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Imagining Eurasia: The Poetics and Ideology of Olzhas Suleimenov's AZ i IA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Harsha Ram
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Abstract

The article examines the controversial book AZ i IA (1975) by the Russian-language Kazakh writer Olzhas Suleimenov. Ostensibly a study of the Russian medieval classic The Song of Igor's Campaign, the book was quickly understood to be a pointed commentary on the history of Russo-Turkic relations and a vindication of the Central Asian nomads, who were seen as oppressed by imperial domination in the field of knowledge no less than in politics. While Soviet critics noted the tension between the book's scholarly premises and its ideological claims, they chose to ignore the deeper implications of AZ I IA as a hybrid genre that conflates the devices of poetry with the scholarly methods of historiography and linguistics. While earlier critics chose to hail or dismiss Suleimenov's ideas on the basis of their scientific accuracy, this article interprets his poetics and ideology as characteristic of a “Eurasianist” tradition in Soviet letters, represented in this case by the linguist N. Ia. Marr and the avant-garde poet Velimir Khlebnikov, both of whom can be said to anticipate essential aspects of Suleimenov's linguistic vision and epistemological orientation.

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Slavic Review , Volume 60 , Issue 2 , Summer 2001 , pp. 289 - 311
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Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2001

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References

1. For example, Frantz Fanon, Les damnés de la term (Paris, 1968), Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978), and Samir Amin, L'Eurocentrisme: Critique d'une idéologic (Paris, 1988).

2. For a genealogy of the term Eurasia and related questions in Russian intellectual or political history, see Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, “Afterword: The Emergence of Eurasianism” (1967), in N. S. Trubetskoi, P. N. Savitskii, G. V Florovskii, and P. P. Suvchinskii, Exodus to the East: Forebodings and Events. An Affirmation of the Eurasians, trans. Ilya Vinkovetsky (Idyllwild, Calif., 1996), 115-42”, Bassin, Mark, “Russia between Europe and Asia: The Ideological Construction of Geographical Space,” Slavic Review 50, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 1–17 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hauner, Milan L., “The Disintegration of the Soviet Eurasian Empire: An Ongoing Debate,” in Mesbahi, Mohiaddin, ed., Central Asia and the Caucasus after the Soviet Union: Domestic and International Dynamics (Gainesville, 1994).Google Scholar For a genealogy of the literary antecedents to the Eurasianist movement, see Ettore Lo Gatto, “Panmongolismo di V. Solov'ev, I venienti Unni di V. Briusov e Gli Sciti di A. Blok,” in Morris Halle et al., comps., For Roman Jakobson (The Hague, 1956), and for the remainder of the evolution, see Georges Nivat, “Du ‘panmongolisme’ au ‘mouvement eurasien': Histoire d'un thème littéraire,” Cahiers du Monde russe et soviétique 3 (1966): 460-78.

3. Trubetskoi, N. S., Savitskii, P. N., Florovskii, G. V., and Suvchinskii, P. P., Iskhod k vostoku: Predchuvstviia i sversheniia. Utverzhdeniia evraziitsev (Sophia, 1921).Google Scholar N. S. Trubetskoi's volume Evropa i chelovechestvo (Sophia, 1920) could be considered another starting point for the movement. Suleimenov's work shows strong affinities with Trubetskoi also, something it is beyond the scope of this article to show.

4. As Milan Hauner observes of the Soviet period in “The Disintegration of the Soviet Eurasian Empire,” 222: “During the Soviet era the term Eurasia was freely used by geographers to describe climatic and physical features of the dual continent but was frowned upon with regard to geopolitical theories. This changed radically under Gorbachev.” The term Eurasia has in fact been invoked by many perestroika-era and post-Soviet politicians, from Mikhail Gorbachev, Vladimir Zhirinovskii, and Gennadii Ziuganov to Nursultan Nazarbaev. Shatilov, A. B., “Geopolitcheskaia model’ klassicheskogo evraziistva i ee sovremennye mifologicheskie interpretatsii,” in Logunov, A. P. and Evgen'eva, T. V., eds., Sovremennaia politicheskaia mifologiia (Moscow, 1996), 78–90.Google Scholar The intellectual figure who has distinmediated the relationship between classical Eurasianism and the present day is of course L. N. Gumilev: see his Drevniaia Rus’ i velikaia step’ (Moscow, 1989) and Ritmy Evrazii: Epokhi i tsivilizatsii (Moscow, 1993). L. N. Gumilev and O. Suleimenov can be seen as the two principal if radically different representatives of Brezhnev-era Eurasianism. The main political “theoretician” of Eurasia in the 1990s is Aleksandr Dugin, ideologue of the New Right, author of Konspirologiia: Nauka o zagovorakh, tainykh obshchestvakh i okkul'tnoi voine (Moscow, 1993), and editor of Elementy: Evraziiskoe obozrenie.

