AbaiCenter

08/05/2026

05/26/2026

Almaty is hosting the 7th International Forum for the Rapprochement of Cultures of Eurasia, dedicated this year to the 90th anniversary of renowned Kazakh poet and public figure Olzhas Suleimenov.

As Harsha Ram writes, Olzhas Suleimenov has maintained a remarkably consistent goal throughout his career: a minority intellectual, willingly or unwillingly Russified, seeks to rediscover his nation's past, and in doing so, to rewrite the Turkic peoples into Eurasian and world history.

"Certainly provocative in the Soviet context, this goal is coupled with a method of enquiry that is, if anything, even more startling: for Suleimenov seeks to know the past as a poet knows language, equating the diachronic axis of history with a writer's deployment of metaphors and tropes."

05/22/2026

"One night, on the verge of a mental breakdown after another episode of my six-month-old daughter’s sleep regression, I made a desperate call to my parents in Kazakhstan and asked them for help. To my surprise, my father, a retired military doctor, offered to come. I was skeptical at first, but too exhausted and sleep-deprived, I accepted his help. At fifty-eight, having flown only once due to his extreme fear of flying, he boarded a plane to New York."

Read "The Yellow Suitcase" by Aizhan Yesbolatova

One night, on the verge of a mental breakdown after another episode of my six-month-old daughter’s sleep regression, I made a desperate call to my parents...