Novel
Колокол
Not translated into English
Maurice Simashko · 1981
Synopsis
Orenburg, in the middle of the nineteenth century. A survivor of the massacre of the biys of his clan, the young Ibrai enters the school opened for Kazakh children at the Border Commission; haunted by nightmares, he learns Russian and geography and dreams of a steppe city of white domes where no one kills. Having become a teacher, Ibrai Altynsarin creates an alphabet, textbooks and schools, stands up to the mullahs who disrupt his classes and to the missionaries who want to baptise his pupils, and sells his possessions to pay for a school that the state does not fund.
Context
The novel, of 1981, follows Altynsarin from childhood to old age and mingles with the narrative interior monologues and period documents: his correspondence with Nikolai Ilminsky, quotations from Herzen's journal. According to the Kazakhstanskaya Pravda, the title evokes both that journal and the first school bell of the steppe. The book was reissued in 1982, 1998 and 2011 and included in the selected works of 1992. It belongs to the series of historical novels on Central Asia that the author wrote in Russian; he devoted another novel to the revolutionary Alibi Dzhangildin.
Who it is for
A historical novel about the school and the alphabet, to be read to discover Ibray Altynsarin, a pioneer of Kazakh education.
Prizes and reception
A LiveLib reader sees in it less a biography than the portrait of a people opening to the world through school and the book.
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