Monthly Archives: March 2018

One of the major issues addressed in Fowler’s Beau Monde is the tension between the cultural exchange inherent in Ukrainian culture, and the Soviet desire to portray Ukrainian culture as authentically as possible, thus requiring the separation of the different … Continue reading →

            Silent Steppe is, I think, a valuable source for our purposes because Shayakhmetov is so interested in delineating the effects of collectivization and cultural destruction down to the level of interactions between individual family … Continue reading →

What struck me the most about Chapters 14-18 was how much the lives of (former) Kazakh nomads had changed. I read with this meta-question in mind: how does Mukhamet mourn – or not – the passing of the nomadic way … Continue reading →

Sorry for the late post y’all What I noticed most while reading The Silent Steppe was Shayakhmetov’s portrayals of the Soviet Authorities. From the end of the first chapter, Shayakhmetov describes the Soviet authorities as destroyers of the nomadic way of … Continue reading →

Apologies again for the late post: So, I found it to be quite interesting how the role of religion was instrumental for how families in the steppe responded to soviet policies. For example, when Muksiin, the fellow fugitive of Mukhamet’s … Continue reading →