Paper long abstract:

Ethnic Words and Soviet Things: Coming to Terms with Soviet Civilization in Esenberlin's Kōşpendiler. My paper focuses on Kōşpendiler, a trilogy written by Iliyas Esenberlin in the 1960s and 1970s, and the relationship of this text to classificatory practices in the imperial and Soviet eras. It explores Esenberlin's understanding of the taxonomies that had classified his heritage and his imagination of the erudition that had marked and recorded it in uncertain, overlapping classifications. My analysis centers on the conclusion of the work, a part of the novel Esenberlin wrote with more than a century of dictionaries, encyclopedias, and taxonomies on his mind. Its culmination is replete with references to sprawling compendia and to individuals studied in the categorization of existing and historical things. This concluding section begins in a "room filled with books." It takes place in the headquarters of Russian Governor-General Vasilii Perovskii and among the paper instruments at his disposal for enumerating landscapes and peoples (the character was based on the real-life imperial officer who presided over the Orenburg region from 1833-1842, the same period in which Kōşpendiler's concluding section begins). "There is a large map of the Orenburg region on the wall" of the office in addition to "the thick leather covered volumes on the shelves and tables in the corners." There are also cabinets in his office filled with documents on the flora, fauna, and topographies of the vast steppe areas that sprawled out to the south and east of this administrative district.

There was nothing fortuitous about this setting or the books and maps with which Esenberlin surrounds the Russian governor-general in the novel. The conclusion was his effort to understand the erudition that had accumulated in the offices of men like Perovskii in the imperial era. It was his attempt to come to terms with this inheritance of paper and with the sediment of words and taxonomies in the steppe across which the Kazakh SSR sprawled. We know a great deal about imperial and Soviet efforts to classify Central Asian peoples and traditions. We know less about the indigenous imagination of these practices - the meaning of these classifications to those categorized by them or the ways in which indigenous artists perceived the tangled history of discarded and altered taxonomies that in some sense shaped Soviet civilization. Esenberlin struggled to make sense of this patrimony in Kōşpendiler.

Paper long abstract:

The Kazakh repatriation from China in the soviet times has been one of the most understudied and poorly reflected in the literature topics. The problems in understanding the situation of ethnic Kazakhs in modernizing and globalizing China and search of the ways to handle their repartition to the historical homeland stem for many reasons from a growing gap between the official discourses on the divided Kazakh world, the type of disseminated information on the Kazakh ethno-political history via mass media and educational institutions, corrupted collective memory that ignores many problematic spots, and intentional silenced voices on the nature of their problems inside China. Qabdesh Zhumadilov is one few writers who dared to raise the Kazakhs' fate in China in the turbulent Maoist era in series of his novels. His works proved to be a breakthrough in the wall of silence erected by the soviet and Maoist regimes on the topics of the fate of Kazakhs that were subjected to the painful processes of socialist modernizations. Works on Zhumagulov were warmly accepted by the generation of the Kazakhs soviet writers who witnessed the negative effects of the totalitarian regime on the lives of soviet people. The general public positively reacted to the return of their co-ethnics, as divided families kept memories and cared of their lost relatives. But as time passed by, memories of the repatriation faded away as new generations of general public and intellectuals concentrated on other topics, mostly raised by the conflicting processes of state and nation building. Present day ethnic repatriation, especially from China, has been not handled in due way, as many aspects of the earlier state-controlled repatriation waves were not studies and brought to the public attention.

The paper would study the differences in the state and literary discourses on the Kazakh repatriation from China in soviet times and its effects on the public awareness in post-soviet Kazakhstan. The sources for paper are archival materials, official documents, accounts of repatriates of 1960s, scholarly research materials, interviews with Qabdesh Zhumadilov and his literary works. Theoretical -methodological basis comes from post-colonial concepts.

Paper long abstract:

Near the end of the first volume of Mukhtar Auezov's novel Abai Zholy (The Path of Abai), the Tsarist police set out in pursuit of a group of Kazakh horse-thieves, only to become hopelessly lost within the depths of the Kazakh steppe. The officers peer through telescopes, but far from making the space legible, these instruments simply leave them ever more-disoriented, literally unable to see the steppe for the grass. Still later, the Tsarist authorities are confounded in court, unable to grasp the generations deep webs of enmity and alliance that had produced the feud which culminated in the horse-thefts. The paradox of the novel is that even as Auezov memorialized Kazakh culture and the Kazakh steppe as somehow always outside the ken of Russian colonial knowledge, he also offered multiple moments of cross-cultural amity and communication: the novel's titular hero, Abai, learns the Russian language, is inspired by Russian poetry, and even succeeds in explaining the lives of the Kazakhs to a Russian court. In turn, the novel itself was arguably a similar act of successful cross-cultural communication: when the first volume was published in 1942, Auezov was feted not only for his skill in fathoming the complexities of pre-Soviet Kazakh life-ways, but especially for his ability to make these life-ways legible to a readership that spilled beyond the borders of the Kazakh SSR. This article examines these contradictory politics of legibility and illegibility within the context first of broader scholarship on the power and limitations of colonial knowledge, but more specifically, within the context of the cultural politics of the Stalin-era.