I was born in the city of Atyrau, and it takes just one step across the bridge to move from Asia to Europe. I lived in the Soviet Union and it took just one December dawn to wake up in the Republic of Kazakhstan. At the click of the clock’s second-hand, I turned from a resident of the twentieth century into a Generation X person, who has seen times without the Internet. And Covid-19 forced me to balance between “offline” and “online”.

Existing at the junction of continents and eras, cultures and concepts, I often feel uneasy, unable to feel like I belong to any particular community:

-  Kazakh by nationality, but writing and thinking in Russian;

- A software engineer by profession, but a novelist and playwright by vocation;

- A woman with an Eastern upbringing, but a European education.

I watch Kazakh cinema, whose stories seem copied from foreign movies. Even the sound of the cue from the first scenes, imbued with the rustle of dry grass and the rumble of the wind, seems foreign. I read modern Kazakhstani authors, and sometimes it is not easy to feel the nationality of the characters and where they come from. The names of the characters have become international, the events that happen to them can happen anywhere in the world, and it only requires a change of names and place, and the impression of the uniqueness is lost.

One wonders how, for example, the American writer Khaled Hosseini, who left Afghanistan as a child, managed to preserve his national identity and wrap his books in it. And why is it so difficult for authors living in Kazakhstan to make Kazakh heroes recognizable, and native steppes not similar to the prairies of Ernest Seton-Thompson?

I write my stories and plays in Russian, which immediately severs off Kazakh-speaking readers who make over 60 % of the population. I do not write in my mother tongue, and modern Kazakh authors are seldom translated from Russian into Kazakh, which automatically strips me of the status of a Kazakh author. But I don't consider myself a Russian author either. To become a Russian writer, you must be born and live in Russia, like Leo Tolstoy in Yasnaya Polyana, and feel Russian with all your soul: the bright green of flooded meadows, strawberries beaded on a stalk of grass, a creaking wooden bridge across the river.

To be a Kazakhstani author these days, for me, means to be limited: limited in readership; limited in the subject matter, since there is always a fear that the work will turn out parochial and neglected by readers from other countries; limited in freedom of expression because of ethnicity and the phenomenon of "Uyat" (Kazakh for “shame”).

How to find balance in your work and your life? How to write about events in Kazakhstan and destinies of Kazakhs, preserving something unique, not thinkable in other countries? How to understand who you are — a Kazakhstani, Kazakh, or Russian writer?

I guess I have long decided for myself that I am a Kazakhstani author. Now it’s up to the reader.