Jamilia

Aitmatov's Talas valley in wartime: a Kyrgyz collective-farm village set between mountain ranges, the men gone to the front, the harvest to be carted down the steppe road and across the river to the railway. The map runs west from the regional town of Talas through the valley Aitmatov grew up in, out toward the line at Dzhambul over the Kazakh border.

Seit

The kolkhoz village

The village

The story is told by Seit, a teenage boy who paints, looking back on a wartime summer in his home village. With the men away at the front, the households are run by the women, among them his brother's young wife Jamilia. The village stands for no real place on the map, but Aitmatov built it from the district he grew up in, near Sheker in the Talas valley.

Opening

inferred The collective-farm village is fictional, but it is drawn from Aitmatov's own Talas homeland; this marks Sheker, the village in the Kara-Buura district of Talas region where he was born and which shaped the story's setting.

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