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Chinghiz Aitmatov (Чингиз Айтматов) (born December 12, 1928) is an author from Sheker, in Kyrgyzstan.
Life
Aitmatov's parents were civil servants in Sheker. The name Chingiz as the same as that of Genghis Khan. In early childhood he wandered as a nomad with his family, as the Kyrgyz people did at the time. In 1937 his father was charged with "bourgeois nationalism" in Moscow, and arrested and executed.
He started working while he was still a child. At fourteen he was an assistant to the Secretary at the "Village Soviet". He later held jobs as a tax collector, a loader, an engineer's assistant and continued with many other types of work.
Despite these early hardships, he was lucky enough to live at a time when Kyrgyzstan was transformed from one of the most backward lands of the Imperial Russia to an educated republic of the USSR. He had the opportunity to study at a school that the Soviets built at Sheker, and he then continued at the local school.
In 1946 he began studying at the Animal Husbandry Division of the Kirghiz Agricultural Institute in Frunze, but later switched to literary studies at the Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow, where he lived from 1956 to 1958. For the next eight years he worked for Pravda. His first two publications appeared in Russian -- The Newspaper Boy Dziuio and Ashim -- in 1952, his first work in Kirghiz -- Ak Jann (White Rain) -- in 1954, and his well known work Jamila appeared in 1958.
His work Chinghiz Aitmatov belongs to the post-war generation of writers. His output before Jamilya was not a large one -- a few short stories and a short novel called Face to Face. But it was Jamilya that came to prove the author's work. Louis Aragon described the novellete as the world's most beautiful love story, raising it even above Kipling's World's Most Beautiful Love Story. Aitmatov's representative works also include the short novels Farewell, Gulsary!, The White Ship and The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years.
He was honoured in 1963 with the Lenin prize for Jamilya and later he was awarded with a State prize for Farewell, Gulsary!.
Online Texts "The Little Soldier" in the original, facing translation by Thomas J. Kiehn (http://www.digenis.org/sold.html)
Bibliography Major Works (and respective Russian titles) - A Difficult Passage (1956)
- Face to Face (Лицом к лицу, 1957)
- Jamilla (Джамиля, 1958)
- The First Teacher (Первый учитель, 1962)
- Tales of the Mountains and Steppes (Повести гор и степей, 1963)
- Farewell, Gulsary! (Прощай, Гульсары, 1966)
- The White Ship (Белый пароход, 1970)
- The Ascent of Mt. Fuji (Восхождение на Фудзияму, 1973)
- The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years (И дольше века длится день, 1980)
- Scaffold (Плаха, 1988)
Related article
External Links - Biography at SovLit.com (http://www.sovlit.com/bios/aitmatov.html)
- The Art of Chingiz Aitmatov's Stories by Iraj Bashiri (http://www.iles.umn.edu/faculty/bashiri/Aitmatov/Jamila.html)
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