Born in Syria and living in Lebanon since the mid-1960s, the writer Ghada al-Samman belongs to a generation that has lived through all the Arab-Israeli wars since 1948. Her work reflects the desire of her contemporaries, who feel the need for changes in social relations, to gain moral independence. This article is devoted to the analysis of socio-political aspects in the novels of Gada as-Samman.

Key words: Ghada al-Samman, Syrian writer, Arab society, socio-political aspects.

The Syrian writer Gada al-Samman can rightly be called one of the stars of the first magnitude in the sky of Arabic literature. She was born in Damascus in 1942 and graduated from the University of Damascus. In 1964, she went to Lebanon to prepare her master's thesis on English literature, for which she collected material in London and other Western European capitals, and she also visited the United States. The writer is fluent in English and French. Ghada as-Samman began her writing career with poetry and journalism, working as a journalist. In 1962, she made her debut as a short story writer with the publication of the collection "Your Eyes - My Destiny". A new collection, No Sea in Beirut, was published the following year, 1963. Soon the third - "Night of the Outlanders" (1966), -then the fourth - "The death of old harbors" (1973) - collections of short stories. The last of them is entirely devoted to the events of the June 1967 war. In the mid-1970s, her first novel, Beirut 75, was published. Appearing shortly before April 1975, it seems to have predicted the events of the Lebanese war of 1975-1990, according to critics and readers. The second novel, "Nightmares of Beirut" (1976), as the title suggests, is also based on the events of the Lebanese Civil War. This was followed by a collection of short stories " The time of another love "(1978), the novel "Night of a billion" (1986), again a collection of short stories "Square Moon" (1994) and again novels - " Absurd Novel. Damask Mosaic "(1997) and "Masquerade of the Dead" (2003). In addition, Gada as-Samman's creative baggage includes a number of poetry collections and a series of volumes of journalism and memoirism.

In all the works of Gada al-Samman, much attention is paid to socio-political issues. This is explained by the fact that the Syrian writer belongs to the military generation, who witnessed all the Arab-Israeli wars since 1948. It belongs to the galaxy of the "sixties", whose representatives are characterized by a thirst for moral independence, internal independence, for which it was necessary to throw off the burden of social prejudices, free themselves from the yoke of patriarchal traditions and conventions that suppressed the living human soul, constrained individual freedom, i.e. it was necessary to change social relations. Therefore, the task of the writer Gada as-Samman was to,

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to "reject lies, resist oppression" [Al-Mawqif al-adabiy, 1981, N 186/187]. And when asked whether a writer should deal with the socio-political problems of his time, she answered:: "A writer cannot help but deal with the socio-political problems of his time if he is really a creative person. A writer is a true mouthpiece [of the throat], the herald of his time" [ibid.].

The overwhelming majority of Gada al-Samman's short stories focus on women's fate, but their content goes far beyond the "female" issue, the problem of women's disenfranchisement in Arab society. She analyzes the situation of women, seeing in it an important symptom of the state of society as a whole, one of its most painful problems. The female theme in the work of G. al-Samman serves a single goal - to show a cross-section of the social structure of Arab society in the modern era. It seems to confirm, in this way, the idea of the famous Arab fighter for women's rights, the Egyptian publicist Qasim Amin, who at the beginning of the XX century came to an incredible conclusion for that time: the humiliated position of women in society is the cause of the decline of Muslims [Kirpichenko and Safronov, 2002, p.113].

The opinion of Afif Faraj, an Arab researcher of the creative work of Gada al-Samman, who summed up: "The progressive social component is present in all stories, but in a state of "mixture"" [Farage, 1980, p. 111]. It also coincides with the assessment of the Italian philologist Paola di Capua, who stated: "The social coordinate is obvious in all the stories of Gada as-Samman" (Di Capua, 1989, p. 78).

