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Abstract

This paper analyzes how the Nauryz, a spring equinox holiday celebrated across Central

Asia became increasingly national in meaning during its revival in late Soviet Kazakhstan.

Although the holiday was reintroduced within the familiar Soviet formula that allowed national form within a socialist framework, literary figures, journalists, and editors used the revival to redefine Nauryz as part of Kazakh historical and cultural identity. Drawing on the late Soviet newspapers, poems, interviews, and archival materials, the paper shows that early media coverage framed Nauryz as a civic and ideologically acceptable celebration associated with

collective labor, ecological campaigns, and the discourse of friendship of nations, rather than as an explicitly national holiday.

At the same time, literary texts played a crucial role in the gradual nationalization of the holiday. Following Diana Kudaibergen’s argument that literature in late Soviet Kazakhstan functioned as a space for reimagining the nation, the paper examines how poets and writers used nostalgia, historical memory, and references to pre-Soviet tradition to frame Nauryz as a recovered element of Kazakh culture. Poems by Mukagali Makatayev and Mukhtar Shakhanov, as well as the republication of works by earlier figures such as Beimbet Mailin, Shakarim Kudaiberdiuly, and Mukhtar Auezov, connected the revival of the holiday to a broader process of cultural restoration. Newspapers and journals reinforced this narrative by citing earlier intellectuals, republishing historical texts, and presenting Nauryz as a tradition that had survived despite decades of official absence.