Мотивы и образы Ф. М. Достоевского в романе иорданской писательницы Кафы Аль-Зоаби «Холодное белое солнце»

Abstract

The aim of the study is to prove the high degree of influence of Russian classical literature on contemporary prose of the writers in the Arab East today, which has emerged as a result of the growing interest in the Russian classical literature in Arab countries in the past. The article analyzes the novel “Cold White Sun” by the Jordanian writer Kafa Al-Zou’bi, which was shortlisted for the Arab Booker Prize in 2019. The conceptual content of the novel is examined, including its themes (the individual’s loneliness in the world, the predestination of fate, atheism, the redemption of crime, etc.), as well as the artistic techniques of the realization of the author’s idea (imagery, reference to the author in the text, the significance of the natural background, etc.) and the aesthetics of language (choice of lexical units, semantic fields, etc.). The scientific novelty of the work is determined by turning to the little-studied material of the latest Arabic literature in domestic literary studies that represents the postmodernist trend of the 21st century, and attempts to establish its close connection with Russian classical literature. The research results indicate parallels in motifs (youthful maximalism, victimology, etc.) and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s imagery (the atmosphere of Petersburg, the room-as-coffin, etc.) discovered in the book by the Jordanian writer.