“THE SALT RIOT” POEM BY P. VASILIEV AS A SOURCE OF HISTORICAL MEMORY

Abstract

The article examines P. N. Vasiliev's poem “The Salt Riot” as a source of historical memory about past events in the Pavlodar Irtysh region. The historical events described in the poem are analyzed in terms of their relevance and historical significance for today’s postcolonial discourse, which has been developing in Kazakhstani scholarship
over the past decades. From the perspective of historical memory, the main focus is on three chapters of the poem: “Yermak’s Siberian Campaign”, “The Cossacks in the Irtysh
Region”, and “Derov”. The article presents perspectives from Russian and Kazakhstani historians on the colonization process of northeastern Kazakhstan and the relationships between the colonizers and the colonized Kazakh people. The article further analyzes
the historical memory depicted in Vasilyev’s artistic worldview, where the history of the colonization of the Pavlodar Irtysh region is constructed around the antithesis of “the native – the stranger”, “Kazakhs – Cossacks”...