Monday, March 28, 2005

I'm sort of catching up on Kyrgyzstan, reading Chingiz Aytmatov again, his 1966 short novel called Farewell, Gulsary! (Proshchay, Gulsary!), life stories of an old man and an old horse.

A very interesting story, very sad. Aytmatov used to be a veterinarian before he became a writer, so the way he writes about animals is amazing: in the novel I read last year, The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years, there was a camel, and some of the stuff about the relations between the camel and his master were making me laugh out loud; in The Place of the Skull, which I didn't finish because of the Orange Revolution, there were wolves; and Gulsary (translated as 'Yellow Flower') is a horse. There are plenty of people in Aytmatov's works, too, of course - plenty of life, plenty of history.

Aytmatov, currently an ambassador in Brussels, spoke out on the events in Kyrgyzstan, calling it a "real revolution" and saying that Akayev's regime has fallen because of the "all-embracing corruption" in Kyrgyzstan (via Komsomolka, in Russian).

Lenta.ru, however, cites a reproachful comment from Fergana.ru news agency (in Russian) - "Where were you before, Chingiz Torekulovich?":

...the most well-known Kyrgyz of the planet, father of the country's minister of foreign affairs, and simply a person enjoying immense authority among the population of the whole post-Soviet space, was silent during the past few days when the situation began to develop in the south of Kyrgyzstan.

1 comment:

  1. Wow.It's about my famous writer Chyngyz Aytmatov.i really like his books.And very disappointed that one day he will leave this world.:(

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