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Chingiz Aitmatov was a Russian-Kyrgyz writer and statesman renowned for films such as The First Teacher (1965), The Girl with the Red Scarf (1977), and Jamila (1994).
Born Chingiz Torekulovich Aitmatov on December 12, 1928, in Kirgizia, Soviet Union, he came from a bilingual Russian-Kyrgyz family. His father, Torekul Aitmatov, was among the first Kyrgyz communists and served as a regional party secretary. In 1937, while studying at the Institute for Red Professorship in Moscow, Torekul was arrested and executed for alleged anti-Soviet bourgeois nationalism. Raised by his mother thereafter, Chingiz attended a Russian school and later enrolled at the Kyrgyz Agricultural Institute in Frunze before shifting his focus from livestock studies to literature at the Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow.
Aitmatov debuted as a writer in Russia in 1952 with stories published in Russian. Between 1958 and 1966, he worked as a roving correspondent for the prominent Soviet newspaper Pravda. In 1967, he joined the Executive Board of the Soviet Writers Union, and the following year he received the Soviet State Prize for literature for his novel Farewell, Gulsary!, which tells the story of an elderly man reflecting on his life alongside his aging horse. He earned two additional State Prizes in 1977 and 1983 and was honored as a Hero of Socialist Labor in 1978.
From 1964 to 1985, Aitmatov chaired the Cinema Union of the Kyrgyz SSR, and in 1985 he was appointed Chairman of the Kyrgyz Writers Union. He served as an advisor to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990-1991 and was named Soviet Ambassador to Luxembourg in 1990. From 1990 to 1993, he acted as the Soviet and then Russian ambassador to Belgium. In 1995, he became Kyrgyzstan's ambassador to Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, also representing his country in the European Union, NATO, and UNESCO. During the 1990s, he was a member of Kyrgyzstan's parliament.
His notable works—Jamila (1958), The First Teacher (1967), Farewell, Gulsary! (1967), The White Ship (1972), and The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years (1988)—have been translated into over 20 languages worldwide. Following the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991, Aitmatov's novels gained new popularity in the West, especially in Germany. He passed away from pneumonia and kidney failure on June 10, 2008, in Nuremberg, Germany, and was buried in Kyrgyzstan.
