Images of mountains in twentieth-century Tatar literature

Abstract

The article presents an analysis of works by Tatar writers and poets of the twentieth century from the perspective of the presence of mountain images in them. Although Tatarstan is a flat territory, mountains are of great importance for Tatar culture as images and symbols of a connection with the archaic past of its history and as a link with the mythological tradition of the Turkic-speaking people.

Mountain images, which were not characteristic of Tatar literature of previous centuries, began to appear in texts of the twentieth century. This is associated with two important periods in the history of national literature: the early twentieth century (intensification of the secularization of Tatar culture, the activation of dialogue with European and Russian literatures, the emergence of psychological prose, modernist tendencies) and the 1950s–1960s (a time of revival of national traditions and avant-garde experimentation).

It has been revealed that the formation of psychological prose in the early twentieth century, and the definition of the “stream of consciousness” as its main device, begins with the mountain image introduced by F. Amirkhan. In the 1950s, mountain images appear in the short stories of A. Eniki, where ethnic and universal values, the connection with historical and cultural traditions, and historical memory are examined. The work of this prose writer became one of the key factors that contributed to the emergence of national themes in Tatar Soviet literature. In the poems of R. Fayzullin, mountain images became emblematic image-symbols of the Tatar avant-garde of the 1960s–1980s.