Ближний Восток и его соседи

g 145 h Diaghilev’s Scheherazade and Russian Orientalism produced a film with the same name, based on the novella. There are several editions of this, shorter or longer depending on the later interpolations that were inserted, not by the author, depending on the ideological situation in the country. The main story starts when a young pioneer, Vol’ka Kostyl’kov, fishes out of the Moskva River an ancient ewer with a jinni inside. When the boy frees him, the jinni Khottabych (‘Ibn Khattab’), as a sign of gratitude, tries to be useful and generous (for example, he produces for his new master four luxurious palaces and a caravan with slaves, sends Vol’ka’s friend to India, and prompts mediaeval geography answers to Vol’ka in class). However, his help is completely unacceptable for a Soviet boy, and Vol’ka helps him to re-educate himself and become an exemplary Soviet citizen happily working in the circus as an illusionist. However, the second edition, which was published in 1953, at the peak of the ideological struggle against the cosmopolites, acquired quite a few interpolations denouncing the sins of Western capitalism and imperia­ lism. For example, when Vol’ka and Khottabych happen to be in Italy they witness the horrors of Mussolini’s regime, or the injustice of the postcolonial powers in India. It is interesting that the author did not suffer prosecution, despite not only his Jewish origin but also some ambiguous coding he used in the text. For example, when Khottabych is about to produce a séance of magic, he pronounces a cryptic word lekhododilikraskalo which is in fact an incipit of the Hebrew liturgic hymn: Leḵah dodi liqrat kallah (‘Let’s go, my beloved, to meet the bride’) in East European Ashkenazic pronunciation. In later editions, this word was replaced by the description какое-то странное и очень длинное слово ‘some strange and very long word’. 21 Obviously, Lagin’s daughter could reveal only after her father’s death that the story was borrowed from Thomas Guthrie (Anstey)’s novel Brass Bottle (1900). Despite some exciting humorous features, such productions were of course wonderful examples of the Soviet Orientalist art. Soviet Scheherazade The Soviet version of Scheherazade was produced as part of national, or non- Russian ballet, which was established on the territories of Soviet Central Asia and the Caucasus, when Russian Orientalist cultural products were re-imported ‘back’ to their Oriental homeland, and reinterpreted for the local cultural milieu through a completely European media, in this case in the form of a ballet. The ballet in question is Amirov’s production at the Baku Opera, which was premiered in 1979 under the title Min bir gecə (‘One Thousand and One 21 I thank S. Yakerson for his help with identifying the source of Lagin’s inspiration.