Narrative
The Rejected Girl
Гологдсон хүүхэн
Tsendiin Damdinsüren · 1929
Synopsis
Tseren is a lost child who is sold and grows up in servitude in pre-revolutionary Mongolia. In the house of the wealthy Bold, she toils like a beast of burden and raises her little daughter in poverty, under the thumb of the nobles, officials and lamas who live off the labour of ordinary people. One night, she sets out alone across the steppe, towards the capital.
Context
The story appeared in 1929, when its author was barely over twenty. It borrows its construction from the narratives of the oral tradition, but takes herders and servants as its characters, and it has been seen as the starting point of the country's realist prose; a Russian introduction reads in it the portrait of a farm worker without rights, a daughter of the old world. In 1961, Dendeviin Chimed-Osor made it into a black-and-white film, from a screenplay by the writer himself, which ranks among the popular Mongolian films of the sixties.
Who it is for
A short story in Mongolian, with no French translation, for those who want to read the first stories written in Mongolia after the revolution.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as the first great work of new Mongolian prose; its author received the State Prize three times.
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