Omar Khayyam in Russian literary interpretation (Vardvan Varzhapetyan’s novel “The smell of a wild rose”)

Abstract

The article analyzes Vardvan Varzhapetyan”s (born in 1941) novel “The Smell of a Wild Rose” (1974–1978), a biographical narrative about Omar Khayyam, the medieval Persian thinker, mathematician and poet. The novel is part of a trilogy about writers from different national cultures and historical eras: in addition to O. Khayyam, V. Varzhapetyan artistically recreated the images of Li Bai (“The Traveler with a Candle”, 1981–1984) and Francois Villon (“The Ballad of Fate”, 1978–1981). There are practically no literary works studying the named text (as, indeed, the entire trilogy). This determines the scientific novelty of the article. It clarifies the genre nature of V. Varzhapetyan’s work and traces the mechanisms of O. Khayyam’s image embodiment through the ratio of documented factual and aesthetic (imaginary) elements; discusses the issues related to the ways of conveying the oriental flavor in the work (“oriental style” as a component of poetics); draws attention to its structural plan (a compositional ring as one of the techniques for coupling episodes and chapters). In the novel, O. Khayyam is not just a cheerful reveler, a regular of drinking establishments. He is a man with a subtle, receptive soul, suffering from the imperfections of the surrounding world, from the evil spread in it in the broadest sense of the word (ranging from ignorance and bad taste to the horrors of violence, murder and deception). It reflects the “Mozartian” context of a creative personality’s fate: on the one hand, the ease of acceptance of being (hence the game motif of the Khayyam model of everyday behavior), on the other – the tragedy of the situation arising from the inability to fully realize good intentions, to purify the world from the filth of total recklessness. “The Smell of a Wild Rose” (the symbolism of the name is obvious) is the novel version of the universal “matrix” of human life as an eternal search for truth and beauty, set out on Iranian cultural material.