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- Convenor:
-
Svetlana Jacquesson
(Palacky University)
Send message to Convenor
- Chair:
-
Ali Igmen
(California State University, Long Beach)
- Discussant:
-
Nicholas Walmsley
(American University of Central Asia)
- Formats:
- Panel
- Theme:
- Regional Studies
- Location:
- GA 1106
- Sessions:
- Friday 21 October, -
Time zone: America/Indiana/Knox
Abstract:
In this panel we want to continue the conversation on vernacularity and modernity that Paolo Sartori initiated at his workshop “Local Modern: Exploring Vernacular Cultures across Central Eurasia.” The workshop was held at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in May 2022 with support from the American University of Central Asia. Specializing in the study of the history and literatures of modern Central Eurasia, the participants in the Vienna event were invited to “add a new interpretive dimension to the current historiography on vernacularisation and modernity by reflecting on what processes of linguistic and literary realignment might signify for local communities, individuals, and their systems of knowledge.” This panel offers four case studies which demonstrate the variety of ways in which poets and writers fashioned visions of the self and community throughout the Soviet period. In her paper Svetlana Jacquesson shows how a Kyrgyz akyn (bard) played havoc with Soviet scholars and writers. Instead of the “traditional epic” that he was asked to produce for posterity in the mid-1920s, he composed and had written down thousands of verses in which he claimed a modern mission for himself and for the “vernacular” epic tradition that were irreconcilable with the Soviet ideas of socialist national cultures. Moving to Uzbekistan, Cristopher Fort dwells on a mode of Soviet subjectivity pioneered by Uzbek men of letters in the 1930s-1960s and connects the act of passive witnessing which distinguishes this Soviet Uzbek mode of subjectivity from other Soviet subjectivities to pre-Soviet Uzbek writing. In the first case from Kazakhstan, Gabriel McGuire singles out the most famous work of Kazakh children’s literature in which the anxiety of preserving Kazakh culture interferes with the vocation of turning children into Soviet citizens and shows how references to pre-Revolutionary Kazakh akyns and to oral literary forms are mobilized to smooth the possible gaps between Soviet and Kazakh identities. In the last contribution to the panel, Christopher Baker introduces Anuar Alimzhanov, a Kazakh poet and artist who attempted to fashion an ethnographic self from varied encyclopedias and disparate classificatory texts in the steppe. His art was an enterprise in assembling the bits and pieces of heteroglot taxonomies into a “mirror of paper”.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 21 October, 2022, -Paper abstract:
My contribution will focus on the writing of Anūar Älīmzhanov, a poet who devoted his career to assembling distinctly Kazakh ethnographies from bits and pieces of paper and taxonomy that had piled up in the Eurasian steppe. Älīmzhanov was a Kazakh artist studied in a heritage that had bent the instruments of natural history to ethnographic knowledge, retooling them to classify human difference in taxonomies that had previously indexed “plants, animals, and natural curiosities, as well as artificialia, or ‘objects of art.’” He sifted through this knowledge while altering and amending it, listing the words that did not match Kazakh things and while remarking on compendia in which the pieces of his past seemed present but also out of place. He made himself an expert in the dictionaries and encyclopedias of the classificatory heritage, envisioning a codex in which the remnants of the past would fit together to form an image of his own ethnography and in which disparate Eurasian names would represent iterations of a single Kazakh tradition. He pulled apart taxonomies and compendia, trying one piece and then another from compendia made by men who imagined a time when “all the languages of the world will be recorded and placed in the dictionaries and grammars and compared together.” His engagement with this knowledge involved cutting out pieces of ethnography and reassembling them to form a mirror of paper, though the reflection he fashioned was ultimately plural than singular. The Kazakh figure he exhibited in his art was covered with paper and words taken from heteroglot translations of experience. Every piece of text or classification he patched into his art represented a translation of reality specific to a time and place and an optic or way of seeing the world bound to “historically determined and determining methods by which experience is apprehended, imitated, and reproduced.”
Paper abstract:
Between 1922 and 1926, Sagymbai Orozbakov – a bard (akyn) -- and Ibyraim Abdyrakhmanov -- a scribe – worked under contract with the Kyrgyz Academic Commission and produced an extensive written record of “the Manas epic”. In this presentation I am trying to solve a puzzle: throughout the Soviet period Sagymbai kept being named a great epic singer; yet, the only way to consider the text he co-produced with Abdyrakhmanov “epic” was by pitilessly purging it.
