Genre Characteristics Of The European Novella And Their Reflection In Uzbek Literature (The Influence Of Boccaccio, Kafka, Thomas Mann, Hemingway, And Other Writers)

Abstract

The novella, positioned between the short story and the novel, has served as one of European literature’s most resilient and adaptable forms. This article identifies core genre characteristics of the European novella—event-centered plotting, temporal and spatial compression, symbolic density, and a decisive, often crisis-like turning point—and examines their reflection in Uzbek prose traditions, particularly in the qissa and hikoya. Drawing on emblematic texts by Giovanni Boccaccio, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, and Ernest Hemingway, the study outlines a comparative narratological frame showing how the novella’s compact architectonics migrated across languages and cultural systems through translation, literary education, and shared modernist poetics. The analysis demonstrates that Uzbek writers adapted the novella’s concentration on a singular, “unheard-of” event, its limited chronotope, and its preference for implication over exposition, while inflecting these features with indigenous narrative habits, ethical didacticism, and parable-like tonality. The results illuminate how European models catalyzed a minimalist turn in Uzbek prose style, encouraged psychological interiority, and offered a flexible vehicle for thematizing social transformation, moral choice, and urbanization in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The article contributes to ongoing debates about transnational genre travel by foregrounding how a portable form like the novella preserves its structural identity while accommodating local aesthetics.