Poets and Politics in Kazakhstan
Culture and History, KazakhstanNo Comment
Translation of Epolet’s post
Poets in Kazakhstan have always been fond of demonstrating their active political position: Olzhas Suleimenov or Mukhtar Shakhanov, but Zhambyl Zhabayev has been the most known.
He was a “politically correctful” poet and lived a luxury live that was unimaginable for most of the Soviet people back that time. The cult of Zhambyl Zhabayev’s personality was developed under the Stalin’s government and lingered later on.
In 1955, the Soviet tobacco industry launched production of the “Zhambyl-100” cigarettes, dedicated to 100-year anniversary of the poet.
Most probably, there are not many people in Russia nowadays, who remember their “political poets” like Demyan Bedniy or Robert Rozhdestvenskiy. But everything goes different way here, in the steppes of Kazakhstan, and people keep the memory of Zhambyl. When Zhambyl town (a regional center) was renamed to Taraz, I thought that the cult is ruined. However, it did not happed.
Ambassadors of Kazakhstan in foreign countries quite often try to lobby the idea of renaming the streets after famous people from Kazakhstan and establishment of memorials in honor of these people - Zhambyl is the most popular one.
Recently in Kiev, the capital of pro-Western Yuschenko-ruled Ukraine, Kuzminskaya street has been named after Zhambyl and established the memorial. It’s quite strange, since Zhambyl was not writing about Ukraine or Holodomor (famine under the Stalin’s rule). In his poems he praised an absolutely different country and a totally different regime. Well, the talent should be above politics, isn’t it?
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