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KOMnAPATHBHCTHKA Comparative Studies
DOI 10.54770/20729316-2022-4-347
А.V. Markov (Moscow), S.E. Kamilova (Toshkent)
THE NARRATIVE ESSAY IN RUSSIAN AND UZBEK LITERATURE: LYRO-EPIC VS LYRO-DRAMATIC
Abstract. The notions of the lyro-epic and lyro-dramatic principle in prose can serve both as genre generalizations or as an indication of the convergence of different traditions within national literature, as well as the specification of national literature at a point of crisis of the novel genre. During the unprecedented events of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the new wave of postcolonial pursuits in world culture, the short story becomes a site not only of narrative but also of genre experimentation: it captures an ever-changing modernity, with the clash of narratives, qualities of inner speech and temporalities forming new configurations of combining epic, lyrical and dramatic moments in each story. This article uses the example of works by Russian (Jan Goltz-man, Sergei Soloukh, etc.) and Uzbek (Shukur Xolmirzaev, Isajon Sulton, Muhammad Sharif, Ulugbek Hamdam) prose writers to show how the development of the lyric and epic element in Russian literature corresponds to the development of the lyric and dramatic element in Uzbek literature. The Russian story is largely dominated by simple allegory, which makes it possible to reduce the complex experience of the past to a set of successive affects. In the Uzbek story, complex allegory dominates, determining the relationship of plot twists and traditional images. It is traced in detail how the work of complex allegory determines the position of the author and the hero, the system of identifications and reactualization of national heritage in the global postcolonial context. The question is raised about the connection of this distribution of genre patterns with the principles of the organization of social life as well as the understanding of the subject of the speech. In Russian literature this subject is a person from the intelligentsia, who inherits the advances of Russian classical literature in depicting the inner world and the challenges of the present. In Uzbek literature this subject is a modern person in the broad sense, who knows how to find a common language with different social groups and who draws on tradition as a source of this common language, rather than of certain emotional experiences.
Key words: post-Soviet literature; short story; poetics of the genre; postcolonial literature; lyro-epic; lyric-dramatic; Russian literature; Uzbek literature.
А.В. Марков (Москва), С.Э. Камилова (Ташкент)
Рассказ-этюд в русской и узбекской литературе: лиро-эпическое vs лиро-драматическое
Аннотация. Понятия лиро-эпического и лиро-драматического начала в прозе могут служить как жанровым обобщениям или указанию на конвергенцию различных традиций внутри национальной литературы, так и спецификации национальных литератур в период кризиса жанра романа. В период небывалых событий распада СССР и новой волны постколониальных поисков в мировой культуре рассказ становится местом не только повествовательных, но и жанровых экспериментов: он фиксирует постоянно меняющуюся современность, при этом столкновение нарративов, качеств внутренней речи и темпоральностей образует в каждом рассказе новые конфигурации сочетания эпического, лирического и драматического моментов. В данной статье на примере произведений русских (Ян Гольцман, Сергей Солоух и др.) и узбекских (Шукур Холмирзаев, Исажон Султон, Мухаммад Шариф, Улугбек Хамдам) прозаиков показывается, как развитию лиро-эпического элемента в русской литературе соответствует развитие лиро-дра-матического элемента в узбекской литературе. В русском рассказе доминирует простая аллегория, позволяющая свести сложный опыт прошлого к набору сменяющих друг другу аффектов. В узбекском рассказе доминирует сложная аллегория, определяющая отношение сюжетных поворотов и традиционных образов. Подробно прослеживается, как работа сложной аллегории определяет позицию автора и героя, систему отождествлений и реактуализации национального наследия в мировом постколониальном контексте. Ставится вопрос о связи такого распределения жанровых паттернов с принципами организации общественной жизни и пониманием субъекта высказывания. В русской литературе таким субъектом оказывается интеллигент, наследующий достижениям русской классической литературы в изображении внутреннего мира и вызовов современности, в узбекской литературе - современный человек в широком смысле, умеющий находить общий язык с различными социальными группами и опирающийся на традицию как на источник этого общего языка, а не отдельных эмоциональных переживаний.