Most compactly (not in a "mixture") topical public issues are raised by G. as-Samman in the novels of the fourth collection " The Death of old Harbors "(1973). Professing directness, honesty, "rejecting lies", the writer did not depict the moments of Arab victory and did not choose for the narrative samples of Arab heroism. In her works, she talks about defeats and does not heroize her characters. As a writer contributing to the spiritual crisis that gripped the Arab world after the June defeat, she persistently posed the "damned" question: who is to blame? and tirelessly searched for answers to the question: what to do? As the Arab researcher of creativity G. al-Samman-Ilham Gali wrote, her literature "will remain in the Arab consciousness as part of one of the most difficult stages in the intellectual history of modern Arabs" [Gali, 1986, p.105].

The great novella "The Ash-gray Danube" (As-Samman, 1973) is one of those whose plot is based on the events of June 1967. The heroine, a radio announcer who read the newscasts on the air in her "velvet" voice, guessed that her messages were prepared by the editorial chief Hazem, with whom she was in contact intimate communication, - misinformation. The Arab victories she reported were chimeras. She asked Hazem direct questions, but he evaded the question. When her Fedayeen brother was killed in a battle on the outskirts of Jerusalem with his detachment, who believed her sister's message (on the radio) that the Arab armies had gone on the offensive, the heroine understands her involvement in her brother's death: "We poisoned people with lies" [As-Samman, 1993(1), p. 131She brands her "velvet" voice as a "tool of crime" [ibid., p. 9, 13]: "I turned my throat into a prostitute and participated in the transformation of information institutions into brothels" [ibid., p. 36]. The accusations of the heroine and the author are targeted and unambiguous. "My country is a bunch of clever executioners and a herd of stupid cattle like me," the heroine continues to see. "Our lives in my country are scattered ashes while they plot against us... And until our death there will be only scattered dust" [ibid., p. 32]. The prospect, as we can see, is more than disappointing - the writer simply does not see it during the life of the current generation.

Is the self-serving political power alone responsible? No, it is organically related to the level of public consciousness, its characteristic concepts, and the way it is presented.-

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statements and judgments. And above all, with the attitude to women in society. In the same novel, the heroine, after learning that her free behavior causes censure in society, ironically: "So Beirut is talking about my scandals! I burst out laughing. - "The honor of a girl" is higher than "the honor of the earth". The defeat of the country is a great scandal, and they stupefy themselves, shutting themselves off from it, inventing small scandals to gossip " [ibid., p. 22].

It seems that the remark "burst out laughing" refers not only to the heroine, but also to the author himself, who gave vent to his sarcasm in the following caustic remark: "It is easier for a man in my country to retreat from the battlefield and return with defeat in complete calm and silence than to suffer a fiasco in bed with a woman" [ibid.]. More than a transparent allusion to the Arab "anik warriors", a sarcastic juxtaposition of their inaccessible military prowess with their arrogance of their male articles would have been devastating if not for the bittersweet tone of the whole story.

Looking for an answer to the question "who is to blame?" Gada as-Samman is far from simplistic and biased. In the guilty confession of her heroine ("I killed my brother and thousands of others, whose names I do not know... My ambition, the historical suppression of me as a woman, and the political guile of my leaders played a role here" [ibid., p. 91] It is impossible not to notice that the author mentions personal quality ("my ambition") as the first reason. In other words, it is not always the fault of one "system". But the social structure, which is inhumane in relation to a woman, does not recognize her as an equal, self - valuable person, in which she is subordinate and oppressed, stands in the penitential triad, in fact, after the original human vice-pride. It is reasonable to assume that Mr. as-Samman expresses his position in such a neighborhood: if society were fair, humane to a woman, and did not cripple her as a person, she would not suffer to such an extent from mental dislocations and distortions. (We find confirmation of our idea in the Syrian literary critic, researcher of the work of Gada al-Samman Abd al-Latyf al-Arnaut, who believes that the writer depicted the vice in which an Eastern woman is squeezed, and her mental illnesses due to this tightness [Al-Arnaut, 1993, p. 134].)

