Kasymaly Dzhantoshev

Born Sept. 2 (15), 1904, in the aul of Tenizbai, in present-day Tiup Raion, Kirghiz SSR; died Sept. 11, 1968, in Frunze. Soviet Kirghiz writer. Honored Art Worker of the Kirghiz SSR (1946), People’s Writer of the Kirghiz SSR (1968). Member of the CPSU from 1943.

Dzhantoshev, a graduate from a pedagogical technicum in Frunze in 1930, began writing in 1926. He was the author of approximately 40 plays. The most significant are The Woman With Black Hair (1928), which is about a Kirghiz woman in an aul before the revolution, Kurmanbek (1942,. staged in 1943, Russian translation 1949), and The Singer of the People (1950). Dzhantoshev’s novel Kanynbek (books 1-3, 1939-48; Russian translation, 1958) depicts scenes from the prerevolutionary life of the Kirghiz people. Dzantoshev also wrote the novel The Shepherd of the Celestial Mountains (1963) and the collection of novellas and short stories The Waters That Spilled Over the Pass (1955). Among the Russian literary works that he translated into Kirghiz is A. N. Ostrovskii’s The Girl Without a Dowry. Dzhantoshev was the recipient of three orders and various medals.