B.D. DAUTOVA,
B.B. BAYAZITOV
LINGUISTIC FORMS OF EXPRESSION OF TIME AND
SPACE CATEGORIES IN ABAI’S POEMS
Time and space form the basis of a work of art. They complement
each other; reveal the content and meaning of the work. Artistic time
and space in fiction is a kind of picture, a moment, a phenomenon that
has firmly entered the worldview and aesthetic position of the writer,
not buried in the dust of time, but subjected to a slight delay. That is,
to deliver aesthetic pleasure to the reader. The problem that allows a
comprehensive analysis of the writer’s artistic search, artistic time and
space that fits into the artistic world of a work is the concept of a per-
son in a work. It also shows the attitude of the writer to it, the author’s
position. For example, in the work of Abai Kunanbaev, we conduct a
comprehensive study of their close connection, organic unity with an
emphasis on real time and abstract time, historical time and mythical
time, as well as on real space and abstract space.
In fiction, the time has various peculiarities that are connected to
literary texts and the author’s goal. Time in the context of the book
may have well-distinguished or extremely ambiguous boundaries (for
example, events may occur across decades, a year, or a few days), which
may be represented in the work, vice versa, it does not correspond
to historical or modern time, which is set by the author tentatively.
Time in a work of art can be multidimensional. The character
of a literary work, in which there is an author and a reader, and the
boundaries: the beginning and the conclusion are both tied to this
property of artistic time. As a result, the text contains two time axes.
Therefore, when time and space work together, finding harmony, the
specific goal of the author is determined. We will analyze it using ex-
amples from Abai’s poems. The magic of Abai’s words is strong. This
is mainly due to the tenderness of the poet’s soul, his ability to express
the truth, albeit bitterly, without compromising the sympathy of other
subjects for the anxieties and tragedies of life.
Time and space play a big role in shaping the style of the poet,
depending on the worldview and point of view of the author, thereby
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determining the specifics of creating an individual author’s picture of
the world, the internal laws of a work of art, being the compositional
support of the work, the internal organizer of the disclosure of artistic
images, forming an artistic picture of the world.
This is evidenced by Kazhim Zhumaliev’s assessment of Abai’s
works: “And in this imitation, the young talent, who thought that fate
only smiled at him, proved that his science and strength are superior
to his contemporaries. Abai surpassed in his time all the imitators of
the East and argued with the poets themselves, who claimed the title
of the pinnacle of the East. However, when Abai came of age and
matured, he did not remain completely under the influence of oriental
literature, but critically returned to the ancient Kazakh literature. Of
course, before Abai, the Kazakh literary language had a basis and was
strong in its own way. The richest Kazakh oral literature, great figures
in the history of literature, such as Bukhar, Dulat, Makhambet, will
become the pinnacle of literature both in the national context and in
the literary language. As Kunanbai, the father of the great poet Abai,
said: “what is the superiority of a person is also his disadvantage”,
the preservation of the national identity of our pre-Abai literature was
both an advantage and a disadvantage. It shows the power of our lan-
guage. The fact that Kazakh proverbs, sayings, parables or poems of
Makhambet are not translated into another language was due to the
strong preservation of the root position of the language as a national
personality” (Abaitanu, 2020: 81].
Space is the environment, state, life of the poet in childhood. This
is due to the fact that space depends on the moment of existence of
motion. The basis of this space is any event, action and place in which
events took place, which are reflected in the flow of time. Because the
poet cannot return to the past. The scientist A.A. Zhanabekova noted
that “Measuring time, when the past never returns, is something alien
to historical time, because history itself is measured by the past. If so,
then the non-return of time is a measure of physical time. Historical
time is time in the mind, everything good is left in the past there-
fore, people must weigh every deed, thoughts on the scales of the past,
comprehend it and try to connect with it” (Zhanabekova, 2012: 81).
The scientist also clarifies the measurements of time and space. The
one-dimensionality of time is manifested in the following: all events
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occur only in one direction - from the past to the present, from the
present to the future. And this happens outside of human conscious-
ness, objectively. In the space of the body, you can move from right
to left, from left to right, from top to bottom, from bottom to top, but
time cannot be moved later, earlier , from the future to the past. Time
does not return. This is its important difference from space. As we can
see, time and space differ from each other , and thanks to these dif-
ferences, they turn objective reality into artistic reality without losing
their significance. And the poet very skillfully combined real events
and abstract thoughts, taking in parallel two spaces and two times. We
have interpreted all these features in poets’ poems using methods of
descriptive and contextual analysis.
