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Abstract

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.