5. N. S. Trubetskoi, “Obshcheevraziiskii natsionalizm” (1927), in V. M. Zhivov, ed., Istoriia. Kul'tura. Iazyk (Moscow, 1995), 426: “Here is an untapped mother lode of work for philosophers, journalists, poets, novelists, artists, musicians, scientists, and scholars of the most varied specializations. It is necessary to re-examine a number of scientific disciplines from the point of view of the unity of the multiethnic Eurasian nation and to construct new scientific systems to replace old and antiquated ones. In particular, this perspective necessitates an entirely new construction of the history of the peoples of Eurasia, including the Russian people.“

6. In Suleimenov's words, “I have no reason to confess my love for Russian culture, to which I belong, perhaps, through the greater part of my upbringing and education.” From “AZ i IA,” an interview with Suleimenov conducted by G. Dil'diaev in Pravda, 12 October 1989. Martha Brill Olcott, in “Emerging Political Elites,” in Ali Banuazizi and Myron Weiner, eds., The New Geopolitics of Central Asia and Its Borderlands (Bloomington, 1994), 47, claims that Suleimenov “speaks only pidgin Kazakh.“

7. Suleimenov's reputation was quickly established with a series of books: Argamaki (1961), Zemlia, poklonis’ Cheloveku! (1961), Solnechnye nochi (1962), Dobroe vremia voskhoda (1964), God obez'iany (1967), and Glinianaia kniga (1969). For his poem in praise of the cosmonaut Iurii Gagarin, “Zemlia, poklonis’ Cheloveku!” Suleimenov acquired national fame and was awarded the Komsomol Prize for Kazakhstan in 1966. A member of the Union of Cinematographers of Kazakhstan since 1969, Suleimenov has written six screenplays. From 1969 to 1991, he was a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and from 1971 to 1981, he served as a secretary of the Committee of the Kazakhstan Writers’ Union. He was reelected to the committee in 1977, even after the scandal surrounding the book AZ i IA, and he became First Secretary of the committee of the Kazakhstan Writers’ Union in 1983, a position he held until 1991. Suleimenov also founded and led the antinuclear movement called Nevada-Semipalatinsk in 1989 and the People's Congress of Kazakhstan (NKK), a political party, in October 1991. The NKK was conceived as a party of “loyal opposition” to the ruling government. It has at different times been closely associated with President Nazarbaev and entered into conflict with him, particularly in the first half of 1995. Suleimenov has been the party's honorary chairman since September 1995 and has served as Kazakhstan's ambassador to Italy since August 1995. Suleimenov's appointment to a diplomatic post was widely seen as an attempt to neutralize his political influence within the country. See McCauley, Martin, ed., Longman Biographical Directory of Decision-Makers in Russia and the Successor States (Harlow, Eng., 1993), 612-13Google Scholar; Kto est’ kto v respublike Kazakhstan (Almaty, 1995), 264-65; and Kurtov, A. A., “Partii Kazakhstana i osobennosti razvitiia politicheskogo protsessa v respublike,” Kazakhstan: Realii i perspektivy nezavisimogo razvitiia (Moscow, 1995), 188-92.Google Scholar

8. Suleimenov, Olzhas, “Kvzaimozavisimosti” (1977-78), Esse, Publitsistika, Stikhi, Poemy (Alma-Ata, 1989), 55–56.Google Scholar These words were spoken at a symposium of the Association of the Writers of African and Asian Nations held in Tashkent in 1977.

