A. G. SHCHERBAKOVA

Post-graduate student of the ISAA of Lomonosov Moscow State University

Keywords: Turkey, literature, drama, Khaldun Taner, carnivalization

Khaldun Taner (1915-1986) - a classic of Turkish literature, who combined in his work the talent of a short story writer and playwright, an innovator in the field of art form, the author of more than four dozen short stories and two dozen plays. In the short story of X. Taner used techniques of satirical carnivalization, which were previously typical only for folk theatrical performances. In drama, he emphasized the epic breadth of the images he created, and stood at the origins of the Turkish epic theater.

The writer's works have been repeatedly awarded prestigious international and national awards. And today they do not lose their relevance, they are analyzed, translated, published and republished.

Khaldun Taner was born on March 16, 1915 in Istanbul. After graduating from the Galatasaray Lyceum in 1935, he went to study in Germany, at the University of Heidelberg. However, in 1938, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis, which forced him to return to his homeland. To distract from the heavy thoughts about the disease, reading books and his own pen tests in literature help him, he writes sketches and short stories. In 1950, H. Taner graduated from the Faculty of Philology of Istanbul University and continued to work as an assistant at the Department of the University. His improved health gives him strength, and he writes a lot. In 1945, his short story "The Accusation" was published in Yedi Gun magazine, and in 1949, his debut book of short stories "Long Live Democracy!" was published, which was highly appreciated by readers and literary critics.

KHALDUN TANER-PLAYWRIGHT AND SHORT STORY WRITER

The young writer developed an interest in theater, and in the mid-1950s he left for Vienna to study theater studies at the Rhein-Gard Academy and the Joseph Stadt Theater Institute.

In the 1960s, H. Taner made his first experiments in the field of drama, which turns out to be inextricably linked with his short stories. Following Brecht ¹, he brings an epic dimension to the dramatic action, and elements of theatricality (dialogic and scenic) to the epic. Taner, a playwright, was most productive in the 1960s and early 1970s.It was at this time that he wrote his most famous plays-The Tale of Ali of Keshan (1964), Shaban Saving the Fatherland (1967), and The Cunning Idiot's Wife (1971). At the same time, he gives lectures on the history of world drama and theater at Ankara University.

In 1966, Taner founded the Turkish Playwrights ' Society with the support of well-known Turkish writers. In 1967, together with Zeki Alasya and Metin Akpynar, he opened the first Turkish cabaret theater in Istanbul, Devekucu, whose highly social plays resemble the buffoonery of a folk theater. He remained the permanent artistic director of the cabaret theater until his death on May 7, 1986.

Taner is the author of famous collections of short stories: "Long Live Democracy" (1949)," Klavisha "(1951)," Rain on Shishkhane Street "(1953)," One Minute to Twelve "(1955)," Sancho's Morning Walk " (1969). Most of them went through more than one edition during the writer's lifetime. His works in the field of short prose, which have received readers 'recognition, include the collection of feuilletons" Letters to the Ostrich "(1960), as well as the novel "Chalyshkur in the Moonlight" (1954), which since 1983 has been published together with the story "Rain on Shishkhane Street", which has an innovative and experimental nature artistic structure*. In 1953, this story won first place in the New York Herald Tribune competition for foreign writers.

National and international prizes were awarded to other short stories by X. Tanera. In 1955, the short story "One Minute to Twelve" received the prestigious Turkish Short Story Prize named after Said Faik. At the annual international festival of humorous works, which takes place in the Italian city of Bardighera, in 1969, the writer was awarded the highest award for the story "Sancho's Morning Walk".

On X's significant contribution. Taner's contribution to Turkish short stories is also evidenced by the fact that a year after the writer's death, in 1987, the Khaldun Taner National Short Story Literary Award was established in Turkey. The first to receive this prestigious award were outstanding masters of Turkish short stories - Tomris Uyar, Nedim Gursel and Muratkhan Mungan.

KHALDUN TANER'S INNOVATION

In the center of the writer's short stories is an unremarkable person, an ordinary philistine with everyday concerns about daily bread. And it is in this ge-

* Each page of the story is divided into two parts, in which two versions of the same work are presented: the left part is the original author's version, and the right part is a version rewritten by the author taking into account the comments of a certain reader (author's note).

roe he makes the reader see a unique personality. Highlighting the tragic and comic in the character of the hero, he encourages the reader to feel his sorrows and joys.

