The Arabic, and first of all the Egyptian, novel, which found its modern forms only at the beginning of the XX century, has now become the main genre of Arabic literature, taking the place of the "Divan of the Arabs"that belonged to poetry in the past. It was the novel that was able to sum up the literary results of the outgoing century.

In the last decade of the 20th century, the novel genre, which since the 1950s claimed to be the leading genre of Egyptian prose, developed especially intensively. You can even talk about a kind of novel "boom", the signs of which were not only the avalanche-like increase in this product and the almost annual appearance of new, notable writers ' names, but also the heightened interest in novel novelties on the part of the reading public and critics, who barely have time to follow all the works worthy of attention.

Leading positions in the field of novelistics are retained by writers who came to literature in the 60s in the ranks of the so-called "new wave". By now, most of them have already passed the milestone of sixty years: Sunallah Ibrahim (b. 1938), Gamal al-Ghitani (b. 1945), Yusuf al-Quayyid (b. 1944), Baha Tahir (b. 1935), Ibrahim Aslan (b. 1938), Muhammad al-Busati (b. 1939) Hairi Shalabi (b. 1938), Ibrahim Abd al-Magid (b. 1946), and others. They are joined by younger and very young authors who have attracted the attention of literary critics and readers with their first published works.

Fathi Embabi's novel "Killing Fields"had a great resonance 1 . In a survey of readers conducted by the Akhbar al-Adab newspaper in late 1996, 20 novels were named the best novels of the year, including seven written by women authors. The largest number of votes was collected by such works as" No One Sleeps in Alexandria "2 by Ibrahim Abd al-Magid, the sixth novel of the writer, and" Tent " 3 by the aspiring novelist Miral al-Tahawi. Despite his advanced age and ill health, Naguib Mahfouz (b .1911), the 1988 Nobel Prize winner, who published Echoes of an Autobiography , 4 miniatures depicting key moments in the writer's life, 5 and a short story collection, The Last Decision, 6 a year later, did not give up his creative work until recently. Edvard al-Kharrat (b.1926) is an active author and holds one of the first places among Egyptian authors in terms of the number of works translated into European languages, in particular French. In 1990, his novel "Oh, the Girls of Alexandria!" 7 was published, and in 1993, his novel "The Stones of Popillo" 8 was published .

The number of female writers has increased markedly and their authority has been strengthened. To the names of famous novelists Nawal al-Saadawi, Salva Bakr, Radva Ashur for the last-

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In recent years, the names of female writers Miral al-Tahawi, Gala al-Badri, and Mayy al-Tlemsani have been added. Participating in occasional discussions in literary circles about" women's " literature, female writers deny the validity of applying this term to their work, considering themselves full participants in the literary process. Indeed, if earlier the problems of women authors ' creativity were somehow limited to the issues of women's position in society and defending their rights, then in recent years women writers have invaded new areas for them, in particular, they turn to the genre of the historical novel ("Al - Bashmuri" 9 by Salva Bakr, "Granada" 10 by Radva Ashur, "Muntaha" (Gala al-Badri). Numerous publications dedicated to the memory of Latifa al-Zayat (1925-1997), the author of the famous novel "The Open Door" 12, a literary critic and social activist, noted the influence of her outstanding personality and her views on the modern generation of the Egyptian intelligentsia.

The most characteristic feature of the Egyptian novel of the 1990s is the variety of individual author's styles: on the one hand, the continuing attraction to stylization (for medieval genre forms, for documents); on the other hand, the desire to experiment, the search for new figurative and genre solutions, leading to genre shifts and the emergence of new synthetic forms. At the same time, there is a fairly traditional narrative style, although innovative in terms of understanding the material, the historical trilogy of Radva Ashur, which tells about the fate of Andalusian Muslims after the fall of Granada - their last stronghold in Spain, and the quasi-historical novel X. Shalabi "Adventures of a merchant of pickles and sweets" 13, the genre of which the author defines as " novel fantasy in time/space (az-Zamakan) ". The hero of the novel, in the role of which the author himself acts, being invited to a meal with the Fatimid Sultan Muizz, is constantly "mistaken" by the century and has the opportunity, without leaving his place, to observe the life and customs of Cairo of various eras.

There are other forms of interaction between the novel text and the context of history, such as extrapolating modern phenomena and problems to another historical era (first encountered in the novels of N. Mahfouz in the 1930s), creating an allegorical picture of history based not on historical data, but on traditions (a technique also introduced in Egyptian literature N. Mahfouz and used, in particular, by M. al-Busati in the novel "Wrath of the Lake") 14 . Every word, every detail in al-Busati's novel is endowed with a metaphorical meaning, which is clarified only by careful reading of the text. The reader, who at first sees as quite realistic descriptions of the lake, the islands on it and the old fisherman in a black boat, stumbles upon "strange" details and details of the characters ' behavior and, trying to explain these oddities, guesses in the images of the fisherman, grocer, coffee shop owner and other characters of the heroes of the Biblical, Evangelical and Koranic traditions. Despite its small volume, "Wrath of the Lake" belongs to the epic genre, its small space accommodates the entire allegorical history of the peoples and religions of the Middle East, which have common roots and are always at war with each other. Typologically, this novel is similar to the novel" Sons of our Street " 15 by N. Mahfouz, but its allegories and metaphors, compared to those used by N. Mahfouz, are extremely complicated.

Mixing genres is a conscious creative attitude of writers, one of the ways to alienate reality, which helps to look at it from a new point of view. The new forms that arise in the course of combining the genre models taken as a model and their individual re-creation are designed not so much to reflect the already established, well-established view of the world, but to contribute to the formation of the view itself. Widespread stylization, witness-

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It also serves as a means of self-identification and identification of opportunities for creating a holistic style.

