Akhenaten полностью

Why didn't Virginia Woolf write a novel about Akhenaten? She should have done - the high priestess of Modernism might have found the story of the most modern pharaoh quite inspirational. She must have known something about Akhenaten. The Woolfs' publishing house, the Hogarth Press, brought out Freud's Moses and Monotheism, translated by their friend James Strachey, who even attempted to psychoanalyse Akhenaten. Less celebrated authors than Woolf, however, have produced quite a quantity of literary treatments of Akhenaten and the Amarna period over the last hundred years. There are at least sixty (listed in the Appendix); doubtless there are others I have missed, as well as unpublished or self-published ones. Most are written in English, French or German, but also in Arabic, Slavic and Scandanavian languages. Their quantity is testimony in itself to the enduring interest in Akhenaten: there is no comparable body of fiction about any other ancient historical character, with the exceptions of Cleopatra and Alexander the Great. Even Ramesses II, Tutankhamun or the Old Kingdom pyramid builders do not compare in the fiction stakes. There is, of course, a long western history of novels and dramas about pharaohs, which enact a compelling drama of love, power and tragedy against exotic backdrops. Francois Pascale's Sesostris (1661), along with tragedies like John Sturmy's Sesostris, or Royalty in Dis­guise (1728), Edward Young's Busiris, King of Egypt (1730), Charles Marsh's Amasis, King of Egypt (1737), and novels like Jean Terrasson's Sethos (1731) are among the earliest. Akhenaten is the heir to this fictional and dramatic tradition.

Almost every genre has been used to tell Akhenaten's story, the novel being the most favoured format by far. The predominance of Akhenaten novels fits in, I think, with the ideas developed by literary critics like Georg Lukacs that the rise of the novel is closely linked to the ideology of individualism. The realistic novel is the mode through which a sustained fictional world is re-created through the individual's point of view, and this sustains the imagination of bourgeois society which creates and consumes these novels. Since Akhenaten has notoriously been called the first individual, we might expcct his 'individualism' to be explored through the novel format. Lukacs' ideas about relationships between the novel and the bourgeoisie also help explain the domestic ideal that lies at the heart of many Akhenaten novels. Most of them are extremely conservative and lack the radical imagination of the alternative Akhenatens.

Apart from novels, there arc short stories, several plays (none of them, as far as I know, ever performed), collections of poetry, and what one might call faction - narratives which mingle fictional elements with some of the apparatus of scholar­ship. Many combine the romantic and crotic with the didactic, and were written for the popular market by authors who were often successful in their day but have made little impression on conventional literary histories. Several authors believe they can commune with Amarna mystically or lived there in previous incarna­tions, as I mentioned in Chapter 5. It may or may not be significant that three-quarters of them were written by women. The Amarna period, with its glamorous and powerful female protagonists, offers plenty of scope for those who want to identify with beautiful princesses. Or perhaps this is just part of the long tradition of women writing historical novels out of an interest in personality, romance, and the historical failures historians dismiss.