Azerbaijani literary critic about Auezov

Abstract

The monograph of the Azerbaijani literary critic and Turkologist
Nizami Mammadov-Tagisoy «Mukhtar Auezov: from tradition to innovation» is devoted to the
problems of studying the work of the great Kazakh writer M. Auezov. This work is the result
of rigorous analysis and active rethinking of the texts of the classic works of the unsurpassed
master of the pen in the context of historical, moral and aesthetic concepts of our time.
As a connoisseur of Kazakh literature and folklore, a translator of Auezov’s story «Beauty
in Mourning» into Azerbaijani and as the author of a number of articles about M. Auezov, N. Mammadov-Tagisoy the author refers in his research to scientific publications not only
from the Soviet but also from the post-Soviet period, and also relies on archival material and
official documents.
If in the first chapter of the monograph the scholar describes the conditions and factors
for the formation of M. Auezov’s creative personality considers the ideological, thematic and
artistic originality of his early stories (“The fate of the defenseless”, “Orphan”, “Marriage”,
“In the shadow of the past”, “Grey Fierce”, etc.), then in the second chapter he analyzes the
ways of reflecting the events of the Karkara (Albanian) uprising of 1916 in the masterpiece
novel “The Hard Time”, which was on the list of banned literature and was only republished
in Russian and translation in 1972. The dramatic works of M. Auezov are the object of the
third chapter of the research book, in which the focus is on the analysis and reassessment of
the historical tragedies «Night Peals», «Khan Kene», «Beket». A comparative analysis of poetic
features (author’s idea, type of conflict, compositional structure, imagery system, etc.) of the
plays «Abai», written in collaboration with L. Sobolev, and «Vagif» by the Azerbaijani poetdramatist S. Vurgun was carried out.
It is that N. Mamedov-Tagisoy’s monograph will give new impetus to the research and
popularization of the creative heritage of M. Auezov – the author of the famous epic novel
«The Way of Abai» – in the context of the development of historical and artistic thought in
the Turkic world.