Animals – human and non – in Aitmatov’s "Kogda Padaiut Gory" and Volos’s "Palang".

The article analyzes texts by two authors from Central Asia: Chingiz Aitmatov (1928–2008), from Kyrgyzstan, and Andrei Volos (b. 1955), born and raised in Tajikistan in an ethnically Russian family. Kogda padajut gory (Aitmatov 2007) and Palang (Volos 2008) each explore a profound crisis of the Central Asian region, from a socio-cultural, political, and ecological perspective, addressing the issues arising from the denaturalized post-Soviet environment. Following the lead of postcolonial ecocriticism (Huggan and Tiffin 2015) my reading brings to light a peculiar feature that these authors share, namely an emphasis on the profound interconnectedness of human and animals and the entanglement of species and landscape. I argue that each of these texts overturns the hierarchical and anthropocentric perspective that is more familiar to Western tradition, through the use of non-human animal characters. These characters – called into being by the specifics of Central Asian space and history – allow our two authors to criticize the abuse and exploitation of Others perpetrated by dominant authorities. More generally, anthropomorphism, or the adoption of a point of view of an “other-than-human” character is very close to ostranenie, a technique that enables these writers to address moral and philosophical questions linked to the overarching narrative of post-Soviet trauma. The response of these authors to the pressures of different discourses of dominance creates a common thread running through their works.