Perception of death in Abay's poems

Death is the inevitable end that all living things on earth will have to face. However, human beings are the only living creatures that live with the awareness that they will die. For this reason, death has continued both as an event that was feared for its existence and as a mystery whose outcome was curious from the times when the human species began to exist. Thinkers, intellectuals, artists, writers and poets have mentioned death in their works, and all of them have put forward an attitude and attitude on the axis of their worldview. Looking at the periods when systematic thought began to develop, two attitudes exhibited in relation to death since the discovery of the article are noticeable. The first is to ignore death and not bring it to mind, while the second is to fill every time of life with its truth. In Islamic philosophy, the issue of death is mostly processed at the point of life after death and the nature of this life. Although the issue of death is examined in all aspects among religious researchers and thinkers, writers and poets have also dealt with this issue in their works. Abay Kunanbayoğlu is a great scholar and poet who lived in Kazakh lands between 1845 and 1904 and created a wide sphere of influence with the spiritual legacy he left. Although he grew up with a scholastic education, he learned the Russian language as well as Eastern philosophy and had the opportunity to meet Western science and philosophy. In this respect, Abay Kunanbayoğlu has been accepted as one of the rarest thinkers of his era. Living in the middle of the steppe, the poet witnessed the deaths of many of his relatives throughout his life. In this context, the attitude of Abay Kunanbayoğlu, who has experienced death very closely, also constitutes a remarkable research topic. Abay's thirteen different mourning poems he wrote about the death of his relatives and his other work, "Kara Sözler", were analyzed with the method of ontological analysis by making use of his poems and related philosophical sources, and the poet's attitude towards death was tried to be revealed in this study.