NAVOI AND GOETHE: COMMON VITAL BENCHMARKS

Abstract

In today’s literary scene, there are some opinions that Goethe, along with Persian poets whom he read with pleasure and considered his teacher, also knew and impressed by the works of Alisher Navoi. However, it is hard to believe it. This article discusses the common (typological) intersecting or non-intersecting lines in the life and work of two great scholars of the East and the West – the sultan of poetry Nizamiddin Amir Alisher Navoi and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, recognized as the “great German”. If we look at the issue in the context of global literary communication, translation and influence, unfortunately, the question of familiarity and influence in the work of these word masters remains an unanswered puzzle.

Despite the development of Turkic literature during the reign of Alisher Navoi, many mature people of the time such as writers, poets and scholars all wrote their poems and researches in Arabic and Persian. Europeans who wanted to learn more about the East paid attention to these languages and began to study them. This is confirmed by the fact that oriental languages (Arabic, Persian, Urdu) are included in the curriculum as a subject in the universities of Germany and surrounding German-speaking countries. As a result, Turkic literature was overshadowed by them. For this reason, Alisher Navoi, who created the palace of Uzbek classical poetry, was not popular in the German-speaking regions for many years. The present article analyzes some unscientific views and false opinions about the poet with evidence and examples.