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" Ethnic Words and Soviet Things: "
Baker, Christopher Aaron
Bovingdon, Gardner
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Latin Dissertation
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| Language of Document
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English
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| Record Number
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1104439
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| Doc. No
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TLpq2232222297
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| Main Entry
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Baker, Christopher Aaron
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Bovingdon, Gardner
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| Title & Author
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Ethnic Words and Soviet Things:\ Baker, Christopher AaronBovingdon, Gardner
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| College
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Indiana University
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| Date
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2019
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| student score
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2019
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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| Page No
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288
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| Abstract
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This dissertation is a study of the writing of Olzhas Sūleimenov, Ilīyas Esenberlīn, and Yuri Dombrovsky and the reflections on paper and taxonomy in their works Az i ia (1975), Köşpendiler (Nomads, 1976), and the Khranitel' drevnostei (Keeper of Antiquities, 1964). It is a study of literary art in late Soviet Kazakhstan and men who wrote with encyclopedias, dictionaries, and classifications on their minds. The works they created were attempts to make sense of the sediment of taxonomies in the steppe across which the Kazakh SSR sprawled, a geography that was layered with ethnographic, botanical, and linguistic categorizations. They wrote with this inheritance of paper in mind and while surrounded by gigantic tomes of Soviet erudition like the Qazaq sovet èntsīklopedīyasι (Kazakh Soviet Encyclopedia, 1972–1978), a text that was itself dwarfed by the Bol’shaia sovetskaia ėntsiklopediia (Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 1969–1978), which issued its final volume in 1978. The latter assorted the entirety of the regime’s heritages into bounded ethnic geographies while detailing the flora, fauna, and geological characteristics specific to each. The Kazakh Soviet Encyclopedia encompassed similarly exhaustive encapsulations, including an elaborate description of the Kazakh anthropological type, a collection of bones, skulls, and bodies depicting average height and arm length, common dental structures, and precise calculations of the length and width of crania. A commentary on this inheritance of paper, the art of Sūleimenov, Esenberlīn, and Dombrovsky was also a complex, indeterminate reflection of it. Their efforts to make sense of categorizations reinforced the syntax and grammar of the classificatory heritages they examined. They critically reflected on this inheritance in moments and in others mimicked traditions that imagined it conceivable to create a book consonant with human difference and the multiplicity of existing things. They also imagined tabulating sprawling realities in minute detail and finding the ethnic equivalent of the Linnaean taxonomy. The genealogy they attempted to understand in art also shaped their writing.
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Asian literature
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Russian history
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