A boy of thirteen rides home across the steppe from a Moslem religious school, impatient, spurring ahead of his escort to shorten the last day of the journey. Within a few pages he is standing in a crowd watching his father have a man hanged from a camel, and then, because the man is slow to die and the crowd has begun to murmur, ordering the body carried to the top of a cliff and thrown off it. The boy presses his hands over his eyes and sinks to the ground. The father is Kunanbai, the aga-sultan — the tsar's appointed head of the clan. The boy is Abai Kunanbayev, who will become the founder of written Kazakh literature.
That is the second chapter of this novel, and it establishes at once what kind of book it is. Auezov is not writing a life of a poet. He is writing about a society and its law, and about a child who has to learn the law from the man who administers it. The scene is not there to make Kunanbai a monster. It is there because the execution of Kodar for a crime the reader is never allowed to be sure he committed is how the steppe settled such things, and because Abai's education begins with watching it.
Abai is the one indisputably major novel in this whole export series, and it deserves to be read for itself before it is read as anything else.
Mukhtar Auezov (1897–1961) wrote about his own family. The jacket of this volume says so without drawing attention to it: Auezov "himself came from the Kunanbai clan", and drew on "facts, recollections, and legends about Abai, treasured by the family". The novelist is writing the founding figure of his national literature, and writing him from inside the household that produced him. That is an unusual position for a novelist to occupy, and it accounts for much of what is best in the book — the absolute sureness about how a aul works, who eats where, who speaks first, what a woman may say and to whom — and for one of its difficulties, which is that a family chronicle written by a descendant has a direction it wants events to take.
Abai Kunanbayev (1845–1904) is not a figure most English readers will have met. He wrote the first body of poetry in Kazakh that was meant to be read rather than sung, translated Pushkin and Lermontov into Kazakh, and argued for the education of a nomadic people in terms that made him enemies among his own. Auezov's novel follows him from that ride home to the end of his life, and in the process gives the most detailed account in any language of how the Kazakh steppe lived in the nineteenth century: the migrations, the feud, the bride-price, the horse-racing, the poetry contests, the slow encroachment of Russian administration.
Now the edition, which the reader should be told about plainly. The title page of this volume reads ABAI (Abridged), and that word is doing a great deal of work. What Auezov wrote is a very long novel in four books. What is printed here is a condensation, made for the export market, and the volume nowhere states what has been cut, by whom, or on what principle. A reader who finishes it will not know whether the parts that seem to move quickly do so because Auezov wrote them that way or because a hand in Moscow shortened them. This is the first thing an honest edition owes its reader and the 1975 volume does not supply it.
Nor does it name the translator. The copyright page credits the illustrator, Y. Sidorkin, and records "© Translated into English. Progress Publishers 1975" — a corporate copyright with no person attached. Someone turned a Kazakh novel, probably through Russian, into the serviceable and occasionally very fine English printed here, and the house that published it did not think the fact worth a line.
The volume opens with a foreword by Abdizhamil Nurpeisov, himself a Kazakh novelist and a younger contemporary. It is a warm and genuinely affecting piece of writing. Nurpeisov remembers the young writers coming back from the war "in worn army coats saturated with the smell of gunpowder smoke", all of them "madly in love with Auezov"; he remembers the older man's kindness to beginners, how "his hands trembled when he took up someone's manuscript", how he would liken the young to "new grass, or a breath of fresh mountain wind". He describes coming into the house and finding Auezov dictating a passage of Abai through a half-open study door. As a portrait of a man by someone who loved him it is worth having.
As an introduction to the book it is a remarkable performance, because of what is not in it.
There is no date of composition. There is no account of the circumstances in which a Kazakh national epic was written and published. There is no mention of the doctrine under which all Soviet fiction was then produced, no mention of the Writers' Union, no mention of any difficulty of any kind. Auezov, in this telling, simply was: "From the outset he was a full-fledged writer," and his gifts unfolded without interruption, admired by the young, honoured by the state, and then dead.
But it would be wrong to say the foreword has no politics in it, and the way it has them is more instructive than silence would have been. Nurpeisov turns to the question of Russia and the steppe, and he does not duck it. He quotes a living Kazakh poet, Olzhas Suleimenov, saying that Kazakhstan was "a huge hard-labour camp floating on the map of the Russian Empire" — which is about as hard a sentence about Russian rule as could be printed in Moscow in 1975.
