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DOI: 10.24412/2470-1262-2023-1-28-34 УДК (UDC) 821.161.1
Zhainagul S. Beisenova, L.N. Gumilyov Eurasian National University,
Astana, Kazakhstan Saule A. Seralimova, L.N. Gumilyov Eurasian National University,
Astana, Kazakhstan Elmira A. Abdrakhmanova, L.N. Gumilyov Eurasian National University,
Astana, Kazakhstan
БейсеноваЖайнагуль С Евразийский национальный университет имени Л.Н.Гумилёва, Астана, Казахстан Сералимова Сауле. А., Ев зи ки н ци н льны университет имени Л.Н.Гумилёва, Астана, Казахстан Абдрахманова Эльмира А. Ев зи ки н ци н льны университет имени Л.Н.Гум илёва Астана, Казахстан
For citation: Beisenova Zhainagul S., Seralimova Saule A.,
Abdrakhmanova Elmira A., (2023). About Genre Diversity in Modern Kazakh Literature. Cross-Cultural Studies: Education and Science, Vol. 8, Issue 1 (2023), pp. 28-34 (in USA)
Manuscript received 11/02/2023 Accepted for publication: 26/03/2023 The author has read and approved the final manuscript.
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ABOUT GENRE DIVERSITY IN MODERN KAZAKH LITERATURE
О ЖАНРОВОМ МНОГООБРАЗИИ В СОВРЕМЕННОЙ КАЗАХСКОЙ ЛИТЕРАТУРЕ
Abstract:
This article is devoted to issues of the genre - as one of the most pressing and most debatable problems today. The purpose of this article is to characterize the genre of historical novel and the genre of essays in Kazakh literary criticism, as well as to provide information
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about representatives of these genres: Ilyas Esenberlin and Bakhyt Kairbekov. Issues of diversity and changes in genres in literature are very relevant and require further study. This will identify important patterns of their development, establish relations between them, determine the specifics of their kinds, and also find which of the genres have outlived their age, and which are still quite viable and meet the spirit of the times. The question of continuity in the development of genres, of historically repeated signs found in the variety of individual genres, in the history of literary criticism is most deeply posed by scientists who have studied literature in close connection with social life.
Keywords: genre, literary criticism, essay, Kazakh literature, historical novel
Introduction.
The main direction in literary criticism is to determine the features of the genre. Some types of genres exist for a long period during the development of literature (for example, fables), and some are inherent only in a certain era. And also, genres are both universal and limited by certain properties. A feature of the genre is that various processes in it interact with each other.
The genre, having gone through complex development processes, aroused great interest of various scientific schools, which gave rise to many opinions, views and hypotheses. Bulgarian scientist Ts. Todorov writes: "The features of the genre change during certain periods, taking numerous additional properties. However, these properties are not the main features. Therefore, when determining the genre of the work, they do not have tangible effects. For this reason, the same work during different periods of the development of literature can be attributed to different genres. In such a situation, an important role is played by what features of the work prevail "[1]. The first monumental work on the formation of the genre in Kazakh literature belongs to the scientist R. Nurgali. He defined the concept of genre in Kazakh literature. In this book, developing a critical understanding of the genre, he presents the stages of development of the Kazakh dramatic genre, social and household stories, the heroes of which are ordinary residents of the village in the early years of the formation of Soviet power. The scientist describes the remnants of the Kazakhs' past as polygamy, kalym, slavery, illiteracy. He addresses the topic of oral folk art. The scientist believes that "today there are different schools in the definition of the genus and type of literature, each of which offers its own point of view" [2]. This phenomenon is not accidental, since the laws of the literary process interact in the genre, for example, content and form, author's plan and literary processes, the "typological" meaning of the genre and its specific types.
Kazakh folklore is unique, it includes over forty genre varieties, a significant part of which is characteristic only of Kazakh oral folk art. It is inexhaustible: there are not only heroic tales, lyrical and epic poems, legends, legends, ditties, love and ritual songs, philosophical reflections, initiations, instructive tales, but also witty sayings, riddles, aphorisms, proverbs, farewell, lullabies and funeral tunes, conspiracies and spells that give a complete idea of the folk being, the people's world understanding of the Kazakhs. The Kazakh people in legends, fairy tales, and legends in other genres of oral folk art teach and educate people only good, best, positive qualities.
