UCLA Center for European and Eurasian Studies

In the novel, I dol’she veka dlitsia den’ or The Days Last More than a Hundred Years Chingiz Aitmatov confronts the inherent tension in representing temporal and spatial reality in the Soviet Socialist Realist genre. The novel’s setting in the peripheral space of the Sarozek Plains and the disclosure of temporal bounds (as indicated by the title) points to a negotiation with an institutionalized Soviet discourse that would otherwise serve to progress a narrative of singular monologism. Aitmatov’s negotiation of a literary and discursive agency through the appropriation of the Soviet Socialist Realist genre invokes Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of minor literatures written in the major language. According to Deleuze and Guattari, a minor literature in its usage of a major language dismantles solidified conceptions of literary identity through a subversive appropriation of the majority discourse. Official form is transformed to articulate minoritized content otherwise marginalized within a geopolitical terrain. As the novel is written from this marginalized perspective, the Russian language and the Socialist Realist genre (both concisdered “official” languages and paradigms of Soviet literary production) are deterritorialized to allow for a space of cultural negotiation that undermines their allocations in the periphery by a politicized center. In this paper, I argue that Chingiz Aitmtov’s The Days Last More than a Hundred Years, collapses established binaries of center and periphery via complicating paradigmatic Soviet conceptions of space and time. A linear linkage between a Soviet center and a “minor” periphery is turned upside down, positing a new space of cultural articulation that negotiates with “official” narratives from the margins of the Soviet “nation-state.”