Issyk-Kul Formula

Murat Auezov, the son of the great Kazakh literary figure Mukhtar Auzeov, passed away June 14, 2024, at the age of 81 years of age. A diplomat, cultural expert, historian and writer, Murat Auzeov received numerous awards for his decades of service, including the Danaker award from the Kyrgyz Republic for his contribution to strengthening the friendship between Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan.

Murat Auezov originally wrote “Issyk-Kul Formula” below in 1999 and republished it in the compilation Mukhtar Auezov and Kyrgyzstan in 2010 in an effort to bring attention to the M. O. Auzeov Museum in Issyk-Kul, which after for many years having served as the family’s dacha in Cholpan-Ata, Issyk-Kul, while in Kyrgyzstan as a child traveling with his father, fell into disrepair.

Murat Auezov sent the essay to the editors of Edgu Bilig in 2022 to be translated into English and shared with readers.

Arti kairli bolsin, jatkan jeri mangige jarik bolsin! (May he rest in peace, and may the place where he lies be ever filled with light!)

ISSYK-KUL FORMULA

My father, Kazakh writer Mukhtar Omarkhanovich Auezov (1897–1961), felt a profound attachment to Kyrgyzstan. One can only guess and speculate why this was so. Was it because in his very young age, being a member of the Society of the Guardians of Kyrgyz Antiquity, he was friends with enlightened representatives of this ancient and gifted people? Perhaps he was once and for all conquered by the majestic mountainous country of Manas, his first acquaintance with which took place while he was putting together his 1979 collection of short stories, Lixaya godina (Dashing year).

Be that as it may, the feeling of adoration for the people, history, culture and landscapes of Kyrgyzstan, wide ranging—from youthful enthusiasm to fatherly tenderness—lay deep within his being, and there are many manifestations of it.

In my father’s deeply engaging three-volume novel-epic about the Kazakh poet-singer and philosopher Abai (1845–1904), Abai zholy (The Path of Abai), if not to count the youth and, of course the mothers, Zere and Ulzhan, the only absolutely positive personage, a kind of "knight without fear and reproach", is a Kyrgyz Izgutty, a friend and assistant of Kunanbai.

In a dire year, the rebels from the Alban family find faith in the success of their hopeless cause when they learn that the Kyrgyz have joined them.

The epic Manas was perceived by my father as the highest achievement of Turkic-speaking heroic tales. In the repressive ’50s, he defended this great creation of the Kyrgyz people with exceptional civil courage, well aware of the risk he was taking.

In connection with the first stories and novels of Kyrgyzstan National Writer Chingiz Aitmatov (1928–2008), my father not only supported the young Kyrgyz novelist, but also proudly announced to the public the emergence of a new bright star in the literary sky.

And, finally, his first and only dacha, a small house, in which with pleasure rested and in a good mood worked in the last two years of life, he built on the shore of Issyk-Kul, in Cholpon-Ata, Kyrgyzstan.

The construction of the dacha was preceded by repeated trips by my father to Issyk-Kul. My younger brother Ernar and I also participated in some of them.

Now, after many years, I understand well that excitement those travels stirred in my brother and me held a different sentiment altogether for my father—one with educational meaning. As teenagers we went through a kind of training, in the course of which we came in contact with nature, nurtured a taste for kindness, tuned our hearing and vision to perceive its endless surprises, including—unthinkable in city conditions softened and penetrating monologues of our father about our brotherly people, the Kyrgyz.

Our car was traditionally met by Kyrgyz writers on the descent from the Kurdai Pass, a stretch of freeway connecting Almaty, Kazakhstan, Frunze (now Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan). After all, the convoy was going to Frunze. In the city, we spent two to three hours in our father’s meetings with colleagues either in the Academy of Sciences, or in the Union of Writers and on a ritual journey surrounding a dastarkhan [felt table] in the house of one of his friends. I remembered the hospitable, illuminated atmosphere of the house of the aksakal [elder] of Kyrgyz literature Tugelbai Sydykbekov with peacocks walking freely in the yard.

Then the journey took us together with accompanying hosts along the Chui valley, through the Boom gorge to the Issyk-Kul basin.

In the Boom Gorge, cutting north-south across the region, the energy of Ulan—the wind from west with its own name, and together with another titled wind, Santash, from the east, determines the weather and climate of the Issyk-Kul Basin—is born. My father would tell us stories about the Ulan and Santash, both reaching maximum speeds of 25-40 meters per second from opposite directions would clash over the lake, reminding us about the Kurdai winds. There was something dissonant in his stories in terms of his intonation and how he semantically loaded the general conversation. Now, it seems to me, I understand the meaning behind his deep drawing of the themes and simultaneous understatements of these thoughtful monologues. They connected with the memory of the Kazakh poet Magzhan Zhumabaev (1893–1938). The wind not only features as a favorite image and leitmotif of his work but also something with which the great poet, and my father’s senior friend and associate, shot in 1938 during the Great Purge, identified himself, his desire for change and the will to implement it.

