I’ve lived most of my life in small, boring towns in the US which nobody writes about. These pleasant but unremarkable places seem designed to pass by unexamined, acting just as a background to a school or home. So when I came to Almaty to study Russian, I had no idea what it meant to deeply and caringly engage with any place, let alone a city of two million people. I still don’t know how to do this, but I’m having a great time figuring it out! My best helper along the way has been The Illustrated Guide to the Meanings of Almaty, a book so superbly useful to me that it seems almost as if it were made for twenty-somethings from the US studying Russian in Almaty. Instead of a tour guide to the hottest restaurants and shopping malls (boring), it is a shot in the arm of pure meaning, memories, places, and people. Published by Knigolyub, designed and illustrated by Zoya Falkova and translated into English by Anton Platonov, it consists of thirty self-contained poems and essays by twenty-two authors, each of which is associated with a specific place.
My favorite piece is entirely focused on a pilaf and shish kebab wagon on Ryskulov Street. That’s the name of the poem–”Pilaf and Shish Kebab Wagon” (70-1). Like the title, the writing by Aliya Dzhirman is simple and direct, with the kind of concreteness I aspire to myself. It is descriptive enough to make me hungry for the shish kebab, served with a finely chopped onion abundantly sprinkled with vinegar from a Coke bottle. I value it because it describes something utterly mundane. The wagon is not a spectacle meant to impress or convey meaning, and yet meaning can be found in it. It exists without self-reflection, without caring about how others perceive its shabby oilcloth and broken plasterboard, it just does its job: “only pilaf and shish kebab/only shish kebab and pilaf” (70).
A bit of reflection sometimes is nice, though. Pavel Bannikov’s poem titled “Beloved Mordor” (92-3) humorously compares Almaty’s smoggy, chaotic look to Mordor, the land of shadow and evil from The Lord of the Rings. It teaches me the lesson I should have known without needing to be told: don’t judge the city by its appearance. The scene of the poem is quite pleasant: walking along a river canal with someone else at night, somewhat inebriated, destined for “coition places”. “Coughing dwarves/walking their pets” (92) and “pixies […] wrapped in tunics” flow by them–just normal denizens of the night. The illustration of an intense-looking, muscly orc holding the leash of a dog which is peeing on a trash can is particularly striking. Even the Eye of Sauron (the Ritz-Carlton tower) is “beckoning with an impetuous fun/a licentiousness of a warm winter night”. It would seem that the storyteller is in for an exciting evening.
My favorite illustration from the book
Pavel Bannikov’s poem attempts to humanize the city and its people. Maria Vilkoviskaya’s poem, “Timing (Metro Guide),” (94-5) goes in the other direction. A break up at midnight in a metro station is depicted with the harsh formatting of a train schedule. Almost every line begins with a 24-hour timestamp, and each event or observation is noted down in a single sentence, like a disaster report. The poem shows the messiness of life juxtaposed on the system of the city. It does not attempt to put metaphor onto the metro station, to find life thirty feet underground. Too much effort. Instead, with a weary voice in the third person, we follow along with the female character as they ride the metro. She sees ads at each station which “defy description,” hears a mechanical voice exclaim “WE ARE CLOSING AT,” and sees people leaving the train, wearing hard hats. It feels like an unfeeling and uncaring world–the opposite side of the city that Pavel Bannikov depicts. Together, they give a more complete picture of Almaty.
I am new here, and so everything that I hear I must weigh in my head equally. Who am I to say that one source of information is better than another? But after reading the book, I am confident that I could not have found a more concentrated source of meaning than this guide. It reminds me of Anuar Duysenbinov’s idea of the söz (Qazaq for ‘word’, see the poem Metamorph)–a dense sediment of language. I read it and the ideas stick in my mouth and come out again every once in a while (like in my first writing assignment for this trip). I was only able to cover a few of the thirty pieces of work, so I highly recommend you read more. Some more of the varied perspectives you can read about are: Elena Klepikova in “Monument to Soldiers-Internationalists (‘The Afghans’)” (36-7), who makes sure we remember the painful past of the Soviet-Qazaq soldiers who fought in Afghanistan. Talgat Dairov’s “The Border” (40-1), which vividly depicts the divide between Almaty’s modern future and the past from “where you reluctantly escaped in the late nineties”. And Lilya Kalaus’s wonderful writing (she contributed five pieces and the afterword) is particularly rich with memory, history, change, and funny little things like two people exchanging garbage bags every morning. In her afterword, she writes: “it’s no secret that our city was not lucky with literary impressions” (131). However, it seems Almaty finally struck it rich.
