Article: The fool's dream: the fall of another new Eden and the Utopian appeal of ethnic solidarity.(Critical essay)

In the last paragraph of Raffi's historical novel The Fool, the hero-"fool," Vartan, wakes from a dream of his native Armenia transformed into a socialist homeland (217). (1) Julian West, Edward Bellamy's protagonist in Looking Backward, also woke from a dream that was the undisguised fulfillment of a utopian wish, but Raffi's Fool first appeared in 1881--seven years before Bellamy's influential novel--and it took form six thousand miles from the shores of Bellamy's Boston. Genocide and mass deportation dowsed the fool's dream in the Old Country, but it reappeared briefly, in a most unlikely way, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada near Fresno, California.

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