LAUSR

The ninth chapter focuses on the depiction by Mukhtar Shakhanov—a popular nationalist writer who was the leader of the Kazakh National-Patriotic Front—of the tragic events of December 1986 when protests against the appointment of an ethnic Russian in the post of the first secretary of Kazakhstan were harshly repressed by the Soviet authorities. In his works, Shakhanov criticised the Soviet regime as a repressive entity set against the Kazakh nation and advocated for the declassification of secret documents about the December 1986 events and its victims. Assessing how nationalist-patriotic discourse in contemporary Kazakhstan is repeating the old forms and frameworks in its desire to create a new nation, Kudaibergenova concludes that ‘The sadness of this failed imagination of the nation lays in the fact that there are hardly ever new nations created or imagined on the basis of the already existing past, the past that nationalist patriots do not want to forget but remember and worship in their hyperbolized victimhood’ (p. 189). The tenth and final chapter discusses the post-independence prose and philosophical texts of the Kazakh patriot Gerold Belger in order to contextualise contemporary Kazakhstan. In his ‘post-national’ novel Tuyuq Su, Belger uses his own memories as a German deportee and the local intelligentsia to depict a peripheral aul (village) and the lives of its residents. In the nomadic world, where spatial dimensions are fluid, time is the only dimension upon which life is based. Hence time becomes the key on which the concept of the post-Soviet Kazakh nation is founded. In this insight into the national debate in the Kazakh literature of the twentieth century, Kudaibergenova emphasises the limitations of ethnic and postcolonial nationalisms as literary canons, marking the complexity of a fluid concept such as nation, which continuously evolves in space and time. The Kazakh nation, in its dialectical discourses, conflicts and debates, has been narrated as a history that imagined, reimagined or rewrote the nation in the past while dislocating it from the present. To some extent, the work under review is limited to the most well-known authors and aspects of Kazakh literature, thus missing the opportunity to explore minor works and authors, to organically consider and compare this literature with that of other Soviet republics, and to explore Kazakhstani regional and subnational realities. Nevertheless, this ambitious interdisciplinary study, which also has the virtues of being methodologically rigorous and ideologically unbiased, enriches the debate on the Kazakh nation with an argument strongly grounded in the interpretation of texts. Kudaibergenova’s book represents a clear and concise work that contributes to debates on nationbuilding in the post-Soviet context and discussions on Soviet totalitarianism, imperialism and postcolonialism. In this regard, it prepares the field for further research on the other republics of the former Soviet Union or other postcolonial contexts.