A. S. GERASIMOVA

Candidate of Philological Sciences

Afghanistan has experienced many hardships in the past century: coups d'etat, a long-standing civil war that continues to this day, the presence of foreign troops on the territory of the state, the transformation of the country into a world center for drug production, supplying the rest of the world with its products, and other troubles.

The result of this was a ruined economy, appalling poverty of the population, and a massive exodus from the country. According to various sources, 2 - 2.5 million people left Afghanistan out of the 13.5 million pre-war population. The most educated representatives of the Afghan people emigrated from Afghanistan, which significantly drained the national culture.

At the very beginning of the twenty-first century, after the entry of NATO troops into Afghanistan, a relative order was created in the country: a constitution was adopted, supposedly democratic parliamentary and presidential elections were held, schools and universities were operating, as well as the media. Some representatives of the Afghan culture returned from emigration to their homeland.

However, a significant part of the country's territory is beyond the control of the central government, and terrorist attacks are not uncommon in the capital, claiming the lives of dozens of civilians. In a word, peace has not yet come to the long-suffering land of Afghanistan.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the Afghan national culture, and literature in particular, is developing in the twenty-first century. mostly outside of their own country through the efforts of writers from Afghanistan. Their main achievement and a kind of phenomenon can be considered the formation of the genre of the modern Afghan realistic novel. The first examples of this literary genre appeared in the literature of Afghanistan relatively late: in Nadari literature in the 30s-40s of the XX century, ¹ in Pashto literature - in the 70s.

At the turn of the millennium, new works of the novel genre were added to Afghan prose, written in Pashto by the oldest writer Saaduddin Shpun (b. 1932). He has lived in the United States for more than twenty years, working for the Voice of America radio, and his novels were also created there. However, they were published in Pakistan. We are talking about the novels "Shintagai" ("Blue Lark", Lahore, 1998) and "Gatyalai" ("Breadwinner", Peshawar, 1999).

The first of them is named after the nickname that the hero of the novel gave his blue trailer for its speed. The novel takes place during the reign of Babrak Karmal (1979 - 1986). The hero-doctor Muhib-is on the side of the forces resisting the central government of Afghanistan. He transports weapons in his trailer and fulfills his professional duty, helping the sick and wounded Mujahideen, and hiding them in a mental hospital when they are in danger.

"Sizovoronka" can be attributed to the works of the spy-detective genre. There are representatives of the Soviet and French intelligence services. Its artistic side suffers from looseness of the composition, its individual parts are poorly connected with each other, which hinders the dynamic development of the action. The novel also contains overly naturalistic pictures, especially when it comes to scenes in a mental hospital.

There is also a love line in "Sizovoronka", but it is written as if dotted. On a mountain pass, Muhib saw an overturned bus and a half-frozen teenage boy. The hero took it to his trailer, warmed it up, and discovered that it was a young woman. Love breaks out between them. Muhib receives an order to get rid of the woman, but does not comply with it. The trailer arrives safely in Kabul thanks to the sharpness and resourcefulness of Shatirina, the name of the heroine, who knows how to negotiate with representatives of the legitimate authorities. In the capital, the heroes part and meet only after a long 4 years, having passed through a series of trials and vicissitudes.

Departing from the tradition of Afghan prose, where a woman is almost always a victim, suffering from an unfair society dominated by men, S. Shpun creates a different type of female image. His heroine has an independent character, marked by emancipation traits. Once in the trailer, where there is only one bed, she offers Muhib to share it with her. On the way from Salang to Kabul, she boldly enters into negotiations with armed authorities, ensuring that the trailer is unimpeded. Shatirina also agrees with Malik (the foreman of the family. - A. G.) to conduct the wedding ceremony. "Your girlfriend told me about marriage," Malik tells the doctor. Muhib is confused: "This request should have come from me." But drawing an external portrait of an Afghan woman, the author remains true to the tradition: "With

She was dressed from head to toe in Pashtun clothing: a blue velvet qamis (national dress), red trousers, a black silk veil decorated with colorful fringes at the edges, eyes darkened with suffering, teak on her forehead. The air rang with the sound of her anklets and silver bell jewelry. "²

Malik, although not a mullah, performs the wedding ceremony, having obtained the necessary attributes for the ceremony: a mountain of sweets on a colorful scarf and the Koran. It happened in the Swat Valley during the onset of severe cold and snowfall. The newlyweds stood at the hotel window in silence, except for the howling of the cold wind and the slamming of the hotel doors and windows. "Shatirina said:

"So our honeymoon has begun.

