Creating a Cultural Nation: Aleksandr Zataevich in Kazakhstan

Moving beyond satire, political commentary, and national laments, Kazakh music began to play a more politically significant role as the state introduced it into public meetings and consecrated it as the national art in the 1920s. Many have argued that this refashioning of Soviet culture was often contradictory. “That advancement in the Soviet Union had the goal of leaving behind traditions and backward elements in an all-embracing assimilation seems to have created no obstacle in allowing advancement to be the very instrument of non-assimilation, demarcation, and erector of social boundaries,” writes Andy Nercessian.¹ Applying this paradox to the world of Soviet music, Nercessian continues, “Strangely, the same may be said of the folk ensemble and its instrumentality in the construction of the past.”² Converting folk from a cultural repository to a showcase of nationalities embracing socialism brought culture to the forefront, while old and new forms coexisted.

Vera Dunham’s In Stalin’s Time (1976) scrutinized the rhetoric and irony of Stalinist culture to discover the deeper codes of proper behavior and conduct as a new Soviet citizen.³ Kazakh music provided the same moral messages and socialist education that preserved traditional national motifs, imbued with a Soviet authority, that transformed the Kazakh world. Moreover, nothing created deeper cultural links between Russians and Kazakhs more than music.

Just as Orenburg provided a key political connection with Kazakhstan, music provided a vital cultural link predating the Russian Revolution. The creation of a Muslim musical-dramatic society, by teachers from the Husein madrassah in 1916, and their formation three years later of the first Muslim music school in Orenburg set a precedent for connecting Kazakh, Tatar, Bashkir, and Russian musical education. Students in the school varied in age from thirteen to the mid-twenties.⁴ During summer breaks, they traveled to Tatar, Bashkir, and Kazakh villages, since one of the goals of the school was to “compose eastern music by collecting eastern motives and melodies in the field of music.”⁵ This early interest had an indelible influence on some of the instructors who taught there. In other cities in Central Asia, new theaters were created or converted; for example, in December 1917, in Fergana, Khamza Niiaz formed a Muslim youth (musical-dramatic) theater.⁶

Affiliated with the Orenburg school, concerts were performed to reflect the new musical fusion between Kazakh classics and Russian stylistics. For the opening of the first theater in the Kazakh Republic on 24 August 1921, a concert was conducted by Leopold Rostropovich, father of famed cellist and conductor, Mstislav, with Aleksandr Zataevich on piano. The music, based in Russian and Western classics, drew on popular “Jewish, Georgian, Persian, Indian, Chinese, Tatar, and Arab melodies.”⁷ Other concerts came to include Reinhold Gliere’s “At the Mosque” and Anton Rubinstein’s “Persian Song.” In 1923, several concerts in Orenburg included “Eastern” musical themes with the performances of Rostropovich, Zataevich, and S. Fedetovoi-Rostropovich.

In 1921, Salikh Saidashev (1900–1954) became director of the school; he was a Tatar composer and director, who later led hundreds of concerts in the Kazakh and Uzbek republics in the 1920s under the auspices of Agitprop. He collected music and folk songs on numerous treks from Orenburg to Tashkent.⁸ Zataevich also taught musical composition at the school.⁹ He later remembered, “In Orenburg I first became acquainted with the multidimensional beauty of Kazakh folk music, until this time musical ethnography was completely unknown.”¹⁰ Yet, while the Muslim music school in Orenburg was closed and Zataevich and Saidashev left Orenburg by the mid-1920s, Zataevich had made his mark in the emergence of the Kazakh Republic, defining and preserving its cultural and national identity.

Aleksandr Zataevich, the State, and Kazakh Music

From the earliest moments of Kazakh statehood, Aleksandr Zataevich...