DULAT ISSABEKOVThat was what literary critics and his contemporaries called Dulat Issabekov, when he became a well-known writer of Kazakhstan. When he was just over a year old, Dulat fell seriously ill, and died - or so they thought. The child's body was put out into a cold corridor prior to its burial the following day. Everything was ready for the funeral - the long shirt the child was to be buried in and the meal for the wake after the burial. Then all of a sudden an old lady neighbour, who had been entrusted with the task of handing the infant's body to the grave-diggers, let out a frantic scream. It turned out that the child was still alive, and not just alive, but laughing, after catching sight of the old woman. This was how Dulat returned from the other world just an hour before his funeral was due to start. This happened in 1943, exactly a year after his father had been killed at the Battle of Stalingrad. The writer was to recall: "We were children then, but robbed of our childhood. Our fathers had been lost at the front and our childhood in villages far away from it".Dulat's mother died on the very day he joined the Communist Youth League aged 14. After that his elder brothers and sisters assumed responsibility for him and he went to a boarding school for orphans in the town of Arys. After leaving school, Dulat became an apprentice fitter in railway communications. In 1961 he gained a place in the philology faculty of the Kazakh State University, from which he graduated in 1966.