As the third reason, the heroine calls her "leaders". But it is clear that the mass media, including radio broadcasting, are called upon to follow the line of the political leadership of the state. The heroine comes to the realization that "our leaders persist in instilling in us that we are heroes floating on the sea of history and being, in order to preserve the seats of leaders and exploiters" [As-Samman, 1993(1), p. 12]. In other words, deceiving and manipulating public opinion is a means for them to stay in power. The heroine of the story analyzes in the wake of events: "Even when everyone became aware of the outcome of the war after June 10, I read on the air everything that Hazem wrote about how it was not a defeat, but a defeat, and the explanations and testimonies of unprecedented bravery that he gave. Those who listened to us believed that the message was transmitted from the capital that had won a victory, and not from the capital that had failed" [ibid., p. 13]. And the comment of the clever henchman of the Hazem regime even explained "the advantages of defeat for the Arabs and how it was necessary, moreover, it represented it as the first means of salvation" [ibid.]. In other words, the authorities, through their media, hiding the real state of affairs, did not want to allow society to take a sober look at the scattered "stones", in fact preventing its spiritual maturation.

The road to the temple of truth of the heroine herself ran through the crucible of torment and moral decline. But in the finale, freed in the cleansing fire of suffering and insight from the taint of involvement in "the swamp of terrible truths, in the mud of which we (the heroine and her entourage. - N. Sh.) submerged" [ibid., p. 12], a woman returns to her homeland to help revive her country (with the pen of a publicist, experience

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an announcer who speaks six foreign languages). Thus, the author, through his heroine, answers the question that arises from readers: what to do? - Business.

The antithesis of business and idle talk, tours on wheels, activity and inaction in society acquires special significance for the Syrian writer precisely in the difficult time of "Arab despair" (the expression of I. Gali) [Gali, 1986, p.105]. This is evidenced, in particular, by close analogies in the texts of the short stories "The Ash-gray Danube" and "The Fire of that Summer" (As-Samman, 1973). The selection of characteristic lexical means is also noteworthy. In the cafe where the heroes of "Pozhara..." visited, " thinkers and artists philosophized (here and further my italics - N. S.) about the defeat, chewed their theories, quarreling among themselves from time to time. Palestine is a mental game of chess for them." Then one author "gave a lecture about defeat, about the need for us to join the West and lick America's heels" [As-Samman, 1973, p. 69], "another genius got up and started talking... about the positive aspects of defeat, that it is a failure, not a defeat, and began to accuse everyone who dares to use the word "defeat"of treason. The reaction of the heroine of the novel is indignant indignation: "Why is it treason to constantly face the truth? How can we win if we betray ourselves when we hide the real truths?". Therefore, the heroes leave this "cemetery of intellectuals"" [ibid., pp. 69-70].

However, more terrible than the greed of the authorities, the verbiage and generosity of the inert demagogic intelligentsia is the duplicity and double-mindedness of "their own" representatives of the left forces. Let's pay attention to the next episode. "A big man in the party arrived, and with him a huge dog... I (the heroine. - N. S.) was forced to listen to his lecture... he talked to me for a long time about the left-wing movement, poverty, and the hungry, defeated people... The waiter came up (the meeting was taking place at the hotel) and said to him: "The food is ready as usual." I was surprised by the large roll of silver paper that the guard handed over to a friend. He explained...: "This is food for my dog. She loves the cooking of the hotel's restaurant" " [ibid., p. 78]. The heroine was outraged by such obvious crookedness. When the "comrade" was already far away, she gave vent to her indignation: "You're a corpse stuffed with slogans on tape. You stink" [ibid.]. The writer shows how demagogic empty talk, double standards deaden revolutionary pathos, and extremely reduce the level of trust in political leaders of the left, too.

One day, the company of heroes of the novel could not stand the usual idle vanity of cafe regulars and fled from the "cemetery of intellectuals" to... a real graveyard, looking for salvation in the midst of its silence. Trips to the graves became commonplace: "Every night we got tired of everything that surrounded us: all the ideological and political graves, patriotic performances, bidding about the defeat, which was officially called "failure". And we had no choice but to go to the cemetery again and again" [ibid., p. 82].

The metaphor is clear to the reader: fruitless demagogy so torments a conscientious person and citizen that it makes them run away. The place of the "last refuge" turns out to be more comfortable for him than the society of politicking idle talkers. As A. al-L. al-Arnaut wrote in his research: "Nuf (the heroine of the story. - N. S.) was not afraid of graves, since the cemetery of the living called "Beirut" inspired her with more fear " [Al-Arnaut, 1993, p. 138].