9. Suleimenov, “Ty—moi geroi (V nashem gorode nachalas’ bor'ba s formalizmom),” Esse, Publitsistika, Stihhi, Poemy, 12-13 (emphasis added). It is interesting that this combination of moderate nationalism and cultural internationalism has remained Suleimenov's ideology even after the collapse of the USSR: Suleimenov's party, the NKK, has opposed Kazakh exclusivism and anti-Russian sentiment in the republic: see A. A. Kurtov, “Partii Kazakhstana i osobennosti razvitiia politicheskogo protsessa v respublike.“

10. The relationship of literature to historiography in the Soviet Turkic republics has not been extensively explored in western scholarship. See, however, Graham Smith, Vivien Law, Andrew Wilson, Annette Bohr, and Edward Allworth, Nation-Building in the Post-Soviet Borderlands: The Politics of National Identities (Cambridge, Eng., 1998), chaps. 4, 7, and 9, as well as chap. 8 on Georgia, which contains interesting parallels with Suleimenov's work; Paksoy, Hasan B., Alpamysh: Central Asian Identity under Russian Rule (Hartford, Conn., 1989) and “Sun Is Also Fire,” in Hasan B. Paksoy, Central Asian Monuments (Istanbul, 1992), 1-13.Google Scholar Interestingly, Suleimenov has clearly expressed his feelings about attempts by Soviet writers to revive the prerevolutionary history of various nationalities. He condemns the Georgian writer K. Gamsakhurdia for the xenophobic patriotism of his historical novel King David the Builder and praises the Russian writer Sergei Markov for his generous attention to Central Asian history: see Olzhas Suleimenov, AZ i IA: Kniga blagonamerennogo chitatelia (Alma-Ata, 1975), 165-72. Suleimenov has acknowledged the two-volume book Pamiat’ by Vladimir Chivilikhin (Moscow, 1988), a self-styled “novel-essay” (roman-esse), as being closely related, in terms of generic form and thematic content, to his own work.

11. Vladimirov, Vladislav, “Eshche raz o ‘Glinianoi knige,'” Na stremnine: Literaturnokriticheskie stat'i i esse (Alma-Ata, 1972), 221.Google Scholar

12. Olzhas Suleimenov, “Slovo o literaturnoi kritike,” Prostor, 1972, no. 5:96. Suleimenov opens the most comprehensive collection of his work, the perestroika edition Esse, Publitsistika, Stikhi, Poemy, with a series of essays, stating: “This is a time for journalistic polemic [publitsistiki]” (6).

13. Suleimenov, AZi IA, 174.

14. Vladislav Vladimirov, “Poiski opory: Improvizatsiia ili znanie? O knige Olzhasa Suleimenova ‘AZ i IA,'” Prostor, 1975, no. 10:96. The book was also warmly hailed by Konstantin Simonov in a private letter to Suleimenov.

15. The first negative review was by A. Kuz'min, “Tochka v kruge, iz kotoroi vyrastaet repei,” Molodaia gvardiia, no. 12 (December 1975): 270-80. A steady stream of more or less virulent criticism followed: L. A. Dmitriev and O. V. Tvorogov, “'Slovo o polku Igoreve’ v interpretatsii O. Suleimenova,” Russkaia literatura, 1976, no. 1:251-58, Iu. Seleznev, “Mify i istiny,” Moskva, 1976, no. 3:201-8. An account and bibliography of the more serious interventions concerning AZ i IA can be found in the article on Suleimenov in the Entsiklopediia “Slova o polku Igoreve” (St. Petersburg, 1995), 5:83-85. Suleimenov himself describes the controversy surrounding the book in the following interviews: “AZ i IA” (with G. Dil'diaev), in Pravda, 12 October 1989; “Olzhas Suleimenov: Posleslovie k opal'noi knige” (with Aleksandr Pelekhatskii), in Literaturnaia gazeta, no. 29 (18 July 1990); “Vozvrashchennaia kniga Olzhasa Suleimenova” (with Aleksandr Tkachenko), lunost', 1991, no. 11:80-81; and “Posleslovie k 2-mu izdaniiu,“Esse, Publitsistika, Stikhi, Poemy, 586. The latter book also contains a justificatory letter, never before published, written by Suleimenov in 1976 to the First Secretary of the Kazakhstan Communist Party D. A. Kunaev. Very little interesting critical commentary exists on the book AZ i IA, in Russian or other languages, but see Haney, Jack V., “The Consequences of Seeking Roots,” in Allworth, Edward, ed., Ethnic Russia in the USSR: TheDilemma of Dominance (New York, 1980), 69–76 Google Scholar; Diat, Frederique, “Olzhas Suleimenov: ‘AzIJa,'” Central Asian Survey?!, no. 1 (1984): 101-21CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and V Geier, “Kriticheskie zametki o nekotorykh rebusakh AZ i IA,” Zaria 1, no. 7 (1991): 31-34. Geier's article, which attacks the book's scientific basis, shows how little the debate has advanced in the 1990s.

