Taking Oscar Wilde to Kazakhstan

Earlier this month I did a whirlwind lecture tour of Almaty, Taraz and Kulan in Kazakhstan, in the company of the Aitmatov Academy’s Director, Rahima Abduvalieva. The trigger for the visit was the 90th anniversary celebrations of the esteemed Kyrgyz writer, Chinghiz Aitmatov, author of Jamila and other novellas and short stories, as well as evocative memoir. I had prepared a lecture on interesting parallels between Aitmatov and Oscar Wilde, which I delivered at Al-Farabi and TIGU universities. Though the two writers lived in different centuries, thousands of kilometres apart, they were both outsider-insiders, who had moved from the colonial periphery — Ireland and Kyrgyzstan — to the metropolis (London and Moscow) and won literary success. That was all the more remarkable in the case of Aitmatov, whose father was a victim of Stalinist oppression as an “enemy of the people”.

In Almaty I gave master classes on Wilde’s life and work to both Kazakh and Russian language philology students and presented copies of my short biography of Oscar Wilde to the universities. I was interviewed in Kulan by a local TV channel, and on my return to London took part, with Rahima Abduvalieva, in a full-length programme on Chinghiz Aitmatov for the BBC Kyrgyz Service. Oscar Wilde was of course a major feature of my contribution then as well, and I like to think that he would have guffawed with pleasure at the thought of having been transported to the Kazakh steppes.

The BBC Kyrgyz programme is available on YouTube.