Kazakh novel is the final genre of development of Kazakh literature. This confirms the artistic and theoretical experience of 20 years. This is evidenced by the experience of world literature mastered by Kazakh writers, which led to the acquisition by Kazakh literature of its place in the world literary process. Kazakh prose of 20 years is historically deterministic, is in living connection with both the previous literary process and its folklore heritage [3].
Literature review
A specific genre analysis of literary works cannot be conducted without theoretical knowledge. The study was based on the works of prominent literary scholars such as A. Baytursynuly,
M.Auezov, K.Zhumaliev, Z.Akhmetov, Z.Kabdolov, S.Aleukenov, S.Kirabayev, T. Kakishev, R. Berdibaev, M. Myrzakhmetov, T. Nurtazin, A. Marghulan, A.Nurkatov, R. Nurgali, S.Kaskabasov, S.Negimov, A.Espenbetov, B.Abdigaziuly, S.Ashimbayev, M.Magauin, M.Alimbayev, B.Gabdullin.
At the beginning of its formation, the historical novel has already caused numerous controversies. While most prominent literary critics of that era attributed the appearance of the historical novel to an innovative, original phenomenon, French classicists opposed this trend, arguing that a writer can truthfully depict only the reality he witnessed. Researchers of historical romance S. M. Petrov, A. I. Pautkin, L. P. Alexandrov, G. Lenobl, I. P. Varfolomeev, A. G. Bakanov and others adhere to a different point of view, believing that a historical novel is a fully formed genre of fiction. Subsequently, a discussion unfolds in literary circles about the need to separate a historical novel into a separate genre.
The word "essay" has its roots in the Latin "exagium" - "weighing", and the founder of the genre is considered to be the French writer Michel Montaigne, who published the book "Les essais" - "Experiments" during the Renaissance. It was the experience of research, formation and development of thought. The poet and novelist M. Shahinyan defines the essay as an active journey of the writer into the world of reality, with its nature, people, plans, victories and morality. She believes that the images and pictures of the essay are purely concrete, documentary, but the thought and the entire logical apparatus are generalized and aimed at a practical conclusion, designed for a wide field of action. In contrast to the story, where people and positions are invented with an approximation to the truth - the essay represents people and positions that are not invented, if the story conveys morality in the image itself, in the course of its fate, then the essay exposes the conclusion, throws it to the reader and deduces the thought from the fact. M. Bakhtin believes that any genre form, including essays, is determined by the theme of the created work, the author's worldview and world outlook [4]. Literary critic M. Epstein calls the essay a supra-genre system that includes philosophical, historical, critical, biographical, autobiographical and journalistic writings. He also claims that the author himself is the main thinking unit of essayistics [5]. As many researchers have noted, new genres arise when there is a need to rethink reality, which encourage us to address the human problem, analyze what is happening in society.
Materials and Methods
The methodology is dictated by the specifics of the subject of our research and involves the synthesis of two approaches: motivic and comparative, taking into account the historical-literary and structural-semantic aspects of the study of a literary text. The use of the biographical method permitted us to analyze and investigate the problem under study. The comparative-historical method allowed us to identify and compare the features of literary genres and determine the trends of their further development. The structural-semantic method contributed to the identification of the interrelationships of the compositional structure and content, and also allowed the most complete disclosure of the contradictory tendencies of the artistic image.
Results and Discussion
Over the years of independence of our country, Kazakh prose has risen to a new stage of its development. During the period of independence, Kazakh writers, freeing themselves from totalitarian vice, headed for expanding the scale of the work. Over the years, the range of the leading genre of prose - the novel - has expanded. Independence introduced freedom of speech to writers. Freedom of speech made it possible for Kazakh writers to once again look at such topics that in the Soviet period they could not freely express and widely cover. Therefore, during the period of independence, works about Kazakh history were written in large numbers, before that they were assessed as lopsided [5].
The historical novel today belongs to the most popular literary genres. Through reading a historical novel, we get acquainted with the history of the past, with the events of long-gone days. The artistic picture of the past primarily reflects the spiritual experience, the moral potential of a contemporary. The writer, exploring history, pushes back on the problems of the present day and tries to find more optimal ways to solve them. And this explains the constant interest in the genre of historical novel.
The genre of historical novel in literature of the 70-90s of the XX and the first quarter of the XXI century is a unique phenomenon. One of its features is the desire of writers for an epic depiction of historical events. Considering the diversity of style orientation, it is necessary to revise the established canons and develop new standards in their study [6].