It is undeniable that in his sprawling masterpiece Sagymbai paid respect to the epic tradition. But he also warned against its limitations, provided examples of what oral traditions missed, and invited Kyrgyz to partake of the rich Turki written tradition. When “read along the grain”, Sagymbai’s records embody the attempt of a Kyrgyz bard to create a modern literary artefact in the Kyrgyz language. In doing so, Sagymbai ignored the expectations heaped on him as an “epic singer” and strived instead to interweave traditional epic themes and motifs with religious, historical or literary narratives that he considered indispensable to a modern Kyrgyz literature.
The answer to my puzzle resides in the fact that throughout the Soviet period and up until the present Sagymbai’s records have been read “against the grain” or against their authorial intentions, i.e., as a sample of textualized oral epic. Sagymbai himself was stereotyped as an epic singer and his composition as a traditional epic, a rare “monument” of Kyrgyz history and culture. For the sake of maintaining these stereotypes, Soviet scholars kept editing and rewriting Sagymbai’s masterpiece while the written records stayed locked in the archives. As did other written records of the epic produced in the first 20 years of Soviet rule. There were not, in fact, satisfactory written recordings of the Manas as a traditional epic but neither Kyrgyz scholars nor Soviet ones wanted to acknowledge this openly. I suggest that to the extent that these written records of failed performances of the “traditional epic” are still preserved, they represent an untapped source for the study of vernacular practices and vernacular identities – Sagymbai offering one such example -- that have been either ignored or suppressed by Soviet (and post-Soviet) folklorization projects.
Paper abstract:
This paper examines the final work of Soviet Uzbek author Abdulla Qahhor, Tales from the Past (O‘tmishdan ertaklar, 1965), an episodic autobiographical novella that, according to the author and his readers at the time, “unmasks” the evils of pre-Soviet Central Asia in order to justify the post-revolutionary Soviet state. The paper uses the example of Qahhor’s novella to argue that the author, and other Soviet Uzbek writers like him who wrote similar autobiographical pieces between the 1930s and 1960s, had another, less discussed goal with his autobiography: to publicly present himself as a Soviet citizen through the act of witnessing and suffering a cruel pre-Soviet past. With this, I suggest that Soviet Uzbek men of letters pioneered a mode of Soviet subjectivity parallel to the better-known subjectivity studied by Russianists. Whereas the Russian authors and public figures analyzed by the Soviet subjectivists typically represented themselves as revolutionaries who constantly struggled between the Marxist-Leninist dialectic poles of spontaneity and consciousness, Uzbek authors like Qahhor presented themselves in these narratives of the pre-Soviet past as passive witnesses, as Soviet new men awaiting the revolution in order to achieve self-actualization. The paper focuses on Qahhor’s Tales from the Past as particularly exemplary of this parallel mode of public self-representation, but I also demonstrate the popularity of witnessing as an act demonstrating Soviet citizenship among Uzbek authors throughout the 1930s and 1960s and tease out the origins of this form of witnessing in pre-Soviet Uzbek writing.
Paper abstract:
Berdibek Soqpaqbaev’s 1957 Meniñ Atım—Qoja (My Name is Qoja), a short novel that reads like a Soviet version of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, is perhaps the most famous work of Kazakh children’s literature. In 1960, Soqpaqbaev followed this novella with his memoir Balalıq Şaqqa Saiaxat (An Excursion to Childhood), an account of his own childhood in the 1930s. Both the novella and the memoir are narratives in which the protagonist’s central task is to fashion themselves not merely into an adult but specifically into an adult who is a citizen of Soviet modernity. As other scholarship on children’s literature in the Soviet Union has emphasized, these tales of talented but mischievous young children are socialist realism in miniature, models of how the Soviet institution of the school brings direction and order to the chaotic and directionless enthusiasms of childhood. Yet the peculiarity of Soqpaqbaev’s work is that his characters are not just Soviet but Kazakh, and in the case of Qoja, not just Kazakh but also a poet. The struggle to fashion the child into a Soviet citizen is consequently entangled with the larger struggle over how (and to what extent) Kazakh culture might be reconciled with Soviet culture. In both Balalıq Şaqqa Sayaxat and Meniñ Atım—Qoja, this paper argues, Soqpaqbayev uses references to pre-Revolutionary Kazakh aqıns (bards) and to oral literary forms as a device by which possible gaps between these identities are smoothed over.