Heterogena jednina: autopredodžbe u romanu Azazil Yūsufa Zaydāna
Heterogeneous Singularity: Self-Images in Yūsuf Zaydān’s Novel Azazeel

Summary/Abstract: This paper analyzes the novel Azazeel by the contemporary Egyptian novelist, Yūsuf Zaydān, from the perspective of imagology. Although awarded as the best novel in the Arab world in 2009, Azazeel and its author have become the subject of numerous controversies. In the media cacophony about the historical reliability of the plot and the characters in the novel, the stylistically highly valuable literary text was lost as well as the potential meanings emanating from it. Creating a special spiritual bildungsroman that speaks about the temptations and the spiritual maturing of Hypa, the monk from the fifth century, Zaydān offers a complex fictional self-image. This distinctive image reveals the diversity of ideological paternalism through self-reflections of Hypa’s spiritual fathers, Cyril and Nestorius, internalization of the Other as a sine qua non of the authentic self through the character of the philosopher Hypatia, and the burden of self-realization within inner universe of the individual in the mirror of Azazeel as the intrinsic doppelgänger of the protagonist.

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