Ключевые слова: постсоветская литература; рассказ; поэтика жанра; постколониальная литература; лиро-эпическое; лиро-драматическое; русская литература; узбекская литература.
Introduction
The short story was in the 19th century reportage, connected with the social framework of the press of the time. Allegorism, parable, in other words, the constructive use not only of "eternal images" but also of "eternal genres" was a feature of the novel [Войцкая 2003]. In the 20th century, the blurring of the boundaries of the novel and the crisis of regular verse led to the assertion of the norm of the essay as a public performance, which can also determine the public and thus the social sound of closely related forms of prose, such as the short
story. In this paper, we examine how the short story became, after the collapse of the USSR, a form of lyrical utterance that overcomes the crisis of the subject of this time. The need to construct multiple cultural subjects and the resulting gaps between the memories and feelings of different characters in the story demanded a reform of the genre. This article explores why, despite the commonality of both the Soviet literary tradition, the genre palette, and the understanding of the essence of lyricism and drama formed by Soviet literary scholarship, the reassembly of the Russian and Uzbek story as a socially significant statement occurred differently and led to divergent results, with the victory of the dramatic element in Uzbek literature.
Materials and methods
The material served as Russian stories published in the central literary journals of Russia, as well as Uzbek stories presented in the textbook [Камилова 2013].
Methods of studying the lyro-epic and lyro-dramatic principle in Uzbek literature and other literatures of similar development have already been elaborated. The works [Askarova 2021; Ruziyeva, Lobar 2021; Sayimbetov 2021; Tukhsanov 2020] show that the lyro-epic in Uzbek literature is associated with special procedures of reflection, including allegory and interpretation, which allows including the personalization of inner speech, making it part of interaction in the material world. The works [Ayimbetova 2021; Kurbanova 2021] prove that the lyro-dramatic is associated with the specifics of the assimilation of dialects and ways of speech, with the reassembly of the characters' social positions and ways of knowledge about the world around them. The lyro-dramatic in this sense generates a postcolonial situation where an authoritative narrator is indispensable, but it is necessary to explain how the dialects created by tradition and culture are combined with the procedures of self-identification of each protagonist. This paper draws fully on these findings, but considers material that has been left out of the focus of these works.
Results
We define the short story-etude (Russ.: рассказ-этюд, sketch) as a continuation of the tradition of Soviet lyrical prose of the 1960s and 1980s. In this prose, fractional personal impressions are linked together into a certain whole, but this whole owes not to general ideas about harmony, but to self-expression, which enables one to move easily from a genre scene to a portrait or a landscape. The present-day continuation of this tradition in Russia is no longer connected to self-expression, but to the realization and filling of the gap between the epic and lyrical organization of the narrative, to the search for an alternative to the routine genre forms, if only through the gesture of their negation. Such is the case of Russian prose writer Yaroslav Goltzman's cycle of stories and sketches (with a subtitle: этюды) It feels, it shines, it flickers [Чудится, светит, мер-
цает], in which a flow of sensory impressions is composed, but memories are presented in an epic key. This connection results in a simple allegorization of life and death, with the allegorical in the gap between the lyrical and the epic:
...It was past midnight, when the birch fire had darkened and turned to ash, the fragile layer of which rounded the outlines of the embers, and I, sinking into a nap, remembered the glowing crust, the thick shadows in the snow, the little mouse. I thought: "Here we are, squeezed by circumstances, driven by fate, running, running, running in our deep rut. Running, until we hide in the darkness.
Уже за полночь, когда березовый жар в печи потемнел, подернулся пеплом, хрупкий слой которого округлял очертания углей, я, погружаясь в дремоту, припомнил сияющий наст, густые тени на снегу, мышонка. Подумалось: "Вот и мы, стиснутые обстоятельствами, гонимые судьбой, бежим, бежим, бежим по своей глубокой колее. Бежим, покуда не скроемся во тьму [Гольцман 1995, 75].
