"Уликовая парадигма» в персидской классике: принцы из Сарандипа и прочие чтецы следов

Ориенталистика. 2021. Т. 4. № 4. С. 1033–1062.

Chalisova N.

The rich history of Persian literature reception in the West includes such a
major event as the translation of the Persian narrative into European languages. This
has influenced the comprehension of a new epistemological paradigm in the humanities.
The story under discussion is the first chapter of Amir Khusrav Dihlavi’s poem
“Eight Paradises” (Hašt bihišt, 1299–1301), in which the Indian princess tells the Sassanian
king Bahram Gur a tale of three princes from Sarandip (Sri Lanka, Ceylon). As
the plot progresses, the princes restore the events of the past according to clues and
signs and repeatedly demonstrate their firāsa or ability to guess based on the analysis
of evidence. The stages of European reception of this story are well known. All this material
is discussed in the methodologically famous work “Clues: Roots of an Evidential
Paradigm” (1986) by Carlo Ginzburg, who connected the “evidential paradigm” with
the Arabic firāsa, a “complex notion which, in general, designated the ability to pass, on
the basis of clues, directly from the known to the unknown”; Ginzburg noted that the
Sarandip princes were famous exactly for that ability. In this article, the Persian prose
sources of the Three princes tale are under discussion, as well as some other sagacity
stories from Persian didactic books (adab). Among the detective characters Abū ʻAlī ibn
Sīnā gained particular popularity; in some stories, the great philosopher and author of
the fundamental canon “The Medicine” acts as a doctor who recognizes a disease by
symptoms and at the same time as a detective who restores the course of events from
evidence and refutes unfair accusations before a judge.

Keywords: литературная рецепция, персидская поэзия, Persian poetry, Amir Khusraw Dihlavi, literary reception, Амир Хусрав Дихлави, Ибн Сина