Mankurt
Mankurts are unthinking slaves in Chinghiz Aitmatov's novel The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years. After the novel, in the Soviet Union the word has become the reference to people who have lost touch with their ethnic homeland, who have forgotten their kinship.[1] This meaning was retained in Russia and many other post-Soviet states.
Origin[edit]
According to Aitmatov's fictional[2] legend, mankurts were prisoners of war who were turned into non-autonomous docile servants by exposing camel skin wrapped around their heads to the heat of the sun. These skins dried tight, like a steel band, causing brain damage and figurative zombification. Mankurts did not recognise their name, family, or tribe—"a mankurt did not recognise himself as a human being".[3] In Aitmatov's novel, a young man turned into a mankurt kills his mother when she attempts to rescue him from captivity.
Aitmatov stated that he did not take the idea from tradition but invented it himself.[2]
Usage[edit]
In the later years of the Soviet Union mankurt entered everyday speech as a metaphor for the Soviet people affected by the distortions and omissions in the history by the official teachings.[4]
In the figurative sense, the word "mankurt" refers to people who have lost touch with their ethnic homeland, who have forgotten their kinship. In this sense, it has become a term in common parlance[1] and journalism.[5] In Russian, there have appeared neologisms such as mankurtizm, mankurtizatsiya (meaning "mankurtization"), and demankurtizatsiya (meaning "demankurtization").[6] In some former Soviet republics, the term has come to represent those non-Russians who have lost their ethnic heritage by the effects of the Soviet system.[7]
In 1990, the film Mankurt was released in the Soviet Union.[8] Written by Mariya Urmadova, the film is based on one narrative strand from Aitmatov's novel.[9][10]
See also[edit]
References[edit]
- ^ a b "Айтматов, Чингиз Торекулович". Кругосвет. Archived from the original on 21 January 2013. Retrieved 22 September 2018.
- ^ a b Dmitry Bykov, Лекции по русской литературе XX века. Том 4 (Moscow: Eksmo, 2019), p. 52: «народ этого не выдумал, это выдумал я» 'The people did not invent it, I did.'
- ^ Excerpt from: celestial.com.kg Archived 2013-10-29 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Horton, Andrew; Brashinsky, Michael (1992). The zero hour: glasnost and Soviet cinema in transition (illustrated ed.). Princeton University Press. p. 131. ISBN 0-691-01920-7.
- ^ Элита Татарстана — журнал для первых лиц
- ^ Тощенко Ж. Т. Манкуртизм как форма исторического беспамятства. // Пленарное заседание «Диалог культур и партнёрство цивилизаций: становление глобальной культуры». 2012. — С. 231.
- ^ Laitin, David D. (1998). Identity in formation: the Russian-speaking populations in the near abroad (illustrated ed.). Cornell University Press. p. 135. ISBN 978-0-8014-8495-7.
- ^ Oliver Leaman (2001). Companion encyclopedia of Middle Eastern and North African film. Taylor & Francis. p. 17. ISBN 0-415-18703-6, 9780415187039
- ^ Horton & Brashinsky (1992). pp. 16, 17.
- ^ P. Rollberg (2009). Historical dictionary of Russian and Soviet cinema. Scarecrow Press. pp. 35, 37, 482. ISBN 0-8108-6072-4, 9780810860728