RUSSIA: Fighting Commonly Accepted Nonsense

MOSCOW, (Russian Profile), June 12, 2008: By Dmitry Babich Russia Profile In Memoriam Chingiz Aitmatov There is something symbolic in the recent chain of deaths of the key figures of the 1980s, the people whose lives and work made Russia’s democratization possible. Boris Yeltsin and the famous cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, the free philosopher Georgy Gachev and now Chingiz Aitmatov – their deaths followed each other in a relatively short period of the years 2007-2008, as if sending Russia a signal from the glorious and idealistic epoch of the 1960s, when all of these great men started their careers. “I often ask myself this question: how would you behave during a war – during an attack or under torture? Wouldn’t you get cold feet? Wouldn’t you surrender?” wrote in his recently published diaries Georgy Gachev, Aitmatov’s peer and friend, and an author of brilliant examinations of Aitmatov’s books. Describing a common situation of the epoch – very often the same people who were heroes during the Great Patriotic War did not dare to say a word that could make the self-assured and unforgiving Soviet bureaucrats angry – Gachev comes to a conclusion which sums up his – and Aitmatov’s – creative achievement: “Courage in pursuing and voicing your own thought, courage in not serving the commonly accepted nonsense, even when the so-called community – both scientific and artistic – requires from you loyal service to this nonsense. This was the challenge our generation had to face, on which it could test itself. We had to be up to the challenge of understanding the world anew.” Like Gachev, Aitmatov was too young to participate in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945. But, born in 1928, he was 25 when Joseph Stalin died. Thus, he was mature enough to see for real the inhuman mechanism of totalitarian repression at its early, “advancing” stage. His father, as well as the father of Gachev, perished in Stalin’s labor camps. For the rest of his life, Aitmatov retained a strong feeling of protest against any kind of repression of human freedom. His characters, mostly the “home grown” village philosophers, provincial visionaries, always suffer under pressure from some kind of evil force. This force is technocratic and relies on violence. It wants submission and thoughtless sacrifice from people, but, above all, it wants them to be “normal,” i.e. to accept the commonly accepted nonsense. This evil force is Protean by nature; it cannot be reduced to the communist state alone. In Aitmatov’s last novel “When Mountains Crumble” it reincarnates itself in heartless post-Soviet nouveaux riches and in foreign hunters who come to the Kyrgyz Mountains to chase an aging local panther. Following Gachev’s formula, Aitmatov’s provincial visionaries discover the world for themselves every day, understanding it anew, without clinging to preconceived ideas and commonly held prejudices. In that, Aitmatov was helped by his Central Asian background. Living in a society in which Marxism, Islam and the old feudal or tribal traditions were lumped together by history’s caprice, Aitmatov could take a detached view of Soviet reality, seeing the world anew through the eyes of a sort of a modern Candide, a seemingly simple-minded savage from Voltaire’s famous novel. Yedigey, the main character of Aitmatov’s most famous novel “The Day Lasts Longer than a Hundred Years” is a “naïve” Kyrgyz villager, asking politically-incorrect questions from behind the hump of his camel Karanar. One such question is – why did people at Soviet funerals always speak only about the deceased person’s work? “So they said, denying the obvious: ‘He stepped into immortality’,” Yedigey ponders, and we hear behind these words the voice of Aitmatov himself, with his firm belief that life cannot be reduced to economy. Advocating spiritual elements in life, however, Aitmatov did not get into the trap of religious fundamentalism, remaining an open-minded freethinker until the end of his days. “Having been born into a Muslim surrounding, Aitmatov always spoke about the special role of Christianity in world history and praised the Russian influence in Central Asia as a positive one,” said Andrei Zolotov, Sr., a member of the Russian Union of Writers and a friend of Aitmatov, who took part in preparing Aitmatov’s works for publication. In Aitmatov’s works, written in brilliant Russian language, one can scan the influences of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and other great Russian writers. A tireless educator, in the last years of his life Aitmatov took part in the Russian Award (Russkaya Premiya) project, aimed at supporting the authors writing in Russian in the countries outside Russia, primarily in the former Soviet republics. A diplomat (he worked as the Soviet and, later, Kyrgyz ambassador in the countries of Benelux in the 1990s), a parliamentarian and a secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers, Aitmatov was often very outright in his political statements, which he included in his works. This irritated his critics, who claimed that he was wasting his talent and sacrificing his reputation for dubious causes. But, this was also a part of his life strategy. “He could appear a little too idealistic in his political statements, but when, in a few years, we look at the big picture, we see that he was right,” Zolotov said. “His speech, which tipped the balance in support of Gorbachev’s candidacy at the Soviet presidential election in 1990, was criticized by many for being subservient. Many people did not like Aitmatov’s praise for Gorbachev’s democratic style, his readiness to give floor to opponents. People got used to the freedom of speech so quickly that they did not perceive it as a value; they took it for granted like the oxygen in the air. Now we see that nothing should be taken for granted.” Zolotov added that, while being seemingly open and clear in his journalist writings, Aitmatov always retained a kind of enigmatic veil over the fiction style of his books, like Tolstoy’s War and Peace, requiring multiple readings. An epic writer on the surface, Aitmatov was a poet in style, with his many books bearing poetic titles. It was probably this penchant for the enigmatic and dubious that saved him from the pressures of Soviet officialdom, of which Aitmatov had to be a part in 1970s and 1980s. “He had a unique ability to go against the current while being on the top of the wave,” said Nikolai Paltsev, a philologist currently working at the Center for Cultural Programs at Moscow’s Foreign Languages’ Library. “Being a secretary of the Union of Writers, one could have more opportunities to publish one’s works, but one was also less free in action. Aitmatov managed to be both influential and free.” Chingiz Aimatov will be buried at the Memorial Cemetery in the village of Chon-Aryk, near Bishkek, on June 14. He is survived by his widow Maria, three sons, and a daughter. A national day of mourning of Aitmatov’s death was announced in Kyrgyzstan. © Russia Profile.org 2008