The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Satire: Identity and Genre in Najaf-Bay Vazirov's Dramas

bstract zerbaijanis are among the pioneers of drama and theatre in the Middle East nations. ajaf Bey azirov (1854-1926), the second Azeri dramatist after Mirza Fathali Akhundzadeh. He had reated ive comedies, before he produced Tragedy of Fakhreddin (1896) the first tragedy ritten by Caucasus uslims. It is generally believed that Vazirov followed the dramatic style of his orefather’s omedies, but there are evident deviations, the most important of which is rejecting khundzadeh’s endency towards a final reconciliation. This structural division is in parallel with the ontrast between omedy and satire in Northrop Fry’s genre theory, where both of them are regarded as arrative literary genres. Comedy favors reconciliation while the aggressive spirit of satire rejects it. Satire is not merely a genre, and is more generally considered as a mode -i.e. a way of representing charactersnamely ‘low mimetic’ in Fry’s account. This paper is reveals a sociological approach of satire in first six plays written by Vazirov, based on concepts borrowed from the psychoanalysis of Jacque Lacan. Based on interplay of the Imaginary and the Symbolism in ‘mirror stage’ theory, it is shown the Vazirov’s emphasis on the ignorance of his people is intermingled with the ideological hegemony of the Russian colonialism. Then it is shown how the possibility of a sexual satisfaction as the traditional symbol of reconciliation in comedy, is usually hindered by a feminine character, known in psychoanalysis as the dominance of Maternal Superego. This is interpreted as a reflection of the exclusion of Muslim inhabitants of Caucasus from the symbolic (political and institutional) structure of their society that is a way of ‘foreclosure’ of the ‘Name of Father’. This crisis of identity causes a chaos that gradually disintegrates the moral and formal coherences of Vazirov’s narrative on one hand, and leads to moral aggressiveness towards people on the other, that makes satire an imaginary subjection of them to an indigenous institution. Finally Tragedy of Fakhreddin is interpreted as a fantasy where the author imagines that the satisfaction of the losses has led him to satire. In summary, the author’s approach to form and structure as a whole is interpreted as a reaction to the politico-social discriminations imposed by the colonial conditions.