Turgenev's name was first mentioned in the Arab East in 1887, in the IX volume of the Arabic encyclopedic dictionary "Dairat al-ma'arif" ("Circle of Knowledge") published in Beirut, where an article on Russian literature was published, written on the basis of English materials, which mentioned, in addition to Turgenev, Pushkin, Gogol, Goncharov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, etc. Since then, interest in Turgenev in Arab countries has continuously increased.
Famous Arab writers of the 1910s and 1920s named Turgenev among the outstanding classics of Russian literature, which had a huge impact on their creative development. Thus, the Lebanese Mikhail Nuayme (1889-1986) wrote that he was "brought up on the fine art of Pushkin, Lermontov and Turgenev"; the Palestinian Khalil Baydas (1875-1949) called Turgenev a "great creator"; the Iraqi Mahmoud Ahmed al-Sayyid (1901-1937) believed that "Russian psychological novels", in particular Nov Russian writers should serve as models for creating "truly folk works"; the Egyptian Mahmoud Teymour (1894-1973) admired the" simplicity, truthfulness, humanistic beginning "of Turgenev's works; his compatriot Yahya Hakki (1905-1993) spoke of the author of" Notes of the Hunter "as an unsurpassed master of"poetic landscape". All of them considered it necessary to learn from Turgenev the objective reconstruction of the surrounding reality, the art of storytelling.
Turgenev's popularity among the Arabs was evidenced by the increasing number of translations of his works into Arabic. From the 1920s to the 1980s, prose poems, numerous short stories, including the series "Notes of a Hunter", a number of plays and novellas, and all the novels of the writer were translated in Arab countries. Individual works of Turgenev are presented in several translations.
Arabic translations of Turgenev's works, especially since the 1940s, were often accompanied by advertisements on the covers of publications or were preceded by prefaces, which were usually written by th ...
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