Most of all, Egyptian authors (and Arab authors in general) want their novels to have a "national face". If in the 60s the main disputes and disagreements at writers ' forums and scientific conferences were caused by the ideological (Marxism or existentialism) and aesthetic (realism or the "new novel") orientation of literature, now the problem of "specialness" (husuiyya) is still on their agenda. the "individual face" (huwiyyah) of the Arabic novel (this, in particular, was the subject of the Pan-Arab literary conference held in Cairo in February 1998). The article clarifies cultural, political, civilizational and other aspects that make it possible to identify the special features of the Arabic novel in the global novel context. There is even a question about the possibility of constructing a theory of the Arabic novel. By the way, the attraction to specialness and originality is characteristic not only for the Arabic novel, similar searches for a" national face " occur in many other literatures of the world, i.e. the problem statement itself belongs to the field of typology of the world novel.

However, representatives of Arabic literature are aware that the concept of the "Arab novel" is rather conditional, firstly, because it is currently developing in the general context of the world novel, reproduces existing realistic, modernist, postmodern forms; secondly, because it does not represent a homogeneous phenomenon and does not represent a global phenomenon. It differs by belonging to a particular Arab country, reflecting the socio-historical specifics, the realities of life and everyday life of this country, using its spoken language. According to Yusuf al-Quayyid, now even the North African novel cannot be considered as a single one, since it is divided into Algerian, Tunisian, Moroccan and Libyan 16 .

Taking into account all these points, it is most objectively possible to speak about the peculiarity of the Egyptian novel, which reflects Egypt as a subject of world culture, and the "Egyptian-centricism" inherent in its authors, despite all the difference in individual creative manners, and the concentration of attention on current problems of Egyptian society and, accordingly, man. At the same time, these problems are also revealed as universal, universal, reflecting the involvement of Egyptian literature in the world literary tradition. Contact with other literatures is being strengthened by translations into Arabic of all notable works from Western languages and an increasing number of translations of works from Eastern languages, as well as by the widespread use of English in Egypt itself.

Along with Egypt's traditional cultural ties with Turkey, Iran, and India, the role of contacts with Japan and China is growing. Trips of Egyptian writers to various Eastern countries have already stimulated the appearance of not only essays, but also fictional works set in China (short stories by Muhammad al-Mahzangi), Bangladesh (short story by Muhammad al-Minisi Kindil "Zu Beida"), and other Eastern countries. Attention is also increasing to the work of writers from Arab countries. As each literature that is part of the Arabic literary community gains its "own face", and the elements of originality in the language and content of its works are strengthened, national literatures begin to arouse more and more interest. The strengthening of literary contacts is facilitated by book fairs held annually in a number of countries, regular meetings of writers, and personal friendships.

With the predominance of individual, subjective elements in the styles and methods of creating an artistic image, it is difficult to distinguish between them in Egyptian Romanistics.-

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They are united by the proximity of aesthetic principles, especially ideological positions, although it would be wrong to talk about a complete de-ideologization of the novel. The stylistic difference between novels written in a modern manner and novels stylized in the genre forms of medieval Arab heritage does not obscure the authors ' good knowledge of the modern postmodern novel, nor does it obscure the desire of both to dissociate themselves from the Western novel tradition that has so long dominated the Arab artistic consciousness. With all the variety and even exoticism of individual styles and stylizations, the traditional realistic style, which was pushed aside for a while, also continues to exist, and in recent novels, quotation and internal monologue are often combined with narration on behalf of an omniscient author.

A common feature of today's Egyptian novel is its topicality. The theme is dictated by the most acute and urgent issues of national existence and identity: the political, economic and cultural situation in the country, as well as the psychological reaction of various segments of society to it, the deepening property inequality, the expansion of leveling Western mass culture, on the one hand, and the strengthening of Islamic sentiment, on the other. What is new in the Egyptian novel of the 90s is evident in the works of authors belonging to the generation of the sixties, and in the works of the younger generation of novelists. Changes primarily concern the novelist and his relationship with the world around him.

At one time, in the 60s, the type of introspective novel was formed and dominated, reflecting the drama of a lyrical character, with many features close to the author, who is experiencing a spiritual crisis, loneliness and alienation from the environment. The first novel of this type was Sun'allah Ibrahim's The Smell Is Everywhere. In his fifth novel, Zatun (18), Ibrahim for the first time abandons the permanent hero-narrator of previous novels, the nameless journalist, the author's alter ego, and separates the images of the narrator and the central character. Moreover, " the heroine is a woman, an ordinary Egyptian woman, the wife of a bank employee, the mother of three children, who is connected with journalism only by working in the archive of a newspaper. However, her strange name (Zatun - "personality"; "essence") encourages us to perceive her not as a private person, but as an image that carries a broader meaning, embodying some essential features of the national character, "the personality of Egypt".

The anonymous narrator takes on the role of an omniscient author, telling in full detail the story of the heroine's life, her relationships with her husband, children, co-workers, housemates; exploring the world of her feelings, worries, hopes and disappointments. The description of Zatun's shopping trips, schools, official institutions, trips to the provinces to visit relatives, to Alexandria to meet a relative returning from Europe creates a panoramic picture of Egyptian customs at the end of the XX century-a technique reminiscent of the famous maqam novel of the beginning of the century "The Story of Isa ibn Hisham" by Muhammad al-Muwaylihi. In al-Muwaylihi, a hero from the past (a resurrected pasha who lived in the era of Muhammad Ali) observes the changes that have taken place in the life of society over the past half century. The heroine of S. Ibrahim, who grew up in the era of Nasser and was brought up in the concepts of that time, represents the same type of "naive" hero, she cannot adapt to the conditions of a new life - and to a new morality.

