Mythopoetic Space and Cultural Memory in Aigul Kemelbayeva’s “Ike” and “Kökqiya”: A Bounded Comparative Textual Analysis

Objective: To examine how two short stories by Aigul Kemelbayeva organize space, cosmogonic imagery, death ritual, and culturally marked memory without treating literary character states as empirical psychological outcomes.

Methods and Materials: A bounded, qualitative comparative textual analysis was applied to “Ike” and “Kökqiya.” A transparent retrospective evidence matrix distinguishes textual observations, interpretive codes, alternative readings, and contextual propositions. The corpus is purposive, not representative. No participant data, psychological measures, or independently documented inter-coder procedure were available.

Findings: In “Ike,” burial, transgression, religious practice, landscape, and narrated remorse structure a morally charged spatial trajectory. In “Kökqiya,” the blue-ox cosmogony, named stars, and lamentation connect mortal loss to narrative scale and remembered cosmological motifs. These are evidenced textual patterns, not demonstrated psychological mechanisms or population-level cultural traits.

Conclusion: The comparison supports a limited claim about the narrative uses of mythopoetic signs in two texts. Broader claims about Kazakh consciousness, readership, and psychological transformation require additional corpora and independent evidence.