16. The meeting of historians and philologists from the Academy of Sciences took place on 13 February 1976. Several summaries of the ensuing discussion exist: S. Zaika, “Literaturnyi pamiatnik i ego prochtenie: Obsuzhdenie knigi Olzhasa Suleimenova ‘AZ i IA,'” hvestiia Akademii nauk SSSR. Seriia literatury i iazyka 35, no. 4 (1976): 376-83; “Obsuzhdenie knigi Olzhasa Suleimenova,” Voprosy istorii, 1976, no. 9:147-54; and the related article by U. Gural'nik, “Kritika: Spory zametki otkliki,” Voprosy literatury, 1976, no. 9:221-24. Judging by accounts given by Suleimenov himself as well as by his close associate Gennadii Tolmachev, the decision to spare Suleimenov was taken at the highest level: Leonid Brezhnev is said not to have found anything excessively compromising in his book, and Suleimenov was provided crucial protection by the Kazakh party leadership for whom an attack on Suleimenov from Moscow was a threat to Kazakh national pride: Brezhnev and the Kazakh leader Kunaev thus acted jointly to circumvent die more drastic repression that was being planned by Mikhail Suslov. Nonetheless, a sustained journalistic campaign against the book was launched, and the book was effectively withdrawn from circulation until its republication in 1989. See the interviews “Vozvrashchennaia kniga Olzhasa Suleimenova,” and “Olzhas Suleimenov: Posleslovie k opal'noi knige,” and the published accounts by Suleimenov in the “Posleslovie k 2-mu izdaniiu,” Esse, Publitsistika, Stikhi, Poemy, 586, and lazyk pis'ma: Vzgliad v doistoriiu—o proiskhozhdenii pis'mennosti i iazyka malogo chelovechestva (Almaty, 1998), 3-8. Cf. also Gennadii Tolmachev, Povest’ ob Olzhase (Almaty, 1996).

17. D. S. Likhachev, “Gipotezy ili fantazii v istolkovanii temnykh mest ‘Slova o polku Igoreve,'” Zvezda, no. 6 (June 1976): 210. More recently, but without the same judgmental pathos, Boris Gasparov, Poetika “Slova o polku Igoreve,” Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, special issue no. 12 (Vienna, 1984), 324, has called Suleimenov's book “scholarly belles lettres” that nonetheless contains a “series of interesting concrete observations.” The serious scholarly objections to Suleimenov's book—in themselves largely valid—amount to this: First, Suleimenov shows only a patchy awareness of the scholarly tradition in the fields of medieval philology and linguistics: hence his polemics are generally against straw men of his own creation. Second, most of his hypotheses are, in the words of A. N. Robinson, “historically unfounded and textologically arbitrary,” although Robinson does acknowledge the potential validity of a handful of insights. See his article “O zadachakh sblizheniia slavisticheskoi i tiurkologicheskoi traditsii v izuchenii ‘Slova o polku Igoreve,'” “Slovo o polku Igoreve,” Pamiatniki literatury i iskusstva XI-XVII vekov (Moscow, 1978), 198, 201-2.

18. Suleimenov, AZ i IA, 8.

19. See Olzhas Suleimenov, “Kochevniki i Rus': O tolkovanii nekotorykh tiurkizmov v ‘Slove o polku Igoreve,'” Prostor, 1962, no. 10:107-9. Suleimenov repeats the thought in AZ i IA, 208: “This territorial principle, the desire to resolve questions of ethnogenesis without venturing beyond state borders that were established in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is nothing less than an attempt to examine the history of a people in a way that is disconnected from greater humanity.“

20. Olzhas Suleimenov, “Bosyi volk i napevy gotskikh dev,” Prostor, 1962, no. 11:111. Suleimenov's other articles in the periodical press include “Nevidimye slova,” Komsomol'skaia pravda, 6 June 1968, and “Gde reka Kaialy?” Literaturnaia Rossiia, no. 38 (298) (20 September 1968).

