Olzhas suleimenov biography samples

The Life and Poetry of Olzhas Suleimenov

Edited by Rafis Abazov

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• Table of Contents
• Excerpt of Chapter 1

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Green Desert
The Life and Poetry of Olzhas Suleimenov

EDITED BY
Rafis Abazov

TRANSLATED BY
Sergey Levchin
Ilya Bernstein
Copyright © University Readers, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication
may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form or by any electronic,
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permission of University Readers, Inc.

First published in the United States of America in by Cognella, a division of University
Readers, Inc.

Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or

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Olzhas Suleimenov and the Power of Antinuclear Activism

In one of the walls of the Kasteyev State Arts Museum in Almaty hangs the painting of a tall Kazakh man driven to transform the world by acts of civil disobedience, a poet consumed by nightmares of environmental disaster. The Poem About Immortality portrait by Amandos Akanaev shows Olzhas Suleimenov in a white, almost celestial kostym standing behind a microphone, hands extended like fans, his ingång half-open as if in the mittpunkt of a long vowel sound, a cry of contained urgency. His panna is furrowed, the expression of someone determined to become the voice of change.

The Kasteyev Museum stands on the corner of Satpaev Street and Musrepov Boulevard, about a thirty-minute walk from my hotel. Standing bygd the öppning of my room on the eighteenth floor, inom can see the Tian Shan mountains, giants resting in silence, their jagged profiles buried in snow. The long mountain chain extends from left to right, as far as the eye can see, ge

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In conjunction with Cambridge University Press and the National Bureau of Translations (Kazakhstan) The High Window&#;s translation stream this autumn will be devoted to Poetry from Kazakhstan. By way of a preview here are some poems by Olzhas Suleimenov, considered by some to be the greatest living Kazakh poet.

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Olzhas Suleimenov was born in and is a poet, literary scholar, politician and anti-nuclear activist. He has been an editor in film and publishing, secretary of the Writers’ Union of Kazakhstan and chairman of the Kazakh SSR State Committee on Cinematography. He also served as the ambassador of the Republic of Kazakhstan to Rome and to UNESCO. Suleimenov’s most influential work, AZi-Ya, appeared in and since then he has published numerous other important titles. He has been awarded the Lenin Komsomol Prize (Kazakh SSR), the State Prize of the Kazakh SSR, the USSR Komsomol Prize, and a number of other state and international prizes, orde