『호자 나스레딘 이야기』에 나타난 민속 전승과 트릭스터 형상의 문학적 재구성

초록

This study examines Leonid Solovyov's The Tale of Hodja Nasreddin—the dilogy comprising The Disturber of the Peace («Возмутитель спокойствия») and The Enchanted Prince («Очарованный принц»)—along four interrelated axes: the literary re-creation of the folkloric trickster, the structural variation between the two volumes, the ambivalence of Soviet Orientalism, and the ethics of active goodness. Rather than a mere anthology of folktales or a children's adventure story, the work recasts the multilayered traditions of Central Asian oral culture within the form of a Russian-language novel. Solovyov's birth in the Near East and upbringing in Central Asia lend concreteness to its settings and characters, yet, filtered through Soviet norms of representation, that same experience also yields an Orientalist decorativeness; his Central Asia thus remains an ambivalent space where lived familiarity and external representation intersect. As a wise fool and trickster, Nasreddin breaks a false order to disclose a higher justice, his jests operating as critical devices that disarm the language of power. Solovyov treats the folk anecdote as the narrative's atomic unit, expanding the reversal of each joke into social satire and ethical judgment, while his montage-like composition turns the city of Bukhara itself into a satirical apparatus. Across the two volumes the figure develops from the bright, aggressive laughter of a popular jester into a sorrowful and wiser man who enacts goodness through deeds—a double movement from a politics of laughter toward an ethics of active goodness, and from the heroism of public satire toward that of anonymous self-sacrifice. The work therefore carries both the limits and the possibilities of Soviet Orientalism, reducible neither to uncritical celebration nor to simple ideological critique; to reread it today is to widen the boundaries of Russian literature itself.

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