One of the outstanding literary critics M.M. Bakhtin introduced
in his studies the term ‘chronotope’ (time-space) in the 30s of the
20th century. This term used to relate to natural science. Reconsid-
ering this notion in the context of artistic creativity, he introduces the
chronotope as a traditionally relevant notion of literature, significant
interrelation of artistically attracted space-time relations (Bakhtin,
1975: 81). The concern literary critics in the artistic chronotope was
prompted by the wish to grasp what is the world into which a work of
art involves us, what is its time, space, social and material environ-
ment, what are the rules of psychology and the fluctuation of ideas in
it, what are the overall essentials that make individual constituents a
single artistic whole. Space and time take a huge place in the forma-
tion of a work of art, since the chronotope defines the genre, supplies a
compositional structure, and is inevitably connected with the plot, the
system of images and motives (Nesterik, 2015: 235). The vital role of
this literary notion takes root from the reality that ‘artistic space and
time serve as forms of existence of the artistic world’ (Temirbolatova,
2001: 61).
Linguists have recently started to search chronotope since space
and time belong to fundamental notions of philosophy (Askin 1966;
Zeman 1971; Aguessy 1977), natural sciences, art (Ivanov 1974). So-
cial and psychological issues of time and space have been considered
by Fraisse (1963: 23), humanitarian aspects of these notions have
been widely investigated in Meyerhoff (1968: 95) and Stuart-Smith
(2003: 8) and Blankson studied them from the angle of exact sciences
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(Blankson, 2006: 9). In 1960s a new branch which is known as text
linguistic arose in linguistic research. At first, it was involved only in
the search for means in formal cohesion in the text not engaging the
content aspect of the text (Karasik, 2001: 113). In the late 1970s and
1980s, one of the main goals of linguistic was detection and charac-
terization of special text categories. The research of text categories
would allow to get full picture about the exact object of discipline,
because it’s most basic and significant features, since it includes rec-
ognizing peculiarities of the text structure, the structure of language
units, same and the connections that are fixed between them (Stachel,
2005: 16). The artistic chronotope took a part in the text types discov-
ered by researchers as well. This is the category continuum which is
defined as “a certain sequence of facts, events unfolding in time and
space”. Chronotope is one of the important directions that make “the
connection between the text and objective reality, reflected and re-
fracted in the text”. As text categories, artistic space and time are used
to develop the text’s content, form a compositional scheme, express
“the flow of artistic reality in time and space,” and add concreteness
and realism to the portrayal (Bloh, 2001: 13). Let’s jump right into
artistic time. Let’s take a look at this occurrence from the standpoints
of literary criticism and linguistics. However, while discussing time in
literature, it’s important to distinguish between creative time and time
as a subject. The time which the writer himself generates in his work
is not the writer’s concept about time, but rather the time which the
writer himself makes in his work. The action of the work takes place
in artistic time: its people live and act, and the events represented in
it occur. To put it another way, artistic time is a state of being in the
artistic universe. It does not accurately reflect real-time events. This is
merely a representation, a model of reality that combines the real and
the fictional. The interweaving of the properties of several times: real,
perceptual, and individual, is referred to as artistic time. The writer
creates several types of artistic time based on these times: real artistic
time, such as the time of a person’s life (physiological time) and cyclic
time, psychological time which is the time of the human mental world,
and surreal artistic time, such as astral, infernal, magical, mytholog-
ical, fabulous, fantastic, and the Looking Glass time. A poetic text
has a somewhat different typology: special artistic time which is a
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time associated with the life of a lyrical hero, generalized artistic time
which is correlated with the life of any individual, abstraction time
which is an empty time of a topic of being, and time-transformation
time where an unreal image is a substitute for time.
In Kazakhstani context the notion of chronotope and its reflection
in Abai’s poetry have been studied by Professor Alua Temirbolat. In
her earlier work as “Chronotope problems in modern prose” (2003)
she defined the role and function of chronotope in modern literature
and analyzed reflection this notion in the works of A. Kim, Paulo
Coelho “The Alchemist” and modern Kazakh writers. Later in the
monograph “Poetic World of Abai” (2015) A. Temirbolat considered
the category of chronotope in Abai’ poetry claiming that many of his
poetic works are permeated by images with space and time content
(Temirbolat, 2015: 108).
Analyzing time and space in the poet’s verses, setting the task of
interpretation, we chose the poem “Ğabidollağa” (“To Gabidulla”). It
is one of the Abai’s poems that have not become the object of analysis
so much. Abai wrote this song as a dedication to a young man named
Gabidulla Gabitkhanuly from his village:
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