A Comparative Analysis of Genre Features in Saadi's “Gulistan” And Uzbek Folk Tales Karomova Shahodat Lutfullaevna

Аннотация

Saadi Shirazi’s Gulistan (1258 CE) and the Uzbek folk-tale tradition belong to different linguistic, temporal and geographic spheres, yet they share the broad purpose of transmitting ethical wisdom through narrative. This article undertakes a comparative, genre-oriented examination of Gulistan’s didactic anecdotes and representative Uzbek folk tales recorded in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Drawing on narratological theory, Persian and Turkic poetics, and Soviet-era folkloristics, the study employs a close reading of one hundred twenty-four Persian prose episodes and one hundred sixty-three Uzbek oral texts filtered through archival transcriptions. Qualitative analysis is complemented by a quantitative mapping of plot functions, actant structures and formulaic motifs. The findings show that Gulistan fuses adab prose conventions with sermonising verse to create a hybrid “mirror for princes” genre, whereas Uzbek tales retain epic and trickster subgenres with a cyclical plot architecture governed by formulaic openings and closings. Both corpora employ concise moral coda, but they differ in the distribution of humour, the role of supernatural intervention and the calibration of social hierarchy. The comparative perspective illuminates the historical diffusion of Persianate literary values in Central Asia while underscoring the resilience of indigenous Uzbek narrative patterns. Keywords: Saadi Shirazi; Gulistan; Uzbek folklore; genre analysis; narratology; Central Asian literature; adab. how Saadi and Uzbek tale-tellers encode moral Introduction: Genre functions as a set of tacit rules that authority, organise plot scaffolding, deploy character shape reader expectation and authorial choice, archetypes and shape tone. In doing so, it contributes mediating the interplay between social function and to three debates: first, the reach of Persianate literary aesthetic form. Persian classical literature, epitomised paradigms in Central Asian oral cultures; second, the by Saadi’s Gulistan, crystallised a sophisticated didactic adaptability of genre conventions across media prose‐poetic hybrid located at the intersection of (manuscript vs. performance); and third, the ethical exegesis (adab) and courtly entertainment. By methodological question of whether quantitative contrast, Uzbek folk tales, preserved primarily through narratology can complement philological oral performance until their systematic collection interpretation in pre-modern comparative literature. during the Tsarist and Soviet periods, reveal a decentralised repertoire of epic, humorous, and moral The Persian corpus comprises the standard eight- narratives whose structures bear traces of both Turkic chapter edition of the Gulistan, amounting to 126 prose shamanistic cosmology and broader Islamic values. anecdotes interleaved with 165 verse passages. Two While scholars have examined the intertextual anecdotes whose authenticity is disputed in the critical migration of motifs—such as the patient dervish, the Tehran edition were excluded, leaving one hundred just king, or the clever servant—across Persian and twenty-four prose units for analysis. The Uzbek corpus Turkic milieus, systematic genre comparison remains draws on the Academy of Sciences’ multi-volume rare. O‘zbek xalq og‘zaki ijodi (1958–1975) and the Karakalpak-region field notebooks of folklorist The present study addresses this gap by comparing American Journal Of Philological Sciences 245 https://theusajournals.com/index.php/ajps American Journal Of Philological Sciences (ISSN – 2771-2273) Hamidov (1926–1934). After removing variants anecdote and employs mono-rhymed masnavi or differing by fewer than three narrative functions, one ghazal fragments, moving from concrete anecdote to hundred sixty-three distinct tales remain, representing abstract gnomic wisdom. Uzbek tales favour formulaic the animal fable, heroic epic fragment, didactic oral mnemonics—“Bor ekanu yo‘q ekan” (“Once there anecdote and trickster cycle subgenres. was and once there was not”)—and tail-rhyme prayers seeking audience blessing. Direct speech comprises 48 The qualitative tier followed Todorov’s genre markers % of Uzbek tale surface text but only 31 % in Gulistan, (dominant narrative act, modality, and linguistic suggesting greater performative flexibility in oral register) and Bakhtin’s chronotope to trace moral storytelling. Humour surfaces in 37 % of Uzbek texts, versus entertainment priorities. The quantitative tier often scatological or trickster-driven, versus 9 % of applied Propp’s thirty-one function model, modified to Gulistan anecdotes, where irony is subtle and reflect Islamic narrative cosmology by substituting moralistic. “interdiction” with “divine decree” where relevant. Each tale’s functions were encoded in an XML schema Shared motifs include the grateful animal, the and processed in Python to generate frequency righteous judge, and the reversal of fortune for the heatmaps. arrogant. Yet their tr