A Central Asian Trilogy: the Legacy of Aitmatov in Ismailov’s Vunderkind Erzhan

This article explores the legacy of two works by Chingiz Aitmatov (1928–2008)—Belyi parokhod (posle skazki) (The White Steamship, 1970) and I dol’she veka dlitsia den’ (And the Day Lasts Longer Than a Century, 1980)—in relation to Vunderkind Erzhan (2011), a povest’ by Hamid Ismailov (b. 1954). The relationship between Aitmatov’s literary productions and that of Ismailov has not been widely investigated yet. I argue that Ismailov’s Vunderkind Erzhan is a remarkable tribute to Aitmatov. Published twenty years after the fall of the Soviet Union, but only three years after Aitmatov’s death, the povest’; results in a reworking of Aitmatov’s literary texts that still presents several features commonly attributed to the socialist realistic novel. In Vunderkind Erzhan, all characters seem to speak with Aitmatov’s voice, to paraphrase Harold Bloom’s description of Marlowe’s presence in Shakespearean early works. The connection between the two writers emerges through a series of analogies that render Ismailov’s povest’ incredibly similar to Belyi parokhod and I dol’she veka. The three fictional works share similarities in plot, characters, and corresponding spatial-temporal settings; the presence of common themes, such as memory and the road; and the use of myths, songs, and legends, which both writers transform into literary subplots and embed in realistic narratives. In fact, even though Vunderkind Erzhan is a complete, independent text, the connection it shares with Aitmatov’s aforementioned works is powerful enough that we might consider these three literary texts a trilogy. As I argue here, Aitmatov’s texts are “seeds,” to use Gérard Genette’s words,[3] that grow in Ismailov’s povest’. While the first part of the article describes the peculiar features shared by these three fictional works, in the last session, I consider the complex issue of “influence.” Ismailov’s rewriting results in a hypertext, as defined by Genette, grafted upon the two Aitmatovian hypotexts, which had been assigned great literary value from the Brezhnev era onward. Finally, I demonstrate the link between the three literary works by considering both textual and contextual factors, which stem from Aitmatovian hypotexts and the historical and cultural context of Central Asia.