SUMMARY:

This article examines Viktor Shklovsky’s 1945 Russian translation of Abai Kunanbaiev’s Gaklia: The Book of Words to challenge the interpretation of Shkolvsky’s formal method as a precursor to postcolonial theory. Through the lens of Orientalism and the socialist sublime, the article illustrates how Shklovksy’s translation process, underpinned by the consistent application of a formal method, resulted in an erasure of the specific cultural nuances of Abai’s work and their replacement with a unified Soviet literary language that prioritized Moscow’s aesthetic hierarchy over peripheral autonomy. Shklovsky’s practice is characterized as an act of colonial appropriation that replaced the authentic voices of Kazakh intellectuals with an Orientalized rendering of the claimed universalist – but essentially ethnoculturally Russian – cultural form.