Wunderkind Erjan

A train rattles through the vastness of the Kazakhstan steppe. A traveller and Erjan, the child prodigy, meet on it. In the middle of this wasteland crossed by the train, the boy plays his violin with such virtuosity that it is not only the narrator who loses his hearing. But the music is not the only miracle. For the boy who looks ten or twelve is in fact already a man of 27; as a child he dived into a nuclear-contaminated lake despite all warnings. Hamid Ismailov thus transposes the Tin Drum motif of the ever-children into the wasteland of Kazakhstan, contaminated by 486 nuclear bomb tests, and gives it an austere intensity of profound beauty. Two worlds collide in it: the vastness and loneliness of the Kazakhstan steppe and the modern world outside it - the train that passes through this world every day as if it has stopped, the nuclear tests that change nature and people like an invisible force, the music that brings a different rhythm into Yerzhan's life.