M. Tarkovsky's story Frozen Time, M. Vishnevetskaya's story T.I.N. (Garden Experience), and M. Butov's story In the Quarry are constructed in a similar way. The action dissolves in a flow of associations, digressions placed inside a specific organization of the narrator's speech, which is picked up by the lyrical flux. The transition to the epic setting then proves to be a rupture, as an introduction of subjectivity not only of another person, but of any other element, which can also recall that behind this inner speech there is also an epic construction.
If the invention of such a lyric-epic tradition in Russian literature occurred in the 1990s, in Uzbek literature it belongs to the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries. For example, in the story Xorazm, jonginam (Dear to my heart, Khorezm) by the Uzbek writer Shukur Xolmirzaev, the main action is interspersed with personal memories, experiences, impressions and lyrical digressions, while the epic seriousness allows us to generalize the ways of expressing impressions and to subordinate them again to a single idea. But while the Russian story retains the lyro-epic identity of the genre, the Uzbek story also allows for lyro-drama-tism due to the intensity of impressions and sketches, as Isajon Sulton's story Bowl on Water. Elegic mood and dramatization of nuanced sensual experiences allows one to construct an image of the homeland as both a source of lyro-epic synthesis and a place of lyro-dramatic experience of a larger time of history. For this more complex genre synthesis over gaps, the author uses a more complex allegory: the homeland is identified with the Beloved, and the foreign land with the Sea, which is quite in keeping with lyrical imagery, but above these two allegories a third allegory, accompanied by a quote from Jalaladdin Rumi, a boat on the Sea as a human destiny, as the Element with which to reckon:
...the bowl does not sail as it pleases, but according to the will of the water element... two people in a boat, which is whirled like a straw among the raging waves, beckons the Fatherland. Passionate desires and dreams of only meeting Her. My beloved, you are the delight of my soul. I feel with all my being an unbreakable bond with my Beloved, and if she does not exist, I have no choice but to perish in this abyss [Камилова 2012, 258].
Such a complex allegory is supported by traditional poetic techniques, such as the refrain: the phrase is repeated several times: "The waves are splashing and beating against the boat." This gives us an almost musical thrill, while the realistic plasticity of the writing, in contrast to the lyrical, almost watercol-or-like Fargana landscape, intensifies the dramatic experience as a constant encounter with the unexpected.
We propose to call such a story not a sketch-story, but a story-reflection, which includes different levels of identification (people, nation, country), as differentiating the life of an individual and requiring recognition of the significance of also unpredictable situations. But the Uzbek and the Russian short story-etude can converge on other parameters, such as the fuzziness of the plot, the absence of a fable outcome, the abundance of lyrical digressions, the open subjective perception of the author, which inevitably includes an evaluative element, the autonomy of feeling and seeing the world, and the openness and transparency of the author's standpoint. Only in an Uzbek story does this independence, openness and transparency of position serve the purpose of civic and national identification.
A separate kind of story-etude is a dialogue between the World of Childhood and the Text. Here the reader and the hero narrator are simultaneously drawn into unraveling events, situations, and memories. The composition is further complicated to confirm the irreversibility of change, to see the harmony of the former life, and at the same time the game is introduced, motivating the change of lyrical pictures, and thus not only the epic but also the philosophical measurement of the story. In S. In Soloukh's story Metamorphosis, this game becomes "to make an elephant out of a fly," [Latin: Elephantum e musca, Russian: из мухи слона, to make mountains out of molehills] i.e. to turn, changing one letter at a time, the 4-letter word mukha "fly" into the 4-letter word slon "elephant," thereby showing the identity of the most integral and the most unexpected.
In this story, the world of childhood in its many manifestations, fragmented into separate sounds, colors, sensations, becomes an independent subject of depiction. The narrative is built on the multidimensionality of the author's perception of life and his own childhood memories, and the composition is subordinated to three parties of wordplay, according to the key years of the character's accelerated maturation. Each part of the story, which has its own mood, syllable and set of expressive techniques; these are the periods of the hero's growing up, they are divided by time frames: 1966 - childhood, 1970 - adolescence, 1972 - youth.