It should be noted that the writer herself has never belonged to any political organization (I. Gali nevertheless believes that her "vision" is directed towards left-wing liberalism [Gali, 1986, p. 105]). I think it was extremely important for her to protect her inner freedom. Al-Arnaut sees this as a causal relationship: "I attribute the rise of the star Gada al-Samman in the sky of Arabic literature to the fact that it did not join any political wave" [Al-Arnaut, 1993, p.10].

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Her non-partisan attitude allowed the writer to speak critically about the activities of any party associations without prejudice. Already in the second collection "There is no sea in Beirut "(1963) in the short story "Gypsy without a harbor", words were denounced " stupid machines put to sleep by ideological hypnosis...". The author's opinion: "the noise of discussion (on political issues - N. S.) in the ears of eternity is nothing more than the squeak of a mosquito..." Her heroine loves the good, truth, freedom and principles that all parties call for, but "they are not responsible for anything in this world" [As-Samman, 1993(2), p. 79]. She (together with the author) has a low opinion of "discussions", does not believe in their propaganda rhetoric, and does not see any special differences in the principles proclaimed by different parties. The same can be said about another character - the Yemeni revolutionary Fadeel from the novel "The Clock and the Raven" ("The Death of Old Harbors", 1973), who says: "Everything should be clearly delineated in our country. You can't do without it. In the West, in the so-called prosperous countries, it is not always clear where the left is and where the right is" [Selected works..., 1978, p. 465].

This theme - if not the identity, then the convergence of ideological appeals and views of various political organizations - is more pointed by the writer in the short story "Another Cold Evening" (As-Samman, 1966). The heroine, Fatima, had three brothers who were members of different political parties. She was proud of her educated, conscientious relatives. But political disagreements turned into an armed struggle. And close people who found themselves on different sides of the barricades began to fight with each other, and all died. The pain in the heroine's soul from this loss is mixed with sincere bewilderment: "Each of them once told me the same thing that the other said. Each of them said: people, ideology, business. Then why were they fighting?" [As-Samman, 1995, p. 138]. The author does not give a ready-made answer, possibly referring the reader to the phrase from "Gypsies..." about "stupid machines put to sleep by ideological hypnosis" that "catches" the attention of the reader out of desperation [As-Samman, 1993(2), p. 79], so that he would come to the conclusion that unprincipled puppeteers are only interested in the intricacies of big politics and do not care that its intrusion into the lives of ordinary people leads to human tragedies, cripples human destinies.

The same motif - "brother against brother" - sounds in the short story " To cut off the cat's head "(collection "Square Moon", 1994). The hero, a Lebanese expat in Paris, Abd al-Razzaq, looks at a family photo. Among the relatives is the one "who killed another brother during the war, and in the picture they were all standing with their arms around each other" [As-Samman, 1999, p.21]. So Abd al-Razzaq was left an only son in his infancy after the death of the other fighters - his older brothers. The writer returns to this topic in the 1990s, and this speaks about what troubled her for decades, during which peace in her homeland was repeatedly replaced by war. She emphasizes the inhumanity of armed conflicts within the country by mentioning the fratricidal syndrome of Cain and Abel (which is what she calls the photo in this story: "Photo of the family of Cain and Abel").

The dramatic situations in which the characters of Gada al-Samman's works find themselves are often caused by the socio-political situation in Lebanon. After the writer settled in this country in the second half of the 1960s, Lebanese events become a constant "voiceover" background in her writings.

In the great novel "Crime of Honor "(collection "The Death of Old Harbors", 1973), the toponym "South of Lebanon" is not just an allusion to the aggressive actions of Israel against a sovereign neighboring state that were committed there, but also a synonym not for life, but for miserable vegetationism, reduced to the extreme level of disenfranchisement and destitution to which the local population is doomed due to the impunity of the aggressor and the inactivity of the authorities of their country.

