Artistic Identity Across Cultures: A Comparative Study of Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstasy and Oybek’s Navoiy

Abstract

This article examines the construction of artistic identity in Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstasy and Oybek’s Navoiy from a comparative literary perspective. Although the novels emerge from different linguistic, cultural, historical, and aesthetic traditions, both transform historically significant creative personalities into literary protagonists and explore the relationship between individual vocation, creative labour, social responsibility, and cultural memory. The study focuses on Michelangelo and Alisher Navoi and compares four dimensions of their literary representation. They are artistic vocation, creative struggle, the relationship between the creator and society, and the cultural function of artistic production. The analysis demonstrates that Stone constructs Michelangelo predominantly as an autonomous artist whose identity develops through material engagement, discipline, physical labour, and resistance to external limitations. Oybek, by contrast, presents Navoi as a poet-intellectual whose creative identity is closely connected with language, moral values, social responsibility, and the cultural development of his society. The comparison shows that artistic identity is represented in both works as a dynamic process rather than an innate and unchanging quality. At the same time, the two novels reveal culturally specific models of the creator, which are the artist as master and individual creator in Stone’s novel, and the poet as cultural and social figure in Oybek’s novel. The article argues that the comparison of English and Uzbek biographical fiction makes it possible to identify both universal and culture-specific dimensions of artistic identity.