Poetry
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Not translated into English
Timur Zulfikarov · 1980
Synopsis
The collection brings together four narratives in poetic prose devoted to legendary or historical figures of the Persian East: two stories of Khodja Nasreddin, a sequence on Mushfiqi, a sixteenth-century Tajik poet, and the Book of Revelations of Omar Khayyam. Each blends poetry and prose in a highly wrought Russian language, which the critic Vladimir Bondarenko called ornamental, nourished by Old Russian and the Bible as much as by the medieval aesthetics of the East.
Context
Published in 1980, it was the first collection by its author to be issued by a major Moscow publishing house; he was then forty-four and had been publishing in journals since the early sixties, while working as a screenwriter. The narrative devoted to Omar Khayyam had appeared separately as early as 1973. Two further collections followed, in 1983 and 1984, then narratives about Nasreddin, which won him the Yasnaya Polyana Prize in 2004.
Who it is for
For those who like the sages and poets of the East retold in a Russian prose full of poetry.
Prizes and reception
It is placed first among its author's major works, before the cycle he later devoted to Khodja Nasreddin.