world: kyrgyzstan | From the Heart of Europe

Kyrgyzstan is half of the answer to a favorite trivia question: which two landlocked countries are bordered only by other landlocked countries, therefore being doubly landlocked? (The other is Liechtenstein.)

It became independent from the Soviet Union in 1991, and unusually for the region developed quite an open and democratic political system after the 2005 Tulip Revolution. However under president Sadyr Japarov, in power since 2021, things have tightened up considerably and it is now once again effectively a one-party state. Its main exports are minerals, especially gold, and textiles, both wool and cotton. The Kyrgyz language, like Kazakh, Uzbek, Turkmen and Azeri, is closely related to Turkish.

The dominant writer here – the most dominant for any country since Colombia – is Chengiz Aitmatov (1928-2008). I must have been in the same room as him on a number of occasions, as he was Kyrgyzstan’s ambassador to Belgium and the EU at the start of the century (having originally moved to these parts as the last Soviet ambassador to Luxembourg, which is coincidentally where I slept last night) and we probably attended a few of the same diplomatic receptions without my realising that a giant of Central Asian literature was present.

See here for the methodology of these posts, though NB that I am now also using numbers from StoryGraph. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in the current boundaries of Kyrgyzstan.

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Jamilia	Chingiz Aitmatov	10,761	784	1,143
The White Steamship	Chingiz Aitmatov	7,660	277	236
The Place of the Skull	Chingiz Aitmatov	2,363	229	93
Farewell Gul’sary!	Chingiz Aitmatov	1,913	149	59
The First Teacher	Chingiz Aitmatov	2,738	54	85
To Have and to Lose	Chingiz Aitmatov	1,787	74	45
Mother Earth	Chingiz Aitmatov	5,343	66	13
Over the Edge	Greg Child	646	128	49

You can imagine how much fun I had tracking down all the variant titles of these books in Russian, Kyrgyz and English.

Jamilia or Jamila (“Жамийла” in Kyrgyz, “Джамиля” in Russian) is about illicit love in Kyrgyzstan’s patriarchal society as viewed by a teenage sibling.

The White Steamship or The White Ship (“Ак кеме” in Kyrgyz, “Белый пароход” in Russian) is about ships on Issyk-Kul Lake in the centre of Kyrgyzstan, and a sacred deer and old beliefs.

The Place of the Skull / The Scaffold (“Плаха”) is about a wolf, and two good men fighting evil, including drug smugglers.

Farewell, Gulsary! / Farewell, Gyulsary (“Прощай, Гульсары!” in Russian, “Жаныбарым, Гүлсары!” in Kyrgyz) is about a man and his horse.

The First Teacher / Duishen (“Первый учитель” in Russian, “Биринчи мугалим” in Kyrgyz) is about an art teacher and the girl he inspires and defends.

To Have and to Lose (“Тополёк мой в красной косынке” in Russian) was adapted into the Turkish film The Girl with the Red Scarf (Selvi Boylum, Al Yazmalım). It is about a girl who falls in love with a truck driver.

Mother Earth (“Саманчынын жолу” in Kyrgyz, “Материнское поле” in Russian) is about a heroic woman in the Great Patriotic War.

Finally, Over the Edge is a non-fiction account by one of four American mountaineers who were held hostage by Islamist guerrillas in 2000, and escaped by throwing one of them off a cliff.

A Killing Winter, by Tom Callaghan, which I have actually read, missed the last spot on the list (by quite some way).

I disqualified a load of books which covered all of Central Asia, or indeed the former Soviet Union. The only one that I hesitated about was A Light through the Cracks: A Climber’s Story, by Beth Rodden, who was in the same group of kidnapped mountaineers as Greg Child; but it seems that more than half of the book is more about her personal healing journey after they were rescued and went home.

I also disqualified two other books by Chengiz Aitmatov, with less hesitation. His top book is The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years (“И дольше века длится день” in Russian, “Кылым карытар бир күн” in Kyrgyz), but it is set in Kazakhstan not Kyrgyzstan (and indeed was second on my Kazakhstan list, after Solzhenitsyn). Piebald Dog Running Along the Shore / Spotted Dog Running Along the Seashore (“Деңиз Бойлой Жорткон Ала Дөбөт” in Kyrgyz, “Пегий пес, бегущий краем моря” in Russian) is set among the Nivkh people who live on the Russian shores of the Sea of Okhotsk.

Thanks to Aitmatov’s dominance, it is a rather male list this week. The top woman writer in Kyrgyz is generally acknowledged to be Zuura Soorobaeva (1924-2012), but none of her work has been translated into English as far as I can tell, and she does not show up on the book logging sites.

I do find books in English by a couple of political analysts, Cholpon Orozobekova and Syinat Sultanalieva. There is also a three-volume anthology of Kyrgyz women’s poetry translated into English.

Next we go to a different part of Asia, Hong Kong; then Latin America for Nicaragua and Paraguay; then back to Europe for Bulgaria.

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The best known books set in each country: Kyrgyzstan