21. Suleimenov, “Bosyi volk i napevy gotskikh dev,” 109.

22. Suleimenov marvels at the Igor Tale's “figurative quality,” its “innovativeness,” and “extraordinary lack of lexical constraint” (“Kochevniki i Rus',” 107, and “Bosyi volk i napevy gotskikh dev,” 112): in this sense we can say that he follows in the wake of Vladimir Maiakovskii who, in Suleimenov's own words, “learned from the unknown poet the colloquial intonations and the compositional devices of the oratorial poem.” Suleimenov, “Kochevniki i Rus',” 107.

23. The notion that the author of the Igor Tale begins by “hesitating in his choice of style” is D. S. Likhachev's, in “Slovo opolku Igoreve” i kul'tura ego vremeni (Leningrad, 1978), 36. At the commencement of the Igor Tale, the anonymous author claims rhetorically to have gone against the poetic fancy of the ancient bard Boian (ne po zamyshleniiu Boianiu) in order to write a song “in keeping with the actual happenings of these times [po bylinam sego vremeni],” but then finally incorporates both stylistic options into his discourse; see V. P. Adrianova-Peretts, ed., Slovo opolku Igoreve (Moscow/Leningrad, 1950), 9.

24. “I would be committing a sin,” Suleimenov confesses, “if I were to declare that the Igor Tale would have fascinated me no less if it had not swirled in the eddies of innumerable interpretations.” Suleimenov, AZilA, 17.

25. Ibid., 155.

26. Ibid., 57.

27. Ibid., 149.

28. President Nazarbaev is said to have shifted to a Eurasianist position on citizenship in 1995, and a Central Asian “Eurasianism” has been officially constituted to reconcile ideologically and integrate economically the Russian and Kazakh sectors of Kazakhstan's population. Cf. President Nursultan Nazarbaev, “Evraziiskii soiuz: Novye rubezhi, problemy, perspektivy,” Piat’ let nezavisimosti: h dokladov, vystuplenii i statei Prezidenta Respubliki Kazakhstan (Almaty, 1996), 442.

29. Suleimenov, AZ i IA, 200.

30. Ibid., 198.

31. Ibid., 210.

32. Ibid., 219.

33. Ibid., 212-17.

34. Ibid., 212.

35. Ibid., 229.

36. The term linguistic alliance-was coined by Nikolai Trubetskoi in 1923. N. S. Trubetskoi, “Vavilonskaia bashnia i smeshenie iazykov, “Evraziiskii vremennik, 1923, no. 3:107-24. This term was further developed by Roman Jakobson in “K kharakteristike evraziiskogo iazykovogo soiuza” (1931), Selected Writings (The Hague/Paris, 1971), 1:144-201. The idea of areal linguistic alliances is quite alien to Nikolai Marr himself, who is in fact Suleimenov's main source of ideas on linguistics. The Turkish Historical Thesis, officially proclaimed in 1932, insisted on projecting Turkish civilization back into remote antiquity, while a complementary linguistic theory called the Sun Theory of Language, which held sway for several years in the 1930s, asserted that “all general ideas emanate from the sun, which is the first human totem.” Speros Vryonis, Jr., The Turkish State and History: Clio Meets the Grey Wolf (New York, 1991), 63, 70. This closely resembles Suleimenov's belief that the symbolic language of primitive man derived ultimately from the first religion, which was a solar cult (cf. Iazyk pis'ma, 273). Unlike these Turkish doctrines, Suleimenov's theses are not racially colored, that is, they do not insist on a genetic link between the ancient Turks and earlier civilizations.

