ТВОРЧІСТЬ МЕГРНУШ МАЗАРЕЇ В КОНТЕКСТІ СУЧАСНОЇ ПЕРСЬКОЇ ЕМІГРАЦІЙНОЇ ЛІТЕРАТУРИ

Abstract

This overview paper presents the work of Mehrnoosh Mazarei (born 1951), a representative of modern Persian emigration literature of the late XX – early XXI centuries, living in the USA. The relevance of the chosen topic is due to the insufficient number of Ukrainian-language studies devoted to the prose of individual personalities among Iranian writers, in particular, the works of Mehrnoosh Mazarei. In the context of the development of modern prose in Iran in the late XX – early XXI centuries it was found that, against the backdrop of the changes brought about by the Islamic Revolution (1979) and the Iran-Iraq war (1980–1988), interest in the status and problems of women increased. Persian women's prose occupies a special place in Iranian literature both in Iran and abroad, since a large number of Iranian writers emigrate to the West and continue to work outside of Iran, including Mehrnoosh Mazarei. It was found that the characters in her works are mostly emigrants who live their lives trying to accept the culture of a new country, but also at the same time to keep memories of the past in order to console themselves with this. The lyrical hero of the stories of Mehrnoosh Mazarei is a woman who adapts to a new life and often recollects her past life. In her works, the writer, despite her feminist ideas, tries to convey to the readers as objectively as possible what the life of emigrant women was like and to tell their stories. Due to achievement of the goal of the study, which was to analyze the trends of Persian women's emigration prose on the basis of the works by Mehrnoosh Mazarei, it has become possible to determine the main features of the main characters of the author, being that they cannot forget that they have no place in their own society, and thus they are trying to adapt to the new rules of the countries where they are. The dominant theme of Mehrnoosh Mazarei's stories is the relationship between a man and a woman, the description of which undergoes serious metamorphosis from gender gap to gender equality, from condemning men to enabling their harmonious coexistence with women, from explaining patriarchy culture as a part human nature to recognizing that it is caused by social relations. The topic of a rebel woman is of no less importance for Mehrnoosh Mazarei. In particular, in the novel "Mina's Revolution", the heroine Mina becomes the embodiment of recalcitrant women, not only of Iran, but of all women with a similar fate: her experience and the difficulties she goes through make her a global rebel, a modern archetype of revolutionary women forced to leave their country in search of a better life and socio-political freedom.