ОТЫРАР КІТАПХАНАСЫНЫҢ БЕЙНЕ ЖӘНЕ НАРРАТИВ СЕМИОЗИСІ: ЖОҒАЛҒАН АҒАРТУШЫЛЫҚТЫ ІЗДЕСТІРУ БАРЫСЫНДА

Abstract

The article explores the image of the Otrar library – one of the most famous places of historical memory of the Kazakh society. We traced the genealogy of this image and its reflection in 4 identified narratives of historical memory: academic (scientific), media (public history, fiction, media), folklore and official (state). The reasons for the popularity of this image, starting from the second half of the twentieth century, and the role of the scientific and creative intelligentsia in the reinvention of the historical subjectivity of the Kazakhs in the process of Soviet nation-building and the anti-religious campaign of 1958-1964, when in order to preserve the cultural heritage of medieval monuments of Central Asia within the framework of the concept autochthonism and “the struggle for progressive folk traditions”, local elites intensified archaeological research, reception and development of this heritage, derived from the classification of “religious” to the definition of “folk”. During this period, the image of medieval urban culture begins to form as a chronotope of the golden age in the historical memory of Kazakhstan society. It is there that the Great Silk Road is located, a developed urban culture, the great and tragic pages of Otrar, the Second Teacher of the world - Al-Farabi, the actualization of whose biography largely revived interest in Otrar and influenced the emergence of the image of the Otrar library in the historical memory. There, urbanization ceases to be a modern problem and becomes a cultural heritage. Within the framework of the article, the mechanisms of formation and overcoming of the cultural trauma of "non-historicity" of the sedentarized nomadic culture by the Kazakh national intelligentsia of the 1950s-1960s were studied. The Otrar library, as a place of historical memory, plays the role of the argument of the “lost enlightenment” in these narratives.