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The main character, Abu Ali, because of the impoverished existence of his family is forced to leave his native places and get a job as a driver in a wealthy Beirut family. During this period, the Southern Lebanese villages were the target of a creeping Israeli colonial expansion. Abu Ali's family also suffered. The Israelis blew up his house, and laid a road for their tanks along the tobacco plantings that fed the large family. The fate of one family becomes an expression of the socio-political problems of all that time.

Abu Ali has an eldest son, Ali, by his first wife Taghrid (a former Beirut cabaret dancer who never got used to working rural life, went into a frenzy and burned herself) and six children by his second, a Palestinian woman named Imtisal. Their daughter, Khadra, loves her mother's distant relative, Jules al-Saleh, a Palestinian fighter. Ali opposes their union, saying that marriage to a Fedayeen means rapid widowhood, poverty and wandering. He believed that Jules and his associates were the cause of the troubles and misfortunes that befell their homes [As-Samman, 1993(1), p. 106]. Here again, one can see the allusive material: after the events of "Black September" 1970, when the Jordanian authorities drove the PDS units out of the country, they were relocated to neighboring Lebanon. A certain part of the population of the border areas blamed Palestinian militants for their troubles caused by the orders of the Israeli military.

It is characteristic that the writer in the novel expresses the opinion of those who are dissatisfied with the fact that Palestinian partisans are fighting against Israel from the territory of another state, the son of a mad mother Ali (after all, the Palestinians did not have their own territory, and the leaders of Arab states at one time declared that the Palestinian problem is their common cause). His Palestinian stepmother strongly objects to his stepson: "Before Jules and his companions came, we were already poor, destitute, abandoned. Nothing much has changed. Their arrival simply accelerated the events that were inevitable" [ibid., p. 106]. "Unavoidable", as the reader can conclude from this work, because of the unresolved problem of the Palestinian people, from whom the homeland was taken away, because of the indifference and weakness of the country's political leadership, which is not able to exercise legitimate authority on the ground. Gada al-Samman includes an episode about robber raids, during which Israelis freely cross the state border and carry out their punitive operations on the territory of a sovereign state: they blow up the homes of Lebanese suspected of sheltering Fedayeen, destroy their crops with their tractors and excavators, and take away their crops. What can defenseless people do? Abu Ali put up a tent on the site of the destroyed house, then "a tin house and became a refugee on his own land" [ibid., p. 105] (here and further my italics. - N. S.). " At night and during the day we (Abu Ali and members of his family. - N. S.) make our way to their own land, like thieves, to gather something from the harvest" [ibid.].

Abu Ali is a simple Fellah man. However, his consciousness also becomes clearer when he unwittingly compares the luxury, waste, idleness, and selfishness of the wealthy residents of Beirut with his poverty-stricken existence in the South of Lebanon. Gada al-Samman, using the method of associations, makes the reader, along with her hero, wonder, wonder and relive, in memory, dramatic episodes of life in his native village, comparing it with the careless, parasitic existence of the jaded Beirut masters Abu Ali and their circle.

Its owner, Mrs. Firdalona, has a closet, the contents of which are enough to open a whole shop selling shoes [ibid., p. 102]. He wonders about her daily idleness. For him, a man of continuous work, her idleness evokes contempt and sarcasm: "This woman is always lying on her bed like a Bedouin woman after a miscarriage" [ibid., p. 93]. One day Abu Ali was ordered to take the owner's poodle Babush to the doctor before participating in a dog show, and he, seeing the doctor's immense care and consideration towards the dog, remembered,

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how his daughter Khadra, who was shot three times in the stomach by Israelis, lay on the floor of the hospital and screamed in pain, but no one came to her aid. And the anesthesia was done only after the father signed a paper on the mortgage of his land to pay for the costs of treatment [ibid., p. 102].