37. Suleimenov, AZi IA, 297.

38. Ibid., 289 (emphasis added). Suleimenov rarely provides a clear account of the origin of his ideas, but they are, philosophically speaking, seldom original. Suleimenov seems unaware of the debates on the various forms of the sign in modern semiotics (e.g., Charles Sander Peirce), but his ideas seem comparable to Lucien Levy-Bruhl's How Natives Think, trans. Lilian A. Clare (Princeton, 1985), originally published in 1910 asLesfonctions mentales dans les societes primitives. Levy-Bruhl was translated into Russian in the 1930s: Pervobytnoe myshlenie (Moscow, 1930) and Sverkhestestvennoe v pervobytnom myshlenii (Moscow, 1937). For a history of theorizations of the symbol, see Todorov, Tzvetan, Theories of the Symbol, trans. Porter, Catherine (Ithaca, 1982).Google Scholar

39. Suleimenov, AZUA, 255.

40. Ibid., 289.

41. Ibid., 297-300.

42. The Clay Book is a hybrid text in which a long, mock-epic poetic text set in the remote past is preceded by a prose introduction situated in the present. Together they constitute a deliberately incongruous juxtaposition of epos, allegory, and parody. The Clay Book has invited a lot more critical attention than AZ i IA: cf. L. Anninskii, ‘“Proidia skvoz’ debri …’ Olzhas Suleimenov i ego ‘Glinianaia kniga'” (written in 1970), Kontakty: Literaturno- kriticheskie stat'i (Moscow, 1982), 121-30, who has noted Suleimenov's repeated recourse to “philological mystification“; L. Mil', “'Glinianaia kniga’ O. Suleimenova: V poiskakh ‘znaka iavlenii'” and Vladislav Vladimirov, “Eshche raz o ‘Glinianoi knige,'” both in Voprosy literatury, 1970, no. 9:23-41 and no. 9:219-27; G. Shashkina, “Poemaosolntse,” Prostor, 1985, no. 4/5:121-24, and Evgenii Sidorov, “Na mirovom kochev'e: O poezii Olzhasa Suleimenova,“Prostor, 1986, no. 3:195-98.

43. Iazyk pis'ma has also been serialized in the journal Prostor, starting with 1998, no. 2. It appears as if the basic premise of the book, if not the actual content, was conceived much earlier, in the 1970s, and is closely linked to the thematics of the second part of AZ i IA. Its purpose is to debunk the Saussurean notion of the arbitrary sign, by rediscovering the “causality of the word” in the most archaic form of writing, the hieroglyph or “imagesign,” which constituted a shared repertory of religious meanings for ancient humanity.

44. This account of Marr's career is based mainly on Lawrence L. Thomas, The Linguistic Theories ofN.Ja. Marr, The University of California Publications in Linguistics 14 (Berkeley, 1997), in particular 135-46; on Marr and Levy-Bruhl, see 113. See also Zhirmunskii, V. M., “Lingvisticheskaia paleontologiia N. la. Marra i istoriia iazyka,” Protiv vulgarizatsii i izvrashcheniia Marksizma v iazykoznaniia: Sbornik statei, pt. 2 (Moscow, 1952), 172–208 Google Scholar, in particular 185-87; I'Hermitte, Rene, Marr, Marrisme, Marristes: Unepage de I'histoire de la linguistique sovietique (Paris, 1987)Google Scholar; Alpatov, V. M., Istoriia odnogo mifa: Marr i marrizm (Moscow, 1991)Google Scholar; Slezkine, Yuri, “N. la. Marr and the National Origins of Soviet Ethnogenetics,” Slavic Review 55, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 826-62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

45. Suleimenov, AZUA, 218.

46. Marr, “Iafeticheskii Kavkaz i tretii etnicheskii element,” Izbrannye raboty (Moscow, 1933), 1:89-90.

47. Ibid., 60 (emphasis added). See also Thomas, Linguistic Theories ofN.Ja. Marr, 10: “[Marr] was preoccupied with the registration of alleged correspondences between languages and did not pause to establish the internal linguistic changes which would justify the form the correspondences took… . The result is a complicated system of arbitrary sound changes with absolutely no time perspective.“

48. N. la. Marr, “Rasselenie iazykov i narodov i vopros o prarodine turetskikh iazykov,” Izbrannye raboty, 1:137.

49. Ibid., 1:148, 155.

50. Both see neogrammarianism as the main manifestation of Indo-European linguistics: cf. Alpatov, Istoriia odnogo mifa, 49, and Suleimenov, Iazyk pis'ma, 18-20.

