Mankurt

For the 1990 Soviet film, see Mankurt (film).

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 came to refer 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

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, 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]

Aitmatov stated that he did not take the idea from tradition but invented it himself.[2]

Usage

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] based on the legend about the mankurt from Aitmatov's novel.[9][10]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b "Айтматов, Чингиз Торекулович". Кругосвет. Archived from the original on 21 January 2013. Retrieved 22 September 2018.
  2. ^ 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.'
  3. ^ Excerpt from: celestial.com.kg Archived 2013-10-29 at the Wayback Machine
  4. ^ 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.
  5. ^ Элита Татарстана — журнал для первых лиц
  6. ^ Тощенко Ж. Т. Манкуртизм как форма исторического беспамятства. // Пленарное заседание «Диалог культур и партнёрство цивилизаций: становление глобальной культуры». 2012. — С. 231.
  7. ^ 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.
  8. ^ Oliver Leaman (2001). Companion encyclopedia of Middle Eastern and North African film. Taylor & Francis. p. 17. ISBN 0-415-18703-6, 9780415187039
  9. ^ Horton & Brashinsky (1992). pp. 16, 17.
  10. ^ P. Rollberg (2009). Historical dictionary of Russian and Soviet cinema. Scarecrow Press. pp. 35, 37, 482. ISBN 0-8108-6072-4, 9780810860728