Documentary material is not included in the author's narrative. Unlike the previous novels of S. Ibrahim, in which documents formed an organic part of the text, here documentary chapters - collections of quotations from the press, official, opposition and foreign - alternate with narrative ones, frame the text.

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create an image of the" information space " in which the characters exist. The alternating chapters are linked by a system of associations: the mass media of the market economy era invade people's privacy daily and hourly, impose on them a way of thinking, rules of life and recipes for success that alienate a person from his human essence.

But the human essence resists the pressure of "new values". Modest, kind-hearted Zatun would like to keep up with the century, live up to the standards dictated by advertising, get the latest household appliances, ceramic tiles of the latest designs, glass in the color of "fumet", but these desires cannot erase from her mind the ideas of justice that she learned from her youth. Because "the kind and easy-going Zatun was the daughter of Gamal Abd al-Nasser's revolution and was brought up on the idea that all people, regardless of their religion, nationality, state and position, are equal among themselves." 19

S. Ibrahim has his own scores to settle with the Nasser regime, and yet the moral values of that era serve as a criterion for the spiritual degradation experienced by society. Zatun's primary concern is the health of her children, she makes every effort to feed the family only with good-quality products, the heroine's struggle for healthy nutrition is equivalent to the struggle for the spiritual health of the nation, for its future. Disillusioned with imported chickens and meat that has long expired, Zatun decides to limit the family's diet to local products only. But the herring bought in a nearby shop, caught, judging by the label, a week ago, turns out to be rotten, and the label is re - glued. The tragic farce scene in the kitchen, where the heroine cries over the "local" herring that is spreading in her hands, carries the ambiguity of the symbol. The tears Zatun sheds are tears of despair and impotence, but their source is the living and any soul that suffers in a world from which high ideals are banished and where the values of consumption and material prosperity prevail.

S. Ibrahim's next novel "Sharaf" 20 is also named after the hero and also significant, it translates as "honor". The novel "Zatun" together with the novel "Sharaf" form a kind of diptych depicting two hypostases of modern Egypt. Sharaf is a young Egyptian, essentially still a boy, belonging to a generation brought up on Schwarzenegger movies, jeans ads, and Marlboros, who doesn't have a permanent job and lives off what he manages to beg from his parents, who also don't have money in their pockets. He spends his university years in prison, convicted of the manslaughter of a homosexual Englishman who attacked his honor. From the mosaic of episodes - scenes of prison life, descriptions of prison rules, stories of prisoners about their past, news reports on prison radio-the image of modern Egypt emerges. In the known fragmentary nature of the text, one can, if desired, catch echoes of the tradition of medieval Arabic prose or the author's desire to recreate the portrait of a "fragmented" society. Episodes are edited by the method of" joining " one to another, the hero is taken through various situations, most of them humiliating for him, gradually adapting to prison rules and mores. The story is told either from the third person or from the person of the hero himself, who does not leave prison until the very end of the novel and ultimately sacrifices, for the sake of survival, his honor, protecting which he went to prison. Sharaf's perception of everything that happens to him and around him is commented on, often ironically. The author-narrator presents his young hero to the reader as "a true son of a great people, who prefers to remain enslaved forever, so as not to deprive himself of the pleasure of dreaming of freedom" 21 .

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However, the personality of the hero "does not pull" to become the structural support of the work, in which the author set himself a large - scale task-to show the connection of the current situation in Egypt with the general situation in the world, with the struggle of international banks and multinational corporations for the redistribution of the world market. Therefore, another character is introduced into the novel-a prisoner, and the story of Sharaf's fate is interrupted by two chapters designed, one as the notes of the prisoner Dr. Ramzi Boutrous Nasif, a Coptic Egyptian who for a long time worked in many countries of the world as a representative of the largest Swiss pharmaceutical company and then "framed" by the company as a scapegoat, and the second "like a puppet show composed and staged by Nasif in prison, parodying famous American political figures.

The appendix to the novel contains a list of oral and documentary sources that the author used when writing it. Similar " references lists "were attached by S. Ibrahim to his previous novels" August Star "22 and" Beirut, Beirut! " 23 , which emphasized the synthetic nature of their genre, in which, due to the presence of a single hero-narrator and his profession as a journalist, the features of the novel and political science research were quite organically combined. In the novel Sharaf, the story of Dr. Ramzi Butrus Nasif is disproportionately long compared to the stories of other prisoners and is therefore perceived as an independent narrative that could serve as a plot for a separate novel. 24

In the novel" Varda " 25 S. Ibrahim managed to achieve a combination of documentary and fiction. He uses all the possibilities of the travel genre in order to create a work that is fascinating, like an adventure novel; strictly documented in terms of the events of the political history of the Arab East in the second half of the XX century. and, at the same time, its allegorical nature resembles a European medieval knight's novel.

The narrator, an Egyptian writer named Rushdie, who traveled to Oman in the early 1990s in search of traces of the beautiful woman he once loved, who still appears in his dreams, recalls meeting her in Cairo in 1957-1959 and reads the diaries that Shahla (Blue-eyed) kept in a mysterious way in the south of Egypt. during 1960-1975, already under the name of Varda (Rose). The double name of the heroine is explained by the fact that in 1965 she, an Omani, the daughter of a rich merchant, left Beirut, where she studied at the university, to her homeland to participate in the national liberation revolution, and took the pseudonym Warda. The search for traces of Warda and her brother Ia'rab, her diaries and her daughter leads Rushdie to the most unexpected places and involves great risks, as the memory of the revolution is banished from people's minds by all means. The heroine's diary contains accurate information not only about the struggle of the rebels against the armed forces of the Sultan and the British and about the attempts of young revolutionaries to establish a new life in the areas they liberated, inhabited mainly by Bedouin tribes, but also about events taking place at that time in other Arab countries, as well as in Africa, Latin America and Vietnam. Precisely dated press and radio reports (the transistor radio is Warda's main asset), and sometimes the newspapers that reach her, give her a general picture of the national liberation movements in different parts of the world and the attacks inflicted on the rebels by the combined forces of neocolonialism, international oil monopolies, and local regimes. The diary also tells about the emerging contradictions, conflicts in the ranks of the revolutionaries themselves - between nationalists and communists, between individual leaders-on the basis of personal hostility and the struggle for power.

