(1835–1865), nineteenth-century Kazakh explorer and scholar. Regarded by many scholars as the first Kazakh intellectual, Chokan Valikhanov was born in 1865. A grandson of Ablai Khan (1711–1781), the last great khan of the Kazakh Middle Horde, Valikhanov (also known as Mukhammed Khanafiia) was initially educated at home, and in 1847 he entered the newly opened Omsk Kadet Korpus as the first Kazakh admitted to the institution. While there he studied history, geography, mathematics, and classics of Russian and Western literature. Graduating in 1853, he worked for the office of the governor-general of Western Siberia, where he became a close friend of the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881), recently released from internal exile in Siberia and assigned to serve five years in a disciplinary battalion, and Petr Semonov-Tian-Shanskii (1827–1914). In 1856 he participated in an expedition to Semirechye province, where he became the first person to write down parts of the great Kirgiz oral epic Manas. Two years later he undertook a clandestine journey to Kashgar in Xinjiang, where he gathered economic and political information for the Russian government. His reports were published in the journal of the Russian Geographic Society and translated into German and English. Honored for his accomplishments, in 1860 he was assigned to the Asiatic department of the ministry of foreign affairs in the capital, St. Petersburg. His health weakened by the arduous journey to Kashgar, he returned to the Kazakh steppe to recuperate from complications due to tuberculosis. He died near present-day Almaty in April 1865. In 1904 an edited volume of his collected works was published by the Ethnographic Section of the Russian Geographic Society.
Further Reading
McKenzie, Kermit. (1989) "Chokan Valikhanov: Kazakh Princeling and Scholar" Central Asian Survey 8: 1–30.
Strelkova, Irina. (1983) Valikhanov. Moscow: Young Guards.
Valiakanov, Chokan. (1958) Izbrannye proizvedeniia. Almaty, Kazakhstan: Kazakh State Publisher.
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