Cengiz Aytmatov

Chinghiz Aitmatov was born on 12 December 1928 in the village of Sheker, in the Talas valley of Kyrgyzstan. His father, Torekul Aitmatov, was one of the first Kyrgyz communists and a party official; his mother, Nagima, was of Tatar origin. Part of his childhood was spent in Moscow, where his father was studying. In 1937 his father was arrested as an “enemy of the people” and shot in 1938. The family returned to the village, and during the war years, at barely fourteen, the boy worked as a clerk at the village soviet. In 1946 he began training as a veterinarian, graduated from the agricultural institute in Frunze in 1953 and worked for a time as a livestock specialist. His first stories appeared in 1952. Between 1956 and 1958 he studied at the Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow; Jamila, which came out of those years, made his name overnight. From 1959 he served as Pravda's correspondent in Kyrgyzstan. In 1963 a volume gathering his tales of the mountains and the steppe brought him the Lenin Prize; Mother Earth appeared the same year. With The White Ship (1970) he brought to maturity a manner of telling in which legend and reality are woven into one another. In The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years (1980) he tied the legend of the mankurt, the slave whose memory has been erased, to the forgetfulness of his own age. At the end of the eighties he became one of Gorbachev's advisers, and later served as ambassador in Luxembourg and Brussels. He wrote in both Kyrgyz and Russian and often translated himself. He carried the legends, laments and animal tales of the oral tradition into the modern novel, turning an ordinary life on the steppe into a universal question of conscience. He died in Nuremberg on 10 June 2008 and was buried at the Ata-Beyit cemetery, which he had helped to found and where his father's remains lie.