Naguib Mahfouz - Nobel prize winner for literature from the Arab world: the first or the only?

The rare awarding of international literary prizes, primarily the Nobel Prize, to Arabic-language authors worries mainly intellectuals and critics from the Arab world. However, the search for an answer to this question implies a deep understanding of the paradigm of development of Eastern national literatures, forces us to turn to comparative literary studies, and poses the problem of the adequacy and completeness of translations from Arabic into European languages, as well as many other topical issues in the field of literary studies. The purpose of this work is to analyze the grounds on which in 1988 the Nobel Prize was awarded to an Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz and to identify potential contenders from the Arab world for receiving high international awards. Using largely cultural-historical and biographical methods and the approach of sociologism, the presented study drew upon the materials from the Arab and Western press, the texts of Naguib Mahfouz himself, and scientific research on the history of Arabic literature by Russian orientalists. An attempt was made to solve several problems: to determine the specific features of the development of Arabic literature, to distinguish the work and personality of Naguib Mahfouz among other Arab writers of the twentieth century, to explain the phenomenon of the “peripherality” of translated modern Arabic novels, etc. The study revealed that modern Arab writers’ potential is often underestimated due to various objective factors and predicted that in the near future the representatives of the Arab world would be nominated for international awards, with two of them being graduates of Russian universities.