First/Last Teacher: Recasting Soviet Legacies in Contemporary Kyrgyz Cinema

Abstract

Renowned Soviet‐Kyrgyz writer Chingiz Atimatov's 1962 novella The First Teacher has staying power in contemporary Kyrgyzstan figuring prominently–and positively–in Kyrgyz culture and cinema of the last decade. This seems to be a postcolonial paradox as Aitmatov's classic has traditionally been read as a socialist‐realist narrative welcoming the arrival of the forcefully imposed Soviet power to Kyrgyzstan in 1924. My fresh reading of Aitmatov's Soviet‐era classic as more ambiguous than originally thought and its subsequent reinterpretations in recent Kyrgyz cinema corroborates David Chione Moore's seminal argument about the reality of post‐colonialism in the post‐Soviet space while also revealing the productive tension between the two conflicting views of the Soviet experiment as non‐colonial or “simply differently configured” colonial. Even though Aitmatov privileges Soviet culture over “backward” Kyrgyz ways and wages a socialist realist struggle between the old and the new in The First Teacher, this early narrative crafted during the Thaw builds in a lot of ambiguity about the Soviet project in Kyrgyzstan. I argue that the novella's pronounced Thaw idealism and its revision of the Stalinist myth of the ideologically driven positive hero, combined with the young writer's subtly articulated Kyrgyz values that exist alongside and often in tension with his distinct Soviet persona, all allow for a more flexible interpretation and negotiation of a hybrid, ambivalent, and multivalent post‐Soviet Kyrgyz culture and nationhood in contemporary Kyrgyz cinema.