Orientalism poetics: story by Leonid Solovyov “The Nomad”

Abstract

The article deals with the problem of orientalism in literature, narrowed to the question of Russian orientalism and its Soviet derivation. The names of Nikolai Karazin and Andrey Platonov are mentioned among Russian literary Orientalists. The researchers identify the differences between Soviet Orientalism and the Orientalism of the XIX century. The analytical paradigm presented in the article outlines the prospects for the scientific study of Uzbek impressions. Salir-Gul (1933) by Sigismund Krzyzanowski and Pavel Zaltzman's novel Central Asia in the Middle Ages (1930s). For the first time, the novel The nomad (Kochevye) by the Russian writer of the twentieth century Leonid Solovyov written in 1929 and published in 1932 is analyzed in detail. Appeal to the folklore, ceremonial, and ritual life of the peoples of Central Asia becomes one of the main techniques of Leonid Solovyov's Oriental poetics. Solovyov's narrator is not a traditional orientalist observer of an alien, and therefore exotic, picture of the world. In Solovyov's poetics, the subject of the story merges with its object and represents a single whole: Russian literature spoke in the voice of a stranger. The material of the article corresponds to the intentions outlined in modern postcolonial studies.

Keywords

• russian orientalism
• soviet orientalism
• leonid solovyov
• folklore
• central asia
• postcolonial problems in literature