Ay-Tana P. Modorova

THE ANCIENT TURKIC THEME IN ARZHAN ADAROV’S LITERARY WORK IN THE SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET PERIODS

This article provides an overview of the literary and artistic works of the Altai writer Arzhan Adarov, devoted to the ancient Turkic theme or containing small references to the ancient Turks, Turkic khagans and kaganates, and their heritage. The main theoretical and methodological framework is memory studies, positioned as a multidisciplinary field of knowledge, since the actualization of historical and cultural memory in literature (and in any art) reflects a complex mechanism of group identification processes, for the study of which it is important to include theoretical developments from various socio-humanitarian fields. An analysis of the writer’s entire creative work from the Soviet and post-Soviet periods revealed the evolution of the ancient Turkic theme, echoing the stages of his creative evolution.: 1) in the early Poetry, in the 1950s and 1960s, the past was generally portrayed as a dark, unsafe time; 2) since the late 1960s, there has been a complication of images of the past, a search for and reinterpretation of historical knowledge about their people, characteristic of all Altaic literature; direct reference to the ancient Turkic period as part of the history of the Altaic people in the poem “Tonyukuk” (1971); 3) 1990–2000-ies – in the post-Soviet period, the writer, by appealing to the memory of the medieval state of the ancient Turks and to the images of great ancient Turkic figures – Tonyukuk, Kul-tegin, Bilge Kagan, sought to show and, perhaps, somehow influence the problems of modern Gorny Altai, also the writer sought to find spiritual supports for the Altai people.