“The Treasury of Mysteries” as a valuable monument of the Azerbaijan Renaissance

Nizami Ganjavi created a tremendous impression in the world literature with his imperishable five poems. The poet used only Nizami pseudonym in his works. This word means disciplined, temperate, a man of poetry, in other words, poems. The first monumental work of Nizami is Makhzan al-Asrar (“The Treasury of Mysteries”). It is his first writing experience in the field of epic poetry. Whatever the poet says, he thinks about modern life, modern people, and people are mostly narrowminded, captured by greed, fame and lust in this age of injustice, unfairness, oppression and arbitrariness. What saddens Nizami the most is that they dominate others and think they are superior. Key words: modern, poet, poetry, society, play, world

Colonising the Play World

In German children’s literature around 1900, the representation of childhood in pseudo-colonial realms participates in a construction of racial identities based on transcultural play. Acts of reading and scenes of instruction intersect with material objects to convey a pedagogy of race dominated by learned whiteness. This article asks: How does German children’s fiction around 1900 reconfigure national identity as imperialexperience? An analysis of a noncanonical though exemplary fictional text about a jungle adventure demonstrates strategies used to include the child in the colonial experience. Imagining this ›play world‹ replicates for the child reader a sense of agency and citizenship through encounters with an indigenous mediator, an impish primate and imaginary landscapes – each represented through the lens of European epistemologies. These tropes produce tension between historical fact and imaginative fiction, working together to map a colonial geography of German identity on to a model transatlantic German childhood. Framed by theories of material objects and toys, and supported by the work of literary scholars and cultural historians, I examine the brief story »Die kleine Urwälderin« [The Little Jungle Girl] from Auerbachs Deutscher Kinder-Kalender auf das Jahr 1902 [Auerbach’s Almanac for German Children, 1902]. In it, the Amazonian setting aspires to historically factual representation, which, however, cedes considerable territory to the realm of fantasy. The projection of a German forest adventure on to a Brazilian geography elides historical truths, such as centuries of the transatlantic slave trade, and instead inserts imperial signifiers into an established syntax of the European child at play. The resulting national ideology of childhood identity in this German language story imposes colonial order on a reimagined play world.