Chingiz Aitmatov in Current Western European Criticism

Abstract

The work of Chingiz Aitmatov, winner of the Lenin and State prizes and People's Writer of Kirghizia, has won truly worldwide renown. His writings have been translated into dozens of languages abroad, and hundreds of articles and a good many monographs have been written about him. Many of these Western comments are well known to us. B. Nevskaia (1) and R. Usviatsevaia (2), particularly, have written about them in special surveys, and there have been numerous newspaper articles and brief notes. Yet one must recognize that many aspects of the reception of this writer's work abroad have not yet been sufficiently illuminated in our country. For example, very little or no attention has been paid to the materials on Aitmatov's work published in recent years in the French, Italian, and Spanish press, where we find both accurate and original interpretations of his works and obvious attempts by bourgeois ideologues to falsify and distort them.