V. N. ZARYTOVSKAYA
Candidate of Pedagogical Sciences
Peoples ' Friendship University of Russia
Keywords: modern Arabic literature, latest Iraqi literature, "The Arab Booker", Ahmed Saadawi, "Frankenstein in Baghdad"
Russian and European readers ' acquaintance with Arabic literature is often limited to works of oral folk art, such as, for example, the fairy-tale cycle "One Thousand and One Nights". Readers with a deeper interest in the East know about the pearls of the pre-Islamic era - "al-Jahiliya" and medieval poetry of the Arabs (Imru al-Qays, al-Mutanabbi, al-Maarri, etc.), and connoisseurs of modern literature appreciate the novels of the 1988 Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz or the brilliant writer Gamal al-Gitani 1.
These works were included in the treasury of world culture and had a great influence on it, but they do not exhaust the great Arabic literature. In the modern globalizing world, the artistic creativity of the Arab East, based on rich traditions, is rapidly developing, mastering, in particular, postmodern techniques, and deserves closer attention, as well as translation into the main world languages.
It is necessary to recognize that very few works of modern Arabic literature are translated and published abroad, unlike, for example, European or American. This is due to a number of factors, including the commercial disinterest of publishers, difficulties in translating Arabic texts, and the specifics of life in the Arab East, which is not shown by every publisher or reader.
However, the turbulent events that swept the Middle East and North Africa in early 2011 (the so-called "Arab Spring") forced the non-Arab world to pay attention to the crisis phenomena that were taking place in this region and to the impact they had on other countries. One of the tools for such diagnostics is modern Arabic fiction. The chronicle of events has acquired an artistic form and is shown from the point of view of individual, subjective experience. And the tra ...
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