A historical novel is a work of fiction, so historical truth here becomes artistic truth. It is important to know that artistic truth is different from life truth, how the truth of art differs from the truth of life. But artistic truth is created on the basis of reality, where facts play a fundamental role. And an indicator of poetic perfection is the interaction of historical truth and author's fantasy.
Ilyas Esenberlin... This name is on a par with the giants of creative thought of Kazakh literature and culture. He can rightfully be considered the founder of the historical novel genre in Kazakh literature. It looks not very noticeable, modest. Always polite in communication, he was an outstanding son of the Kazakh people, an eyewitness to the difficult trials and tragic fractures of the twentieth century, who conveyed the truth to this day. Until the recent past, many European scientists and writers considered the civilization of nomads almost a civilization of savages and barbarians. Having familiarized themselves with the works of Kazakh writers, primarily with I. Esenberlin, many of them revised their views. The writer tore off the labels of historians of stagnant years, deeply comprehending the path traveled by the nomads and, comprehending it in a new way, made his important creative contribution to the genre of historical novel. In his works, he brilliantly showed the multi-polarity and multi-vector foreign policy of the Kazakh khans for many centuries. His literary legacy will not lose its relevance as long as there is a great steppe. Historian E. Bekmakhanov, who studied the national liberation struggle led by Khan Kene against the tsarist autocracy, which was then a closed topic for historians, was sentenced to 25 years in prison in the early 50s. What courage you need to have in order not to be afraid to take up such a topic again. In his diary, Ilyas Esenberlin wrote: "Although I have already had many years, I have not yet accepted my main book. I thought of her for a long time. And there was something to think about, because I wanted to create not a novel, but an epic. And this epic should cover not one historical era, but all the main, so to speak creative stages of our history from the Middle Ages to the present... I was preparing to write such a book for a very long time, almost twenty years, only after an internal awareness of the problem I was able to begin this important topic"[7].
The trilogy "Nomads" was first published in Russian in 1978 by the Moscow publishing house "Soviet Writer" in a hundred thousand copies. The translator of the book was a great friend of Kazakh literature Maurice Simashko, and the preface was written by academician Alkey Margulan - an outstanding historian, archaeologist, and ethnographer. The publication of "Nomads" was a truly epoch-making event for Kazakhstan. Ilyas Esenberlin's books were in demand by readers at the time of their appearance, many years ago, and today. The reason here is simple: despite the prohibitions and libel, he was the first to show his reader a unique and reliable picture of the complete drama of the seven-century history of the people. I. Esenberlin today remains not only the first, but also the largest historical writer in Kazakhstan. He was more worried than others about the fate of the cities erased from the face of the earth. He managed to solve many secrets in the past of the Great Steppe and leave the chronology of events of several centuries, highlighting the most iconic figures [8]. In modern Kazakh literary studies, essay studies occupy an important place among other literary genres, representing one of the new possible ways of comprehension and cognition of being. The increased attention of modern literary criticism to "borderline" genres: biographies, memoirs, diaries, essays is explained by the processes of transformation of the genre system occurring in the conditions of the crisis of artistic consciousness at the turn of the XX-XXI centuries. An essay is a special genre of literature that combines the features of the writer's artistic and theoretical creativity. The essay has a two-level semantic structure: the artist's view into himself and the artist's view of the beautiful, which formulates the author's aesthetics. This is made possible by the uniqueness of the writer relative to the rest of the world. The essay is a genre characterized by duality at different levels: text and context, text and metatext, author and reader, "pure author" and "human author". Essayism is a genre of modern philosophizing, denoting a clearly expressed aesthetic character of speculative and artistic thinking. Essayism is also understood as a set of philosophical and artistic works in the field of thought [9] Essayistic, being a borderline literary field, serves as a field of intersection of the main features of various genres and speech strategies. The essay as a form combines such specific features that are inaccessible to any other genre, and bring it closer to the philosophical form, as: imagery, striving for mental generalization, reflexivity, descriptiveness, proximity to free presentation. Essayism