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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 article examines the representation of the Aral Sea crisis in Final Respects by the Kazakh writer Abdijamil Nurpeisov through the lens of postcolonial ecocriticism, drawing particularly on the concept of ecological imperialism. It argues that the novel represents the Aral Sea not simply as an environmental catastrophe, but as a peripheral space transformed by Soviet modernization and the unequal power relations that sustained it.

The article shows that the large-scale irrigation projects and cotton monoculture policies that led to the desiccation of the Aral Sea reflected a developmental model grounded in anthropocentrism and technological rationality. Rather than representing a natural disaster or an isolated policy failure, the novel portrays the Aral Sea crisis as the outcome of Soviet efforts to transform Central Asia into a cotton-producing region, regardless of the ecological costs borne by local communities. Through its depiction of ecological collapse, displacement, bodily suffering, and social disintegration, the novel reveals how Soviet modernization depended upon the ecological sacrifice of peripheral territories in order to sustain the developmental priorities of the imperial center.

The article further examines how imperial power operated through the unequal distribution of authority over knowledge and environmental decision-making. By portraying the interactions between state officials, technical experts, and local communities, Final Respects reveals how peripheral populations were excluded from decisions that profoundly shaped their environment and everyday lives, producing conditions of subaltern voicelessness. Simultaneously, the novel depicts fragmented and internally contradictory forms of local resistance that remain constrained by the ideological and institutional structures of Soviet rule.

Through its portrayal of ecological collapse and its consequences for local communities, Final Respects offers a literary perspective on Soviet ecological imperialism and highlights the value of postcolonial ecocriticism for understanding environmental change in Central Asia.

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The epic of Edige is a widely shared epic tradition among various Turkic communities, including Kazakhs, which narrates the story of Edige, the legendary founder of the Noghay Horde. As a rich performative tradition, Edige has attracted the attention of scholars of oral literature, history, religion, such as Karl Reichl, Victor Zhirmunsky, and Devin DeWeese, who have examined the epic’s historical depth and performative elements. However, one central narrative motif, namely recurring father-son conflicts, has received little scholarly attention. This paper examines this theme in Kazakh versions of Edige, focusing on the rupture between Edige and his son Nuraly. In several variants, their feud frequently arises from Edige’s broken promise to give Nuraly one of the daughters of Tokhtamysh, a ruler of Chinggisid descent. While on the surface this episode dramatizes the consequences of failed paternal obligations, such as the distribution of war spoils, it simultaneously reveals broader political anxieties surrounding legitimacy and succession in the post-Mongol imperial context. The conflict becomes especially meaningful when viewed in relation to the institution of guregen, the political status of sons-in-law to the Chinggisid lineage. In the successor states of the Mongol empire, including the Golden Horde, marriage into the ruling family became one of the official pathways through which non-Chinggisid elites could acquire authority and secondary legitimacy. For Edige and his kin, access to Chinggisid daughters symbolized entry into the symbolic capital of Chinggisid prestige. Within this framework, the rivalry between Edige and Nuraly can be interpreted as a feud over access to political authority. Since the epic of Edige functions as “exculpatory narratives,” as Thomas Welsford argues, it provides Edige with alternative forms of legitimacy. The recurring presence of daughters of Tokhtamysh implicitly acknowledges the continuing political supremacy of Chinggisid descent and the need for such legitimacy among non-Chinggisid elites. Drawing on several Kazakh epic variants, including Edige Zhyr, Er Edige, Edige Batyr Angimesi, and Maulimniyaz-Edige, the paper argues that father-son conflicts centered on Tokhtamysh’s daughters acquire a clear political meaning, reflecting anxieties over access to Chinggisid legitimacy rather than merely disputes over broken promises.

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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 Kazakh Soviet children’s novellas included in the mandatory state school curriculum: Menin atym Qozha(1957), Zhusan isi (1976). 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 novellas.

The study is structured around two central questions. First, it examines how these novellas represent the complexities of Kazakh childhood across distinct Soviet historical phases, including the post-war period, 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 novellas, 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.