Interview by Yulia Gubanova
Sharkhan Kazygul, the first winner of Kazakhstan’s Mecenat.kz Award, was one hundred percent confident about his novel The Kulpet. Yuliya Gubanova spoke with the writer at the request of Alma Review and found out what this confidence was based on, how the novel was written, and how Sharkhan Kazygul sees the modern Kazakhstani writer.
“I’m a Real Text Twister, or After 60 You Have to Create“
– Sharkhan, tell us, how did you write the novel?
– During the pandemic, I had nothing to do as I am retire. I usually ghost-write memoirs, but at that time there was not even that kind of work. And I can’t judy twiddle my thumbs. After sixty years of working in both hemispheres, it is so important to me at my age to be engaged in creativity, mental work. One shouldn’t interrupt this! Otherwise it can lead to the breakdown of neural connections, and a person quickly grows old and dies. That’s how I began to write my novel. I can say I had spent the previous forty years thinking about it. I was a strong reporter and didn’t want to be a bad writer, so I didn’t take up fiction. But literary steam has to be let off. I also know that I’m going to die one day. So as long as I was alive and strong, I decided to write at least one novel.
I wrote Kulpet in four months, and spent six months polishing it. Editing is an important part of my journalistic work, so it took me a long time to finish the novel. You see, I’m a real text twister!
While I was writing, I didn’t have a strict schedule: I would wake up and have tea (one mug of tea, then one cigarette for a total of three mugs of tea and three cigarettes in half an hour). I would get focused and get my thoughts together and sit down to writte. For me was very important not to be disturbed by anyone. When my thoughts were consistent, I did not stop writing. I paused when I hesitated and went for a walk. While walking I would often have the idea of how to proceed and then I would keep writing. My only principle was not to write when I had no ideas.
There were days when I did not write at all, and sometimes I managed to write five pages a day. There were also days with thoughts but without writing. I wrote them down on paper, but then I would walk around and think, “How is it better to write from a literary point of view and as understandable as possible?” In other words, I mulled over on this or that plot turn or scene until it was perfectly formulated.
I have been collecting material for the last thirty years. I had a spontaneous card-file. I was slowly writing down different details, thoughts. There was no scientific approach to it. But these notes helped me preserve the temporal vocabulary, so that I could convey the atmosphere of the novel’s events and accurately render the dialogue.
I chose the settings that would allow me to write about large-scale things. If a person travels, he thinks globally, but if he lives in an aul, a village, he thinks in proportion to the place where he lives.
I have never been to Afghanistan or the United States, but I read a lot about these countries, studied materials about the Afghan war. I have a friend who lives in the United States, we studied together in the university. I asked her a lot of questions about adapting, how to learn English to the level needed to live in America, how to get a job, and many other things.
– When you applied for the contest, you were 100% sure of the novel. What gave you this confidence?
– I can tell you for sure: it was not self-confidence. I put my whole soul into this novel: into the composition, the characters, the language and the style. It was important for me to polish everything. I’m not saying I wrote it at the level of the greatest writers. But I did what I wanted to do as well as possible.
Since I have been doing journalism all my life, I know very well when I have done a good job and when I haven’t. For example, I am writing an essay. If it doesn’t come out well, it is obvious, and I’ll tear it up and write it again. When it comes out well, it is also clear. So with the novel, I’m not bragging–I knew I had written it wal. I wouldn’t have entered the contest if I had any doubts about it. In fact, this is the first contest in my life. Before, I did not want to participate in journalistic contests. But this was a happy accident: I had written the novel, and then heard of a new contest–Mecenat.kz.
Kulpet is Anguish
– Since the novel is in Kazakh and has not yet been translated into Russian, can you tell us what it is about?
– In short, my novel is about anguish, the suffering of the soul, the love for the homeland, and the search for self-identity. My main character, Abuzhan Raiysov, returns to Kazakhstan, his homeland. On the plane he starts remembering the past, thinking about life and death, about conscience, the final judgement and redemption.