"Wonderful things are happening in this city," Abu Ali continues to wonder. - It seems that I am no longer able to understand anything of what is happening in it" [ibid., p. 108]. Indeed, in the South of Lebanon, "the land is burning", "residents are dying", and here people are dancing, bathing dogs, decorating them, giving them an elegant look. Celebrations are held in their honor [ibid., p. 108]. Just at such a festival, on the site of the Dog Owners ' Club, Abu Ali discovered the problem of social confrontation. "People on this site are divided into two parts facing each other. Dogs and their owners are on the same side. The retinue is on the other side... Each looked at the other in such a way that the least that was reflected in it was the inability to understand each other, despite the fact that it is assumed that they all know at least one language" [ibid., p. 109]. And then, realizing that the haves live in a different reality, that they are not really interested in either the Israeli aggression in Southern Lebanon or the problem of Palestinian refugees, they heard from the hostess and her friend the extremely cynical: "What do we care about them (South Lebanese peasants and Palestinians. - N. Sh.) business?.. The main thing is that we are all right" [ibid., p. 107], Abu Ali decides to steal a rifle from the owners, return to his native land and "kill the first Israeli who encroaches on his land" [ibid., p. 108].

So with the acquisition of a new life experience from being in the city, in a different social reality, in the service of a family of jaded egoists and cynics, the hero of Gada al-Samman matures a protest and an "adult" determination to take fate into his own hands - to defend his living space with weapons in his hands from the brazen Israeli occupiers.

Thus, using the principle of antithesis, motivated by the author's intention to demonstrate the depth of stratification in society, the dramatic discrepancy in the interests of different groups of the population, the multi-vector nature of their aspirations, different levels of their social claims and expectations, Gada as-Samman reveals to his hero and readers the social abyss that separates these groups, the polar levels of their life - sybaritism, egoistic satisfaction of their whims and whims of the haves and the hopeless vegetationism of the rest. This gave her the basis in her subsequent works-the novels "Beirut-75" and "Nightmares of Beirut" - to anticipate the events of the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990). In " Nightmares...", she directly stated through the mouth of her heroine: "It is not true that Beirut flourished and flourished before the civil war. He only seemed beautiful... The sweet life in Beirut has always been the lot of a select few" [Al-Samman, 1987, pp. 354-355]. Therefore, it is natural that poverty, suffering, envy and grumbling of the lower strata of society, in turn, led to civil war. In this light, the true meaning of the heroine's statement in this novel becomes clearer.: "I bless this fiery whirlwind that has brought me so much misery, if it burns out injustice and religious discord, and freedom, equality and love will prevail in the torn land of Lebanon" [ibid., p. 353]. As we can see, on the one hand, the anti-humanistic idea of war, on the other-humanistic tasks.

The theme of not direct, but indirect consequences of war, a kind of "retardation" of these consequences, repeatedly appears in the novels of Gada al-Samman.

In the finale of the novella "Brain in a Locked room "(collected works "Square Moon", 1994), a second narrative plan appears: the reader learns that the hero of the novella is a patient of a clinic for the mentally ill and, as it turns out from a conversation between a doctor and a nurse, imagines himself a ghost. The story of this patient is that he went into exile, leaving his father in his homeland, accumulated an impressive fortune there, and when ver-

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After being mistaken, I found a relative in a miserable nursing home in a helpless state without proper care. A rich son and would have liked to compensate his father for the years he lived in poverty, but he came back too late. The father before his death, consciously or not, does not give his son forgiveness, and the son under the unbearable weight of guilt and remorse goes mad.

In this novel, the reader's attention is drawn to the following idea:" ... The past, the action of the past, killed the present and the future " [As-Samman, 1999, p.210]. We are talking about the hopelessness and irremediability of the consequences of the military hard times. This refers not only to the immediate death of loved ones, but also to deep, irremediable psychological trauma. Character "of the brain..."I ended up in a hospital for the mentally ill. And the hero of the novella "Conspiracy against Badia "(collection "Square Moon", 1994) had the initial stage of schizophrenia. Proper treatment and care would help Badia cope with the disease. But the sanatorium where he was treated, due to the death of the owner, Dr. ar-Rajak, and military events, was closed by his widow, and patients were asked to disperse. The receding disease returned, began to progress, led to a split personality syndrome, and then to a manic-depressive state. Badia-Aidab (an anagram of the hero's name) strangled his girlfriend Elizabeth and shot her cousin Edward, a psychotherapist, faking the murder of his sister's brother and his subsequent suicide. The sick brain of the character was satisfied that the police would not be able to find the true culprit, and at work colleagues express their condolences to him in connection with the death of the bride, not suspecting him of the killer.