"No, not a month, but months," I said. "We'll stay here until the snow melts. We spent the night in the trailer as if in memory of the first night on the Salad "³.

So sadly and idyllically ends the novel "Sizovoronka". The author leaves the final section open. The writer could hardly foresee the future fate of the characters - during the difficult period described in the novel, it was difficult to predict the fate of the country itself.

S. Shpun's great success should be considered the creation of a new female character for Pashtun literature. Shatirina in the novel "Sizovoronka" is an effective nature, she lives in the real socio-historical situation of her country. It is included in the confrontation between government and opposition forces, has its own civil position and knows how to defend it. The creation of such a feminine character is a new and significant phenomenon in the prose of Afghanistan at the turn of the century.

S. Shpun's novel "Sizovoronka" is an ideologized work with a pronounced anti-Soviet orientation. Despite some artistic mistakes: the looseness of the composition, hypertrophied naturalistic scenes, "Blue-Lark" is undoubtedly a step forward in the process of establishing the genre of the novel in the literature of Afghanistan in the Pashto language.

A much larger artistic phenomenon was the novel by the same author "Gatyalai" ("Breadwinner"). It can rightly be attributed to the modern full-blooded realistic novel. Already his "Prologue" is a vivid, visible, almost cinematic picture: "Until the infidels (infidels) came to us, everything went as we got from our ancestors; we knew both sorrow and joy. Our world wasn't a blooming rose garden for us, but it was our world that we were used to. Qadir and Haji Zardad still collected their interest from debtors. The shopkeeper, Shah Muhammad, was still hanging on to the beans. We boys also stole melons from our neighbors ' melons. Sorcerers and fortune-tellers with khurjins on their backs, as always, scurried from house to house. Village mullahs also comforted widows and orphans. Everything was in place. And if someone complained about their life, well, you can't escape fate.

When these enemies came, everything turned upside down, everyone moved from their places. For ten years, maybe a year, people walked day and night like ants, one or two at a time, from the lowlands, from the slopes of mountains, out of rivers, out of the forest thickets, out of caves, down from the trees. Some walked leaning on a staff, some ran, on cars, on donkeys, on bareback horses, on bicycles, on rafts, with flintlocks on their backs, with iron chests. They moved in electric light and in the glare of the sun; wrapped in veils, with their faces uncovered, and with their heads uncovered; some in short kamis, some in galoshes, some in high boots, and some even barefoot. Whole families of illiterates, university graduates, doctors and masters, mirzas and peasants were walking with infants in their arms, one or two at a time.

4^{Gradually the drops formed a stream, a stream, a canal, and then a river in which the water flows in dead silence, and flows from everywhere: from Badakhshan, from Khazarejat, from Herat, from Andarab and Talikan."}

I think it is excusable to quote such a long quote here. This is the beginning, the exposition of the novel, which clearly shows the beginning of the national tragedy of the Afghan people, which defined the watershed, the split in the life of society into "before" and "after" the entry of Soviet troops into the country.

Then the action moves for a while to Pakistan, where the characters are waiting for entry visas to the United States. Later, the novel tells about the life of the main character, Gulajan, in America.