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From Rushdie's memoirs and Varda's diary entries, the image of a woman with a strong character, beautiful and courageous, educated and fully committed to the cause for which she fights, constantly analyzing the mistakes made and the reasons for failures, emerges. Warda dies, betrayed by her own brother, but leaves behind a daughter, Va'ad (The Promise), who has a motherly character.

The tendency to separate the images of the hero and the author and to differentiate their functions in the novels of the 1990s is due, among other factors, to the level of self-awareness of the character. The hero of the novel" Fields of Murder " by F. Embabi, Abdallah ibn Abd al-Galil, is a young peasant who rose to the rank of non-commissioned officer in the army and lost his leg during the 1973 war. Unable to find a place in his native village, since all his property was appropriated by relatives, he was forced to go to work in Libya. Abdallah knows a lot more about the world than the peasant characters in the Egyptian novels of the 1960s and 1970s, in particular, than Misri, the son of a village watchman, the hero of the novel "War on the Land of Egypt" by I. al - Quayyid26 . Misri's story was told by the author on behalf of other characters. The hero F. Embabi constantly participates in the author's narrative.

Abdallah's fate appears to be one of thousands of people who wander in search of work, cross the border at night without documents, are deceived by recruiters and hunted by the police both at home and in neighboring Libya. The author's narration is accompanied by quoting lines from the Arabic medieval folk novel "Taghriba Banu Hilal" - the story of the migration of the Banu Hilal tribe from Egypt to the Maghreb, its campaign across North Africa. A reminder of a dramatic event from centuries ago, captured in the national epic, unites the past and present of the lower classes of the people .27 The collective experience of the people is displayed in panoramic paintings from the point of view of the author-an external observer, as well as directly experienced and comprehended from the inside by the main character. The voice of this new - in terms of thinking - hero, a fellah who became a soldier and then unemployed, sounds in the novel on a par with the author's.

The narration in I. al-Quayyid's novel "The Pain of Separation" is mainly based on monologues and dialogues .28 An unsolvable conflict that causes unrest, disputes, and even scuffles in the village arises from the arrival of an unusual message - in the form of a tape - from one of the residents who went to work in an oil-producing country. The peasants can't find out the contents of the message because they don't have a tape recorder. But the mother of the author of the message, who saves the tape torn in a fight, hopes that she will still be able to glue it together and listen to it.

The works of al-Quayyid, who writes mainly on a rural theme, clearly show the evolution of the consciousness of the hero-peasant, due to the destruction of the patriarchal foundations of his existence, as well as the experience gained outside the village - in the army, in cities, in other countries where peasants go to work.

In 1994, al-Quayyid realized his long-standing idea-he wrote the novel "Bird's Milk" 29 entirely in the Egyptian colloquial language. The heroine of the novel is a young and beautiful woman, a mother of two children, whose husband trades for a living as he can. In the rich and imaginative language of a resident of the Cairo folk quarter, Terter tells the story of her life and love. The story begins romantically - with the meeting of Terter with her husband's accomplice, a handsome guy Gazaley, and ends dramatically - in prison, because they did not find honest ways to earn the life that the heroes dreamed of.

The experiment with the use of an exclusively colloquial language has provoked disapproving responses from some readers and critics, who consider it unacceptable to sacrifice literary Arabic, one of the foundations of the Arabic language.-

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in favor of the language of the Egyptian common people. It is noteworthy that poetry in the spoken language has long been established as an artistic phenomenon. In dramaturgy-in comedy and domestic plays and in Egyptian cinema (which is watched in all Arab countries) , the use of exclusively spoken language is also not disputed by anyone. In prose, however, the scope of its use remains limited, and attempts to expand them are often seen as impertinent. And yet, the voice of the lower-class hero who asserts his vision of the world, his truth, becomes more and more different in the polyphony of the voices of the characters of the Egyptian novel.

Various models of the introspective type of novel continue to be created, in which the image of the external world is refracted through the perception of the hero-an intellectual, either very young, just starting to live, or a person who has a long life experience behind him, which he is trying to comprehend. Mentioned among the best novels of 1996, young writer Mahmoud Hamid's novel "Twenty-first Zero" 31 is written in the name of a young man who is celebrating his twenty-first year of birth and comes to the conclusion that the next year of life will be as "zero" as all those already lived, and that there is no need to live at all.

Baha Tahir's fifth novel, Love in Exile, was written after many years in Geneva, where he had worked for UNESCO since 1981. The hero is an Egyptian journalist living in Europe, in virtual exile; although he is listed as a correspondent for a Cairo newspaper, he knows that his reports will probably not be published, as they contradict the newspaper's position. The hero has everything in the past - the intensity of political and social struggle, ideological disputes, family happiness. He does not find mutual understanding with grown-up children, with whom he communicates only by phone: the daughter demands a car as a gift for successfully passing exams; the son, a capable chess player, refuses, for religious reasons, to participate in an international youth tournament. As a journalist, the hero is well aware of the situation in a world dominated by violence and force - the text of the novel includes documentary materials about the facts of political terror in various countries. Constantly sorting through his memories, looking for explanations for what happened to him and the world, the hero does not find the strength for a new love, for creating a new family. But he does not want to accept it, show "flexibility", go to the service of those in power and give up his journalistic duty to truthfully inform people about what is happening in the world. The beliefs of youth, the moral values of the recent past serve him, as well as the heroine of S. Ibrahim's novel "Zatun", as the inner core that does not allow you to bend, submit to circumstances, go with the flow.

