famous people

HIS HEART IS IN THE STEPPE.

The famous Kazakhstan writer, the Kazakhstan State prize winner, Ivan Petrovich Shukhov is 100 years old.
It is a surprising fact: the outstanding Kazakhstan writers Habit Musrepov, Sabit Mukanov and Ivan Shukhov were born, lived and worked in the Zhambyl district of our Severo-Kazakhstanskaya oblast
The great talent of these wonderful writers, literary success and public activities are highly valued by different generations in Kazakhstan and beyond its bounds. Nowadays, in the independent Republic of Kazakhstan, we read their works of great talent with interest and gratitude.
President N.A. Nazarbaev said confidently in the book “In the stream of history”: “The cultural expanse of Kazakhstan is the expanse of the interconnection and interdependence of various ethnic cultures. We formulate and follow these principles openly and there is no tactic political game or wish to conceal anything. It is true that many ill-starred Cassandras heralded an ethnic chaos in Kazakhstan, first of all for the cultural reasons. It is true that the complicated ethnic cultural structure potentially bears a conflict charge. But besides the internal policy reasonable enough on national issue, in Kazakhstan the great role belonged also to the fact that the interaction of cultures often developed not according to the canons of the totalitarian state but opposite to them. It was the long experience of cultural contacts in spite of their being sometimes superficial and limited that played their positive role.”
Ivan Shukhov… Though almost thirty years have passed from the sad moment when this man went to the other world, to the eternity – his house situated in Presnovka is not empty. The museum was opened there.
They say that the writer was unpretentious in his private life. It is true; he led a modest, simple, open life. He could hardly think that excursions would go to his study. But the respect of his country-people was showed by the fact that they preserved the articles of writer’s, editor’s life, they preserved his inexpensive personal things – the things of the past Soviet epoch. Of course, this materialized memory is the sign of the constant interest to the unusual personality of Ivan Petrovich.
It is remarkable that local people gather in this museum-house in order to recall the old times, to sing Cossack songs. The traditional readings of Shukhov books take place here. There are also a lot of guests who come to Ivan Shukhov’s native place on purpose. The people of the Severo-Kazakhstanskaya oblast remember not only Ivan, the youngest one of the Shukhovs’ thirteen children. They know from the stories of their parents or grandfather also his father, the well-known drover of Pre-Ishim, Pyotr Semyonovich Shukhov, they know also his mother, Ulyana Ivanovna. They were people who were uneducated while their youngest son became a writer…
“For all that I have good as a man and as a literary man I am obliged to my illiterate parents, in the first place – to my mother”, Shukhov says confidently. He says as about the main human feature of this common stanitsa Cossack woman – about his sociability. As for his father, he went about the entire Northern steppe, he knew both how the Cossack stanitsa and how the Kazakh aul lived. It is important that his father’s stories about the customs and habits of country-people became the basis of the children’s upbringing, became a corner-stone in determining the creative origin of Ivan.
Like all respectable parents the Shukhovs wanted their children to excel them in life. They found the possibility to give Ivan good education according to those times, and the years of education in Petropavlovsk and Omsk, his first trip to Moscow brought the future writer together with outstanding creative people.
The fact about Ivan Shukhov’s friendship with Mikhail Sholokhov is widely-known. Of course, two young literary people were united by their belonging to the Cossacks. He recalls: “We only began to enter the literature at that time but we were connected by the common life material and experience. I think that I was lucky – the close, immediate association with Sholokhov at the very beginning of my biography as a writer helped me much in my literary self-determination. I remember a deep impression that was produced on me by the first published chapters of “The quiet Don”. They served as a sort of impulse for writing “The bitter line”.
The novel “The bitter line” published in the year when the author was 25 years old was Ivan Shukhov’s powerful break-through in the big literature.
A.M. Gorky notes in his letter to the young colleague: “You wrote a very good book it is indisputable. While reading “The bitter line” you get an impression that the author is a gifted man who treats his work very seriously. Being a Cossack he finds enough courage and freedom in order to depict Cossacks with ruthless and true severity that they deserve… You could not see all that you depicted. But when one reads your book he feels that you seemed to be an immediate viewer and participator of all the events, depicted by you, that you seemed to overhear all the thoughts and understood all the feelings of your heroes. This is the real, true art of depicting life with the power of word.”
Sabit Mukanov, in his turn, valuing the first large production of his countryman and friend from his early years, writes: “The bitter line” by Shukhov is good not only due to the fact that the life of the Cossacks are considered in the classical point of view and the master brings in his verdict on the kulaks but also due to the fact that the author shows the century-long friendship of the Kazakh people with the great Russian people.”
The social reforms in the village became the basis of the next production by Shukhov, the novel “Hatred”. According to the eyewitnesses the writer had been working at this novel for 15 hours a day, and the production was completed within a short period of time. However it does not seem to be written in haste.
The fate gave I.Shukhov the possibility to live both in the Russian and in the Kazakh capitals, to go beyond the ocean; however his heart always tenderly kept the spirit of the Kazakh expanses. I am sure that the serious reader more than once reread, for instance, these exact lines of one of the chapters of “Hatred”: “The steppe has been lying for five days as if incinerated by fire and hail. It was burned by the severe breath of the violent whirlwind. The wind, saturated with salt and the poisonous smell of saline land, raised snowstorms from the distant land places and carried them formidably to the steppe that seemed to be deprived of all living things. The dry stalks and leaves of chernobylnik whirled and floated in the air, and the sun covered with ashy twilight, was seen shining evilly and stingily through the cold celestial darkness.”
Together with natural phenomena I. Shukhov reproduces relations among people. One can cite more great writers and literary men but he should think that Ivan Petrovich offered his opinion of life not only to the professional writers. The popularity of “Hatred” can be proved by the statistics: from 1932 to 1947 the novel was republished for 14 times that is hundreds of thousands books were in demand. The feature film “The enemy paths” was shot by this production in 1935. And if we resort to the history of cinematograph we will see that the right for screening seventy years ago belonged not to the handicraft things but to considerable, outstanding productions.
The value of all that I.Shukhov created in literature and publicism is constant. Using his books the young reader can truly estimate the Soviet history, the events in the north of Kazakhstan and in the large country. The novels “The bitter line”, “Hatred”, “The Motherland”, “The acting army”, essays about the countrymen participation in the Great Patriotic War, his tales and stories, a lot of publications on the pages of the largest editions, editor’s activities, and at last “The Presnovsk pages” are highly appreciated by the state and society.
But his biography contained also dramatic episodes. Though Ivan Shukhov did not have the fate of the famous Kazakhstan poet Magzhan Zhumabaev, nevertheless Ivan Petrovich suffered trying to return the good name of Magzhan to literature. The editor of the “Prostor” magazine, rare by its selection of publications was discharged for the try to publish verses of the poet subjected to repression.
Ivan Petrovich not only left in the memory of people the depiction of the steppe almost in its original state. He was among the first writers who glorified the development of the virgin land. Here he gave priority to the story of those people who did not come to our land from distant places but who had lived there from the very beginning and responded to the bold project of raising and developing the virgin land.
Today, in the year of centenary from the birth of I.P.Shukhov, the reader holds in his hands the book, dedicated to this wonderful man, a great master. The materials of different authors gathered in this collection can help to orient in the stream of literary works and in that realistic world that was created in literature by our countryman, an honest, truthful laborer – Ivan Petrovich Shukhov.