Ближний Восток и его соседи

g 143 h Diaghilev’s Scheherazade and Russian Orientalism the sins of all womankind and repent. The contrast between the completely naked young girl and the fully covered elderly man immediately brings many associa- tions, among which the first would be Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863). Van Dongen’s interpretation was among those that offered a new approach to the traditionally euphemistic representations of the scene — showing a lo­ ving couple where a husband is peacefully listening to his flirtatious wife chat- ting away, in a typically romantic depiction combined with a rather prominent but still restrained eroticism (Pl. 17) — instead of the ‘real’ constant horror which Scheherazade must have survived, sharing the bed and the company of a mentally ill man (Pl. 16). Nameless Sex slave who turned a suffering cuckold into a serial killer Paradoxically, the role of Shahrzad in the Arab tale whose main features in early European translations of the eighteenth century, both French and Eng- lish, are submissiveness and patience, was almost replaced by that of her an- tipode 18 : the lady, whose behaviour convinced Shahriyar in the evil nature of 18 Sumi A. M. and Cluver C. Body, Voice and Gaze: Text and illustration in the frame story of the Thousand and one nights // The Arabian Nights and Orientalism , ed. by Yuriko Yamanka and Tetsuo Nishio. London: I.B. Tauris, 2006. P. 194–216, esp. 201. Pl. 17. Ferdinand Keller, Scheherezade and Sultan Schariar, Karlsruhe, 1880. Sotheby’s catalogue (13 June 2006)