An introspective type of novel can also be attributed to the "Call of the Unknown" 33 by Gamal al-Ghitani, written in a completely different non-traditionalist style compared to the novel "Love in Exile". The plot is based on the motif of the allegorical journey of the hero of the work through the desert, which symbolizes his life path. The author understands the lived life as a Sufi experience of ascent to absolute knowledge, and a person - as a microcosm in which the unity of being is embodied. The world with its past and present, passed through the "inner eye" of the hero, appears in the novel as if reflected twice: the allegorical, life-long journey of Ahmed ibn Abdallah through the desert from Cairo to the Maghreb is restored by him from memory and recorded from his words by Gamal ibn Abdallah, the chronicler of the Maghreb Sultan. Gamal has never left his hometown, but both characters have made the same dramatic journey of physical and spiritual evolution, and their meeting symbolizes the return of a person to himself, his "peering" into his spiritual essence.

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As required by the laws of medieval rihla (journey), the story of the journey is full of descriptions of "wonders and curiosities". Time and space, being signs of a spiritual journey, flow into each other. Images of ancient legends and legends, fairy tales of the "Thousand and One Nights", Sufi works - magic numbers, magic talismans, strange creatures-are woven into a whimsical pattern, behind the ligature of which you can guess the outlines and problems of today's world, historical events, moments of the author's biography, the motives of his earlier works. And the mental stops when crossing the desert in the "oasis of Umm al-saghir", where the hero's son was born; in the "land of birds", where Ahmed was elected king; in the camp of "crutchers" - playboys of life; in the "city of shadows", where the hero loses his material essence-these are stops on paths to the truth, and the stages of Egyptian history whimsically transformed by the hero's inner eye. If at first the hero leaves his camps, obeying a mysterious voice, which he cannot disobey and the nature of which he is unable to comprehend, then towards the end of the path, having overcome many trials and temptations, he along with maturity gains freedom of will, the ability to choose. The reader leaves the hero sitting on the shore of the great ocean, from which no one has yet returned. The hero's journey is nearing completion, and when he "reaches his limit", his "eternal journey", his "true being" will begin.

What did the hero learn from his wanderings through the desert of earthly life? The images of the Hadhramautz, a caravan guide who gives Ahmed magic talismans; the caravan master, a native of the beautiful island of Tinnis, a personification of the earthly paradise; the Old Testament elder, who has the ability to read footprints, fill up the image of teachers of life who begin in the early stories of G. al-Gitani, passing on their knowledge, moral principles, and high ideals to the student. The constantly emerging image of a palm tree also has a special symbolic meaning: Ahmed remembers the Hadhramaut as "thin and tall as a palm tree"; the reader of footprints daily " feeds "the lonely" straight-stemmed palm "with milk from his lips; floating in the fog of the "city of shadows", having lost his footing, the hero distinguishes the image of a tilted boat in the chaos of visions. palm trees with exposed, withered and blackened roots, but with a green crown, which is nourished by a "weak, thin as a hair" root preserved in the ground.

Repeated images and motifs create a certain inner semantic backbone of the allegorical narrative, which develops into a system of stable spiritual and moral values. Ahmed feels that he is changing along the way: "... in my Egyptian time, I was whole, unified, harmonious, but with each new stage that I pass in the direction of the place where the sun sets, I am fragmented, stratified. Something in me remains clear and obvious, but something goes away, and it is impossible to return it even with the help of memory. " 34 What remains clear and obvious is connected with the images of the teachers, with their precepts, with childhood memories, with the "reliable hand of the father", with the straightness of the palm tree, with the wisdom of the book, with the springs gushing in the desert, with the light of the sun, followed by the hero, moving in the direction of sunset. "Returning to oneself", finding one's essence is read in this context as the need to preserve a person in oneself, not to let the roots that connect with the "soil", with the precepts of ancestors, with the spiritual tradition of the distant past be cut off.

In many aspects, al-Ghitani's philosophy of being coincides with that embodied in the novels of N. Mahfouz, whom the writer considers his teacher. But there are also significant differences of opinion between teachers and students. The metaphysical motif of" eternal journey"," true being " is present in both. However, N. Mahfouz asserts the possibility of a moral transformation of a person who renounces "the love of money and power over others" (as it is said in his novel "The Epic of the Harafish" 35), and connects with the transformation of the person himself the creation of a new life.-

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creating a socially perfect society. The hero of N. Mahfouz's novel "The Journey of Ibn Fatuma" 36 goes together with a caravan of the best people of humanity to the future in search of the promised land "Dar al-Gabal". The hero of G. al - Gitani has only the "unknown", the boundless ocean ahead of him. G. al-Gitani sets his hero a more modest task - not to succumb to the temptations of the world, to remain a person no matter what. The hero's acquisition of free will does not lead to anything more than a protest against defilement, a withdrawal from it into contemplative solitude.

The wanderings of the characters in G. al-Gitani's novel "Pyramid Texts" 37 in search of truth take the writer even further back in time. Getting acquainted with the ancient Egyptian "Books of the Dead", the characters reflect on the meaning of changes taking place in history and in man himself, on the problem of cognition. A person can achieve absolute knowledge if he overcomes the time limit, gains the ability to see both the past, present and future (the hero of his novel "The Call of the Unknown"also aspired to this). Figuratively, cognition begins with a dot and ends with a dot. The novel is graphically arranged in a pyramid: the chapters from beginning to end get shorter, and the text of the last fourteenth chapter - like the top of the pyramid, the point where time ends and eternity begins-contains only three words: "Nothing, Nothing. Nothing." But the previous chapter says: "All... out... nothing" (in Sufi terminology, "nothing" and "everything" are equivalent).

