Mukanov, Sabit

Born Apr. 13 (26), 1900, in Tauzarskaia Volost (small rural district), Akmolinsk Province, now Dzhambul Raion, Severnyi Kazakhstan Oblast; died Apr. 18, 1973, in Alma-Ata. Soviet Kazakh writer and public figure. Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Kazakh SSR (1954). Member of the CPSU from 1920.

The son of a hired stock raiser, Mukanov took part in the Civil War of 1918–20. He studied at the Institute of the Red Professors from 1930 to 1935. In 1936–37 and again from 1943 to 1952, Mukanov served as chairman of the administrative board of the Writers’ Union of Kazakhstan.

Mukanov was first published in 1922 as a poet. His novels The Bey’s Son (1928), Bright Love (1931; under the title The Lost Ones, 2nd ed., 1959), and Temirtas (1935) are devoted to the class struggle in Kazakhstan and to the portrayal of the new man. His novel Mysterious Banner (1938; in subsequent editions, Botagoz) is an artistic embodiment of the social panorama of the Kazakh people in the period between 1910 and 1920. His novel Syr Darya (1947–48) examines collective labor during the Great Patriotic War of 1941–45. Mukanov’s autobiographical trilogy The School of Life (1949–53) won the Abai Kunanbaev State Prize of the Kazakh SSR (1967). Between 1967 and 1970 he wrote the trilogy A Passing Meteor about the life of the Kazakh thinker and scholar Chokan Valikhanov.

Mukanov served as a deputy to the second through eighth convocations of the Supreme Soviet of the Kazakh SSR. He was awarded the Order of Lenin twice, three other orders, and several medals.