Chinghiz Aitmatov
Kyrgyz Author
| Date of Birth | : | 12 Dec, 1928 |
| Date of Death | : | 10 Jun, 2008 |
| Place of Birth | : | Sheker, Kyrgyzstan |
| Profession | : | Author, Screenwriter |
| Nationality | : | Kyrgyz |
Chinghiz Torekulovich Aitmatov was a Kyrgyz author who wrote mainly in Russian, but also in Kyrgyz. He is one of the best known figures in Kyrgyzstan's literature.
Biography
Aytmatov’s father was a Communist Party official executed during the great purges directed by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in the late 1930s. Aytmatov’s literary career started in 1952, and in 1959 he began writing for Pravda as the newspaper’s correspondent in Kirgiziya. He achieved major recognition with the collection of short stories Povesti gor i stepey (1963; Tales of the Mountains and Steppes), for which he was awarded the Lenin Prize in 1963. Although Aytmatov composed in both Russian and Kyrgyz, many of his works, which are predominantly long short stories and novellas, were originally written in the latter language. Major themes in these works are love and friendship, the trials and heroism of wartime, and the emancipation of Kyrgyz youth from restrictive custom and tradition.
Among Aytmatov’s most important works are Trudnaya pereprava (1956; “A Difficult Passage”), Litsom k litsu (1957; “Face to Face”), Jamila (1958; Eng. trans. Jamilia), Pervy uchitel (1967; “The First Teacher”), Proshchay, Gulsary! (1967; Farewell, Gulsary!), and Bely parokhod (1970; The White Ship, also published as The White Steamship ). Subsequent novels, written originally in Russian, include I dolshe veka dlitsya den (1981; The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years), which blends Central Asian folklore traditions with science fiction, as well as Plakha (1986; The Place of the Skull) and Tavro Kassandry (1995; “The Mark of Cassandra”). He also cowrote, with Kaltai Mukhamedzhanov, Voskhozhdenie na Fudziyamu (first performed 1973; The Ascent of Mount Fuji), a play considered provocative during the Soviet era for its examination of the themes of authority and dissent. Many of Aytmatov’s stories appear in English translation in Piebald Dog Running Along the Shore, and Other Stories (1989) and Mother Earth, and Other Stories (1989).
Aytmatov was made a member of the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. in 1966. In 1967 he became a member of the Executive Board of the Writers’ Union of the U.S.S.R., and he was awarded the Soviet State Prize for literature in 1968, 1977, and 1983. He served as an adviser to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and as the Soviet ambassador to Luxembourg. From the 1990s Aytmatov was the Kyrgyz ambassador to the European Union and several European countries. He also served as a member of parliament in Kyrgyzstan.
Quotes
Total 16 Quotes
And all of a sudden I began to understand his strangeness that made people shrug and mock; his dreaminess, his love of solitude, his silent manner. Now I understood why he sat on the look-out hill of an evening and why he spent a night by himself on the riverbank, why he constantly hearkened to sounds others could not hear and why his eyes would suddenly gleam and his drawn eyebrows twitch. He was a man deeply in love. I felt it was not simply a love for another person, it was somehow an uncommon, expansive love for life and earth. He had kept this love within himself, in his music, in his very being. A person with no feeling, no matter how good his voice, could never have sung like that.
The only thing I'll never have is what I have lost for ever and ever... As long as I live, until I draw my last breath, I shall remember Asel and all those beautiful things that were ours. The day I was to leave I went to the lake and stood on the rise above it. I was saying good-bye to the Tien Shan mountains, to Issyk-Kul. Good-bye, Issyk-Kul, my unfinished song! How I wish I could take you with me, your blue waters and your yellow shores, but I can't, just as I can't take the woman I love with me. Goodbye, Asel. Good-bye, my pretty poplar in a red kerchief! Good-bye, my love, I want you to be happy.
It is a pity the spirit does not grow old too.
Nothing but water -- an ever-moving swell; nothing but waves, swiftly forming and instantly dying; nothing but depths; dark, fathomless depths; and nothing but sky, scudding white clouds, puffy and intangible. This was the living world, nothing besides, nothing else but sea. No winter or summer, no hills or ravines.
His singing made me want to fall to the ground and kiss it, as a son to a mother, grateful that someone could love it so keenly. For the first time in my life something new awoke within me, something irresistible: I still cannot explain it. It was a need to express myself, yes, to express myself, not only to see and sense the world, but to bring to others my vision, my thoughts and sensations, to describe the beauty of the earth as inspiringly as Daniyar could sing. I caught my breath for fear and joy of the unknown. At that time, however, I had not yet realized the need to take up brush and paints.
There will be winter, there will be cold, there will be snowstorms, but then there will be spring.. Agian.
But you no longer heard the song. You had gone away, my boy, into your tale. Did you know that you would never turn into a fish, that you would never reach Issyk-Kul, or see the white ship, or say to it: "Hello, white ship, it's I"?
Oh, Issyk-Kul, my Issyk-Kul--my unfinished song! Why did I have to remember that day when I came here with Asel and stopped on the same rise, right above the water? Everything was the same. The blue-and-white waves ran up the yellow shore holding hands. The sun was setting behind the mountains, and at the far end of the lake the water was tinged with pink. The swans wheeled over the water with excited, exultant cries. They soared up and dropped down on outspread wings that seemed to hum. They whipped up the water and started wide, foaming circles. Everything was the same, only there was no Asel with me. Where are you, my slender poplar in a red kerchief, where are you now?
Trains in these parts went from East to West, and from West to East . . . On either side of the railway lines lay the great wide spaces of the desert - Sary-Ozeki, the Middle lands of the yellow steppes. In these parts any distance was measured in relation to the railway, as if from the Greenwich meridian . . . And the trains went from East to West, and from West to East .
I was astounded at the passion and fire of the melody itself. I could not describe it then, nor can I now. Was it just his voice or something more tangible emerging from his very soul that could arouse such emotion in another person, and bring one's innermost thoughts to life?