The novel received mixed reviews from critics, and there were also doubts about whether it could be considered a novel. Some saw the work as an expression of a Sufi worldview, others as an existentialist one, and others as an attempt to create an image of Egypt as a kind of supreme and eternal value. It should be noted that literary criticism is now in a very difficult situation. A huge number of novels, unusually and each time constructed in a new way, with their own metaphorical language, causes confusion among critics, who do not know with what standards and criteria to approach them. It is no coincidence that when asked about the best literary and critical work of 1996 in the Akhbar al-Adab newspaper questionnaire mentioned above, many people answered that none of them aroused serious interest, and that criticism is going through hard times now. As for the "Pyramid Texts", judging by the development of G. al-Gitani's work in recent years, critics correctly caught in the novel both the contamination of Sufi and existentialist thought, and the spirit of "Egypticism" as a constant of the author's self-consciousness.

Two novels of 1996," No One sleeps in Alexandria "by Ibrahim Abd al-Magid and" The Tent " by Miral al-Tahawi, which received the highest rating of readers of Akhbar al-Adab, are indicative of the difference not only in the styles, but also in the worldview of their authors. Abd al-Magid acts as the heir and successor of all the traditions of both new Egyptian prose, starting with the enlightening "Description of Paris" (1834) by Rifaa al-Tahtawi and ending with the latest examples of the novel genre, and the artistic experience of world literature in its broadest sense - the novel is full of reminiscences and direct references to numerous works Arabic and world literature. All chapters are preceded by epigraphs from prose and poetry from different countries and centuries-from the Babylonian flood legend to the Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell. The synthetic structure and epic-romantic character of Abd al-Magid's work is most accurately conveyed by the epigraph from Paul Eluard: "From pleasure to madness, from madness to light-I create my whole from all that exists." From these words, the author proceeds and creates a poetic image of Alexandria, "a city always reborn to happiness" 38, whose land is saffron 39 .

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Alexandria, a Mediterranean, port, cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic and multi-confessional city, is the central character of the novel. The spirit of this city, where nations and cultures mingle, where the friendly union of the Muslim Sheikh Magd al-Din and the Christian Dimyan arose - the ideal of human relations that withstands all tests and is destroyed only by the death of Dimyan, determines the author's worldview.

Abd al-Magid describes one of the most dramatic periods in the centuries - old history of Alexandria-the years of World War II, when the city was bombed by German aircraft, and not far from it, in the Libyan desert, there were bloody battles between German and British troops. Alexandria of the war years appears as a piece of the world, as a drop of water that reflects the whole, the whole planet. The text of the novel, which flows in a continuous stream, includes reports on the activities of the heads of warring states; on troop movements; on battles on land and sea; information on the history of Alexandria (ancient and recent); current chronicles of economic, political, and cultural life; street, family, and love scenes; and poems by European and Egyptian poets.; folk songs (mawvali); songs of Alexandrian bards.

As a result of all this, the novel resembles a huge mosaic fresco. This style conveys the continuity of the flow of life, its eternal movement, which can not be stopped by any world upheavals-despite wars, bloodshed and devastation, people continue to love each other, suffer in separation, play weddings, give birth to children: On June 22, 1941, the day Hitler's troops attacked the Soviet Union, Zahra, Magd al-Din's wife, gives birth to her son. A global, all-planetary war allows you to feel especially acutely the interconnectedness of everything with everything. Allied soldiers - English, Scots, Irish, Indians, Australians, Negroes, New Zealanders-arrive in Alexandria from all over the world. Communicating with the soldiers working on the railway, Magd ad-Din and Dimyan begin to feel not only the vastness of the world, but also their belonging to it, the commonality of problems and concerns that concern people, the need to "know languages" in order to understand everything that is happening.

After experiencing tragedies of destruction and loss, residents of the city, after the defeat of Rommel's troops at El Alamein, celebrate the victory. Evening Alexandria, illuminated for the first time in three years by the light of street lamps, the lights of all ships in the roadstead, looks like a "giant piece of amber". This picture gives the ending of the novel an unusual major key for Egyptian novels of recent years. "A white city under a blue sky, near a blue sea will bring back the joy of life to its children," the author claims. The most important conditions for this are openness to the world, tolerance and friendly agreement between Muslims and Coptic Christians, while both remain faithful to their religion (the parents of young Muslim and Christian lovers still do not consent to the marriage of their children).

Miral al-Tahawi's "Tent" is one of the most tragic Egyptian novels. The writer is one of the young literary intellectuals who are grouped around the magazine "Al-Kitaba al - ukhra" ("Other Writing") published by Hisham Kishta. Samir Gharib Ali, the author of the controversial novel "The Falconer", expressed the general position of the group of writers in a sensational interview with the French newspaper Nouvel Observateur as follows: "From now on, the writer will no longer play the role of a prophet and preacher. Arabic eloquence no longer serves abstract theories. We reject ready-made schemes and adhere to the individualistic theory (an-nazariyah al-fardiyah), which is the refuge of young writers who no longer have any pleasures left, except for personal "trifles of life", which are still the object of hatred from the SRT-

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rons of biased literature " 42 . Mey at-Tlemsani, the author of works on cinema and literature, in particular on the work of Proust, and the novel Dunyazada, also spoke about the fact that the inner world of the individual and individual values are now the main material of the novel .43 This phenomenon is explained by the fact that many intellectual, ideological and religious values have "crumbled", and today's novel reflects the existential anxiety of its authors in the face of a world in which there is no social movement capable of dispelling or at least easing this anxiety .44

