CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2022
| Author | Huseynova, Elnura |
|---|---|
| Title | The Nightingale Sings in the Thaw: Soviet Canonization of the 18th-century Tbilisi Ashiq Sayat-Nova |
| Summary | The current thesis examines the nationalization and Sovietization of the 18th-century Tbilisi ashiq Sayat-Nova. The bard’s ethnic background and multilingual oeuvre consisting of Armenian, Azeri and Georgian poems rendered him an ideal figure for being molded into an Armenian national poet and a symbol of the Transcaucasian friendship. This process was underpinned by relocating Sayat-Nova from the Near Eastern bardic tradition to the Armenian literary canon and universalizing the poet’s significance both of which had their origins in the prerevolutionary representations of the poet. The thesis will elucidate how Soviet nationality policy combined with the rise in Soviet internationalism made the Thaw a decisive moment in canonizing the bard as part of Armenian national and Soviet multinational literature. This work marks a departure from the previous scholarship on Sayat-Nova dominated by Romanticist assumptions about the poet’s individuality. Without attempting to construct the extraliterary details of the poet’s life, it contextualizes his poems within the corpus of ashiq poetry while analyzing their evaluation in Soviet literary criticism from the vantage point of Russian formalism. The thesis also provides a comparative analysis of the prerevolutionary and Soviet translations of Sayat-Nova’s poetry suggesting continuity between the two. |
| Supervisor | Shaw, Charles and Siefert, Marsha |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2022/huseynova_elnura.pdf |
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