Entwining Tongues: Postcolonial Theory, Post-Soviet Literatures and Bilingualism in Chingiz Aitmatov's <em>I dol'she veka dlitsia den'</em>

Abstract

This article reads I dol’she veka dlitsia den ’ — by the late Kyrgyz writer, Chingiz Aitmatov — as an instance of the postcolonial/post-Soviet uncanny, highlighting both the affiliations and the disjunctions between postcolonial theory and post-Soviet cultures. I argue that Aitmatov’s novel is shaped by its articulation of a dual critique: the novel employs conventions from Russian village prose as an idiom of anti-imperial polemic directed at Soviet modernization policies, while simultaneously critiquing the ethnic nationalism of village prose by putting that genre into dialogue with the formal codes of other literary genres, such as science fiction and Central Asian folktales. Aitmatov’s model for this anti-essentialist dialogism, however, is Soviet bilingualism, which urged the development of “local” minority languages through asymmetrical exchange with the authoritative “world” language, Russian. I dol’she veka dlitsia den ’ is thus an anti-colonial novel whose criticism of Soviet imperialism is nonetheless based on the imperialist ideology of Soviet bilingualism.