He wrote Camiyla/Jamila, published in 1958, which introduced Aitmatov to the world and is considered a masterpiece in a way. Louis Aragon calls this novel the most beautiful love story in the world.
Cengiz Aytmatov, one of the most important writers of the 20th century, who first comes to mind when it comes to Kyrgyz Literature, was born on 12 December 1928 in Şeker Village in Talas Valley, where it is believed that the headquarters of Manas (Manas Epic) is located. His father is a statesman and his mother is a teacher.
In the childhood memories of Cengiz Aytmatov, the first of four children in the family, his grandmother Ayimkan is an important hero. The author's grandmother is a woman who adheres to the Kyrgyz traditions. He knows folk songs, laments, and fairy tales very well. Cengiz Aytmatov grew up listening to his grandmother Ayimkan's tales and folk songs. One of the reasons why Aitmatov is a great writer is that he is fed as much as possible from his national sources. In addition to the cultural richness of the region where he lived, the interest of his family had a great impact.
Chinghiz Torekulovich Aitmatov (12 December 1928 – 10 June 2008) was a Kyrgyz author who wrote mainly in Russian, but also in Kyrgyz. He is one of the best known figures in Kyrgyzstan's literature.
His father, Chinghiz Aitmatov, was taken into custody in 1937, when he was nine years old, on charges of public enemy for supporting Turkishness and Turkish unity, and his family never heard from him again. They were secretly murdered in 1938, along with 137 people, including the then-prime minister of Kyrgyzstan. They are buried in the old brick factory at a place called Çön Taş in Kyrgyzstan. However, years later, in 1991, mass graves called Atabeyit today were unearthed.
After their father is arrested, Chinghiz Aitmatov and his siblings are taken care of by their uncle Riskulbek. “My uncle Riskulbek was very intelligent and educated. According to rumors, my uncle Rıskulbek gave me the name Cengiz. This shows that he knows history well. Because the Kyrgyz have made it a tradition to name their children after great people in history. However, his uncle will also suffer the wrath of Stalin, he is arrested towards the end of 1937 and they are never heard from again.
Although he was only 14 years old when the Second World War began, he took on heavy duties. Because he can read and write Russian, he is brought to the village secretary and later becomes a tax officer. Since he could read and write, he was given the task of conveying the news of death from the front to the families. According to him, one of his most difficult tasks was to give the news of the death of their relatives to those whose children or spouses died in the war. In many of the works that he will write in the following years, Aitmatov will tell the cruelty and coldness of the war mostly through the experiences of those behind the front.
After the war, he graduated from Cambil Veterinary Technical College in Kazakhstan and then from the Kyrgyzstan Agricultural Institute. In 1953, he started his business life with a veterinary diploma. In 1952, his first work, the story Journalist Child Dzyuyo, was published. It tells the fate of children in post-war hunger and misery in Japan, through the little boy Dzyuyo, who tries to make a living by selling newspapers.
Aitmatov's most striking, most mysterious, most controversial work, which tells the tragedy of the war, and leads people to different thoughts and different interpretations, is his 1957 novel Face-to-Face. The characters in the novel Face-to-Face, which can also be described as an autobiographical work, are real and is the story of İsmail, his own villager fleeing the war. As in this work, the protagonists of many of Aitmatov's works consist of his own villagers.
He wrote Camiyla/Jamila, published in 1958, which introduced Aitmatov to the world and is considered a masterpiece in a way, while he was studying at the International Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow. The first name of the work, which Louis Aragon calls the most beautiful love story in the world, is Music. There is no doubt that this name was given from the melody of the love songs that Daniyar and Cemile sang while they were working. The work, which the author takes from real life, tells the story of trying to be suppressed and surrounded by many elements such as love, marriage, tradition, and social values. However, the subject of war in his novel is handled intensely in the background this time. When Cemile was first published, it was heavily criticized by Kyrgyz writers on the grounds that it was against the Kyrgyz traditions and did not comply with the principles of socialist realism.
Soil is one of the prominent elements of nature in the novels of Cengiz Aytmatov, who uses his pen to design a world where values are kept alive and to deal with the universal problems of man. In Aytmatov's narratives, the soil appears as a force that invites people to the awareness of the meaning of the world and life. The 1963 novel Mother Earth conveys the critique of the destruction caused by wars and the struggles of people with the language and witness of the land.
Through the works of Chingiz Aitmatov, the world learned about Kyrgyzstan, the Kyrgyz, Lake Issyk Kul, and the Tian Shan Mountains. Not only in Kyrgyzstan but also in many countries, there were families who gave their children the names Cengiz, Daniyar, Cemile, Asel, Tolgonay, and Duishen. Chingiz Aitmatov wrote his works in Kyrgyz and Russian.
The story of Cengiz Aytmatov's Kızıl Cooluk Calcalim (Red Scarf) is about the pure love of İlyas and Asel, who has frivolous personality, their marriage, and their separation after a while.
Aytmatov works as a zoo technologist at the time he wrote his work. Kyrgyzstan considers breeding his yaks and raising a new cow. In Kyrgyzstan, yaks are found only in the Tian Shan (Narin). He sets off and has to stay overnight in Dolon. Nights in a very old house built for roadside travelers. Two drivers are chatting drunkenly in a corner. The bed given to Chingiz Aitmatov is next to the beds of these two drivers. Meanwhile, Cengiz Aytmatov is forced to listen to the life story of the drunk driver, albeit reluctantly. The truck driver tells that his loved one lives in Dolon, and he sees her every time he passes by, but he does not even look at the girl's face, or how he falls in love with her, in short, his love life from the beginning to end. The story of Selvi Boylum Al Yazmalım is born while Aitmatov was traveling to the Tian Shan Mountains. In 1963, he won the Lenin Prize for Literature with his book Stories from the Mountains and Steppes, which also includes this story.
The White Ship, dated 1970, is one of Aitmatov's works, which evokes wide repercussions in the literary world and in which the types created with the message to be conveyed are in great harmony. The protagonist of the novel is a seven or eight-year-old boy. Aytmatov creates a fictional novel that extends from the pure and clean world of the child to the bitter and bare reality of life. For him, childhood is the seed of future human character. Childhood is the period when he begins to learn the real mother tongue and to feel his ties with the people around him, nature, and especially culture. By establishing a dramatic relationship between the grandfather, who represents the past, and the child, who represents the future, he brings unique interpretations to human feelings and thoughts. Aitmatov, The White Ship, and elements such as epic, legend, and fairy tale take place in his works.
In the 1980's The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years, he tells about people who try to preserve their traditions. In the novel, the memories experienced during communism, the ignoring of what people consider sacred, and the questioning of love, present the reader with a self-criticism of social and cultural problems. Aytmatov uses a very special technique in his novel, where he blends the legends of the past with the science fiction of the future.
Cengiz Aytmatov has been involved in diplomatic affairs of the USSR and the Kyrgyz Republic since 1990. The writer, who fell ill while on a business trip in Tatarstan on May 16, 2008, was taken to Nuremberg, Germany, and died on June 10, 2008, in the hospital where he was treated. The statue of his beloved son of the Kyrgyz people is on the Ala-Dag Square in Bishkek on 30 August 2011.