Abstract

This paper re-evaluates Chyngyz Aitmatov’s 1970 novella The White Steamship through oral-formulaic theory and performance studies, asking how the Kyrgyz author mobilizes a performative approach drawn from oral tradition to underscore the local specificity of his call to social responsibility while appealing to a universal readership. Aitmatov was profoundly influenced by Central Asian epic performance, participated in the standardization of Kyrgyz epos in Bishkek in the late Soviet period, and was intimately involved in theatrical stagings of his work. Yet most scholarship on Aitmatov and performance—whether epic or modern—has emphasized linguistic analysis or socio-cultural context rather than the performative modalities structuring his literary texts themselves.

In the same year as the novella’s publication in Novyi Mir, Aitmatov published the essay “A Necessary Clarification,” responding to the backlash over the work’s perceived anti-Soviet pessimism. There he insists that his goal is not pointed moral commentary, but the restaging of long-standing questions about humankind’s relationship to the natural, social, and spiritual worlds, articulated for centuries by epic bards. By explicitly aligning his literary craft with ancestral practice, Aitmatov offers scholars an alternative perspective on his fraught positioning between Central Asian tradition and Soviet modernity.

The paper concludes by juxtaposing the epic performativity of The White Steamship with the dramaturgical techniques of The Ascent of Mount Fuji—Aitmatov’s only play, co-written with Kazakh playwright Kaltai Mukhamedzhanov and staged in Moscow in 1973 to great public provocation. Both The White Steamship and The Ascent of Mount Fuji address moral questions about the collective preservation of cultural value in the face of a global modernity that threatens to erase it. This comparison illuminates Aitmatov’s attempt to bridge ancestral oral tradition with the expectations of a modern theater-going public and, more broadly, to advocate for cultural value in an era of globalizing modernity.