Mother Earth

Aitmatov is an enigma. For a start he is not Russian, but Kirgiz. Yet he has gained distinction through the medium of Russian. He writes not one but two versions of each work: first in Kirgiz, then in Russian, sometimes under a different title and in a different version, in the manner of Conrad, Nabokov and Narayan He is at once both liberal and conservative; he has been embraced by the Soviet establishment from Khrushchov to Brezhnev, Andropov to Gorbachov. Brezhnev, in fact, once set him alongside Gorky, Mayakovsky, Sholokhov and Alexey Tolstoy as essential reading for young people. He has received the supreme accolade of Lenin Prize for Literature (1963) as well as the State Prize (1968). He was a leading figure in the USSR Writer’s Union, he has headed the Kirgiz Filmmakers’ Guild for 25 years, was a member of the parliament and a Party member; he has been a delegate to the last five Party congresses and a Pravda correspondent. He was on the editorial boards of the two leading Soviet literature journals: Novy Mir and Literaturnaya Gazeta, and the editor of Druzhba Narodov. He was admired by liberals for his outspoken, daring, innovatory work, his bitter criticism of Stalinism, his airing of taboo subjects like drug addiction, army deserters, women’s infidelity and national conflicts in erstwhile Islamic communities, his religious sympathies ( Christian of all things), his anti-bureaucracy, his championing of individual and personal values, his defence of non-Russian ethnic culture and traditions, and his semi-independent international peace initiatives (hosting the ‘Issyk-Kul’ discussion forum in his native Kirgizia, with presence of such notables like Arthur Miller, Claude Simon and Sir Peter Ustinov). The eminent Hungarian philosopher and literary critic George…