Від Шевченка до Невруза: пам’ять і ритуал у багатошаровій сучасності новітньої казахської поезії в Актау

Abstract

This article examines how the city of Aktau is represented in contemporary Kazakh poetry as a layered modernity structured through memory and ritual. Between 1964 and 1991, the city bore the name Shevchenko, embedding a transregional resonance between the Black Sea and Caspian worlds; the 1991 restoration of the indigenous toponym preserved not only local geography but also the exilic trace, exemplifying Boym’s concept of “reflective nostalgia” (2021). Meanwhile, ritual images such as Nevruz suspend industrial chronologies, re-inscribing the city into seasonal and cultural cycles. Through the works of poets including Tilepov, Oralbayuly, Yesdaulet, Bayekeev, Nurjan, and Arip, Aktau emerges not merely as a Soviet port but as a “poetic palimpsest” continually rewritten through dual motifs – mountain/sea, wind/fauna, Nevruz/apartment blocks. In addition to these spatial and symbolic tensions, the article highlights how ecological imagery animates the poetic imagination of the city: wind, salt, and waves often appear as active agents negotiating with the technological infrastructures of modernity. This ecological perspective reveals how natural forces resist, absorb, or reinterpret industrial impositions, adding a dynamic environmental dimension to Aktau’s literary identity. The study also examines gendered interpretations of urban space, demonstrating how female poets reframe the city through an ethics of care, domesticity, and relationality. These readings introduce alternative emotional geographies that complicate the heroic, industrial, and often masculine-coded representations found in Soviet-era verse. By situating these voices alongside narratives of exile, labor, and ritual, the article presents a multidimensional account of how memory operates across both personal and collective registers. The study thus integrates theories of cultural memory (Assmann), ecocriticism (Buell; Oppermann), and post-socialist memory politics (Humphrey; Tlostanova) to demonstrate how Aktau is imagined both nationally and transregionally within Kazakh poetic discourse. Ultimately, the article argues that Aktau functions as a literary archive in which modernity, mythology, ecology, and care ethics intersect, producing an evolving cultural narrative that continues to shape contemporary Kazakh identity.