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In a 1999 interview, Qazaq Soviet writer Sara Myñjasarova (1924 - 2002) explained that she became a writer not out of inspiration, but out of dissatisfaction with how Qazaq male authors portrayed women. In their novels and povests, women appeared as passive, docile, and powerless, shaped to fit dominant political narratives. In contrast, Myñjasarova emphasized women’s historical agency, describing Qazaq women as autonomous, brave, and central to the nation’s social life. For her, writing became a means of restoring women’s dignity and challenging reductive literary representations. My paper examines Myñjasarova’s novel Tözim šeñberi (1987) to explore how knowledge about “the Qazaq woman” has been produced as uniform and ideologically constrained. It asks: how did political and literary narratives construct this singular, passive figure? What narrative strategies helped naturalize this image? And how does Myñjasarova’s novel disrupt it by reintroducing complexity, historical specificity, and alternative forms of agency? Through close textual analysis, the paper argues that Tözim šeñberi does not simply offer a counter-image of Qazaq women, but actively challenges the epistemological frameworks that have shaped gendered knowledge in Qazaq literature. In doing so, it repositions women as dynamic and heterogeneous subjects and reclaims their role in the cultural and historical imagination.

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In Astana Opera, a theatre opened in 2013, the opera Qyz Zhibek is performed regularly, and the performances are often completely sold out. This opera with music composed by Yevgeniy Brusilovsky and libretto written by Gabit Musrepov in 1934, for more than 90 years managed to captivate the audience, and has lived on in stage both outside and within the Soviet and independent Kazakhstan, serving as a representation of Kazakh culture. However, Qyz Zhibek opera was created in a turbulent time in the history of Kazakhstan, written amidst the most tragic famine and Stalin’s Great Terror. It became a tool simultaneously in communicating the socialist ideals and in crafting the distinct national identity, however self-orientalizing it might have been. The comparative analysis of Musrepov’s version of the epic with the version, published in Kazan by Jusipbek Khoja in the end of the 19th century, and an analysis of Brusilovsky’s memoirs and of the Soviet newspaper entries, interviews and journals, concerning the production of the opera Qyz Zhibek and its participation in the 1936 dekada of Kazakh Arts in Moscow demonstrate that the Soviet interpretation of the epic inevitably continued the Tsarist orientalist discourses on the nomadic population. The de-construction of the heroic nature of Zhibek for the opera with this version’s consequent performance in the dekada of Kazakh Arts in Moscow reflect the continuity of the orientalist idea of the ‘civilizing savior mission’ of Tsarist and later Soviet administration towards its periphery.

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This paper examines sleep and bodily stillness in Aman Rakhmetov’s poetry collection Человек засыпает и становится фотографией (“A Person Falls Asleep and Becomes a Photograph”). In these poems, sleep is not simply rest but a state of vulnerability and suspension. Music appears only in solitude and in the horizontal position of the bed; poetry is described as bordering on insomnia; and the sleeping person becomes a photograph: still, visible, and freed from performance. Wakefulness, by contrast, is figured as something cinematic and staged.

Several poems also circulate as Instagram Reels created by the poet. In these videos, slow gestures, background music, and editing reshape the poems’ intimacy and address, turning private reverie into a mediated encounter with viewers. By reading the printed poems alongside their digital versions, this paper asks how contemporary Kazakh poetry negotiates stillness, exposure, and performance across page and visual media platforms.

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One of the most famous Qazaq representations of Soviet nuclear testing is Roza Muqanova’s short story «Мәңгілік бала бейне» (1990), which was adapted to the theatre stage in 1996. In my paper, I argue that Muqanova’s short story performs what I call “empathic storytelling”. Instead of creating a sense of catastrophe through the imagery of the iconic mushroom cloud or crippled bodies, she carefully analyses and presents her main protagonist Laila, a young woman who looks like a small child due to the impact of radiation on her body. Instead of focusing on the catastrophic, Muqanova’s short story creates empathy for her protagonist who suffers not only from the negative impact of radiation, but also – and maybe even more so – from how she is seen and treated by other people. My analysis relies in part on archival research, particularly a collection of reviews of the short story that give voice to its emotional impact. Secondly, I provide a close reading to show how the short story creates empathy. I argue that it does so by closely describing stigmatisations of disability in rural Qazaqstan. Thereby, the narrative carefully guides the reader to see Laila not in terms of disability, but as a gentle soul that inspires empathy and love. Thus, I argue, that “empathic storytelling” such as Muqanova’s «Мәңгілік бала бейне» helps to de-stigmatise disability.