100 Tenge Muhtar Auezov 125 years

Muhtar Auezov, born 1897 in what is now the Abai region of Kazakhstan, wrote Abai — a multi-volume epic novel chronicling the life of the 19th-century Kazakh poet Abai Qunanbaiuly — which became the foundational text of modern Kazakh literature. The Soviet authorities initially viewed his work with suspicion, and Auezov faced political pressure during the Stalinist purges, surviving where many of his contemporaries did not. He died in 1961, the novel still incomplete by his own exacting standards.