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Abstract

This article analyses the mythopoetics of Karazin’s Orientalist novel Nal depicting one of the most important historical events of the late 19th century: the war in Central Asia. The author of the article focuses on the fate of the character who during these major historical changes (clashes between East and West, Us vs. Them), is trying to find a new understanding of himself. N.N. Karazin combines the myths about God’s birth and death from three religious systems, creating a remarkable image of a wandering man making a difficult, due to his mysterious origin, moral and spiritual choice. Karazin describes the history of inner discord of a man who lost his heart to Asia, quickly adapted to life there, learned several dialects, made friends and fell in love. All this, on the one hand, gave him a happy feeling of unity, due to his impartiality and openness to the world, and on the other – a terrible spiritual split, unacceptable in a war with its clear-cut friend–foe opposition. The theme of spiritual borrowing, raised in the novel, stayed extremely relevant up to the end of the 19th century, when traditional morality lost its position while ideas about the death of God and the birth of an Overman were gaining in popularity. For Karazin, this overman was the son of an English woman and an Indian man, who was brought up by a Russian general in Russia and whose incredible story became a symbol of the struggle between two empires for the soul and the heart of Central Asia during the colonial wars of the late 19th century.

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References

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