Literature from Kyrgyzstan: Jamila by Chinghiz Aitmatov

 

I disagree with Louis Aragon that Jamila, the debut novel of the Kyrgyz author Jamila is the ´most beautiful love story in the world literature´. There are certainly, many elements of the story, set during the WWII, in the 1940s, that may be considered beautiful, but the story in itself is rather a literary account of love, among many others.

The story teller is Seit, nowadays an artist, once a young man coming-of-age. His brother, Jamila´s husband, is on the front. A marriage without love that Jamila will abandon as she ran away with Daniyar, the man she deeply fell in love with. Seit is collecting the story from the maze of his memory, from the standpoint of a child, which explains the tender, delicate tone of the story. He is observing with pure children eyes the relationship between the two, observing feelings and reaction between the two he is not still able to translate into the socially codified language.

The novel was published in Russian in 1958 and made famous in translation into French by the above mentioned Aragon, familiar with the Russian/Soviet literature, not only through his wife, the Russian-born Elsa Triolet. The story was very popular in the former communist Germany, being included on the list of the compulsory school readings.

I am relatively familiar with the literature produced during the Soviet times, but Jamila is different as it is more focused on creating a story than displaying a social reality, that game of contrasts of ´before´ and ´after´ the creation of the Soviet Union and the dynamics of the social relations. However, there are some noticeable social shifts: the traditional family relationships are manifested in the relationship between Jamila and her mother-in-law, the interactions between people in the village and even their way of life. It will take some time to completely uproot the old ways, and after the war this was done particularly through the transfer of population which mixed and changed the ethnic distribution in the various republics incorporated into the giant Soviet Union.

After the local and international success with Jamila, Aitmatov had a further bright literary career, complimented by seamless political achievements. He was an adviser to Gorbachev, the last president of the Soviet Union, the last USSR ambassador in Luxemburg and after the independence of Kyrgyzstan, Bishkek´s diplomatic representative to the EU, NATO and Benelux, among others.

I had access to Jamila in the audiobook version, based on a translation from Russian into German by Gisela Drohla. 

I would love to have more time to come back to some old Soviet-based authors and explore different angles and identities. Lacking any clear schedule in this respect and without adequate Russian language skills to read in the original language, I can only rely to some random discoveries at my local libraries, remnants of the GDR´s bibliographies or some enthusiastic translations into French by unabated socialist authors, like Aragon. As for now, I am glad to add to my virtual collection of literary travels an author from Kyrgyzstan.