The Literary Aspect of Abay’s Kara Sozder in Terms of Language Use

Abstract

Abay (Ibrahim) Kunanbayev was a great Kazakh poet, writer, thinker, composer, and politician who lived between 1845-1904. He is considered the founder of contemporary Kazakh literature. When his literary side is evaluated, it is seen that he produced works in both poetry and prose. The versatile education he received forms the originality of the content, language structure, and formal features of his works in both poetry and prose. Abay’s poems, about which many studies have been conducted in Turkey, have been evaluated in terms of style. However, it is seen that his prose works also have a unique style, and no independent academic study has been conducted on this subject. In this study, sentences were selected from Abay’s 45 prose works called Kara Söz by sampling method, and it was tried to be revealed that he had an impressive style even in prose. Abay is also stylistically original in his prose works and it is possible to evaluate them from many perspectives. However, due to the limitations of this study, Abay’s Kara Sözler was tried to be evaluated with a nine-item study. As a result of the study, it was determined that Abay achieved this impressiveness by using some sentence types, monologue or dialogue style speeches, and quotations. Evaluating other stylistic elements that could not be evaluated in this study will reveal Abay’s success in using the Kazakh language and his artistic talent in bringing prose closer to poetic style more clearly and will contribute to Abay’s studies.