Thus, the war deprived a person of the chance for recovery and made him a socially dangerous type, obsessed with suspicion and suspiciousness, capable of killing people for unsubstantiated motives that arose in his brain, which was doomed by this war to progressive paranoia.

The inhuman nature of war is the leitmotif of virtually all the works of Gada as-Samman's latest collection, Square Moon (1994). In the long novella "Write down: I am not an Arab", a Lebanese couple living in Paris, "the most beautiful country in the world "[Al-Samman, 1999, p.63], did not come here to escape the hardships of war. The couple left their homeland after the war to ease the "mortal anguish": their only daughter was killed by " a bullet of joy (salute - N. S.), launched on the occasion of the end of a long conflict." And before that, according to the wife, their dreams "were all destroyed by the war" [ibid., p. 65]. No matter how nice Paris was and their apartment with a view of the Eiffel Tower, the characters ' lives, as the writer shows, were irreparably distorted after the war, which insanely absurdly claimed their child-it was no longer life, but survival.

In the short story "The Other Side of the Door" (collection "Square Moon", 1994), Lebanese spouses Naim and Leila also left their homeland. There, life ended for them at the moment when their son Shaker was hit in the back: he broke the "back", as Naim said, that is, the life of his parents. They emigrated, but it turned out that they "moved from being shelled by fire to being shelled by poverty" [As-Samman, 1999, p. 160]. The plot of this story is another human tragedy, caused by the "brutal fratricidal war".

The low-income condition was aggravated by the oppressive psychological atmosphere in the family: "He (Shaker - N. Sh.) is a child who has not laughed for five years now, since the shrapnel of the last shell of the war hit him and caused paralysis of the lower part of the body" [ibid., p. 155]. And only the acquaintance with the clown Bubus, their Lebanese expat compatriot, brought happiness to the house: the care of "Uncle Bubus" for the boy, numerous generous gifts for his birthday, hilarious tricks that the clown showed Shaker and his fellow guests magically literally "put on their feet" the previously immobilized boy, awakening him. it has a sense of joy in life.

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It was known about "Uncle Bubus" himself that the war had dramatically changed his life. He graduated from the philosophy department of the University of Beirut and was going to work as a philosophy teacher. "That evening, when I (hero - N. S.) applied for a job, the shelling started, and we went down to the shelter... When a shell fell and exploded in front of the shelter door, it killed my mother, and I promised myself to devote my life to making children laugh and working as a clown "[ibid., p. 160].

Fortunately, the grief did not crush the young man, he "found himself", was able to give his soul to a new business, become useful to people and find satisfaction in it. After all, it was he who advised Shaker's parents to arrange a holiday for the boy, to invite guests. Naeem and Leila heeded his advice: "This is the first time we will celebrate Shaker's birthday. And this is on the occasion of the end of the war in Lebanon " [ibid., p. 158]. As we can see, the war is irremediably present in the lives of the heroes: both the misfortunes it brings, and the reviving hopes in connection with its end.

However, the fate of this Lebanese couple could have been just as dramatic as that of their compatriots - the characters of the novella "Write down: I am not an Arab" - where the parents lost a young daughter, and here the child could have died at birth: Leila's contractions began in a bomb shelter. "It was impossible to get her to the hospital because of the violent fratricidal battle that broke out between our roof and the next one. And Shaker was born in a shelter: fortunately, one neighbor was a midwife "[ibid., p. 160].

So ordinary people, their birth and life, become hostages to someone's profitable war, merciless, relentless bloody tragedy. And Gada al-Samman tirelessly raises this topic again and again in order to convey the truth about the war in an effective language of artistic images, to arouse the reader's strong rejection of it and its absolute condemnation.

