Discord

Gherold Belger is a Kazakhstani translator, prose writer, publicist, and literary scholar. He translated classics of Kazakh literature (Mailin, Musepov, Nurpeisov, and others) into Russian. He is the author of numerous novels, novellas, and literary-critical works focused on the historical path and current situation of Russian Germans and their national literature.

He was born into a family of Volga Germans. In 1941, by Stalin’s decree, as an ethnic German, among all Germans of the USSR, he was deported to Kazakhstan—to a Kazakh aul near the present-day village of Yskaka Ybyraeva (SKO) on the Ishim River, where the young Gherold mastered the Kazakh language perfectly. He grew up in the aul, studied at a Kazakh secondary school, and then at the Faculty of Philology of the Kazakh Teacher Training Institute (now Abai University) in Almaty.

After graduating, he worked as a Russian language teacher, then at the literary magazine “Juldіz.” From 1964, he has been a prose writer, translator, and critic. Since 1971, he has been a member of the Union of Writers of Kazakhstan. Since 1992, he has been deputy chief editor of the German-language almanac “Phoenix.” Since childhood, he lived and worked in Kazakhstan. He freely spoke Kazakh while working in the sphere of three cultures—Kazakh, Russian, and German. The writer worked tirelessly, producing 7–8 books per year. On the occasion of his 75th birthday, the Ministry of Culture and Education funded a ten-volume edition of his works. Gherold Karlovich is the author of more than 40 books, including the novels “The House of the Wanderer,” “Tuyuk Su,” “Discord,” as well as 1600 publications in the periodical press.