Gulajan is a young peasant boy, naturally endowed with intelligence, organizational skills, beauty, strength, dexterity, hard work and self-esteem. It is also distinguished by its seriousness and taciturnity. At home, he had only received a basic education, but he managed to grow wonderful melons that won prizes in competitions for the most delicious and fragrant melon. The second major achievement of Gulajan was the ability to rein in the wildest and most skittish horse. The hero loved horses, he himself had only an old pack mare, but even on it he managed to win the game of bozkashi**.

Once in a foreign country, in a foreign world, without knowing a word of English, a young Afghan does not seek to fit into the paradigm of a different culture. He is a fully developed personality with a mentality formed on the basis of the socio-cultural traditions of his ancestors and individual, personal experience of life in the homeland from which he has just parted.

Gulajan believes that his stay in a foreign land is temporary, and dreams of returning to his native land. Only by the will of fate, he is forced to settle his life in an alien world, and he does it, of course.-

* Teak - national head decoration made of metal and beads (author's note).

** Bozkashi-goat-picking - a sports game where riders, snatching the carcass of a goat from each other, rush to a pre-determined place; it is common among Afghans, Uzbeks, and Turkmens (author's note).

I have only pragmatic considerations: I quickly learn American household appliances, take English lessons from the local padre, and make friends with Americans. Gulajan is quite loyal to the foreign-speaking environment, he even gives money to the padre for the American church, although he considers it very greedy.

Nevertheless, the hero Shpun remains a true Afghan, true to his religion, the usual stereotypes of behavior. He tries to fulfill all the requirements of Islam: he goes to an American church, where he performs namaz, spreading a prayer mat on the side. Gulajan weeps bitterly when he discovers that he has missed most of Ramadan (the Muslim fast) out of ignorance, due to the lack of a Muslim calendar.

Preserving his ethno-cultural essence, this illiterate Afghan peasant develops a foreign cultural and civilizational space, as if transferring a piece of his native country to it and applying the knowledge and skills that he acquired in Afghanistan. He began to do his usual business-cultivating a piece of land and growing varieties of melons, the seeds of which he brought with him. With the help of three American friends, he creates something like a small cooperative, and he works on the melon from dawn to dawn, earning the respect of his companions.

Gulajan is respected not only by his inner circle. He became a hero among a much wider circle of Americans. By chance, he had a chance to participate in rodeo competitions, where he managed to tame the wildest and strongest Mustang, which threw more than one rider. As the winner, he received a prize of 20 thousand dollars, a very significant amount for an illiterate Afghan.

Gulajan, with his usual modesty and dignity, met the greetings of the American public, but refused tempting offers of contracts, considering such performances for money an unworthy occupation for a man.

The hero of Shpun manages to maintain his self-esteem and his principles in a foreign cultural environment, where a different scale of values is used, where success and success are at the forefront.

Gradually, the author expands the cultural and civilizational space in which Gulajan exists. He sends his hero, accompanied by his black American companion, to New York. There was supposed to be a UN session on the Afghan issue, and a large delegation of Afghans came there. Gulajan went to the famous city to meet with a compatriot who brought him seeds of Afghan melons.

Here are Gulajan's first impressions of visiting New York: "The Roosevelt Hotel in New York was a dime a dozen Mujahideen. All the leaders gathered, surrounded by their brothers, nephews, and security guards. The hotel looked like some kind of Pakistani hotel, because there were a lot of dark-faced people with beautiful curly hair who spoke English with a distinctive accent. "⁵

Without thinking about the essence of the issue discussed at the UN session, Gulajan carefully observes the behavior of his compatriots and notes with some embarrassment that they behave only based on their national traditions and customs, without taking into account the place and time of what is happening.

The Afghans sat down in the great hall, as if at a wake, waiting for a treat and demanded that food be brought to them from the restaurant in this hall. The delegates ' assistants quickly made a dastarkhan out of their tsadars, and the delegates ate sitting on the floor. "Every leader had an interpreter made up of Afghans living in America. Most of these translators worked in various American offices. If they weren't fully naturalized, they were at least half naturalized. However, when they learned about the arrival of the delegation, they immediately abandoned everything, pulled out their tsadera and national clothes, rosaries from their trunks. They spent their days going to get their bullets, and at night they slept under tzadars in one of the hotel rooms"⁶. Gulajan's whole nature could not approve of such behavior of his compatriots, he considered this obvious conformity degrading to human dignity. In addition, he denounced the Afghan leaders, each of whom had special, private meetings, established personal contacts with representatives of the American Congress, pursuing personal goals and hiding their contacts from other members of the delegation.

