Genre transformations of the story about the painter in contemporary Uzbek literature

Contemporary Uzbek literature, addressing the perceptions of the present-day reader, is developing new attitudes and techniques of fiction based on the synthesis of the traditions of the Western and Islamic cultural worlds. Uzbek literature has established a new genre, the “ma’rifi novel”, a novel narrative based on a parable of oriental type. A biographical novel about a painter appears to be part of a parable, which depicts the inner world of the artist. The painter can only act as socially active by justifying his or her treatment of himself or herself and others. Thus, the parable serves as a mechanism for mainstreaming the inner life of the hero when it is not embedded in a melodramatic plot, but directly refers to the final moral judgment. While Uzbek literature of the pre-Soviet and Soviet times spoke of the painter as an inspired conductor of the ideal and carrier of progressive ideas, nowadays the mimetic concept of art has been replaced by a constructive one. The artist is portrayed as the maker of the secondary reality and of the universal code of culture, including the moral standard. This allows for a more acute depiction of moral collisions in the artist’s life. This new conception requires both the reinforcement of the features of the parable and the insertion of ekphrasis as a model of the direct effect of the aesthetic program on the comprehension of reality. Ekphrasis permits not just to point to the direct perception of the painting by the artist’s audience represented in the narrative, but to show that the artist’s personal experience corresponds to the social experience of the audience, that is, to show the audience’s readout of the code. The readout of the code as a sum total of the artist’s creative ideas essential to the national culture is accelerated through the use of universal symbols such as Home, Garden, Creation, and History. In general, we can say that the parable turns into a story with a relatively free progression through the mentioning of different works of art. In this case, the works of art become symbols, quite in the vein of intrigue in Western literatures, when the characters’ motivations, their inner monologue and reflections are read through the artificial pictures. The moral choice of the hero then continues the inner monologues of both her/him and her/his audience.