51. In fact several of Marr's articles proposing specific etymologies, genealogies, and linguistic derivations strikingly resemble Suleimenov's procedures and could have served as models: “Predvaritel'noe soobshchenie o rodstve gruzinskogo iazyka s semiticheskimi,” “Shumerskie slova s osnovoi en v osveshchenii odnogo iz polozhenii iafeticheskoi semantiki,” and “Perezhitki eshche semanticheskikh grupp ‘nebo+voda’ iz shumerskogo iazyka,” all in hbrannyeraboty, 1:23-38, 2:151-52, and 2:153-54. Differences between Suleimenov and Marr can of course be noted: for example, Suleimenov, unlike Marr, makes no attempt at a rapprochement with Marxism and is thus free to privilege symbolic language and the written sign without reference to socioeconomic factors or material culture. It is also worth noting that other attempts to revive Marr have been made, predictably in post- Soviet Georgia: see Smith, Law, Wilson, Bohr, and Allworth, Nation-Building in the Post-Soviet Borderlands, 177-79.

52. L. Anninskii, “'Proidia skvoz’ debri …’ Olzhas Suleimenov i ego ‘Glinianaia kniga,'” 124: “This mischievous philologism has its own poetic halo in the Russian cultural tradition and goes back through [Semen] Kirsanov to [Velimir] Khlebnikov.” Other critics who have pointed in passing to the Suleimenov-Khlebnikov nexus are Andrzej Drawicz, “Nowe doswiadczenie i stare tradycje,” Nowe ksiazki, 1970, no. 22; and Tolmachev, Povest’ ob Olzhase, 55. See also Evgenii Sidorov's statement in “Na mirovom kochev'e: O poezii Olzhasa Suleimenova,” Prostor, 1986, no. 3:195, which could apply equally to both poets: “Russian poetic language inhales the breath of the east in his work and is adorned by a sensitive attention to the very root of words, their etymological essence and semantic variants.” Suleimenov mentions Khlebnikov once in AZ i IA, 206.

53. Khlebnikov, Velimir, “Pust’ na mogil'noi plite prochtut,” in Kharszhiev, N. and Grits, T., eds., Neizdannyeproizvedeniia (Moscow, 1940), 318.Google Scholar

54. Khlebnikov, Velimir, Sobranie proizvedenii Velimira Khlebnikova, ed. Stepanov, N. (Leningrad, 1928-1933), 5:155 Google Scholar. On Khlebnikov's “imaginary philology,” see V P. Grigor'ev, Grammatika idiostilia (Moscow, 1983); on his relationship to Asia or the Russian “south,” see Iu. M. Loshchits and V. N. Turbin, “Tema vostoka v tvorchestve V Khlebnikova,” Narody Azii i Afriki, 1966, no. 4; Mirsky, Salomon, Der Orient im Werk Velimir Chlebnikovs (Munich, 1975)Google Scholar; Tartakovskii, P., Russkie poety i vostok: Bunin, Khkbnikov, Esenin: Stat'i (Tashkent, 1986).Google Scholar

55. Velimir Khlebnikov, Tvoreniia, ed. V. P. Grigor'ev and A. E. Parnis (Moscow, 1986), 142-43; the definitive redaction of the poem is found only in this edition. The circumstantial and textual history of “S utroboi mednoiu,” as well as some of its symbolic detail, have been carefully unpacked by A. E. Parnis in “V. Khlebnikov v revoliutsionnom Giliane (novye materialy),” Narody Azii i Afriki, 1967, no. 5:157-64. Suleimenov could have read earlier redactions of this poem, which do not differ in essential details.

56. Khlebnikov, “Khudozhniki mira!” Sobranieproizvedenii, 5:216-17, 219. Empirical evidence for this postulate is found by enumerating the words in which kh occurs as the initial and determining letter. This search for examples was an ongoing preoccupation: some years before Khlebnikov had observed that khleb is a “plant that artificially guards and defends man,” while man “hides in the khizha, khiba, khata from the forces of disease and death.” Khlebnikov, “Razlozhenie slova,” Sobranie proizvedenii, 5:201.

57. See Suleimenov, lazykpis'ma, 16-33, and Khlebnikov, “Svoiasi” and “Khudozhniki mira!” both in Sobranieproizvedenii, 2:9 and 5:216-17.