Creativity of X. Taner cannot be attributed to any literary movement or direction of the "pre-Taner" period. He passes through various aesthetic approaches that are close to his worldview. Therefore, in one Taner short story, existential motives are intertwined with a realistic depiction of reality, and essayistic plotlessness-with an ironic mockery of human vices in the spirit of A. P. Chekhov, while close attention to the fate of the "little man" and his attempts to protect himself from the hostile external world - with an appeal to unsolvable "eternal questions".

The specificity of Khaldun Taner's artistic position determines the poetics of his short stories. Remaining a realist writer, he is more interested not in the socio-political component of the "little man's" life, but in the moral and spiritual one. The measure of high spirituality helps Taner from the very beginning of his creative career to occupy his own special niche in Turkish literature, developing an individual artistic style in which forms of satirical imagery are dominant.

Through caricature and irony, through carnivalization (replacing the essence with an external form, inverting the "top" and "bottom", metonymic substitutions) and hyperbolization of the ugly, he shows a soulless "programmed" society, bureaucracy and mustiness of state institutions, the inconsistency of a person with his position, the moral emptiness and squalor of those in power, the infinity of suffering of "little people". The writer does not know how to change the world order in which cruelty and indifference reign, so the only thing that remains for him is to ridicule the absurdity of this world.

Decades later, many of Taner's artistic discoveries were adopted by representatives of Turkish "magic realism" (L. Tekin, M. Kachan) and postmodernism (M. Mungan, N. Eray, I. O. Anar, etc.). Each of the writers of this new, young generation develops in its own way the techniques of satirical ridicule of everything stereotyped and stamped, but Their experiments are based on the innovation of Khaldun Taner.

CARNIVAL OF IMAGES AND "CARNIVALIZATION" BY KHALDUN TANER

In one of the first short stories, "A Warm Place" (1945), Taner implements the code of "carnivalization" through the author's game of "the other": the author allegedly deliberately "leaves" the text, giving way to an unnamed personal narrator, who, trying to be as objective as possible, tells about the events that happened to the main character, Dorozhny working Ryza. In fact, behind every word, behind every remark of the narrator, lies the ultimate subjectivity associated with the position of the author himself, with his search for a moral ideal.

The image of the road worker-day laborer Ryza accumulates those qualities that Taner considers the most important for a person-courage, honesty, kindness and hard work. Ryza does not want to "eat bread" for nothing in a " warm place "(manor house), where he was invited to serve by a rich elderly lady in gratitude for saving her from under the hooves of a mad horse. After working for his mistress for a short time, the hero returns to his friends for heavy road work, believing that in this way he acts more honestly towards himself and others.

The carnival game of "The world in reverse" is featured in the story "Sebati Bey's Trip to Istanbul" (1948). Taner uses the concept substitution technique - he turns inanimate objects (plants) into animate ones, and animate ones (people) into inanimate ones. This technique, combined with the abundance of internal monologues of the main character Sebati Bey, which prevail over his external actions, helps the writer to highlight more clearly the existential, tragic alienation of a lonely old man from the social reality surrounding him.

The image of Sebati Bey is, as in the case of the hero of the previous story, a kind of protest against the immorality of the surrounding world. However, unlike the working Ryza, Sebati Bey goes not into the world of working people, but into the world of his own feelings, or rather, simply closes in on himself. Poor lonely old man has long since broken ties with reality and lives in the imaginary world of plants-beautiful and harmonious. Only extreme circumstances - the need to purchase seeds of an unusual variety of roses - force Sebati Bey to leave home one day and go to the house of a relative living on the other side of Istanbul. In the pandemonium of a huge metropolis, perceived by the hero as hostile to himself, Sebati Bey drops precious seeds on the ground, which are immediately trampled by a crowd of indifferent people-mechanisms, people-machines. An old man with a sense of hopeless doom returns home to hide from people with " shameless and empty faces."

The image of Sebati Bey, in which even the very idea of meeting people in a terrible, alien city causes irritation and fear, has typological similarities with existential heroes who have broken all ties with the surrounding world. The presence of existentialist motives in the writer's work was also noted by Russian literary critics (L. O. Alkaeva, S. N. Uturgauri).².

