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Paper abstract:

This paper is devoted to the work of Zuura Soronbaeva (1924-2012), one of the first Kyrgyz women prose writers. My goal is to show that her stories and novels, written exclusively in Kyrgyz, can be considered as an intense dialogue with her readers, a dialogue which took place during her travels as a journalist through the towns and villages of her native Issyk Kul. As attested by her personal archive, Sooronbaeva received a large number of letters, to which she often responded. Many of these letters and responses are integrated on various levels of the narrative. Together with first person-narration, dialogues, a great number of sayings and proverbs (makal-lakap), they give the narrative tissue an undeniable “oral” quality. The works of Sooronbaeva enjoyed a large popularity at a time when reading still mattered, especially for readers who could read Kyrgyz, and even more for those who were limited to it. I will argue that it is this genuine dialogue between the writer and her public that “liberated” her work from the call to which exclusively male writers responded, such as Kasymaly Baialinov, Nasiridin Baitemirov, or Tügölbai Sydykbekov, and even Chyngyz Aitmatov. The topic of the “liberation of the woman of the East” is absent in Sooronbaeva’s writing. I will illustrate my argument through the analysis of Sooronbaeva’s story “Kievtik kyz” (The Girl from Kyiv), first published in 1985; her novella Astra Gülü (Aster Flowers), which appeared in 1974, and her novel Arman (Grief), published in 2012. If I compare Sooronbaeva’s main female characters to Aitmatov’s Zhamila, the latter leaves her ail for an unknown place where she can find a new existence and freedom. As to Sooronbaeva’s women, they find themselves struggling, half-way between village and city. Most of them have to return to the village because of the weight of tradition, and ultimately, they don’t find any place of their own. Like her protagonists, Sooronbaeva traveled from city to the villages of her region and its isolated kolkhoz. Observing how life styles and beliefs changed from the late Stalin years to the 20th Congress, and when “developed socialism” became zastoi (stagnation) to be finally replaced by the chances and threats of privatization, she wonders, at the end of her life, if all that remains of her dialogue with her readers is grief and sorrow.