Abstract
In ‘Journey to Arzrum’, set in the Caucasus during the Russo-Turkish War of 1828-9, Pushkin refers to Hajji Baba, rogue-hero of James Morier’s novels The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan (1824) and The Adventures of Hajji Baba in London (1828). Morier’s novels, set in Persia, the Ottoman Empire and London, became widely known to Russian readers in the early 1830s, in translations by the orientalist popular fiction writer and journalist, Osip Senkovskii. They were read both as entertaining satire and as a source of knowledge about the East. Since the 1820s, Pushkin and Senkovskii, contemporaries and rivals, had been experimenting with different literary styles for representing the East. While Senkovskii, an orientalist of world renown, turned to sarcastic satire, parody and masquerade after his encounter with Morier, Pushkin, whose library reveals a sustained interest in the English novelist, moved beyond satire, shaping a new genre of first-person travel prose.
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