In 1957 the sanatorium of the Council of Ministers of Kyrgyzstan served as the recreation base on Issyk-Kul. But traveling along the northern shore of the lake, and meetings with manaschis (reciters of the epic dedicated to the legendary Kyrgyz hero Manas) and burkutchis (eagle masters) filled most of the time. My father liked it when Ernar and I, being next to him, patiently listened to the temperamental, unaccustomed throaty performance of Manas. I believe that in those days we were lucky to hear the famous unrivaled Manaschi Sayakbai Karalaev (1894–1971). Something ancient, pastoral stable, original and mesmerizing was felt even by such unsophisticated listeners of the epic, as my brother and I were.

And my father's pleasure was absolutely genuine, not only educationally encouraging, when he suddenly would recognize we were catching something in the semantic content of the rapid Kyrgyz tales. He wanted the owners of the house and the accompanying writers to know about it. We retold what we understood under their approving cheers, but when we stumbled on the Kyrgyz word chong, it stirred special excitement, unkind jokes and laughter. The reason, as it turned out, was their excellent, better than Ernar and me, knowledge of the novel Abai, in particular, the episode in which the young akyns (poet-singers) started a dispute whether there is or not in the Kazakh language the word shong. As it turned out, there is and in the same meaning as in Kyrgyz—big.

The following year, 1958, we, together with my father and Ernar, spent part of the summer in the already built Cholpon-Ata house. After graduating from school, I was preparing to enter university. By that time, it turned out that a prerequisite for entering the Arabic department of the Institute of Modern Languages at Moscow State University, like I was planning, required knowledge of English, and I had German at school. And then it was finally agreed that I would apply for the Chinese department. Ernar still spent a lot of time on the lake.

I had to prepare for exams and read books on China and Chinese fiction. My father took the replacement of Arabic by Chinese language calmly, noting, firstly, the grandiosity of China in all respects and, secondly, in the Chinese language of ancient and medieval materials clarifying the history of the Kazakhs. In those days, I began to have substantial conversations with my father on humanitarian topics, which lasted with natural interruptions for two more years, until his last days.

Conversations that revealed so much to me even then gave rise to anxious premonitions and doubts—whether I could cope with the difficulties of the chosen path. I remember well the caressing warning and alluring appeal of his words: To be called a humanitarian, you can do with a minimum of information, but to become one in practice, you need an ocean of knowledge.

The atmosphere of light, spiritualized communication reigned in the days of the guests' arrival. Of course, my father was at that time at the zenith of his literary fame, was universally recognized as a coryphaeus of the artistic word. But people were attracted to him for something more than just him having glorious name. In communicating with him, they revealed, and above all for themselves, as natures spiritually rich and meaningful. They saw deeper meanings in their own lives and actions. Through participation in the rise of powerful, kind intellect and relaxed, exquisitely revealed wisdom, they gained personal self-respect. He was fully endowed with a talent for healing, inspiring communication. I think that on the Issyk-Kul coast he managed to realize this property better than anywhere else.

Three years later I found myself back in the Cholpon-Ata lodge. It was August. Just the month before, on June 25, a day or so before his fatal operation in surgery, he handed me two letters addressed to his friends in the Semipalatinsk region with the instruction to meet me and show me the places where his childhood and youth had passed. I was already supposed to keep a diary of observations and reflections on what I had seen. It was in August that we were going to meet in Cholpon-Ata, he—after what I thought was an uncomplicated operation—and I, after a trip to his small homeland. He did not return from the hospital; I did not go to Semipalatinsk that year. My diary was left blank.

Of course, I visited the Cholpon-Ata house in the next three years and in more than a dozen years more than once. It cozily housed a small, but with an adequate selection of books, district library. The Kyrgyz authorities, who accepted the house as a gift from the family of M. Auezov, also took care of the museum exposition. But all this gradually fell into disrepair, presenting an obvious image of neglect.

In September 1992 I visited the house again. But this time, it became cleaner and tidier, as if warmed by a kind of caring attitude unto itself. It got a patron, Bektur Tulegenov, the head of Cholpon-Ata district telecom. We met with him, and he told us that his late mother came to him in a dream and told him to take care of Mukhtar's house standing on the shore. And for the fifth year, since ’92, he has been paying for the work of three employees of the library-museum, making as much as possible repairs as he can. Will Bektur keep his position? Will he still be successful in entrepreneurial activity? Absolutely. A good deed is returned by good. It cannot be otherwise in the Issyk-Kul Valley.

When did it start? Who, from what side, was the first to perform this act of goodness in relation to a brotherhood between peoples, not subject to circumstances, that has carried through the centuries the power of a covenant and an attractive example for others. Isn’t it more important to remember Is it necessary to look for answers to these questions? Is it not more important to remember that it was, is and should be preserved in the future? Mukhtar Auezov sacredly honored this tradition and contributed immensely to its growth.

And now Chingiz Aitmatov writes stories, novels and essays, in most of which the world of Kazakhs is hardly less than the world of Kyrgyz. The largest sculptor of the Central Asian region, Turgunbai Sadykov, born in Kyrgyzstan in1935, is preparing to erect a monument to my father in the center of Bishkek.

The golden thread of brotherhood that binds our peoples is winding, winding from the depths of centuries. It is not difficult for time to be a great weaver-unifier when it has such material.