World Literature in the Soviet Union

This coedited volume examines Soviet engagement with world literature from intellectual-historical, literary-theoretical, and institutional perspectives. Its central core deals with three distinct periods: the ferment of 1917 – 22, when Maxim Gorky founded the World Literature publishing house shortly after the 1917 October Revolution; the 1930s, when the world literature project was revived following Gorky's return to the Soviet Union; and 1958 to 1991, when the Afro-Asian Writers’ Congress was inaugurated in Tashkent until the collapse of the Soviet Union. The volume's central chapters examine the evolution of Soviet debates throughout these years, world literature's relationship to the Soviet ideological mission, and the many institutions which sought to make the world literature project a reality. These included not only the World Literature publishing house (which employed such luminaries as the Futurists Victor Shklovsky and Yuri Tynianov) and the Institute for World Literature founded and named for Gorky in 1932, but also the book series and journals which flourished throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the early Comintern congresses of the 1920s, the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association and its congresses, as well as the Communist University of the Toilers of the East, which had branches in Moscow, Baku, and Tashkent (1921 – 38) as well as the Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia (1960 – ) in Moscow. This focus allows for wide-ranging discussions that include the development and framing of the peripheral (non-Russian) literatures of the Soviet Union within the world literature project, the process and politics of translation of works from countries with which the Soviet Union was aligned, and the development of formal and informal social networks between writers within and outside of the country. It is a well-conceived and richly informative volume which will appeal to experts and nonexperts alike.While the coeditors’ introduction provides a welcome synopsis of each contribution, its brevity suggests a lost opportunity to bring cohesion and theoretical clarity to the volume at the outset, though Galin Tihanov's opening essay serves to fill this gap somewhat. He begins by presenting four meanings of world literature: as embodiment of cultural diversity; as conduit of culture; as canon; and as the study of the circulation of texts in translation. While the first two are particularly important in the Soviet context, the revolutionary utopian dream to spread world culture and to bring hundreds of works to the Soviet masses soon became both a Soviet state-building project and an anticolonial one, as literary networks developed to draw the countries of Africa and Asia into the Soviet realm of influence. Tihanov brings in two theorists whose ideas underlay the evolution of a Soviet world literary theory, only one of whom was involved in the Soviet world literature project on an institutional level: Mikhail Bakhtin and Nikolai Konrad (a Japanologist and Sinologist who was one of the founders of the multivolume History of World Literature). Neither subscribing to the traditionally Eurocentric approach to world literature, both helped shift chronologies and broaden perspectives, revealing, for instance, that the Renaissance was not a purely Western European phenomenon. While Tihanov's essay brings in many of the institutions, actors, questions, and debates that ground the volume, a clearer introduction placing the debates within the context of major milestones in Soviet history would help lay readers find their way more easily through the book.The exceptionally strong core chapters of the volume reflect the stages Tihanov outlines. Maria Khotimsky's clear and well-organized chapter uses the two book catalogs released by the World Literature publishing house and several introductions from books in the series to analyze the changing conception of world literature. The two series, one devoted to Western and the other to Eastern literatures, testify to the extraordinary ambition of the project, which began with the literature of Mesopotamia and brought together internationally renowned specialists on European, Asian, American, and African literatures. Khotimsky shows how world literature debates reflected the contested space of the new Soviet print culture, dialogue with past literary models, and tensions between the local and the universal. Sergey Tyulenev's rich chapter focuses on the problem of translation underlying both world literature and larger Soviet projects on both a theoretical and a practical level. It brings up one of the most salient problems of the whole volume: how an ideological movement which defines itself by the new can respond to the necessity of dealing with the old. The question of what and how to translate is richly productive for all participants, but it also brings up tensions and problems. In that vein, Edward Tyerman's fine chapter uses Chinese poetry as the lens through which to examine how the Soviet world literature project negotiated the problem of difference and commensurability. Rossen Djagalov examines in fascinating detail the formal and informal networks among Soviet and African and Asian writers in the context of Cold War geopolitical cultural competition. Elena Ostrovskaya, Elena Zemskaya, Evgeniia Belskaia, and Georgii Korotkov examine the multilingual journal International Literature as a utopian space and compare and contrast its four different linguistic iterations (in Russian, German, English, and French) using a variety of different methodological approaches including data visualization, which provides a new and original approach within the volume.Susanne Frank's, Katerina Clark's, and Schamma Schahadat's chapters all delve into different related aspects of the core Soviet world literature project. Frank's chapter differs from the rest of the volume by dealing with a literary tradition from the Soviet Union's own periphery; she examines how the framing of Armenian literature as a tradition changed from prerevolutionary to Stalinist times, an evolution which reflects the changing internal politics of the Soviet Union. Clark considers Shklovsky's understanding of the roles of form and content in world literature in his postrevolutionary writing in her characteristically lucid and luminous style. Schahadat injects an important genre into the mix — socialist realism — which was, of course, the officially sanctioned genre for some of the period under examination. She asks how socialist realism is reflected in the reception of world literature in these years.The volume's core is bookended by two strong chapters on Russian literature and worldliness: Anne Lounsbery analyzes world literature's conceptual difficulties with Russian literature, which is neither quite Western or non-Western enough to fit into the schemes of twenty-first-century Western World Literature theorists such as Franco Moretti and Pascale Casanova. Maria Rubins discusses Russian diasporic writings from several different times as places as world literature and the ways in which they build worldliness into the text.While the volume is well conceived, wide-ranging, erudite, and rigorous, more focus on the Soviet Union's own national peripheries may have made the volume more topical in the current historical moment.

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