Having received the coveted box of seeds, Gulajan and his companion went to get acquainted with the city. New York gave them mixed feelings. They admired the Statue of Liberty and the skyscrapers of Manhattan, but felt a sense of dread when they found themselves in gloomy neighborhoods inhabited by the poor, teeming with bandits and crooks of all stripes and nationalities, even the scions of the Sicilian mafia, crammed with dirty shops and brothels. "In short, Gulajan only breathed a sigh of relief when they returned to their village in Arizona with a box of Afghan seeds."⁷

On American soil, Gulajan also met his love - a girl from the nomadic Afghan Ahmadzai tribe, who came to the United States to visit her brother, who had long left his homeland. The girl responded to his feelings, but demanded that he woo, observing all the Afghan traditions and customs. This meant that Gulajan had to fly to his homeland to ask for the hand of his beloved from her father and get consent. So he did, without deviating from his ethno-cultural attitudes.

The novel " Breadwinner "is much less ideologized and politicized than its predecessor"Sizovoronka". Only the prologue and a few episodes at the end of the work remind of the national tragedy, the civil war and the struggle of Afghans against foreign troops at the end of the XX century.

During his stay in Gulajanu's home country,-

* Tsader-belonging to the Afghan national dress: a large piece of dense fabric worn on the shoulders like a raincoat or a large shawl (author's note).

* * Dastarkhan - a tablecloth spread on the floor and covered with dishes of food (approx. author's note).

He was going to participate in a terrorist act-the bombing of a government helicopter. This peaceful peasant became imbued with the sentiments of the Pashtun nomads, to which his bride's relatives belonged, and took part in the operation they prepared.

Both the hero and his father dream of peace in their country; then they would return to their native Kattagan and live as before.

Gulajan does not seek to integrate into American society, as the heroes of Turkish literature living in Germany do.⁸ He only adapted to a different socio-cultural environment, found his niche in it, using the skills and abilities that he acquired in his homeland. The hero carefully preserves his religion, national traditions and customs, in a word, his identity. Gulajan identifies himself as an Afghan who is forced to temporarily stay in a foreign country and dreams of returning to his former life in his native land.

The architecture of the novel "Breadwinner" is very simple and linear. The story is narrated from the third person in chronological terms. Events follow one another according to the passage of time. Unlike the previous novel by S. Shpun, where you can quite accurately determine the time of action, in "Breadwinner" there are no such landmarks. What is clear is that the events in the novel cover a roughly ten-year period from the end of 1979, when Soviet troops entered Afghanistan, to the end of the 80s, when they were withdrawn from the country.

With the advent of S. Shpun's novels, we can say with full justification that the genre of the modern realistic novel was formed in Afghan literature. The works tell about the private life of an ordinary person in all its manifestations. The characters ' living environment, their connections with other characters, their experiences and feelings are reliably shown. All this is given in the context of a specific socio-historical reality. The author managed to avoid schematics in the depiction of the characters, especially in the novel "Breadwinner", where a full-blooded national character was created. Shpun's novels do not suffer from the edification and didacticism that distinguished Afghan prose before. The author can only be blamed for the lack of psychological elaboration of characters. However, this does not detract from the creative success of the venerable writer and his contribution to the development of Afghan literature in the Pashto language.

The next step in the development of major prose forms in Afghan literature in the Pashto language was the publication of the work of Mustafa Sadiq (b. 1971) "Pate sha, baran di" ("Stay, It's Raining", Peshawar, 2000). The author determined the genre of his work himself by putting the word 'novel' in parentheses on the title page. The work of M. Salik proved to be quite popular and went through two editions within two years in 2000 and 2002.

