THE EVOLUTION OF THE NATIONAL HERO IN T. KAYIPBERGENOV'S TRILOGY "DASTAN ABOUT THE KARAKALPAKS"

Annotatsiya

Kayipbergenov's trilogy Dastan about the Karakalpaks is organised around a sequential change of protagonist across three generations — Maman-biy, Aydos-biy and Yernazar — each occupying the centre of one of the trilogy's three books. This paper argues that the three heroes do not represent three isolated historical portraits but successive, logically connected stages in the evolution of the collective identity of the Karakalpak people: from a military-political alliance with a stronger power, through collective suffering and displacement, to a deliberate cultural rapprochement. It is concluded that this generational replacement of the hero is the trilogy's principal compositional device for modelling the historical fate of a people as a continuous yet internally dramatic process.