steppe, Kyushi, and Kulager. He would describe the transformation of the traditional landscape as it was forced to suit the demands of the new epoch. The talented writer Beimbet Mailin (1894-1938) created a vivid portrait of a poor peasant called Myrkymbai who agitated for the transformation of a Kazakh aul into a Kolkhoz. In the short story Raushan, the Communist he depicted the fate of a woman deprived of rights in the old days who with the advent of Soviet power becomes a worker for the new life in the aul.

Reading the works of such wordsmiths as Seifullin, Jansugurov and Mailin one does not have the impression that they are creating deliberate propaganda for Communist ideals, rather their works convey a sense of beauty and a feeling of joyous illumination, such as experienced by converts to a new faith. Their fate is all the more tragic because of this. All three were declared 'enemies of the people' and punished in the name of the same Soviet power which they had celebrated.

Of works about the war the best known are Moscow For Us by the writer/soldier B. Momyshuly, Notes from the Front by M. Gabdullin, and the war novels The Soldier from Kazakhstan by G. Musrepov, and The Long Awaited Day by A. Nurpeisov.

A major event in the history of Kazakh literature was the publication of the first Kazakh novel-epic Abai (1947), and Abai's Path (1956) by Mukhtar Auezov (1897-1961). One of the few survivors of the pleiade of the creative Kazakh intelligentsia of the '20s and '30s, the author's intention was to give the nation back its historical memory, successively destroyed by Soviet power, by recalling the nomads' high spiritual ideals and their expression. Auezov carefully modelled Abai's image, drawing on the rich possibilities of the Kazakh language and the traditions of epic narrative and folklore, and saturating the narrative with the names of story-tellers, poets, musicians, philosophers, scholars, historians and political activists from many nations. The novel about Abai soon tame to be known as 'an encyclopedia of Kazakh life'. Its high artistic standard and synthesis of Kazakh narrative traditions with the experience of world-wide writers gained him international acknowledgement. The novel won the highest state prizes of the Soviet Union and was translated into thirty languages.

Beginning in the 1960s (the time of the Khrushchev 'thaw' in the Soviet Union) Kazakh literature and the humanitarian sciences began to be concerned with reviving national history. Ну the '70s this interest in history became more conceptual than factual. Historical events, lavishly interpolated into literary works in the preceding decade, were considered in a wide human context, and the theme of contemporary life is set in relation to the past. The novel trilogy Blood and Sweat by A. Nurpeisov, The Nomads a series of historical novels by I. Esenberlin, Spring Waters by M. Magauin, and works by the commentator A. Alimjanov were the most famous prose works of this time. In poetry, works by M. Makataev, T. Moldagaliev, K. Myrzaliev and others were popular.

A new milestone in the development of Kazakh literature in the '70s was the work I in Russian - of Oljas Suleimenov (b. 1936). His crafted prose, in the composition Az and Ya, becomes a form of historical-linguistic enquiry, free of ideological prejudice and cliche, into the ancient sources of Turkic culture. With huge erudition and easy mastery of his historical material, Suleimenov was able to weave a thread linking Kazakh literature with older Turkic and pre-Turkic imagery, based on analysis of the monumental Russian twelfth century work The Tale of Igor's Campaign and the ancient Sumerian epic Gilgamesh.

Suleimenov's poem 'The Book of Clay' revolves around cultural researches into the depths of world history. It produced a huge response in Soviet literature, inspiring a new generation of the intelligentsia in their search for a spiritual dimension.

Of most recent literary works, Suleimenov's artistic exploration 'The Language of the Letter' (1998), dedicated to the problems of defining the origin of literature and language, and Nurpeisov's newel Last Duty (2000) about the extinction of the Aral Sea and people's tragedies at the start of the new millennium, are especially of note.

Kazakh (Қазақ тілі / Qazaq tili / قازاق ٴتىلى)

Kazakh or Qazaq is a Turkic language spoken in Kazakhstan, Russia and China by about 11 million people. There are also Kazakh speakers in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Russia and Iran.

Kazakh at a glance

· Native name: Qazaqşa, Қазақша [qɑˈzɑqʃɑ] / Қазақ тілі, Qazaq tili,قازاق ٴتىلى‎ [qɑˈzɑq tɘˈlɘ]

· Linguistic affliation: Turkic, Kipchak, Kipchak-Nogay

· Number of speakers: c. 11 million

· Spoken in: Kazakhstan, China, Mongolia, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Russia, Iran

· First written: 19th century

· Writing system: Arabic, Cyrillic and Latin alphabets

· Status: official language in Kazakhstan, and in the Altai Republic in Russia

Kazakh was first written with the Arabic script during the 19th century when a number of poets, educated in Islamic schools, incited revolt against Russia. Russia's response was to set up secular schools and devise a way of writing Kazakh with the Cyrillic alphabet, which was not widely accepted. By 1917, the Arabic script was reintroduced, even in schools and local government.

In 1927, Kazakh nationalist movement sprang up but was soon suppressed. At the same time the Arabic script was banned and the Latin alphabet was imposed for writing Kazakh. The Latin alphabet was in turn replaced by the Cyrillic alphabet in 1940.

Recently as part of a modernization program the government of Kazakhstan has stated plans to replace the Cyrillic alphabet with the Latin alphabet. Currently the costs and consequences of such a move are being investigated.

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