His parents died when he was a university student. His father’s enemies took revenge on Abuzhan by sending him to serve in Afghanistan in 1985. By that time, he had already graduated from the Aktobe Medical Institute and worked as a surgeon in a regional hospital.
Before deploying, Abuzhan comes home to say goodbye to his homeland. On the train he meets a girl, Assel, leaves her his house, and departs to serve without saying anything. While he working in a hospital in Kabul, a nurse, Irina, persuades him to escape: together they make their way to Pakistan, and from there they fly to the USA.
In the USA, he continues to work as a surgeon, and he is doing well: he is in demand and quite well off. He marries a girl from the Kazakh diaspora, and they have a son. But Abuzhan constantly feels that he is losing his identity, his roots. His wife tragically dies, and Abuzhan raises his son by himself.
The son graduates as an astrophysicist, works for the IAEA, and considers himself an American. Abuzhan decides to return to Kazakhstan. What will his return to his homeland be like? Will he find what he was looking for so long? Readers will find out about this when they finish the novel.
– How did the title of the novel come about?
– I work a lot with the fifteen-volume explanatory dictionary of the Kazakh language. In my spare time I study Kazakh words from there – 5-6 words a day. Even though I know Kazakh perfectly well, I still find something forgotten or out of use. Many of these words have very interesting meanings. When I was writing a novel, I didn’t immediately think of a title, but somewhere in the middle of the work, I opened one of the volumes of the dictionary, and found the word “Kulpet“. It is an archaism which means suffering of the soul – a perfect title for my work because I am a human soul investigator.
– How did you come up with names for the main characters?
– The names of my characters are charactonyms. The main character’s name is Abuzhan Raisov, his name consists of two parts: Abu means a person capable of dealing with issues in the emotional and spiritual spheres, and Zhan means soul. Besides, I knew that in the USA he would have to adjust his name to local standards: there he became Abu Rais. His father’s name was Erden, because he was a brave and principled man /the direct translation from Kazakh is “a powerful warrior”, from Mongolian “erdene”–a jewel (interviewer’s note)/. The main character’s mother’s name was Rakhia, a Muslim name, and she believed in God. The Nurse Irina Nemolyaeva was just a woman without spirituality, she did not believe in God and the final judgement /the surname presumably comes from the nickname Nemolyai, Nemolyaka which literally means “one who does not pray, goes to work or to the table without prayer”(interviewer’s note)/.
– How did you find the idea of the novel?
– I have always been involved in philosophy, antropology, and the study of the Universe. I constantly recorded my reflections in social networks. I have published nine non-fiction books including a two-volume collection of reflections Online Thoughts On My Ownsome. For example: ‘When a woman and a man get married, they say, ‘It happened by the will of God!’ And when they get divorced, they start blaming each other, ‘It’s been your fault!’, ‘No, it’s been your fault!’ A kind of paradox… There is a rumor, Allah once said, ‘I do everything, and people blame each other.’
I wanted to interpret these reflections through images and scenes. I came up with a story, a plot, using an idea from the early 1980s. However, I put it aside for a long time, as I didn’t think I had enough writing talent. Then, two years ago there was that very moment to realize the idea.
The story in the novel is fictional but based on real events. It was very important for me to convey the inner feelings of the characters, to delicately show the culture of intimate relationships about which our today’s youth knows almost nothing – this part took me the most time: I spent three months working on just three pages. For us, Kazakhs, this is a very closed topic, and this is why I wished to make it as interesting and beautiful as possible.
Sharkhan Kazygul was born in 1956 in Aralsk. He graduated from the Faculty of Journalism of the Kazakh State University named after S. M. Kirov. He is the author of nine publicistic books. He is an academician of the International Informatization Academy and also the winner of the Mecenat.kz Literary Award.
Yuliya Gubanova was born in Moscow in 1977. Translator, writer, traveler (40+ countries, 150+ cities). A graduate of the Open Literature School of Almaty. Author of a collection of short stories “The Way Home”. Author of the course “Tell a Story in Your Travel-blog”.
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