Life and Myth: The Mother in Chinghiz Aitmatov’s Literary Creation

Abstract

Chinghiz Torekulovich Aitmatov was born on 12th of December 1928 in Sheker, a village in the Soviet Republic of Kirghizia. Both his parents were literate and had enjoyed schooling in a society of oral tradition. It is remarkable that the future writer’s mother, although belonging to a Muslim society with nomad way of life, with authority and power exercised above all by men, had been given access to education. As to Chinghiz Aitmatov’s father, he was one of the first Communists in Kirghizia, devoted to a cause which in his eyes was great; in the late thirties he was invited to Moscow in order to receive higher instruction in Marxist philosophy and there, in the Soviet capital, Torekul Aitmatov in 1937 was arrested; he disappeared.