Jambyl Jabayev - Authorship Controversy

Authorship Controversy

It has been claimed that the actual authors of published poems of Jambyl were actually Russian poets, who were officially credited as "translators."

Poet Andrey Ignatievich Aldan-Semenov claimed that he was the "creator" of Jambyl, when in 1934, he was given the task by the Party to find an akyn. Aldan-Semenov found Jambyl on the recommendation of the collective farm chairman, the only criterion of choice was that the akyn be poor and have many children and grandchildren. After Aldan-Semenov's arrest, other "translators" wrote Jambyl's poems.

In a different account, according to the Kazakh journalist Erbol Kurnmanbaev, Jambyl was an akyn of his clan, but until 1936 was relatively unknown. In that year, a young talented poet Abilda Tazhibaev "discovered" Jambyl. He was directed to do this by the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan, Levon Mirzoyan, who wanted to find an akyn similar to Suleiman Stalsky, the Dagestani poet. Tazhibaev then published the poem "My Country", under Jambyl's name. It was translated into Russian by the poet Pavel Kuznetsov, published in the newspaper "Pravda" and was a success. After that, a group of his "secretaries" - the young Kazakh poets worked under Jambyl's name. In 1941-1943, they were joined by the Russian poet Mark Tarlovsky.