COSMODROME AS A 'GIFT OF MODERNITY': REPRESENTATION OF THE THEME OF SPACE IN KAZAKH AND KYRGYZ LITERATURE.

• Author: Sarkulova, Manifa

1. Introduction

   April 10, 2021... The car rushes along the road, the yellow desert steppe spreads around, thickets of hard saxaul and tamarisk flicker outside the windows. The silhouettes of camels can be seen in the distance, and the bizarre outlines of structures resembling mazars and Muslim cemeteries suddenly attract attention. Aitmatov's lines from "The day lasts more than a hundred years" come to mind about the great desert spaces--Sary-Ozek, the Middle Lands of the Yellow Steppes, where the family cemetery of Ana Beyit was located, which became the resting place of the legendary Naiman-Ana, who fell by the hand of her son, turned by enemies into a mankurt, a being without memory, without roots and without a heart. After all, these tragic events could have happened in these places, on Baikonur land.

   Being members of the research group of a scientific project dedicated to the theme of cosmos in the cultural landscape of Kazakhstan, we are going to the anniversary launch of a rocket at launch platform No. 11, which bears the name of Gagarin. As soon as the car crosses the barrier that separates the territory of the cosmodrome from the surrounding steppe, we seem to find ourselves in another world, getting from the world of virgin nature to the world of high technology.

   The 'space' agenda in the Soviet era was actively developed in art and literature, while the problem of space exploration could be represented ambiguously, including in the post-colonial aspect. Laura Adams notes that despite the abundance of discussions as to whether it is possible to speak of post-Soviet countries as post-colonial, the fruitfulness of the application of post-colonial theory in this aspect is beyond doubt (Adams 2009: 34).

   In contrast, M. Tlostanova, a well-known decolonial theorist, categorically disagrees that the post-Soviet can be viewed through the prism of post-colonial theories and proposes to approach the analysis of the post-Soviet and post-socialist through critical theories of globalization and transculturalism. An example of such transcultural identification is the book by Olzhas Suleimenov' Az i Ya", where the idea of the mutual influence of the Turkic and Slavic cultures is clearly traced. The researcher writes about the need to develop a comprehensive and differentiated approach to interpret the realities of the former socialist world, taking into account colonial and imperial differences, ways of modernization, understanding of ethnicity, nation, religion, multiculturalism, etc.

   "Then one can speak of the post-Soviet case rather as a transimperial, transcultural and transnational, and not just post-colonial due to the Russian/Soviet imperial-colonial configuration, marked by less rigid and clearly defined divisions into center and periphery, a more chaotic ethno-cultural mixture, where racial stratification was not dominant, as was the case in Western empires. Transcultural and transnational discourses are, as it were, built-in terms for describing the realities of the Russian-Soviet empire and what has come to replace it" (Tlostanova 2004: 383).

   The concept of transculturality and translingualism of Tlostanova in relation to the Central Asian writers of the Soviet period--Suleimenov, Aitmatov, S. Sanbayev and many others, who created their works exclusively in Russian, the language of the metropolis, is quite justified. "The imperial language of Soviet literature was Russian. And in the Russian literature of the Soviet period, imperial writers naturally arose--not those who expressed the very spirit of the empire, but, on the contrary, those who worked at the intersection of resistance and subordination: resistance to ideology, subordination to language" (Ivanova 2014: 34).

   This article explores how the Baikonur cosmodrome, which became the embodiment of the gift of modernity received from the Soviet era by the Republic of Kazakhstan, and in general, space themes are represented in the works of Kazakh and Kyrgyz authors. In this sense, post-colonial discourse is a valuable resource, since the current state of the country can hardly be called free, and the current situation with the cosmodrome, leased to Russia until 2050, testifies it. If previous post-colonial studies of the region focused on the problems of memory, culture in general, the very logic of Orientalism, which became the forerunner of post-colonial studies, assumed the analysis of literary material in order to identify the 'orientalist' view of the East and, more broadly, post-colonial countries.

   Based on the study of the works of Kazakh and Kyrgyz authors who addressed the topic of space in the Soviet and post-Soviet period, the article shows how the conquest of outer space was perceived by the inhabitants of Uly Dala (1), how global and national contexts were combined in 'space' literature, national identity was conjugated and the desire to fit their people into the modern post-Soviet 'space' era, into the new global world, the world of advanced space technologies and even subsequent space colonization.

   Postcolonial theory is rarely used in the analysis of Soviet and post-Soviet literature, moreover, it could not become a full-fledged component of understanding the past and present of the countries of the former USSR, which is by no means explained only by the different quality of colonial experience (Breininger 2012: 14). Referring to Salman Rushdie's 'writing back' concept, the researcher notes that 'writing back' allows two different approaches: either a direct protest against the cultural hegemony of the West, an open challenge to the culture of the colonialists, or the opposite silence of 'minor' writers, i.e., an inaudible, hidden protest" (Breininger 2012: 14).

   D. Matsinier calls for decolonization of research methodologies: "In research the life worlds and world views of the inhabitants of the former colonies continue to be the object of study with the help of Western methodological tools. Scholars have not assimilated the world views (ontologies and epistemologies) of the former colonial peoples as a form, not simply as the content of analysis" (Matsinier 2008: 34).

   On the contrary, the fruitfulness of the use of postcolonial theory due to the involvement of researchers of the post-Soviet world in new global networks of knowledge production and the transition to a more complex, critical understanding of both the colonial past and the postcolonial present, which became possible after gaining independence, is noted by A. Bisenova and K. Medeuova (Bisenova and Medeuova 2013:36).

2. Baikonur--as a 'gift of modernity'

   There is a certain problem of distinguishing between colonization and modernization, since colonization also implies inevitable modernization, which could be perceived as "a sophisticated form of coloniality aimed at suppressing one's own cultural identity", the 'colonized' in such a situation turns out to be not a passive recipient of the 'gift of modernity'--he seeks to appropriate and, having mastered it, make it your own. Postcolonialism, on the other hand, can turn into a radical denial of the significance of the European enlightenment project, a total rejection of 'colonial modernity' and its 'progressive content' (Remnev 2014: 194).

   The modernization of the Union republics in the Soviet era was uneven, the researchers note that the main idea at that time was the idea of a 'conservative revolution': building centers of high modernity (in some ways even overtaking Western models, for example, in the military or space sphere) based on traditional, even forcibly revived archaic institutions in other, basic areas (for example, the revival of the institution of the community in the form of collective farms in agriculture) (Vishnevsky 2014: 34). Kazantsev calls the Russian-Soviet modernization project in Central Asia an ill-balanced forced modernization and writes about the possibility of compensation and assistance in the formation of independent states after the fall of the USSR (Kazantsev 2008: 300).

   The Baikonur cosmodrome, erected in the Kazakh steppe, can be considered a grandiose project of Soviet modernization, this 'gift of modernity', which required the investment of huge human and financial resources and embodied the grandiose plans of the Soviet government for space exploration during the Cold War with America. However, after the collapse of the Soviet empire and the subsequent 'parade of sovereignties' of the national republics, the question of the status of the cosmodrome inevitably arose, which currently causes ambiguous interpretations among the Kazakhs themselves. At the same time, "the epistemological profile of most Soviet texts about the Baikonur cosmodrome presents the local landscape before the construction of the cosmodrome as a...