In the first part the word mig "moment" in six moves turns into the word cas "hour", thereby acting as a complicated but unambiguous allegory of time, a happy time when the main character Lesha Kuleshov was in harmony with himself and the outside world. The narrative is told in the first person, the world is presented through the prism of a nine-year-old child's perception, where prerequisites of identification, but not identification itself, are shown, the plot is reduced to a retrospective, expressed in one-word phrases:
A short and happy moment when everyone is asleep. The whole world. Except for the birds, the dogs, and Grandpa <...> Yut and Bulwark. Everything you need in old magazines. The black and white pages smell of summer. Ants. The attic and the roof [Солоух 2003, 109].
In the second part, larger in volume, the "fly" turns into the "elephant" in nine moves. This is no longer a retrospective of fragments, but a change of episodes, which involves reflection, putting together a jigsaw puzzle of associative modes. The allegory, which is elegiac in mood, is replaced by the bitterness of adolescent experiences, given through the eyes of the rival protagonist Igor Toporkov and the girl Muza Tarasyan. The change of narrator made it possible to convey the subtlety of moods and the nuances of feelings of adolescents. Allegory here becomes affirming and offensive, for example, the final word "elephant" reminds the hero of the imperfection of his body. In this way, play simply belongs to others, and growing up is revealed through the fact that the hero ceases to be interested in childhood games, like playing with a fly, but is only interested in how he looks from the perspective of others. This is how the identification of his own self with his own irreversible self is created.
In the third part, the word god "year" turns into the word vek "century" in seven moves. But here time becomes no longer a time of subjective experience, but a time of narrative, which is imbued with the vitality of adventure. In this case, all adventures are connected with the house, but the house at the end is sold by the parents, and thus there is a complex allegory of parting with childhood and adolescence, it is also parting with the past, it is finding the present self. Thus nostalgia, longing, shame, and growing up converge within a single allegory, pointing to a gap. Not only does the house no longer exist as property, but memories are lost, as when one loses the game.
The system of allegories allows the author to solve a double task: to show the gradual expansion of the hero's experience, but at the same time, distancing himself from the modes of perception of adulthood, to show the agile mind of the child in his defenseless truthfulness. The allegories allow the author to take a detached stance, looking at growing up from inside and outside, and so show that each new experience of growing up is quite identical for this hero, despite the metamorphoses declared in the title; after all, Ovid's homonymous poem talks about preserving identity for moral purposes, not about its destruction while altering external form and modes of emotional relation to memories.
The closest we come to this complex allegorical understanding of childhood as a precursor to both adult states and reflective identifications of the unity of one's self is the story Kuldirgich, by the Uzbek writer Muhammad Sharif. But here again we will see both similarities and differences between Russian literature as one of Western literature and Uzbek literature as literature of the Central Asian experience. In the Russian story, childhood is reconstructed with the help of associative threads, smells, sounds, and colors, which bring it closer to the original idea of childhood experience, that is, the reconstruction of childhood turns out to be lyro-epic. And the reconstruction of childhood in Sharif's story is lyro-dramatic. Instead of pleasant associations, a system of ruptures is given,
those brief moments in life when the disease (diabetes) recedes, and the hero seems to fall into the chaos of unexplored sensations, into the elements, like the element of the Sea in the story by Sulton.
And I woke up in the morning and ran. Climbing up the mountainside, I kept running and running. Everything rustled and crackled beneath my feet, I picked wormwood, ran, jumped over a tumbleweed, ran, my feet were scratched by camel thorns... I was always running. Then I ran faster than the wind, like a whirlwind flying [KaMraoBa 2013, 84].
The hero identifies through the great imaginary, which turns out to be a pattern of unpredictable development of all subsequent associations.