Then watch what happens to it. The very next clause begins "even in those days progressive Russian intellectuals were paving paths of friendship into these outlying steppes", and the labour camp dissolves into a procession of exiles: Dostoyevsky; the Marxists; "a continuous stream of sick and enfeebled prisoners — victims of the tsarist arbitrariness — came plodding to Kazakhstan from the heart of Russia." The Kazakhs, Nurpeisov writes, "did not shun these emaciated, bearded strangers"; the herdsmen called Taras Shevchenko akyn tarasi, a poet of justice; Chokan Valikhanov corresponded with Dostoyevsky, who urged him to be "the enlightened intercessor for his people"; and Y. P. Mikhaelis, exiled for his politics, became Abai's close friend and put him on to the magazine Sovremennik.
Every word of that is true and some of it is moving — and it converts an indictment of an empire into a story about friendship between peoples, in a single sentence, by changing the subject from the state to the exiles the state had banished. This is the characteristic Soviet operation on the national question, performed here with real literary skill. The sharp quotation is not suppressed. It is printed, and then absorbed.
So the foreword is not a failure of nerve. It is the form working as designed. A commissioned foreword in an export edition exists to place the author safely: to establish that he is a classic, that his classic status is uncontested, and that there is therefore nothing to discuss. Warmth is the most efficient way of achieving this, and so is generosity toward the sharpest thing your opponent might say.
The same instinct governs the series. This volume belongs to the Progress Soviet Authors Library, launched in 1973, and the jacket states its purpose: for the first time "the foreign reader will have an opportunity to gain a comprehensive picture of Soviet literature over the last fifty years in its many forms". Fifty years, from 1923 — which is to say a picture beginning conveniently after the revolutionary decade and its arguments, and running through a period whose literary history is, to put it at its mildest, not a story of uninterrupted flourishing. A canon is made by what it leaves out, and this one was assembled by a house that could not name the principle of exclusion.
And the Lenin Prize, which the jacket announces, belongs to the same apparatus. A state literary prize is editorial control applied after publication: it fixes the meaning of a book by declaring which reading of it is the honoured one. Abai was awarded the highest such prize the Soviet Union had. It is worth asking what the prize was for.
It is a better book than its packaging.
Auezov's real subject is authority, and he is unusually clear-eyed about it. Kunanbai is the most interesting character in the novel, and he is not a villain of the kind a didactic novel would have produced. He is intelligent, devout, physically brave, genuinely persuaded that what he does is justice, and prepared to be cruel in public precisely because the crowd's sympathy for the victim is itself a threat to the order he maintains. Auezov gives him the scene at the cliff and then declines to editorialise. The horror is left to work on the reader through Abai's hands over his eyes.
The other great strength is the writing itself, which the English reader should be warned is better than the packaging suggests. Auezov can do the set piece — the migration, the horse race, the funeral feast — but he is at his best on small human weather. Here is Abai, sixteen and in love, seeing Togzhan in her father's yurta:
Besides Suyundik, his wife and his two sons, Adilbek and Asilbek, there was one other creature there — the loveliness of spring itself. She was Togzhan, the daughter of Suyundik. She kept coming in and out from the Small Yurta of her mother, Suyundik's younger wife. The sholpy in her hair tinkled at every movement.
The tinkling hair ornament doing the work of the whole encounter, because the boy cannot look directly and can only hear her moving: that is a real novelist's instinct, and the book is full of it.
The writing about the steppe is the other great strength, and it is not decorative. Auezov knows that a migration is an economic event, that a feud is about grazing, that a poetry contest is a way of conducting a quarrel by other means. The texture of the book is thick with the specific — the shokpar, the soeel, the yurtas set in their order of precedence — and none of it is exotic furniture. It is how the society reproduced itself.
