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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.

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This paper examines the construction of the Aral Sea as an “imperial ecological space” through a literary analysis of Kazakh writer Abdijamil Nurpeisov’s novel Final Respects (1983). It draws on the theoretical frameworks of ecological imperialism and postcolonial ecocriticism, revealing the relationship between environmental governance and imperial power structures in Soviet Central Asia.

The paper argues that the large-scale irrigation projects and cotton monoculture which led to the collapse of the Aral Sea ecology reflected a model of modernization grounded in anthropocentrism and technological rationality. The novel shows how this state-driven development model produced environmental and social injustices. The drying of the sea destroyed lives that depended on it, including fishing communities. The Aral Sea disaster was not a natural crisis, but a historically produced catastrophe shaped by the intertwined forces of political power, developmental ideology, and technological rationality.

The paper also examines the hierarchical relations between Moscow and the Soviet republics through the lens of a center–periphery power structure. The novel reveals how centralized decision-making marginalized local voices through its satirical depiction of bureaucratic discourse, scientific authority, and local elites, who devalued fishing communities and placed them in a condition of subaltern voicelessness. Final Respects not only documents the ecological catastrophe but also exposes the imperialist logic underlying Soviet modernization projects. The novel provides a narrative framework for reinterpreting the Aral Sea crisis from a local perspective and helps reassess the significance of postcolonial ecocriticism in Kazakh Soviet literature.

Keywords: Postcolonial ecocriticism; Ecological imperialism; Aral Sea crisis; Soviet Central Asia; Subalternity

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This paper explores Tselina (The Virgin Lands, 1978), the third installment in the USSR leader Leonid Brezhnev’s infamous series of memoirs, as a work of literature and a historical document of the late 1970s. The book claims to contain Brezhnev’s autobiographic account of his mission as Second, and then First Secretary of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan in 1954–1955 responsible for the Virgin Lands Campaign in the northern regions of the republic. By reading a sample of the text closely, I demonstrate that its alleged ghostwriter, the newspaper Pravda (“Truth”) agricultural correspondent Alexander Murzin, assembles Brezhnev’s narratorial voice from impersonal clichés of Soviet bureaucratic newspeak, which, as Alexei Yurchak’s socio-anthropological research from the early 2000s showcases, had by then lost its referential grounding in empirical reality and functioned as a form of quasi-aestheticized, performative public discourse dissociated from Soviet subjects’ private interests. I argue that Tselina is a paradigmatic sample of late Soviet non-fictional discourse, which, like today’s post-truth, alternative fact, and fake news practices, functions in the mode of fiction by disregarding Aristotle’s distinction between history and poetry. Like the poet and unlike the historian of the Poetics, producers and consumers of ideologically charged narratives deal with what could/should/must have happened according to the objective rules of reality, not with what exactly happened on its chance-driven surface. Indicating how Tselina is fundamentally at odds with both the empirical facts it supposedly renders and with its “author’s” physical image so familiar to his contemporaries from TV, I account for the book’s low tellability (in narrative theory, the parameter measuring the degree to which a story is worth telling and interesting to read/listen to) as resulting, initially, from its formulaic nature and, later, from the temporary disintegration of Soviet doublethink. I rely on the recently published historical scholarship on Brezhnev, the theory of fictionality, and experimental translation studies to trace how Murzin’s literary exercise in authorial ventriloquism falls into oblivion without ever being properly read.

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This paper examines how Soviet ideology and policies shaped the childhood experiences of Kazakh children through an analysis of three Kazakh Soviet children’s novels included in the mandatory state school curriculum: Zhusan isi (1942), Menin atym Qozha (1957), and Bir atanyń balalary (1973). Using the concept of coloniality of being and discourse analysis, the study explores the protagonists’ inner struggles with Soviet expectations and orphanhood. The paper contrasts arguments between the idealized notion of a “happy Soviet childhood” and the realities faced by children under the Soviet regime, particularly in the Kazakh context, through Kazakh-Soviet children's novels.

The study is structured around two central questions. First, it examines how these novels represent the complexities of Kazakh childhood across distinct Soviet historical phases, including the post-war period, the Thaw, and the late Soviet years. Second, it analyzes how Soviet policies—such as collectivization, war mobilization, schooling, and youth organizations—shaped children’s identities through processes of coloniality.

Given that the authors of these works remain part of the contemporary state school curriculum, the paper argues that their classroom implementation often lacks critical colonial perspectives, contributing to forms of historical erasure. Overall, the study demonstrates how literary texts, when situated within their historical context, can be used in educational settings to foster critical reflection on Soviet colonialism and Kazakh childhood experiences.

While substantial scholarship exists in the English language on Soviet children’s litetature, it, it primarily focuses on Russia as the Soviet production rather than non-Soviet republics. Therefore, there has been little academic research on the issues of power imposed by the Soviet Empire, colonialism, or the decolonial analysis of Kazakh Soviet children’s novels, even though they play a key role in Kazakh literary education.

The paper is based on my master's dissertation and draws on existing scholarship in Kazakh, Russian, and English, as well as primary Kazakh Soviet texts.