OREANDA-NEWS. On 24 December 2008 was announced, that the Alem Art public foundation and the Chinghiz Aitmatov International Fund had presented the first-ever unabridged edition of the works by the iconic author. Authorized by the Aitmatov family and sponsored by JSC BTA Bank, it comes in eight volumes that include the entirety of literary works, social and political essays from the 1950-60s (with the first Pravda articles among them), dialogues with contemporaries (K. Vonnegut, D. Ikeda and many others), public speeches, the final novel When The Mountains Fall and the story-letter Commitment to God… The well-illustrated edition also includes forewords from leading literary critics from the CIS.

The unabridged edition free of censorship common in Soviet times was conceived by the author himself earlier this year. And, after Mr. Aitmatov became an independent member of the BTA Board of Directors in April, it was the bank’s senior management that offered to him to do it together and thus celebrate the author’s 80th anniversary.

Along with this, BТА and Alem Art will be presenting Rauf Mamedov’s White Dreams on the Way Home, the latest documentary on Mr. Aitmatov’s career, which premiered on the author’s birthday December 12 on Russia’s RTR channel.

The name of Aitmatov continues to ring multitudes of bells for generations of readers, who have been both moved and inspired by the works of the man whose unique command of the language widely crowned him the unofficial leader of the USSR’s writing profession as far back as the 1970s. A classic in his own lifetime, he was recognised with numerous international awards and saw his works translated into 176 languages and published in 128 countries with the total number of books printed in excess of 80 million. Many of them live on screen and on stage.