The plot of the aforementioned novel "The Brain in a locked room" at first seems to have nothing to do with socio-political issues. In the beginning, a man and a woman are preparing "for debauchery", when suddenly the lady's husband appears and kills the opponent-strangles him. The couple leaves for their home, and the strangled disembodied ghost follows them. He is appalled by the hypocrisy and self-interest of these people, whom he considered friends. But their moral decline, as the writer shows, did not begin with murder, but from the moment when their house was destroyed during the war and they began to live on the money of their compatriot. "Ah, this is the misfortune that began when our homes were destroyed in Beirut..." [Al-Samman, 1999, p.205]. "May Allah destroy the homes of those who destroyed our dwelling" [ibid., p. 207]. Having deprived the couple of shelter, the war pushed her-fortunately, not out of life at all - to the sidelines of existence. The mentioned compatriot supported this almost extinct life in poverty. For this, the spouse was forced to turn a blind eye to the sponsor's attention to his wife, to pretend, to be hypocritical. The soul-corrupting parasitic existence, envy of a rich "friend", the conscious humiliation of their dependent position, the forced indulgence of the whims of the patron dehumanized the spouse's personality, led to the failure of the internal "brake", to a crime.

With a vivid, expressive language of artistic images, the writer repeatedly calls on readers to condemn the war, which is an inexorable imperative that invades the destinies of people, destroying their life plans, taking the lives of their loved ones, and often "dehumanizing" the survivors. And together with the war, to pass judgment on the figures behind it, who are invested with direct power and public authority, those who own power and money.

Thus, the analysis of even a few short stories from the entire impressive body of works of this genre by a Syrian writer (55 works) shows that Gada al-Samman throughout her writing career was a consistent exponent of the socio-political aspirations of her contemporaries. Contradictions, injustice, and the inhumane nature of the social structure

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it reveals through the language of artistic images and with the help of sharp accusatory criticism. It is no exaggeration to say that the heroes of her works, the artistic world she created, became part of the cultural consciousness of the XX century and naturally entered the XXI century, became what Yu.M. Lotman called the "collective memory of culture" (Lotman, 1993, p. 286).

list of literature

Al-Arnaut, Abd al-Latyf. Gadat as-Samman. Rihlya fi aamalikha geiri-l-kamilya (Gada as-Samman. A journey through its incomplete collection). Damascus: Matabia Alef ba al-Adib, 1993 (in Arabic).

Gali Ilham Ghada al-Samman. Love and War (Gada as-Samman. Al-hubb wa'l-harb). A study in the sociology of literature. Beirut: Dar al-Talia, 1986 (in Arabic).

Di Capua P. Protest and responsibility in the works of Gada as-Samman (At-Tamarrud wa-l-ilti-zam fi fann Gadat as-Samman). Beirut: Dar al-Talia, 1989 (in Arabic).

Selected works of writers from the Middle East. Novels and Stories, Moscow: Progress Publ., 1978.

Kirpichenko V. N., Safronov V. V. History of Egyptian literature of the XIX-XX centuries. In 2 volumes, vol. 1. Moscow: Vostochny lit., 2002.

Lotman Yu. M. Selected articles. In 3 vols. Vol. 1. Articles on semiotics and typology of culture. Tallinn, 1993.

Al-Mawkif al-adabiy. Damascus. N 186, 187, 1981.

Nasib al-Ikhtiyar Najla. Taharrur al-mar'a abra aamal Simun du Bufuwar wa Gadat al-Samman (Liberation of a woman based on the works of Simone de Beauvoir and Gada al-Samman). Бейрут: Дар ат-Талиа, 1990.

As-Samman G. Koshmary Beyruta [Nightmares of Beirut], Moscow: Raduga Publ., 1987.

Al-Samman G. The destruction of Old Harbors (Raheel al-marafi al-kadima). Beirut, 1993 (1).

Al-Samman G. No sea in Beirut (La bahr fi Beirut). Beirut, 1993(2).

Al-Samman G. The Night of Strangers (Layl al-ghuraba). Beirut, 1995.

Al-Samman G. Square Moon (Al-qamar al-murabba). Beirut, 1999.

Faraj A. The theme of freedom in women's literature (Al-Hurriyah fi'l-adab an-nisayyah). 2nd ed. Damascus: Bureau of Arab Studies (Muassasa al-Abhas al-Arabiyya), 1980 (in Arabic).

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