Overcoming cultural trauma through re-invention of the historical agency of the Kazakh nomadic culture in the works of Olzhas Suleimenov in the 1960s

Abstract

The article is devoted to the reflection on the historiosophical works of the Kazakh poet of the sixties Olzhas Suleimenov, the key plot for the Kazakhs to acquire multiple identities and historical subjectivity in the 20th century: the loss of the nomadic way of life, the museumified play of symbols of nomadic existence from the point of its no return (urban chronotope of sedentarized nomadic culture), the reception of historical memory of the post-nomads of the heritage of the medieval urban culture of Central Asia, the dialogue of the new historical subjectivity with the world culture (inscribing the national into the planetary) and the reinvention of its images, seen by the Kazakh intelligentsia in the reflections of ancient history. The studied literary and historiosophical material make it possible to comprehend the issue of the correlation between nomadic and sedentary in the historical memory of Kazakhstani society and the presence of a cultural trauma of “non-historicality” here, overcome in the second half of the 20th century. The factors that formed this cultural trauma include 1) the interruption of nomadic culture as a result of forced collectivization and sedentarization of the 1920s -1930s; 2) the historiographic tradition of describing nomadic culture as regressive and its perception by the Kazakh national intelligentsia in the 1960s and 1970s through the dominant historical narrative. The way to overcome this trauma was the reception of the cultural heritage of the medieval urban culture of Central Asia, the active archaeological research of which began in these years in the Kazakh SSR and the inscribing of a reinvented historical subjectivity in the world history of civilization, which, in turn, contributed to the formationof multiple identities at the level of representation of historical memory.