A Model of Critical Historiography in T. Kakishuly’s Scholarly Legacy: Alash, Sakentanu, and the Reconstruction of the National Literary Canon

The significance of the present study lies in the need for a theoretical interpretation of T. Kakishuly’s scholarly legacy as a model of critical historiography associated with the restoration of literary memory and the reconstruction of the national literary canon. The aim of the study is to identify the model of critical historiography in T. Kakishuly’s work and to determine how literary memory and the national literary canon are reconstructed through Alash, the literary and intellectual legacy of the Alash movement; sakentanu, or Saken Seifullin studies; and the history of Kazakh literary criticism. The methodology of the study is based on historical-literary, historiographic, literary-discursive, and canonological analysis operationalized through a coding matrix of historiographic fragments. The scholarly novelty of the study lies in interpreting T. Kakishuly’s works as an integral model of transition from ideologically distorted interpretation to canonical reconstruction. The study identifies strategies of critical re-evaluation, terminological clarification, the restoration of aqtandaq (“suppressed / blank pages of literary history”), and the inclusion of authors in national literary memory. The main findings confirm the significance of T. Kakishuly’s critical historiography for the theory of literary historiography, memory studies, and research on the national canon, while also showing that the proposed model requires further comparative testing in other Kazakh and post-Soviet literary-critical corpora.