Paper abstract:

In my paper, I will focus on the depiction of the environmental and human crisis caused by the manufactured desiccation of the Aral Sea in three different novels: Abdi-Jamil Nurpeisov's "Final Respects", Rollan Seisenbaev's "The Dead Wander the Desert", and Chingiz Aitmatov's "The Day Lasts Longer Than a Century". All three novels conceptualise this environmental catastrophe as well as its Soviet imperial setting differently. However, they all link environmental degradation to imperial institutions and creatively engage with time as well as space in order to narrate the catastrophe. Thus, the temporality both of empire as well as that of catastrophe intermingle and one is told through the other. The novels differ in that they engage with various dimensions of time and space. While Nurpeisov's novel focuses almost exclusively on the Aral Sea region and Almaty, Seisenbaev and Aitmatov extend the spaciality of their novels beyond the territory of Kazakstan, the latter even into space. In terms of time, Seisenbaev and Nurpeisov focus on the lifetime of a generation while Aitmatov incorporates legends of a distant past as well as the enounter with extraterrestrial beings who, symbolically, represent the distant future of earth. At the same time, the catastrophe is deeply connected to Soviet imperialism and, particularly, to imperial institutions and the imperial economy. While all three novels practise ecocriticism through their depiction of the catastrophe, they differ in their explanations as to why this happens. In Nurpeisov's and Seisenbaev's novels, much attention is payed to science as an academic institution, clientilism and bureaucracy. Nonetheless, the environmental catastrophe is not only connected to these imperial institutions and mechanisms but also to questions of morality. Particularly Nurpeisov points to the conflict between morality and a Soviet identity that is connected to the fulfillment of quotas for the imperial economy. Seisenbaev includes a critique of the mechanisms of agricultural production and chemical poisoning to stress both the "slow violence" (Rob Nixon) and the quick violence of pollution that occurres regionally and affects individuals. Aitmatov, in turn, focuses on questions of technology and progress on a larger scale and allegorically points to a looming planetary catastrophy. Thereby he draws attention to the dark side of technological progress and asks the fundamental question of whether technological progress can safe humanity from climate change.