The Main Thing Isn't Shakespeare, It's the Footnotes

Abstract

ter's works provoke reactions both acute and equivocal. To be sure, even the astonishing Dzhamilia (1959; Eng. Jamila), that early masterpiece by Chingiz Aitmatov, was rejected at the outset by some Kyrgyz writer-elders as a foreign body at the very time the whole literary world was delighting in it, calling it a national phenomenon. Further, Aitmatov's ascent to the summit of the literary Olympus was even more dramatic, if not tragic. That's how it was. But what is taking place now around Aitmatov in Russian literary criticism in a certain quarter, of course is beyond all comprehension. As a result of the sharply reduced flow of information from Russia, I do not know everything that was published about Aitmatov's 1995 novel Tavro Kassandry (The Mark of Cassandra) and where it all was published. But I do know that this most complex novel has not only its confirmed, highly competent defenders, but also its spiteful detractors. The critic V. Bondarenko is one of the latter {Nash Sovremennik, 1995, no. 4). Bondarenko can now take pleasure in the fact that accomplices of sorts have turned up in Kyrgyzstan as well; obsequious and snakelike, they have reprinted the Russian critic's magazine article in its entirety in the newspaper Kyrgyz Madaniaty, which, coincidentally, is convulsively and feverishly living out its final fateful days. Bondarenko's article, if we are to speak frankly, is in no way the stuff of literary criticism; neither by its content nor in the manner of its execution does it