The Formation of the Canon of the Kazakh Soviet Literature: History, Institutions, Translations

The paper is devoted to the formation of Kazakh Soviet literature and its canon in 1920s and 1930s. National literature of Soviet Kazakhstan was a cultural construct created in accordance with general ideas of Soviet literature and correlated with processes in Russian literature. In the paper Kazakh-Soviet literature is represented as a system which comprises a number of interrelated projects: creation of a national corps of literature texts; translations into the Russian language; Russian and Kazakh publications of real and fictitious writings of Kazakh song akyns. With regard to the analysis we can state that the canon of Kazakh Soviet literature was formed on the basis of literary genre. Each of literary genres was developed by one of six Kazakh writers: S. Seifullin, I. Dzhansugurov, B. Mailin, G.Musrepov, M. Auezov, S.Mukanov. The special chapter is concerned with the features of Kazakh folklore. The chapter covers genre and thematic features of the first collections of Kazakh songs - akyns. The study shows that the analysed texts represent original Russian texts and are not translations from the Kazakh language.