Mustafa Salik was born in Jalalabad, the son of an officer. After the April Revolution in 1978, he moved with his parents to Pakistan, where he graduated from the lyceum in Peshawar and studied literature at the Dawat University. In 1998, he worked in London for the BBC for a year and returned to Pakistan. He returned to his homeland in 2003.

The novel is titled with words from a popular folk song, and it devotes a lot of space to poetry and music as the most appropriate way to express feelings. M. Salik's work tells about the romantic love of an Afghan student Ghazan for a classmate from the lyceum. The plot is very common in Afghan prose of the XX century. - lovers can not connect because of class inequality or prejudice. Despite the fact that the heroine, Tsanga, responded to Gazan's feelings, their love was doomed. For a village girl from a mountain Pashtun tribe, there is nothing to dream of going to university. The villagers were already condemning Tsang's father for allowing her to study in the city. "In the village, a marriageable girl becomes the mistress of the house and wears a large veil." Despite all the prevalence, even some hackneyed plot, Salik's novel is distinguished by close attention to the sphere of feelings. It is all imbued with lyricism, poems, songs, pictures of nature, sounds that fill them take up a lot of space in it.

Lyrical tonality is determined primarily by the character of the main character. Gazan is an artistic, poetic, musical person, inclined to philosophical reflections. He dreamed of entering the Faculty of Philology after graduating from the lyceum and entered.

Love between the characters began at first sight. And how could such an impressionable, sensitive young man not fall in love with a girl of magical beauty?

One day, a new student named Tsanga was brought to Ghazan's class. In Peshawar, Afghan refugees, young men and women studied together, unlike the locals. "Tsang was all about attractiveness. Truly, she had a fabulous beauty. Her soft pink lips looked like a newly opened rosebud. And when a smile played on them, it was impossible to compare it with anything else. In short, her whole appearance is extremely attractive: a long neck, a thin waist, even, even, thin, white fingers. She was a true example of natural proportionality and harmony. What else can I say about it? In the words of Hamza Baba, she was a tasty morsel of a girl... Beautiful, no matter how you look at it. The curls are so black and long and heavy that I can't tell you." Even her friends recognized the beauty of the Collet: "Villain, these mountains, these mountains of curls will break your shoulders and greatly threaten your waist,"⁹ her best friend Zarina jokingly said.

M. Salik's description of female beauty differs from the one most often found in Afghan prose, when the authors ' attention was focused only on the woman's face. Salik covers the entire figure of the Collet with his eyes, noting its beauty and such

Hamza Baba-Amir Hamza Shinwari (1907-1994)was a famous Pashtun poet, considered the father of the modern Pashtun ghazal.

details like the girl's extraordinarily beautiful hair and fingers.

In addition, the writer gives the heroine a good voice, she quietly sang Pashtun folk songs in class. Gazan was conquered. The girl responded to his feelings, and they managed to explain.

The scene of the explanation is written by the author very subtly, tremulously; the most subtle manifestations of feelings are recorded: the trembling of the fingers of the Collet, the timid, from under the eyelashes, Gazan's observation of girlish excitement, the feeling of happiness that seized the hero when the beloved raised "black eyes illuminated by light". In response to the hero's question: "Tsanga, will you believe that I love you? Her lips trembled, and I could feel her ragged breathing."

