Abstract
ZUHRA'S JOURNEY: THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN GENDER, NATURE, AND SPACE IN ABISH KEKILBAYEV'S STORY "COUNTRY HOUSE"
Abish Kekilbayev, who began his writing career in the 1960s and pioneered a new era in Kazakh prose, wrote stories about ordinary people in 20th-century Kazakh-Soviet society, attempting to transcend the narrow confines of socialist realism, based on crude ideological propaganda, and to deeply reveal human reality from different perspectives. In this respect, the story "Şetkeri Üy/Kır Evi" (Country House), which depicts a woman who loses her husband in World War II and struggles to remain visible within a patriarchal social structure, is a notable example. In this story, the author breaks with the classical template of Soviet narratives depicting the aftermath of the war, centering on the theme of "sacrifice for the homeland," and recounts the life of a woman named Zühra, her relationships with men, her loneliness, and her confrontation with the ravages of time through the identification of space and nature. In this way, he indirectly demonstrates the ongoing nature of the problem of gender equality, which, socialist realism argues, has been solved through reductionist discourse. The identity established in the story through the female body/home/nature offers diverse readings within the framework of critical theories such as Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space, gender-based literary criticism, and eco-feminism. This article analyzes the story "Country House," drawing on a theoretical foundation grounded in these critical methods, to reveal the innovative perspective within a narrative that transcends the typical World War II-era perspective of the backroom. This will identify the transformation in Kazakh literature in the 1960s regarding the phenomenological conception of space, social gender, and eco-feminism.
Keywords
Abish Kekilbayev, Country House, Kazakh literature, gender, Gaston Bachelard, poetics of space, eco-