Where the novel is weaker is where it has to arrive somewhere. Abai's development has a destination fixed in advance: enlightenment, learning, the Russian connection as the road out of backwardness. That reading of Abai is not an invention of the Soviet period — he did translate Pushkin, he did argue for schooling — but in this novel it acquires the shape of an inevitability, and characters begin to be positioned according to whether they are ahead of or behind the movement of history. The feudal order is doomed; the reader always knows it; and the effect is to flatten some of the opposition into obstacle. It is the standard cost of the method, and Abai pays less of it than almost any other novel in this series, but it pays some.
Here is the question this edition invites and cannot ask itself.
The doctrine governing a book like Abai was that Soviet culture should be socialist in content and national in form. The formula is usually treated as a licence, and on paper it is one: it says that a Kazakh novel may be Kazakh. What it also says, in the same breath, is that the Kazakh part is form. The content comes from elsewhere. A national literature is granted the right to its own materials, its own landscape and its own language, on condition that what those materials are made to mean is settled centrally.
Abai is the best possible case for the doctrine and it still shows the seam. Auezov was given resources no Kazakh writer had ever had — an audience, an academy, translation into the language of international circulation, a national epic commissioned in effect from his own family history — and he used them to produce something that will outlast the state that paid for it. That is a real achievement of Soviet cultural policy and it should be said plainly, because the alternative account, in which nothing good came of any of it, is false and the books are there to prove it false.
But the condition was real too. A novel about a nineteenth-century Kazakh enlightener whose road leads towards Russia is a novel that can be honoured. The reading of Abai that the prize fixed is the one in which the Kazakh past is a preparation. What could not be written, under the same dispensation, was the account in which the encroachment of Russian administration on the steppe was a conquest, or in which the destruction of nomadic society had a twentieth-century sequel. Auezov lived through that sequel: the settlement of the Kazakh nomads at the end of the 1920s and the famine that followed it killed a catastrophic proportion of his people. It is not in this book, and it could not have been. A national literature whose content is set elsewhere cannot write its own worst decade.
Then ask whether the state kept its own bargain. It did not, and the evidence is in this volume's own foreword — not in what it says, but in who wrote it.
Twelve years after this edition appeared, in the winter of 1986, Kazakhs demonstrated in Alma-Ata against Moscow's appointment of a Russian to head their republic. It was among the first open nationalist protests of the Gorbachev period, and the Soviet press spent the following months on the problem of "nationalistic moods" in the Kazakh-language press — attacking, among other things, a newspaper item about a kindergarten where instruction would be in Kazakh "as the children themselves and their parents wanted", and asking whether it was "necessary to publish such material propagating national specificity even from kindergarten age". In Pravda of 5 March 1987 a Kazakh writer was produced to strike the balance. The two languages, he explained, were like "two breasts of a common mother", both needed to sustain a healthy infant. International Viewpoint, reporting the campaign that spring, noted the obvious thing about the metaphor: he did not suggest that Russian infants needed Kazakh, and Russian children were certainly not losing their language.
The writer was Abdizhamil Nurpeisov, who wrote the foreword to this book.
There is no reason to think worse of him for it than of anyone else asked to perform that function, and the point is not personal. It is that the same man, in the same official capacity, introduces the Kazakh national epic to foreign readers in 1975 and manages Kazakh national feeling for domestic ones in 1987 — and that the second task follows from the first. "National in form" produced both. The doctrine that let Auezov write Abai is the doctrine that required somebody to explain, when Kazakhs demonstrated, that a mother has two breasts.
Not the framework. The framework collapsed, and when it did, the national feeling it had spent sixty years managing turned out to have been managed rather than dissolved.
What survives is the writing, and specifically Auezov's refusal to simplify the world he came from. The steppe in this novel is not a backwardness waiting to be relieved. It is a complete society with its own law, its own poetry, its own cruelty and its own means of arguing with itself, and Auezov renders it with the authority of someone describing his own relatives. A reader who comes to this book for the politics will find them, and they are the politics of 1949 and 1959 and 1975. A reader who comes to it for the thing it actually is — the first great novel written in Kazakh, by a man writing his own great-grandfather's world — will find that it is still there, under the abridgement and the prize and the foreword, doing what it was built to do.
Read it for the boy on the cliff-top with his hands over his eyes. Everything the century afterwards did to Kazakh literature, including the honours, is downstream of the question that scene asks: what does it cost to be educated by the people who hold power over you?