Aqyn agha? Abai Zholy as socialist realism and as literary history Gabriel McGuire School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Nazarbayev University, Kabanbai Batyr 53, Astana, Kazakhstan ARTICLE INFO Article history: Received 10 December 2017 Accepted 10 December 2017 Available online 21 December 2017 Keywords: Kazakh literary history socialist realism oral literature Abai Zholy Zar Zaman A B ST R AC T In Mukhtar Auezov’s 1942 novel Abai Zholy, socialism is an end anticipated not just by history but more specifically by Kazakh literary history. In his earlier scholarly writings, Auezov had presented Abai as a transformational figure in the emergence of written Kazakh liter- ature. In the novel, Abai becomes not only a literary innovator but also a political reformist: Auezov’s Abai is horrified by the harsh and feudalistic behavior of his father Qunanbai, a wealthy local leader, and finds companionship and inspiration in his encounters with a series of famous 19th century Kazakh aqyns (bards). Auezov thus used Abai Zholy to argue that Kazakh folk literature had always been animated by a spirit of social critique which, in its laments and desires, had anticipated the Soviet world. This paper compares these aqyns’ depiction in the novel first with Auezov’s earlier scholarship on the 19th century and second with the content of the aqyns’ own surviving works. These ideas reflected both contem- poraneous shifts in Soviet nationalities policy and the influence of socialist realist literary models, which commonly staged both literary history and generational conflicts as alle- gories of political change. Copyright © 2018, Asia-Pacific Research Center, Hanyang University. Production and hosting by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). 1. Introduction Mukhtar Auezov’s Abai Zholy is literary history written as revolutionary epic. 1 In the novel, Auezov fused his en- during preoccupation with Kazakh literary history with his specific interest in the 19th century Kazakh essayist and poet Abai Qunanbaiuly to create a text hailed as a classic of so- cialist realism. Auezov’s interest in Abai dated to his earliest years: in a 1918 essay entitled “Abai, his works and craft,” he made expansive claims for Abai’s social and literary sig- nificance. For earlier poets, he wrote, verbal dexterity had been not an art but only a device to gain food and shelter, and so “the aqyn and the beggar had gone hand in hand;” Abai was the first to use poetry “to depict the human char- acter, to tell its flaws, and show the path to humanism” (1918/2014, p. 42). In later works, Auezov continued to present Abai as transformational in his understanding of the link between verbal art and humanism, but he replaced the harsh evaluation of earlier aqyns with sophisticated explo- rations of the genres and themes of Kazakh oral literature. Auezov’s 1927/2014 Adebiet Tarikhy (History of Literature)—a foundational attempt to organize Kazakh oral literature into a history of genres—contained detailed descriptions of earlier aqyns along with transcriptions and analyses of their works. In his novel, Auezov repeatedly shows the young Abai meeting with Kazakh aqyns who are fictionalized versions School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Nazarbayev University, Kabanbai Batyr 53, Astana, Kazakhstan. E-mail address: gvmcguire@gmail.com. 1 Kazakh words are Romanized in accordance with the ALA-LC stan- dard (but without the use of diacritics) except where other spellings have already become standard in English. All quotations of Kazakh texts are orig- inal translations by the author. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.euras.2017.12.001 1879-3665/ Copyright © 2018, Asia-Pacific Research Center, Hanyang University. Production and hosting by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Journal of Eurasian Studies 9 (2018) 2–11 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Eurasian Studies journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/euras