Who was the last Qazaq author you’ve heard of? What about poet? Or director? Or musician? Or even the last Qazaq you’ve heard of at all?
Before I got here a few weeks ago, I couldn’t tell you a single artist or writer from the country. Even the country’s most celebrated poet and author, Abay, whose name is plastered in more places in a single city than I believed possible, is essentially unknown anywhere outside of Qazaqstan. He was born and lived in the 19th century, dying right after the turn of the century in 1904. In my couple weeks of being in the country, I still haven’t read a single word of his poetry. This is a signal of something important in Qazaq literature and art. Very little of it is known outside of Qazaqstan. Almost none of the literature has been translated into English or other languages, written in both Qazaq and Russian, leading to it being relatively unknown.
[Abay]
Why’s that so? Well, first, it’s not a well known country on the world stage. Not many people sit on their couches and wonder, “What’s Qazaq literature like?” Instead, they look to Russian literature, or English, or French, or Chinese. However, just because it’s not well known doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t be translated. This is where systemic problems start to come into play.
Back in the USSR the state supported publishing, funding massive artists’ and writers’ unions, ensuring that they had the money and resources to write and then publish. Of course, there were issues, particularly a heavy dose of censorship, but at least there were publishing houses. With the collapse of the USSR came the utter destruction of publishing houses in the country. From the 90s, and continuing until today, there are very few, if any major publishing housing that publish Qazaq literature. Children’s books are always in demand and have publishers in the country. But literature? It’s left to the artists themselves.
Literature and art, even though we love to ignore it, always find a way to exist anyway. So there’s still plenty being made, it’s just hard to find it. On one of our excursions around the city, our lovely guide Azhar took us to a room in this old building. A medium sized room, in a large modernist, soulless building that had been used by the KGB. In this building imbued with horrifying memories is a group of artists who rent out a room to use as a study to draw, to write, to make beautiful things. Of course, they have almost no money. I think she took us there mainly to get us to buy what the artists were selling, more than to learn about the city.
We had the luxury of meeting with a critic, one of the few in Qazaqstan. Her name is Alyona Timofeyeva. She’s still in her twenties, but she’s incredibly knowledgeable about the theater scene in the city and can talk about Qazaq literature for days. She came into class to talk with us, and we had the chance to ask her questions. We had already heard about this little theater in the middle of town, АртИШок (Art-I-Shok), so we wanted to know what she thought about the different types of theaters in the town. Was the old fashioned, massive theater in the middle of the city as impressive to watch as the building is large? Or was this little contemporary theater group more interesting to watch.
She did not hesitate. She loves АртИШок. But more than that, she told us about her gripe with the institutionalized forms of art in the country. Wherever there happens to be government funding, it’s is only for the oldest, and in her opinion, most boring forms of the artform. In this case, she meant the massive downtown theater. She didn’t hate it, but she certainly didn’t think that it was anything exceptional.
In fact, I’m finishing editing this blog post just after I saw a lovely performance at АртИШок. And the show? It was amazing.
[Orion getting pulled onstage as a part of the show at АртИШок]
Throughout all the difficulties in making a living off of art in Qazaqstan, there is some non-governmental money floating around. So who’s doing this? Multinational corporations. In fact, our professor Victoria told us about how in the year before she left Qazaqstan to teach at Carleton, when she was working at Naserbayev university, a lovely lady who worked for an oil company came to her to ask for her input on who would be best to give their money to. And it’s not nothing either. They do more work than the government to get money to young artists and groundbreaking art. After we realized that this was a thing, we started noticing how a lot of the art Instagram pages we had discovered on our trip were in fact sponsored by private companies.
None of us quite know how to feel about private companies stepping in the spend money where the government doesn’t. It feels a little dirty almost. But we’re also happy that they’re getting anything at all.
I’m really excited to continue to learn and explore art in Qazaqstan, especially getting to see a second show at АртИШок in two days.
I’ll let you know how it goes,
Ellis Kondrashov
