Abstract:

This paper is devoted to the activities of two “prophets” of the “woman question,” the Crimean Tatar writer and journalist Gasprinsky and Chernyshevsky, the author of the highly influential novel What Is to Be Done? With the October Revolution Chernyshevsky’s ideas became realized in the campaigns of Soviet “affirmative action,” interrupting and suppressing Gasprinsky’s attempts to create a common language and culture of the Turkic peoples of Central Asia.

Investigates how “women’s liberation” became one of the main topoi of Soviet Kyrgyz literature, and to what extend its emancipatory content determined and—was determined by—Russian/Soviet stylistic patterns, such as avant-garde writing, socialist realism, and later genre tendencies of Soviet literature. I will also trace the survival, despite rejection and repression, of Gasprinsky’s ideas until and beyond the existence of Soviet Central Asia.