The Soviet Union in two Arab novels

Abstract

The study aims to analyze the representation of the Soviet Union in two Arab novels, “Ice” (2011) by Egyptian Sun‘allah Ibrahim and “Time of the Red Reed Pipe” (2012) by Kuwaiti Thurayya al-Baqsami. Within the vast expanse of the Arab “emigrant” literature one can find relatively few works of fiction that have to do with the USSR despite the fact that in the 1960-1980s thousands of Arab students studied in the country. Among a couple dozen Arab writers who wrote some fiction about the USSR very few spent more than a couple of months in the country, and their works, as a rule, present idealized and rather superficial images of the Soviet Union. Unlike these authors, Sun‘allah Ibrahim and Thurayya al-Baqsami spent in the 1970s quite a long time in Moscow in the status of ordinary students, and for this reason their novels present a much more realistic picture of the Soviet Union. Without any noticeable warmth towards their Soviet hosts, the writers consider many negative features of Soviet social and economic life as commodity shortage, low quality of Soviet goods and services, illegal currency operations, etc. The two authors’ representations of the Soviet Union stand in contrast to the Soviet’s own idea of how the people from the developing countries perceived the “country of victorious socialism.”

Keywords

• arab literature
• soviet union
• sonallah ibrahim
• thuraya al-baqsami