Narrative and Memory in Kazakh Literature

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel examines the fraught and often contradictory relationship of memory, narrative, and storyteller in Kazakh literary texts. The panel moves from Gabriel McGuire’s consideration of various Kazakh oral epics and their depictions of the role of singers in transforming events into narrative on to Dana Akhmerova’s examination of a Soviet era novel, Sayin Muratbekov’s The Smell of Wormwood, that depicts a child taking on the role of storyteller for his community even as his own life falls painfully short of the happy resolutions often promised by fairy tales. The panel concludes with Aibarsha Kazhyakpar’s study of a contemporary novel, Yuri Serebrianksy’s Altynshash, in which the novel itself takes on the role of storyteller who weaves together the fractured memories of Poles deported to Kazakhstan in the 1930s

Sub Unit

• Literature: 20th Century

Chair

• Christopher Baker, American U of Central Asia (Kyrgyzstan)

Papers

• Singers of Counsel: Aqyns as Companions and as Counsellors in Kazakh Oral Epic - Gabriel Vertin McGuire, Nazarbayev U (Kazakhstan)

• Fragmented Narratives and Post-Soviet Remembrance in Yuri Serebryansky’s 'Altynshash' - Aibarsha Kazhyakpar, Stanford U

• Estranged Aestheticization: The Rebirth of the Qazaq Epic Qozı Körpeş – Bayan Sulu in Soviet Socialist Culture - Galiya Galymzhankyzy, Nazarbayev U (Kazakhstan)

Discussant

• Christopher Baker, American U of Central Asia (Kyrgyzstan)