E. Safarli’s novel “The Sweet Salt of the Bosphorus” as a transcultural text

Romanova Kseniya S.,

Candidate of Philology,

Teacher of the English Language and Professional Communication Department

Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation

e-mail: ksuromanova@inbox.ru

IstinaResearcherID: 30793891

The article analyses how transculturality manifests itself in a Russian-language novel The Sweet Salt of the Bosphorus by Azerbaijani writer Elchin Safarli. Despite the author’s allusions to the Constantinopolitan text of the 20th century Russian literature, a whole range of specifics prevents one from referring this novel to the Russian literary tradition. Due to the symbiosis of two mentalities in Safarli’s perception of the world, this literary piece incorporates the following transliterary features of writing: author’s specific bilingual consciousness, which unlike monolingual, particularly the Russian one, states that human’s destiny is predetermined by one’s personal choice and actions; the reconstruction of an Azerbaijani view of the world by means of the Russian language, which at the level of poetics manifests itself in that the gustatory and olfactory components of perception become dominant form of the characters’ sensory reactivity and are an important key to understanding the author’s position; interlinguistic dimension of the text which includes both Turkish and Azerbaijani speech and transliterated linguistic fragments, and which implies the implicit dialogue between the author and the Russian-language reader; actualization of the Russians’ cultural integration in the East and objective description of the “Russian” view of the world by the writer who belongs to the Eastern cultural code.

Keywords: transculturality, bilingual, emigration, Istanbul, transnational consciousness, sensory reactivity
 

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