Parodic and Messianic Genealogies

Abstract

This chapter discusses Russian imperial poetics and its Azeri translations in the work of Nikolai Gogol and Jalil Memmedquluzade. Taking up Gogol’s parodic prose as central to the Russian literary canon and Formalist poetics, I discuss Memmedquluzade’s interest in Gogolean parody as central to the development of a native Azeri prose canon and understandings of Russian and non-Russian ethnicity as well as the relationship between metropole and periphery through the period of revolutionary transition.