Last Respects

Read the obituary at Global Voices Online.

Chingiz Aitmatov {Чыңгыз Айтматов} passed away this week in Nuremberg, Germany. On May 16th, Aitmatov suffered kidney failure. His health steadily declined, and he was reportedly in a coma before he passed on June 10th. His funeral was held yesterday, June 14th, in Bishkek. Thousands came to view the writer lying in state, and state representatives from Russia, Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan were in attendance. He is buried near his father’s grave in Ata-Beyit cemetery, 12.5 miles south of the capital. He is survived by his wife, children, and numerous relations.

Aitmatov wrote literature in both Russian and Kyrgyz, and he was far away the most well known figure of Kyrgyz literature, not counting the fictional hero Manas of the eponymous epic. Born a nomad in December 12th, 1928 in Kyrgyzstan, his family led the wandering life of the majority of Kyrgyz for most of his childhood. With the changes in the country and the Communist practices sweeping into Central Asia, his father was executed in 1937 for “bourgeois nationalism,” one of the backlash movements from Moscow to keep the various Moscow-endowed nationalities in check. He is best known in the west for his first novel, The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years (1980). Along with his later novels, it was translated into several languages, an astonishing feat for a Central Asian writer, especially one that used to write for Pravda. In addition to his literary work, Chinghiz Aitmatov was the Kyrgyzstan ambassador to the EU, NATO, UNESCO, and the Benelux countries. His son is a former foreign minister of Kyrgyzstan, Askar Aitmatov.

Both his writing and artwork were admired while he was alive, and Aitmatov received many awards from the State and various institutions. He was respected as a man who had seen nearly every niche available in life in Soviet Kyrgyzstan. Born a nomad, the son of civil servants, he would find work as an assistant to his Village’s Secretary of the Soviet, as a tax collector, a loader, an engineer’s assistant, a writer, an editor, an artist, and a journalist. His first educational efforts were pointed towards animal husbandry at the Kirghiz Agricultural Institute in Frunze [Soviet-era Biskhek] before turning to literary pursuits at the prestigious Maxim Gorkiy Literature Institute in Moscow, where he lived from 1956 to 1958. Following that he worked for Pravda, until his literary career had gained enough support to allow him to concentrate solely on his writing.

His works are monumental, and worth reading by anyone. He is not an academic writer, but his works teach more effectively about the life and traditions of the Central Asian people in the last century than any single ethnographic text. The human element makes his books so approachable that even your mother in Chicago would appreciate them, and I can’t recommend them enough.

This is a sad week for Kyrgyzstan.

This post was written by...

Michael Hancock-Parmer – author of 158 posts on Registan.net.

Michael earned an MA in Central Eurasian Studies in 2011 and remains a student at Indiana University pursuing a dual PhD in Russian History and Central Eurasian Studies. He served 6 months in the Peace Corps in Uzbekistan in 2005. After the events in Andijan and the subsequent closure of the program, he served 2 years in southern Kazakhstan, returning to the Midwest in 2007. His general area of interest is on post-Timur Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, centered on the Syr Darya river valley.

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