Sharif constructs an associative series of happy moments: "mole - dimples on cheeks - game - wind" and the associative series of the period of aggravation of the disease: "ant - ant - lion - helplessness - pain - coma." But unlike Soloukh, these associative series are not related to the perception of the hero from the other or the discovery of his being in time, but only to participation in the life as a great allegory, in which there is an Element that makes some mighty and others helpless. Again, as with Sulton, dissolution in the Element does not prevent the articulation of desire, but no longer in the form of transgressive love for the fatherland, but in the form of jokes and serious reflections of a terminally ill child. Thus, while affirming childhood as the best period of life, the writer simultaneously recognizes even the most tragic events as part of this experience of the early years of life as the spiritual homeland of the soul. Also, this story is based on the identity of the hero to his place, with the only difference that the place of childhood is unstable, it has both the comic and the tragic, but it proves from the contrary the stability of the places of adults.
This principle of lyro-dramatism as corresponding to the spiritual and social experience of Central Asia can also be illustrated in many other Uzbek stories. Thus, in the story of the Uzbek writer Ulugbek Hamdam The River of My Soul [KaMH^OBa 2013, 232] shows the hero-narrator suddenly escaping from a closed and programmed circle of life brings a thousand misfortunes upon his head. He is attacked on all sides by the eternal guardians of the order of measured life: Duty, Responsibility, Obligation, Prohibition, Law, etc., preventing the hero from remembering his true self. The story captures the easily recognizable type of contemporary with the American dream, with a set of responsibilities of a successful man with a daily to-do list, with a clear program for the future, with a passion for comfort and the iron psychology of the new Shtolz (Goncharov's Oblomov). It is only in the dream, which here becomes The Element, that the hero realizes that he lives in an imaginary world and feels a wild urge for freedom. Hamdam understands freedom as liberation from humanly fabricated conventions and the desire to experience the eternal, real world, which turns out to be the hero's only spiritual homeland.
Discussion
So, the difference between the ways of the Russian and Uzbek story is determined not by the aesthetic or genre preferences of the authors, but by the work of allegory. The treatment of the past in Russian storytelling requires simple allegory, which permits communication to be maintained in the language of culture that emerged back in the Soviet era, and to be invested with existential meanings through the self-determination of the narrator. The collapse of the USSR and the postcolonial situation undermined, but did not destroy, the position of the narrator here. And the Uzbek narrative requires a complex allegory that connects the present with the distant past and explains how it is possible for a subject who is about to die, but who has become an integral part of Uzbek society with the established distribution of professional responsibilities. The professionalization of speech also occurs here: the hero grows up not because he faces a new experience, as in the Russian story, but because his speech becomes adult, lyrical, while after his death the other characters and the narrator become full participants in the further life drama, which reflects the postcolonial world situation.
The genre of the story-etude in the Uzbek version turns out to be a reflection that generates different levels of national identification, with complex allegory indicating the grasping of the national ideal and directly producing it. Whereas in Russian stories patriotism is built into the comprehension of a complex historical path, in Uzbek prose it serves to establish a stable subject: Fatherland appears to be a model subject, from which and in whose relation other configurations of contemporary experience can be derived.
Of course, this is the overcoming of the didactic and pathetic attitude to the patriotic theme in Soviet Russian and Soviet Uzbek narratives, together with the revival of that notion of the place of the subject among other subjects, the distribution of fates and actions among all people in the nation, where everyone is assigned his own occupation in life and his own set of future events, which is characteristic of nation-building in Central Asian literature, distinguishing it from Western literature, including Russian, where the hero constantly overcomes his or her limits to become not the same.
REFERENCES (RUSSIAN) ИСТОЧНИКИ
1. Гольцман Я. Чудится, светит, мерцает. Этюды // Новый мир. 1995. № 12. С. 71-85.
2. Река души моей: Сборник современных узбекских рассказов / ред., сост. С. Камилова. Ташкент: Изд-во «Адиб», 2012. 312 с.
