Doffing "Mankurt's Cap": Chingiz Aitmatov's The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years and the Turkic National Heritage

Abstract

The appearance of Chingiz Aitmatov's I dol' she veka dl itsia den' (The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years) in December 1980 created a major literary sensation in Moscow. There was something in the novel for everyone, and reviews in the Soviet Union. the Western press. and in emigre periodicals were overwhelmingly positive. Soviet critics especially welcomed the novel for its timely appearance after a serious discussion about the crisis of the genre "novel" in contemporary Soviet letters. As such Aitmatov's novel was singled out as the work pointing the way Soviet literature should go in the 1980s.