Kyrgyz steppes, Soviet halls, and mythic modern prose
Chinghiz Aitmatov wrote chiefly in Russian yet became a voice for remote Soviet Kyrgyzstan—novelist, film jurist, Communist Party member, and later ambassador to Luxembourg and Brussels. His father was executed in Stalin's purges; Jamila made him famous; folklore and animals thread every tale.
Born 12 December 1928 to a Kyrgyz father and Tatar mother in Sheker, Aitmatov was fourteen when his father fell to a 1937 charge of bourgeois nationalism and execution the next year. He worked as a village clerk, tax collector, and engineer's aide before studying animal husbandry, then the Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow (1956–1958), and eight years at Pravda. He joined the Party in 1959 during de-Stalinization, served on the Supreme Soviet, and endorsed Gorbachev's glasnost.
Early Russian pieces appeared in 1952; Kyrgyz White Rain followed in 1954. Jamila (1958) broke through, joining a Lenin Prize compilation Tales of the Mountains and Steppes in 1963 with To Have and to Lose, Camel's Eye, and The First Teacher—several later filmed. The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years (1980) and The Place of the Skull (1987) extended his reach abroad. Critics and admirers alike noted quality; his method wove oral legend into contemporary life, with camels and stallions sharing fate with humans as in Farewell, Gyulsary!
From 1990 he was Soviet then Russian ambassador to Luxembourg; from 2000 Kyrgyz envoy to the EU, NATO, UNESCO, and Benelux, then France. Film festivals from Moscow 1961 to Berlin 1994 knew him as jurist or president. He died in Nuremberg, 10 June 2008, aged seventy-nine, and was buried at Ata-Beyit cemetery he helped found—near where his father likely rests. The New York Times obituary called him a Communist writer who gave Kyrgyz a voice, then diplomat and Gorbachev adviser.
Source: Chinghiz Aitmatov