3. Солоух С. Метаморфозы // Знамя. 2003. № 12. С. 108-112.
ЛИТЕРАТУРА
1. Войцкая И. Дерево и царство: о поэтике богословия. Минск: Новые мехи, 2003. 164 с.
2. Askarova M. Homil Yakubov's Views on Oybek Lyrics // ACADEMICIA: An International Multidisciplinary Research Journal. 2021. Vol. 11. № 3. P. 2412-2415.
3. Ayimbetova Z. Types of assimilation and artistic function of simple folklorisms in I. Yusupov's lyrics // Berlin Studies Transnational Journal of Science and Humanities. 2021. Vol. 1. № 1.5. P. 159-168.
4. Kurbanova O.B. Critical skills of Ibrahim Gafurov // Scientific reports of Bukhara State University. 2021. Vol. 5. No. 56. P. 131-143.
5. Ruziyeva M.Y., Lobar S. Lyro-epic Literary Fairy Tales in Uzbek Children's Literature // Middle European Scientific Bulletin. 2021. Vol. 11. P. 417-425.
6. Sayimbetov Sh.U. Lyro-Epic Description in Karakalpak Poems (on the Example of the Poem Confession by G. Seytnazarov) // Theoretical & Applied Science. 2021. No. 12(104). P. 966-968.
7. Tukhsanov O.R. Djamal Kamal is an Experienced Translator // Theoretical & Applied Science. 2020. No. 4(84). P. 950-956.
REFERENCES (Articles from Scientific Journals)
1. Askarova M. Homil Yakubov's Views on Oybek Lyrics. ACADEMICIA: An International Multidisciplinary Research Journal, 2021, vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 2412-2415. (In English).
2. Ayimbetova Z. Types of Assimilation and Artistic Function of Simple Folklorisms in I. Yusupov's Lyrics. Berlin Studies Transnational Journal of Science and Humanities, 2021, vol. 1, no. 1.5, pp. 159-168. (In English).
3. Kurbanova O.B. Critical Skills of Ibrahim Gafurov. Scientific reports of Bukhara State University, 2021, vol. 5, no. 56, pp. 131-143. (In English).
4. Ruziyeva M.Y., Lobar S. Lyro-Epic Literary Fairy Tales in Uzbek Children's Literature. Middle European Scientific Bulletin, 2021, vol. 11, pp. 417-425. (In English).
5. Sayimbetov Sh.U. Lyro-epic Description in Karakalpak Poems (on the Example of the Poem Confession by G. Seytnazarov). Theoretical & Applied Science, 2021, no. 12(104), pp. 966-968. (In English).
6. Tukhsanov K.R. Djamal Kamal is an Experienced Translator. Theoretical & Applied Science, 2020, no. 4(84), pp. 950-956. (In English).
(Monographs)
7. Voytskaya I. Derevo i tsarstvo: opoetike bogosloviya [Tree and Kingdom: About the Poetics of Theology]. Minsk, Novyye Mekhi Publ., 2003. 164 p. (in Russian)
Марков Александр Викторович, Российский государственный гуманитарный университет.
Доктор филологических наук, профессор кафедры кино и современного искусства РГГУ Научные интересы: теория литературы и искусства. E-mail: [email protected] ORCID ID: 0000-0001-6874-1073
Камилова Саодат Эргашевна, Национальный университет Узбекистана. Доктор филологических наук, профессор. Научные интересы: современная русская литература, современная узбекская литература. E-mail: [email protected] ORCID ID: 0000-0001-7542-3970
Alexander V. Markov, Russian State University for the Humanities. Doctor of Philology, Professor at the Department of Cinema and Contemporary Art, RSUH. Research interests: theory of literature and art. E-mail: [email protected] ORCID ID: 0000-0001-6874-1073
Saodat E. Kamilova, National University of Uzbekistan.
Doctor of Philology, professor. Research interests: modern Russian literature, modern Uzbek literature.
E-mail: [email protected] ORCID ID: 0000-0001-7542-3970
