Utezhan Nurgaliyev was the poet with strange destiny. Probably, such destiny would have Arthur Rimbaud if he remained to live. Judge for yourself. When Nurgaliyev was 18 years old he was declared the Kazakh Pushkin, from a remote Aktyubinsk aul he was called up to Alma-Ata. Fantastic take-off of his poetic career begins. But here he goes again to the aul and everything breaks. And for many years. But these years were not in vain. From the lyric poet he turned in epic poet, and from epic into the philosopher. The first transformation is marked by the book «Last summer of war», the second was «The Athenian school». As to “The Athenian School”, went out in 1996, this book, besides, that it laid in Zhazushy publishing house for 15 years, is remarkable that in it Utezhan for the first time after Abay and Shakarim addresses to experience of ancient philosophy.
Certainly, in this sort of undertaking swing and inconsistency of the author who quite recently has been very surely "registered" in the present strikes. But interesting is that Nurgaliyev was never identical to his time. From the very youthful lyrics, he constantly disappeared in a certain gap, or in intertemporal crack, reaching that vigilance and detachment of the detached onlooker. It is useless to seek Nurgaliyev's author's position, it is in lack of a position, as in tactics of the horse nomads flying as a whirlwind and having perturbed the opponent, disappearing in a flash.
So “The Athenian school” of Nurgaliyev first causes bewilderment: for what all this never-ending poetic retelling of antique wisdom with the infinite retreats which do not have any relation to philosophy? If it is a serious intention to acquaint tribespeople with the world of the Greek thought reorienting anew such corypheus of new time as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, then why all these grimaces and equivoques, this terrifying familiarity with really Rabelaisian impudence?! And only having plunged into the text more deeply, you understand that the author, as though a condition of ecstatic revolt against obvious, tries to balance two elements of search of truth - antique and demotic-Kazakh or aul and quixotic. Having removed thereby antiquity from a pedestal of a metaphysical inaccessibility, he immerses it in whirlpool of a unity of vital and intellectual stream where there is no division into barbarians and Hellenes, on high and low, and consequently, any philosophical tendency is perceived as "gleam" and “dash”, as the leisure imagination of “the old woman History”.
The poem in prose «Night jog» is devoted to Askar Suleymenov, a sign figure of the 70th, the writer and the playwright professing principles of an existentialistic esthetics.
Biography is written by Auezkhan Kodar