Miral al-Tahawi's novel is written in the genre of self-narrative, although it is not autobiographical in the literal sense of the word. The narrator is a girl, then a girl, the daughter of a rich Bedouin from Upper Egypt. Her childhood memories are fragmentary, they pop up, as if through a fog, a haze of time, individual episodes, details of life in a large house surrounded by duval, in the middle of the desert. Around the house are lands belonging to Fatima's father, his slaves, his Fellah tenants, and next to the house is his father's tent, where he spends most of his time. The father often goes out and returns with gifts for all the family members. He has three daughters and no sons. The sick wife does not leave her room, from which only her crying and moaning can be heard (only when Fatima becomes an adult does she learn that her late mother's name was Samavat-Heaven). The house is commanded by a stern grandmother-the father's mother. The girls are looked after by a slave named Sardub. At night, little Fatima slips out of bed and settles down on the floor, next to Sardoub.

Wayward and freedom-loving Fatima likes to climb trees and constantly runs away to the desert to her friends, people and animals, listens to the stories of Bedouins and slaves. Fatima is her father's favorite, and he calls her the "Princess of Adnan" and promises her a future worthy of a princess. But she doesn't keep her promise, and neither does Anna, the Englishwoman to whom her father gave the girl for treatment: Fatima, who always runs barefoot, does not heal the wound on her leg. Anna is attracted to the girl's extraordinary personality and obvious artistic talent, she teaches Fatima foreign languages and makes her perform in front of her guests, tell them fairy tales and legends of the desert, of which she knows a lot, and then write down her stories. But Fatima, for Anna, who is writing a dissertation on Bedouin life, is an object of study rather than emotional attachment. Fatima is uncomfortable in the house of Anna, whose beautiful blue eyes remind her of the motionless eyes of a spider waiting for prey. After amputating her leg, the girl returns to her home, where her father has a new wife and a daughter, his new favorite, to whom he gave the name of the first, late wife - Samavat. Fatima suffers deeply. "My father calls,' Samavat, my princess, come to me, ' and I cry and swallow my tears. Why are you so unkind? Is Fatima completely over? " 45 Fatima hates her father, who has grown old, stooped, and pathetic. And he, who has long ceased to go anywhere, if he meets his daughter crawling on the ground in the yard, looks away.

The individual tragedy of the girl from as-Said is perceived as the tragedy of a talented person, whose huge inner world, which contains the entire universe, is inaccessible to the understanding of those who live next to her - the sisters who love Fatima are busy with ordinary household chores, and her grandmother calls her "touched". This poetic world is made up of images of the sky, with its day and night suns, and the desert land, a gigantic space filled with life, the secrets of which so attract and attract Fatima, and the connection with which is cut off when the heroine turns into "a lame duck crucified on a tent peg" 46 .

The traditional theme of female unfreedom, one of the most developed in Arabic literature - it is present in the novel by M. at-Tahawi in the stories of the sisters of Fatima-acquires in the story of Fatima herself, thanks to the personality of the heroine, a completely different meaning.

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other scales. Her spiritual tragedy is embodied in the "bodily" image of physical mutilation, the epigraph-dedication reads:: "To my body, the peg of a tent pitched in the desert." The inferiority of the flesh and the resulting suffering of the spirit doom Fatima to "crawl". And only in her mind, in her memories, is she able to "jump" over walls and duvals, "run" through the desert and meet people dear to her heart, people who have disappeared from her life, resurrect their appearance, their words, their destinies. But the long, heavy braids pull her head down, and at night it seems to her that the family ties strands of her hair to small pegs, "hanging" her by the braids. Everything is hateful to her, and she calls on the flying blind scorpion, hearing the whistle of which, "cowering shepherds", "pour out" their poison into her.

In a brief review on the cover of the novel, he is compared, in terms of the power of the impression he makes, to a "tattoo" that leaves an indelible mark on the skin. This impression is created by the intensity of the heroine's inner monologue, the tragic acuteness of her feelings, the expressiveness and poetry of the narrative language, which is saturated with Upper Egyptian colloquial vocabulary that conveys the realities of the desert, Bedouin life, and Bedouin poetic folklore - beliefs, fairy tales, and legends.

If the epic novel "No One Sleeps in Alexandria" by I. Abd al-Magid is perceived as a work that sums up the results of the Egyptian novel's development of the artistic experience of world literature of different eras, then the small chamber novel "Tent" by M. at-Tahawi (along with the novels "Dunyazada" by M. at-Tlemsani, " Twenty-first Zero"M. Hamid and the works of a number of other young novelists) suggests the entry of the Egyptian novel into a new stage of evolution. Time will tell if this is true. At the same time, two such different works - one (the events of which are attributed to the past half a century ago) ending on a major note, the other - on a tragic note-bring together the desire for "free flight", for openness to the world, for communication with all people and peoples living on earth, which is equally inherent in their heroes.

If, in conclusion, we look at the Egyptian novel of recent years from the point of view of language, it reveals a huge variety of language layers used by the authors. This is the modern literary Arabic language, which over time absorbs more and more elements of the Egyptian spoken language, and the language of peasants and urban common people, and dialects of different regions of Egypt, as well as spoken languages of other Arab countries, in particular Lebanon - in the novel "Beirut, Beirut!" by S. Ibrahim, and Libya - in the novel "Beirut, Beirut!" by S. Ibrahim. F. Embaby's "Language of murder", the language of the press and television, official documents, the international trade vocabulary that has become commonplace in apparently all countries of the world, the Americanized language of new businessmen. And in novels stylized as monuments of medieval Arabic heritage, there is a language of Sufi writings, historical chronicles, fraternal messages (rasail ikhvaniyya is a well-known medieval genre), folk romance (sira), etc.

