Persianate Verse and the Poetics of Eastern Internationalism

by Samuel Hodgkin

Overview

At the height of literary nationalisms in the twentieth century, leftist internationalists from Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, India, and the Soviet East bonded over their shared love of the classical Persian verses of Hafiz and Khayyam. At writers' congresses and in communist literary journals, they affirmed their friendship and solidarity with lyric ghazals and ruba'iyat. Persianate poetry became the cultural commons for a distinctively Eastern internationalism, shaping national literatures in the Soviet Union, the Middle East, and South Asia. By the early Cold War, the literary entanglement between Persianate culture and communism had established models for cultural decolonization that would ultimately outlast the Soviet imperial project. In the archive of literature produced under communism in Persian, Tajik, Dari, Turkish, Uzbek, Azerbaijani, Armenian, and Russian, this book finds a vital alternative to Western globalized world literature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781009411639
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	12/21/2023
Series:	Cambridge Studies in World Literature
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.91(d)

About the Author

Samuel Hodgkin is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University. His articles have appeared in Comparative Literature Studies, Iranian Studies, Philological Encounters, Cahiers de Studia Iranica, and Cahiers d'Asie centrale.

Table of Contents

Introduction. Persianate/Eastern/International: Geographies, forms, periodizations; 1. Tribunes: the newspaper poetry of Eastern revolution, 1905–1925; 2. Canons: Classical Persianate voices in national and international literary institutions, 1921–1948; 3. Occasions: context collapse in the multinational system of socialist realism, 1934–1938; 4. Translations: sentimental internationalism and its Eastern love languages, 1941–1972; 5. Recognitions: persianate internationalism at the ends of Soviet empire, 1958–2023; Conclusion. Old verses for a Persianate internationalist future.