Persianate Verse and the Poetics of Eastern Internationalism

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. =Contents= Cover 02 Half-title page 03 Series page 04 Title page 05 Copyright page 06 Contents 07 List of Figures 08 Acknowledgments 09 Technical Note - Translation Transliteration and Dates 10 Introduction - Persinate, Eastern, International - Geographies, Forms, Periodizations 11 Chapter 1 Tribunes - The Newspaper Poetry of Eastern Revolution, 1905–1925 12 Chapter 2 Canons - Classical Persianate Voices in National and International Literary Institutions, 1921–1948 13 Chapter 3 Occasions - Context Collapse in the Multinational System of Socialist Realism, 1934–1938 14 Chapter 4 Translations - Sentimental Internationalism and Its Eastern Love Languages, 1941–1972 15 Chapter 5 Recognitions - Persianate Internationalism at the Ends of Soviet Empire, 1958–2023 16 Conclusion - Old Verses for a Persianate Internationalist Future 17 Appendix A Commemorative Compendium (Tazkira) of Writers, Scholars, Bureaucrats, and Saints 18 Notes 19 Bibliography 20 Index