It should be emphasized that Taner's short stories can only be about the manifestation of individual existential motives, and not about the modernist hero who is completely alienated from the world. The writer does not allow his characters to completely lock themselves in personal experiences. He constantly confronts them with a reality full of social contradictions and lack of spirituality. That is, we can say that the tragedies of his characters are always socially determined. These are the tragedies of "little people" who do not have the strength to resist the cruelty and arbitrariness of the modern world. The injustice of life hurts the souls of his characters, causes them bitterness, indignation, unwillingness to put up with evil and adapt to it. Therefore, they seek salvation in hard work ("A warm place"), in detachment from the world ("A warm place").Sebati Bey's trip"), to Refor-

the world Wide organization of state institutions ("Reforms in one institution").

A special place in the Taner carnival belongs to female images (the stories "Beatrice Mavyan", "Hariklia", "Reforms in one institution"). The readiness of the heroines to accept the immorality and squalor of life surrounding them is ridiculed by the writer using such satirical techniques as replacing the inner with the outer and vice versa, grotesque slurring and stereotyping, irony, etc.

The short story "Beatrice Mavian" (1946) is permeated by the juxtaposition: who a person really is and who he tries to appear to others. So, the appearance, actions, statements and reflections of the main character Beatrice completely do not correspond to the ideal image of the "highly civilized", "highly educated" and "highly moral" "secular mademoiselle" for which she pretends to be. Taner's personal narrator, who was included in the carnival game, is called upon to emphasize this discrepancy - a narrow-minded person representing the type of urban philistine with low material wealth, praises the heroine with all his might, proves her "high spirituality". But the paradox is that the more praises he sings to her, the more noticeable for the reader becomes her imaginary in everything - imaginary education, imaginary spirituality, imaginary beauty. Thus, the personal narrator, unwittingly (as intended by the author), exposes the true nature of Beatrice Mavyan. In this story, for the first time in Taner's short stories, the discrepancy between the positions of the author (the author's view of reality) and the personal narrator (the primitive philistine consciousness, blinded by the norms of consumer society) begins to appear.

Hal-dun Taner's personal narrator - an "average" person-is not used to thinking much about life. But he was used to thinking in ready-made cliches, which were formed in his brain by the loud, protruding insolence and lack of spirituality of the surrounding world. Therefore, the narrator's admiration for the" brilliant representative of the fair sex " Beatrice Mavyan, who has a rich inheritance, has no limits. From the point of view of Beatrice's material wealth, the girl's ugliness, described with grotesque exaggeration, loses relevance for him. The narrator is quite sincerely perplexed why until the age of twenty-eight there was not a single candidate for the hand and heart of this "subtle nature".

The unexpected marriage of Girard to Beatrice becomes the denouement of the story. The state obliges the Giraffe to pay property tax. He has no money. So, on reflection, he comes to the conclusion that " hugging Beatrice's hairy body and kissing her pimply face will still be a lesser evil compared to having to pay sixty thousand lire in cash."³. Such a decision, from the point of view of the personal narrator, seems quite logical and correct. He would have done it himself if he'd been in Gerard's shoes.

The specific poetics of the satirist (in his own words, the "narodnik style") gives him the opportunity to talk "on equal terms" with the reader, without "chewing" or explaining anything, and without avoiding didactic teachings.

The humanism of Taner's writing position and the problems that he raises in his stories make them understandable not only for Turkish readers, but also for readers of other nationalities. Today, his works have been translated into English, French, German, Greek, Russian and many other languages. His books are published in Austria, Israel, Pakistan, Norway, and Switzerland. In Turkey, a theater in Istanbul's Kadikoy district is named after Khaldun Taner.

¹ See for more details: Oganova E. A. Tradistii narodnoi dramy v sovremennoi turestkoi dramaturgii. M. 2006 (in Russian)

^{Alkaeva L. O.} 2 From the history of the Turkish novel of the 20-50s of the XX century. Moscow, 1975, p. 233; Uturgauri S. N. Oblivion is beyond control. Selected publications, Moscow, 2004, p. 154 (Alkaeva L. O. 1975. Iz istorii turestkogo romana 20 - 50-e gody 20 veka. M.); (Uturgauri S.N. 2004. Zabveniyu nepodvlastno. Izbrannye publikastii. M.) (in Russian)

^{Taner H.} 3 Dairede Islahat // Butun Hikayeleri-1. Kizil Sacji Amazon. Ankara, 2005, s. 55.

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