Chingiz Aitmatov was a Russian-Kyrgyz writer and statesman known for
such films as
Der erste Lehrer (1965),
The Girl with the Red Scarf (1977)
and Jamila (1994).
He was born Chingiz Torekulovich Aitmatov on December 12, 1928, in
Kirgizia, Soviet Union. His family was bilingual, Russian-Kyrgyz. His
father, Torekul Aitmatov, was one of the first Kyrgyz communists and a
regional party secretary. In 1937, while attending the Institute for
Red Professorship in Moscow, Torekul was arrested and executed on
charges of anti-Soviet bourgeois nationalism. Young Aitmatov was
brought up by a single mother. He attended the Russian school, then
Kyrgyz Agricultural Institute in Frunze, but changed from the study of
livestock to the study of literature at the Gorky Literature Institute
in Moscow.
He made his literary debut in Russia, in 1952, with publication of his
stories in Russian. From 1958 to 1966 he was roving correspondent for
the leading Soviet Newspaper Pravda. In 1967 he became a member of the
Executive Board of the Soviet Writers Union, and in 1968 he won the
Soviet State Prize for literature for his novel Farewell, Gulsary!, a
tale of an old man reminiscing about the parallel lives of himself and
his old horse, which is dying. Aitmatov won two more State Prizes in
1977 and 1983, and was named a Hero of Socialist Labor in 1978.
From 1964 to 1985 he was Chairman of the Cinema Union of Kyrgyzian SSR,
and in 1985 he was named Chairman of the Kyrgyz Writers Union. In
1990-1991 he served as an advisor to
Mikhail Gorbachev and in 1990 was
appointed Soviet Ambassabor to Luxemburg. He served as the Soviet and
then Russian ambassador to Belgium from 1990 to 1993. In 1995, he
became Kyrgyzstan's ambassador to Belgium, Luxembourg and the
Netherlands and also represented his home country in the European
Union, NATO and UNESCO. During the 1990s, Chingiz Aitmatov was member
of the Kyrgyzstan's parliament.
His representative works : 'Jamila' (1958), 'The First Teacher' (1967),
'Farewell, Gyulsary!' (1967), 'The White Ship' (1972), and 'The Day
Lasts More Than a Hundred Years' (1988) were translated in more than 20
languages across the world. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in
1991, Aitmatov's novels found a new audience in the West and gained
popularity in Germany. He died of pneumonia and kidney failure on June
10, 2008, in Nuremberg, Germany, and was laid to rest in Kyrgyzstan.
