Mankurt

Mankurt is the term for an unthinking slave in Chinghiz Aitmatov's novel The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years.

For the 1990 Soviet film, see Mankurt (film).

According to Aitmatov's fictional legend, mankurts were prisoners of war who were turned into non-autonomous docile servants by exposing camel skin wrapped around their heads to the heat of the sun. These skins dried tight, like a steel band, causing brain damage and figurative zombification. Mankurts did not recognise their name, family or tribe—"a mankurt did not recognise himself as a human being".[1]

In Aitmatov's novel, a young man defending his homeland from invasion by the nomadic Ruanruan is captured, tortured, and brainwashed into serving his homeland's conquerors. Having completely lost his memory, he kills his mother when she attempts to rescue him from captivity. In the later years of the Soviet Union mankurt entered everyday speech to describe the alienation that people had toward a society that repressed them and distorted their history.[2]

Aitmatov did not take the idea from tradition but invented it himself.[3] N. Shneidman stated "The mankurt motif, taken from Central Asian lore, is the dominant idea of the novel and connects the different narrative levels and time sequences".[4]

Etymology and usage

"Mankurt" may be derived from the Mongolian term "мангуурах" (manguurakh, meaning "stupid"), Turkic mengirt (one who was deprived memory) or (less probably) man kort (bad tribe).

In the figurative sense, the word "mankurt" refers to people who have lost touch with their ethnic homeland, who have forgotten their kinship. In this sense, it has become a term in common parlance[5] and journalism.[6] In Russian, there have appeared neologisms such as mankurtizm, mankurtizatsiya (meaning "mankurtization"), and demankurtizatsiya (meaning "demankurtization").[7] In some former Soviet republics, the term has come to represent those non-Russians who have lost their ethnic heritage by the effects of the Soviet system.[8]

In cinema

In 1990, the film Mankurt (Манкурт) was released in the Soviet Union.[9] Written by Mariya Urmadova, the film is based on one narrative strand from the novel The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years.[10][11]

See also

References
  1. Excerpt from: celestial.com.kg Archived 2013-10-29 at the Wayback Machine
  2. Horton, Andrew; Brashinsky, Michael (1992). The zero hour: glasnost and Soviet cinema in transition (illustrated ed.). Princeton University Press. p. 131. ISBN 0-691-01920-7.
  3. Dmitry Bykov, Лекции по русской литературе XX века. Том 4 (Moscow: Eksmo, 2019), p. 52: «народ этого не выдумал, это выдумал я» 'The people did not invent it, I did.'
  4. Shneidman, N. N (1989). Soviet literature in the 1980s: decade of transition. University of Toronto Press. ISBN 978-0-8020-5812-6.
  5. "Айтматов, Чингиз Торекулович". Кругосвет. Archived from the original on 21 January 2013. Retrieved 22 September 2018.
  6. Элита Татарстана — журнал для первых лиц
  7. Тощенко Ж. Т. Манкуртизм как форма исторического беспамятства. // Пленарное заседание «Диалог культур и партнёрство цивилизаций: становление глобальной культуры». 2012. — С. 231.
  8. Laitin, David D. (1998). Identity in formation: the Russian-speaking populations in the near abroad (illustrated ed.). Cornell University Press. p. 135. ISBN 978-0-8014-8495-7.
  9. Oliver Leaman (2001). Companion encyclopedia of Middle Eastern and North African film. Taylor & Francis. p. 17. ISBN 0-415-18703-6, 9780415187039
  10. Horton & Brashinsky (1992). pp. 16, 17.
  11. P. Rollberg (2009). Historical dictionary of Russian and Soviet cinema. Scarecrow Press. pp. 35, 37, 482. ISBN 0-8108-6072-4, 9780810860728
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