The heroine tried several times to answer. "Just like a pigeon with clipped wings, trying to fly up from a tower, rose and fell, and yet remained in place."¹⁰

After the prom, the lovers had to break up. Tsanga returned to her village and was married to a wealthy peasant: "The Highlanders do not allow their girls to study, they consider the university an institution of red infidels"¹¹. Gazan became a student of the Faculty of Philology, but suffered immensely in separation, both mentally and physically: "Sometimes my body was pierced by something like electrical discharges, sometimes my head was split by sharp pain, "said Gazan," my arms and legs moved against my will... The words "living corpse" used to seem only dead to me - from dramas and novels. Now I realized that I was the living corpse. "¹² Neither doctors nor local healers could help the hero, whose only desire was to see his beloved. It has become a kind of idee fixe. Then the doctors recommended a friend of Gazan to take him to the mountains of Swat, Tsangi's native land. The trip took place, in which the hero learned about the fate of his beloved, and he happened to see her from afar. Ghazan found himself just a note left on the path Tsanga was following, asking her to sing a song for him. Tsanga sang a folk song that she used to sing at the lyceum:

  
 
 "It's raining in the surrounding mountains, my dear, 
 Hail is coming. 
 Don't go, stay here tonight, it's raining." 
 
 
 

This song, like a refrain, accompanies the characters in their conversations and actions. Lovers were perceived by others as characters of the old Pashtun legend Adam Khan and Durhaney. This is a kind of Afghan Leyla and Majnun, who died because they could not unite due to old tribal traditions. "Seeing Tsanga was a very strong shock for me. And all around was an indescribable beauty: the singing of birds, the gentle murmur of streams, the world of waterfalls and shepherd's horns merged into a captivating musical harmony of being... The entire universe danced with the song. My head spun, and the mountain pines and high mountain peaks danced before my eyes... My vision went dark. And when I opened them again, I saw that I was in Peshawar, in the Khybar Hospital, in the emergency department.

Zmarak (the hero's friend - A. G.) and several doctors are standing at my bedside. "¹³

This is how M. Salik finished his poetic narrative about the love and unfulfilled hopes of the young heroes, leaving the reader with a bitter feeling of sadness and regret.

It should be noted that there is a certain peculiarity of the language of M. Salik's novel - there are many Anglicisms in it. Repeatedly in the text of the novel there are words emergency, chairman, announcer, etc., written in letters of the Afghan alphabet. Earlier in the prose of Afghanistan in Pashto, there were no borrowings from English. This is a feature of the language of M. Salik, which indicates his education and broad outlook.

Afghanistan's prose in national languages still has a very limited readership. The circulation of Afghan books does not exceed 500-1000 copies; and the percentage of literacy in Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan, where they could read literature in the local languages of Afghanistan without translation, is very small.

At the turn of the millennium, literature in the Pashto language was enriched with works of large narrative form, mastering the genre of the realistic novel. The characters are ordinary people, and the subject of artistic research is their private life in modern concrete historical reality. The appearance of realistic works of the novel genre can be considered a major step towards the development of literature in Afghanistan.

A real breakthrough in the development of Afghan prose should be considered the works of writers from Afghanistan, created in European languages. They surpass the Afghan novels discussed above in terms of coverage of life material, its artistic implementation, and accessibility to a much wider range of readers. The novels of Khaled Hosseini (b. 1965) and Atiq Rahimi (b.1962) can be considered a breakthrough, which gave the literature of Afghanistan a prominent place in the world literary space. However, this is a topic for another article.

¹ See: Asoev Kh. Formation of the genre system of Afghan prose in the Dari language. Dushanbe, Donish Publ., 1988, pp. 92-102.

^{Shpun Saaduddin.} 2 Shintagai (Blue Lark). Lahore, 1998, p. 160.

³ Ibid., p. 162.

^{Shpun Saaduddin.} 4 Gatyalai (Breadwinner). Peshawar, 1999, p. 1.

⁵ Ibid., p. 34.

⁶ Ibid., p. 35.

⁷ Ibid., p. 37.

⁸ See: Uturgauri S. I. German Turks (Search for identity) // Who are we and what is our wandering? East to West. MIV RAS, 2007, pp. 89-107.

^{Salik Muhammad.} 9 Pate sha, baran di (Stay, it's raining). Peshawar, 2002, p. 4.

¹⁰ Ibid., p. 37.

¹¹ Ibid., p. 47.

¹² Ibid., p. 77.

¹³ Ibid., pp. 81-82.

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