Chris Fort1; 1 American University of Central Asia, Kyrgyzstan
Discussion
This presentation will examine how Central Asian authors in early Soviet Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan conceived of and produced works of socialist realism, a Russian-born notion, soon after the literary trend was introduced in the 1930s. It argues that, contrary to the vague Stalinist instruction that objects of Soviet culture be “national in form, socialist in content,” the novels written by early Soviet Kazakh and Uzbek litterateurs were national and international in form and socialist and national in content. In this short presentation, I will concentrate on the content of the novels to show how Kazakh and Uzbek authors represented their national proletariat through the more locally relevant lenses of sedentarism and traditional gender roles rather than through depictions of labor.
