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Abstract

This paper examines the role of Kazakh historical prose of the independence period, particularly the historical novel, in revitalizing national historical memory. It aims to identify the generic, thematic, and ideological features of historical works produced after independence, as well as their broader literary orientation and dominant ideas.

The study is based on a corpus of nearly fifty historical works written during the independence period, including historical novels, novel-essays, historical narratives, and documentary-historical prose. It employs textual-hermeneutic, comparative-historical, typological, and interpretive methods. The analysis is also informed by scholarship on the historical novel, historical memory, postcolonial discourse, and national narrative.

The findings suggest that the proliferation of historical writing in the independence period was not a random literary phenomenon. Rather, it reflects an aesthetic and intellectual need to return to historical origins, recover suppressed or obscured memory, and revisit a past distorted by colonial domination. In these works, the idea of freedom is no longer represented merely as a struggle to attain liberation; instead, it is rearticulated through the preservation of independence, the consolidation of national consciousness, the restoration of historical justice, and the pursuit of spiritual renewal. In this context, historical figures and events are frequently reinterpreted beyond Soviet or imperial explanatory frameworks and are imaginatively reconstructed and reassessed from the perspective of national interest.

The study also shows that Kazakh history of the eighteenth to twentieth centuries occupies a particularly prominent place in historical prose of the independence era. Special attention is given to the colonial expansion of the Russian Empire and the Soviet regime, national liberation movements, the weakening of khanate authority, land dispossession, and the fate of batyrs, biys, and national intellectuals. This pattern indicates the emergence of a decolonizing orientation in contemporary historical prose. From this perspective, the Kazakh historical novel of the independence period should be understood not merely as a genre that narrates the past, but as an important literary space for affirming national subjectivity, renewing historical consciousness, and shaping postcolonial discourse.