Oriental Discourse in Russia: The Case of Alexander Pushkin
Oriental Discourse in Russia: The Case of Alexander Pushkin

Summary/Abstract: This paper takes a holistic view of the phenomenon of Oriental discourse in the Russian literary tradition in an attempt to understand its roots, connections and historical and literary evolution during the past three centuries. Although Russian Oriental discourse started and was inspired by German Romanticism, and the French Enlightenment, that discourse soon afterwards grew into a totally independent phenomenon (which I call ‘Orientalearning’) of ‘naturalization’ of the oriental texts, appropriating their ideas and literary characters but providing them with a new Russian meaning. As a result, Russian Vostokian naturalizations have become an inseparable part of the native Russian literary tradition since the 19th century. To illustrate this phenomenon, a number of examples of adaptation of early pre-modern Arabic texts into Russian are analyzed, including Alexander Pushkin’s Imitations of the Quran and The Prophet.

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