attracts precisely by the openness of the feelings and thoughts of the author, who shares with the reader the innermost, experienced, thought-out. From the above, one of the important principles of Essayism can be revealed - this is the desire to convey the feeling that lives in the author and determines his attitude to what he saw. Thus, it can be concluded that the essay is a set of ethical and moral laws, which is very important in dialogue with other authors and cultures. In this context, the creativity of the outstanding Kazakh poet and essayist Bakhyt Kairbekov is of great scientific interest. Bakhyt Gafuovich Kairbekov is a famous Kazakh poet, essayist, translator, film director and screenwriter. He was born in Almaty, graduated from the Gorky Literary Institute and the Higher Courses of Screenwriters and Directors at the USSR State Cinema. B. Kairbekov combines various types of creative activities and uses different genre forms in his works. A variety of genres, an emotional-biographical fusion of translations, parables, interviews, diary fragments are characteristics of the poet's creativity and represent a kind of emotional "background" that contributes to a deeper insight into the content of texts, understanding the specifics of temporal and spatial relations [10]. The genre of the essay is one of the significant signs of the originality of his works. The essay for B. Kairbekov becomes a more "personal" genre. In it, events are not only reproduced, but also serve as an occasion for author's reflections, generalizations, and problem statements. The author's "I" of the essay carries a deep content, performs a great psychological load,
determines the style and tone of the creativity. Thus, essay writings become for the author one of the forms of cognition of the surrounding reality. The main thing for him is the love of his native land and expanses. Through his essays, B. Kairbekov enters into a dialogue with the reader and becomes closer to him. Through his books, reader involuntarily immerses himself in the history of the nomadic people, travels through the mountains and steppes, feels harmony with nature and the cosmos. The essay allows the reader to realize the individuality of the author, to understand his spiritual world and state more deeply, and thereby performs an important communicative task. Essayistic acts for the writer as a kind of creative laboratory and a deep personal confession.
Conclusion
The study of the genre diversity and its classification is an important issue of modern literary studies. The significance of such genres as historical novel and the genre of essays in literary criticism was determined. In the process of our work, we made an attempt to analyze the critical works of both Kazakh and foreign literary scholars in the context of genre diversity in Kazakh fiction.
The phenomenon of the genre in Kazakh literature is wide and diverse. Its development was carried out under the influence of world literature. In parallel, modern genres are developing as biographies, memoirs, essays and the transformation of the modern genre system is taking place.
References:
1. Bakhtin M.M. Voprosy literatury i estetiki. Issledovaniya raznykh let. M.: Khudozh. lit.. 1975. p.12
2. Nurgaliyev R. Traditsii i sovremennyy literaturnyy protsess: Monografiya / Rymgali Nurgaliyev. - Alma-Ata: Zhazushy. 1986. p.438
3. Ismakova A.S Poetika kazakhskoy khudozhestvennoy prozy nachala KhKh veka (tematika. zhanr. stil) : avtoreferat dissertatsii doktora filologicheskikh nauk : 10.01.02.- Almaty. 1998. p.60
4. Bakhtin M.M. The problem of content. material and form in literary art..Kiev. Next. 1994.p.233
5. Epstein M.N. At the crossroads of image and concept (essayism in the culture of modern times). M.. Soviet Writer.1989. pp. 334-380
6. Beysembiyev K. Ocherki istorii obshchestvenno-politicheskoy i filosofskoy mysli Kazakhstana. Alma-Ata: Kazakhstan. 1976.p. 428
7. Bakanov A. Sovetskiy istoricheskiy roman. Kiyev. 1989. p.184
8. Berdibayev R. Ot legendy k romanu. Stati i issledovaniyana kaz. yaz.). Alma-Ata: Zhazushy. 1976. p.224
9. https://iphlib.ru/library/collection/newphilenc/document/HASH01e1ff027f5920f4c8bae3 e1
10. Salkhanova Zh.Kh. Genre of essays in the works of Bakhyt Kairbekov. Bulletin of KazNU. 2015
Information about the Authors:
Zhainagul S. Beisenova (Astana, Kazakhstan) - Doctor of Philology, Professor of the Department of Russian philology of L.N. Gumilyov Eurasian National University http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7022-4956; SCOPUS Author ID: 565377108500; E-mail: [email protected],
Saule A. Seralimova (Astana, Kazakhstan) - doctoral student of L.N. Gumilyov Eurasian National University
http://orcid.org/ 0000-0002-2114-894X E-mail: [email protected], ORCID ID: 0000-0001-7022-4956
Elmira A. Abdrakhmanova (Astana, Kazakhstan) - doctoral student of L.N. Gumilyov Eurasian National University, E-mail: [email protected]
Acknowledgments: I express my deep gratitude to my colleagues for their support during the writing of the article, and for giving me invaluable advice.
Contribution of Authors: Solely the authors contributed to this work
