Aitmatov 1928 - 2008 (80)
There Will Be Winter, There Will Be Cold, There Will Be Snowstorms, But Then There Will Be Spring.. Again..”
QUOTES
Born on December 12, 1928 in Sheker, his parents were civil servants and he spent his childhood as a nomad, in many parts of the country. In 1937 his father was accused of "bourgeois nationalism" by the Russians in Moscow and he was arrested and executed in 1938. Aitmatov was forced to work from an early age, at the age of fourteen he was assistant secretary in the village Soviet and later worked as a tax collector, loader. assistant engineer and continued with many other tasks. He lived at a time when Kyrgyzstan was being transformed from a remote country of the Russian Empire into a USSR republic. He first studied at a Soviet school in Sheker and in 1946 began studying at the Department of Animal Husbandry of the Kyrgyz Agricultural Institute in Frunze, but later transferred to the Literary Institute at the Maxim Gorky Institute of Literature in Moscow from 1958 to 1958. For many years he worked for the newspaper Pravda.
His first two publications appeared in 1952 in Russian. His first work published in Kyrgyz was "The White Rain" in 1954, and he became world famous with the novel "Jamilia" in 1958. In 1980 he published the novel "The day lasts more than a hundred years" which was translated into many languages in all over the world.
In addition to being a writer, he was a diplomat in Kyrgyzstan and a friend and adviser to Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev. He suffered kidney failure and on 16 May 2008 was admitted to a hospital in Nuremberg, Germany, where he died of pneumonia on 10 June of the same year.