The interaction of so many historical, as well as regional layers and social levels of language feeds the Egyptian novel with juices coming from both the centuries-old literary tradition and the rapidly changing reality, constantly expands its visual capabilities, enriches the image of the world created in it with an abundance of new colors and nuances.

notes

Embabi Fathi. 1 Marai-l-katl (Killing fields). Cairo, 1994.

Abd al-Magid Ibrahim. 2 La ahad yanamu fi-l-Iskenderiya (No one sleeps in Alexandria). Cairo, 1996.

at-Tahawi Miral. 3 Al-Khiba (Tent). Cairo, 1996.

Mahfuz Naguib. 4 Asda al-sira al-zatiya (Echoes of an autobiography). Cairo, 1996.

5 Perhaps the publication of miniatures will facilitate the task of researchers of I. Mahfouz's work, since many of the key moments of the writer's life captured in them were repeatedly displayed in his novels, and each time in a new way. South African writer Nadine Gordimer wrote an article about the book.

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Mahfuz Naguib. 6 Al-Qarar al-ahir (Last decision). Cairo, 1997.

al-Kharrat Edwar. 7 Ya banat Iskenderiya! (O girls of Alexandria!) Cairo, 1990.

al-Kharrat Edwar. 8 Hijara Popillo (Popillo Stones). Cairo, 1993.

9 Bakr Salva. Al-Bashmuri. Cairo, 1998.

Ashur Radwa. 10 Garnata (Granada). Cairo, 1994.

al-Badri Gala. 11 Muntaha. Cairo, 1995. Muntaha is the name of the village where the novel takes place.

al-Zayat Latifa. 12 Al-Bab al-maftuh (Open door). Cairo, 1960. Russian translation by A. Gorodetskaya and L. Medvedko (Moscow, 1964).

Shalabi Khairy. 13 Rakhalat at-turshaghi al-halwaghi (The adventures of a merchant of pickles and sweets). Cairo, 1995.

al-Busati Muhammad. 14 Sahab al-buheira (Wrath of the Lake). Cairo, 1995.

Mahfuz Naguib. 15 Aulad haratina (Sons of our street). Beirut, 1967; Russian edition-Legends of our street. Translated by V. Kirpichenko, Moscow, 1990.

16 Akhbar al-adab. 22.02.1998.

Ibrahim Sun'allah. 17 Tilka-r-raiha (The smell is everywhere). Cairo, 1966.

Ibrahim Sun'allah. 18 Zatun. Cairo, 1992.

19 Ibid., p. 129.

Ibrahim Sun'allah. 20 Sharaf. Cairo, 1997.

21 Ibid., p. 159.

Ibrahim Sun'allah. 22 Najmat agustus (August Star). Cairo, 1974. Ibrahim Sun'allah. Beirut, Beirut! Cairo, 1978.

24 Due to the political topicality and outright satire of S. Ibrahim's novels, he is one of the most widely read Arab authors, including in the West. Immediately after the completion of the novel "Sharaf", the writer was invited to the United States, where his book aroused interest and became the subject of study and discussion. The novel was soon translated and published in France.

Ibrahim Sun'allah. 25 Warda. Cairo, 2000.

al-Quayyid Yusuf. 26 Al-Harb fi barr Misr (War in the land of Egypt). Cairo, 1978. Russian translation by V. Kirpichenko (Moscow, 1983).

Egypt ranks first in the Arab world in terms of the number of workers who emigrate to work in oil-producing Arab countries.

al-Quayyid Yusuf. 28 Wah ' al-bu'ad (The pain of separation). Cairo, 1989.

al-Quayyid Yusuf. 29 Laban al-usfur (Bird's milk). Cairo, 1994.

30 In twentieth-century Egyptian prose, there are only a few works written in a colloquial language, especially in the vernacular, such as the novel by I. al-Quayyid.

Hamid Mahmoud. 31 As-Sifr al-hadi wa-l-ishrin. (Twenty-first zero). Cairo, 1996.

Tahir Baha. 32 Al-Hubb fi-l-manfa (Love in exile). Cairo, 1995.

al-Ghitani Gamal. 33 Khatif al-magib (Call of the Unknown). Cairo, 1992.

34 Ibid., p. 187.

Mahfuz Naguib. 35 Malhamat al-Harafish (The Epic of the Harafish). Cairo, 1977.

Mahfuz Naguib. 36 Rihlat Ibn Fatuma (Journey of Ibn Fatuma). Cairo, 1982.

al-Ghitani Gamal. 37 Mutun al-ahram (Pyramid texts). Cairo, 1995.

Abd al-Magid Ibrahim. 38 Edict. op. p. 214.

39 The expression "her land is saffron" is used in relation to any place that is native or dear to the speaker. A folk song (mawwal) is dedicated to Alexandria, the first line of which reads: "Alexandria is Mary, and her land is saffron." The name "Her land is saffron" was given to his autobiographical story by E. al-Kharrat, a native of Alexandria.

Abd al-Magid Ibrahim. 40 Edict. op. p. 403.

Ali Samir Gharib. 41 As-Sakkar (Falconer). Cairo, 1997.

42 Akhbar al-adab. 08.02.1998.

at-Tlemsani Mayi. 43 Dunyazada. Cairo, 1997. The novel, translated into English by Roger Allen, was shortlisted for the 2001 London Independent Award.

44 Akhbar al-adab. 05.10.1997.

am-Tahavi Miral. 45 Edict. op. p. 134.

46 Ibid., 38.

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