Chingiz Aitmatov

Chingiz Aitmatov was born on 12 December 1928 in the village of Sheker in the Talas Valley of Kyrgyzstan (then the Kirghiz ASSR). His father, Torekul Aitmatov, rose from a peasant activist to a Soviet and Communist Party official of Kyrgyzstan, but was arrested in 1937 and shot in 1938. His mother, Nagima Abduvalieva, a Tatar, was a political officer in the army and later a public figure. Shortly before the father’s arrest the family moved to Sheker, where the children grew up. During the war the fourteen-year-old Chingiz served as secretary of the village soviet and also worked as a teacher and at other jobs.

After eight years of school he studied at the Dzhambul Zootechnical College in Kazakhstan, graduating with honours. In 1948 he entered the Kyrgyz Agricultural Institute in Frunze (now Bishkek), graduated in 1953 and spent the next three years working in livestock farming. He began writing at the same time: his first story, “The Newspaper Boy Dziuio”, written in Russian, was printed in 1952. In 1956–1958 he attended the Higher Literary Courses at the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow.

In 1957 the magazine “Ala-Too” published his Kyrgyz novella “Face to Face”. “Jamilia”, which came out in 1958, brought him international fame; Louis Aragon translated it into French. It was followed by the novellas “Camel’s Eye” (1960), “To Have and to Lose” (1961), “The First Teacher” (1962) and “Mother Earth” (1963), and in 1963 the book “Tales of the Mountains and Steppes” won him the Lenin Prize. He joined the Communist Party in 1959 and in 1959–1960 edited the magazine “Literaturny Kirgizstan” while also serving as Pravda’s correspondent in Kyrgyzstan. He wrote his early works mainly in Kyrgyz and translated some of them into Russian himself; from the mid-1960s he wrote chiefly in Russian.

“Farewell, Gulsary!” (1966) received the USSR State Prize in 1968. The director Bolotbek Shamshiev filmed “The White Ship” (1970), and the literary basis of the film brought Aitmatov a second State Prize in 1977. With the Kazakh playwright Kaltay Mukhamedzhanov he wrote the play “The Ascent of Mount Fuji” (1973). The novellas “Cranes Fly Early” (1975) and “Piebald Dog Running Along the Shore” (1977) were followed by the novel “The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years” (1980), in which the legend of a captive robbed of his memory — the mankurt — became one of the book’s central symbols; it won him a third State Prize in 1983. He was made a Hero of Socialist Labour in 1978. The novel “The Place of the Skull” (1986) was the last of his works to appear in the USSR.

Aitmatov was also active in public life: he sat in the Soviet of Nationalities of the USSR Supreme Soviet in 1966–1989, was a People’s Deputy of the USSR in 1989–1991 and a member of the USSR Presidential Council, served as first secretary of the Writers’ Union of Kyrgyzstan in 1986–1991, edited the magazine “Inostrannaya Literatura” and initiated the international Issyk-Kul Forum. In 1974 he was elected a full member of the Academy of Sciences of the Kyrgyz SSR. In 1973 he was among the signatories of a letter by Soviet writers condemning Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov. From 1990 he was the Soviet (from 1992 the Russian) ambassador to Luxembourg, and in 1994–2006 Kyrgyzstan’s ambassador to the Benelux countries. In these years he published “The White Cloud of Genghis Khan”, “The Mark of Cassandra” (1994) and “When the Mountains Fall” (“The Eternal Bride”, 2006). In 1997 he was named a Hero of the Kyrgyz Republic.

According to the National Encyclopedia of Uzbekistan, almost all of Aitmatov’s works have been published in Uzbek and staged in Uzbek theatres, and the composer I. Akbarov wrote music for “Mother Earth”. He was awarded Uzbekistan’s orders “Do'stlik” (Friendship, 1995) and “Buyuk xizmatlari uchun” (For Outstanding Merit, 1998); the second was given for his contribution to the friendship between the Uzbek and Kyrgyz peoples and on his 70th birthday.

In May 2008 Aitmatov was being treated in a hospital in Nuremberg, Germany, where he died on 10 June. On 14 June he was buried at the Ata-Beyit memorial complex near Bishkek, and the day of his funeral was declared a day of mourning in Kyrgyzstan. In 2018 his 90th anniversary was marked in Uzbekistan under a resolution of the President, which provided for a memorial book, “Chingiz Aitmatov and Uzbekistan”, a documentary film and naming a street in Tashkent after him; that year a street in the capital was renamed after him. In 2023, for his 95th anniversary, the O'zbekiston publishing house issued a ten-volume edition of his works in Uzbek. His books have been translated into more than 170 languages.