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Eurasia Without Borders: The Dream of a Leftist Literary Commons, 1919–1943

2023; Penn State University Press; Volume: 60; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/complitstudies.60.2.0397

1528-4212

Ali Behdad,

Soviet and Russian History

During the past two decades, the field of comparative literature has witnessed two major shifts in the interest of its practitioners, one toward postcolonial studies and the other a return to the idea of world literature. On the one hand, thanks to the publication of Edward Said’s 1978 seminal book, Orientalism, a new generation of comparativists have not only attended to the political implications of literary representations, but they have also turned their critical attention to the literature of the formerly colonized people. On the other hand, other scholars have reworked Goethe’s notion of Weltliteratur to articulate a new understanding of comparative literature as world literature—an approach that does not merely eschew national boundaries but incorporates more rigorously literary works from across the globe. Although these two scholarly movements both attempt to deconstruct comparative literature’s Eurocentrism, they work out of different, if not opposing, ideological poles. While scholars of comparative postcolonialism tend to be more political in their criticism and generally focus on the literature of the global south, those advocating the idea of comparative literature as world literature have been mostly formalistic in their approach and have broached a broader range of literary works in their studies, albeit in translation.Katerina Clark’s magistral Eurasia Without Borders is located at the intersection of these new directions in comparative literature. Mining a wide range of understudied literary and cinematic works by Russian, European, and Asian authors, many of whom were affiliated with Soviet cultural institutions during the interwar period, the book aims to explore the “missing link between world literature as it emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and world literature as it has preoccupied theorists and cultural historians in recent decades” (9). Clark uses the meeting of the Congress of the Toilers of the East in Baku on September 1, 1920, which included delegates from the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and the Far East as the starting point for what she describes as “the dream of creating a leftist Eurasian cultural space” (2). Organized by the Comintern or Communist International, the goal of the conference was both to internationalize the communist revolution and to help anti-imperialist national liberation movements across Asia. In narrating the story of the interwar literary international, Clark also posits “the idea that the ‘Moscow’-oriented interwar internationalist, anti-imperialist movement in literature can be seen as a predecessor of the postcolonialist” (363). Despite the fact that the Eurasia without borders project was “tenuous,” its geographic reach extremely limited and its progress at best “faltering,” she claims that the various congresses organized by Comintern and other Soviet agencies were the beginning of an anti-imperialist form of world literature, one that was meant to work against the more established, Eurocentric literary “worlds” that Pascale Casanova and other theorists of world literature have described (9).Although the literary international of Comintern and Bolshevik officials was marked by asymmetry, Clark argues that the project of Eurasia was created both “vertically” through ideological directives from Moscow and “horizontally” through a wider set of encounters between leftist intellectuals. To attend to these different forces, she insightfully makes a distinction between “the literary international, a formation comprising organizations and individuals who were linked because they sought to establish a Eurasian cultural space of the left and/or subscribed to the anti-imperialist or antifascist causes,” and “the ecumene . . . a more amorphous and never formally constituted body of roughly like-minded writers, who were not necessarily members of any leftist party or implicated in any of the institutions of the literary international, but who to a significant degree shared their anti-imperialist or antifascist sentiments” (23/24, emphasis in original). While the first group of writers constituted a concrete and organized community, the ecumene was a more “mental orientation and identification with the anti-imperialist cause” (24).The book which is more a literary history than a theoretical work is divided into two main sections that deal mostly with relations, influences, and interactions among European, mostly Russian, and a small group of Asian writers: in the first part, she elaborates how, during 1919–1930, writers from Asia and Soviet Union “responded to the call for a unified Eurasian cultural space,” while the second deals with the broadening of the ecumene from 1930 to 1943 in response to the rise of fascism (37). In the first chapter of part one, for example, she focuses on the literary career and anti-imperialist activism of the Turkish writer Nâzim Hikmet (1902–1963) to elaborate the complicated relation between vernacular, Asian cultures, and the dominance of Marxist models of literature dictated from Moscow, while in the second, she comparatively studies the works of the Persian–Kurdish writer Abolqasem Lahouti (1887–1957) and the Russian avant-garde poet Velimir Khlebnikov (1885–1922) to demonstrate the ways in which Persian classical literature was appropriated by the newly-formed literary and educational institutions in the Soviet Union, most notably the Communist University of Toilers of the East (KUTV), to create a transregional revolutionary culture. Similarly, in the final chapter of the first section, she looks at the creative and activist works of four internationalist figures, Sergei Tretyakov (1892–1937), Boris Pilnyak (1894–1938), André Malraux (1901–1976), and Qu Qiubai (1899–1935) who in different ways mitigated the information and knowledge gap between East Asia and the Soviet Union. Her aim in discussing these works is to demonstrate that “the ecumene not only was a centrifugal movement with Moscow as metropole but also comprised individuals and groups who sought lateral links, a looser pattern of affiliation, and a more fluid aesthetic” (198).In the second part of the book, Clark takes the international writers’ conference on November 6, 1930, in Kharkov as the dividing point in the literary international—a division marked by a westward incline and an ideological shift from anti-imperialism to anti-fascism. For example, she shows how Russian and German cinematic and theatrical works about China—such as Vsevolod Pudovkin’s 1928 Storm Over Asia, Yakov Bliokh’s 1928 Shanghai Document, Sergei Tretyakov’s 1924 Roar China!, and Friedrich Wolf’s 1930 Tai Yang Awakens—helped the emergence of a new mode of artistic expression that was hybrid in that it incorporated tropes from the Soviet-sponsored literature without necessarily following its characteristically revolutionary plot. In a similar vein, she studies the works of Anglo-Indian writer Mulk Raj Anand (1905–2004) in the context of certain historical shifts such as the formation of the Soviet Writers’ Union in 1932, which led to the displacement of proletarian-oriented literature by social realism and the coming to power of the Nazis in Germany that helped the creation of a more liberal approach to literature. Her broader aim here is to understand the way in which writers like Anand negotiated the competing demands of nationalism and internationalism during the 1930s by elaborating on the “bi- or multidirectional flows of ideas, texts, and literary models during this period” (283).While Clark’s attempt to fill the “glaring lacuna in standard accounts of world literature” is praiseworthy, Eurasia Without Borders contains a number of lacunae of its own (9). To cite one conspicuous example, the book overlooks a crucial and important body of literary works by Turkic Muslim writers on the periphery of the Soviet Union during the revolutionary period in the 1920s, when an alternative or avant-garde Azari literary aesthetic emerged. As Leah Feldman has convincingly argued in her compelling study of this literature, On the Threshold of Eurasia: Revolutionary Poetics in the Caucasus (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018), Russian and Muslim cultural interactions well proceeded the Russian Revolution. Also, remains unexamined in Clark’s study is the nuanced interplay between Russian Orientalism and anticolonial Marxism that one witnesses in Azari literature from the revolutionary period. She is quick to dismiss Michael Kemper’s notion of “Red Orientalism,” and yet as it becomes abundantly evident in her discussion of works by Fyodor Raskolnikov (1892–1939), Larisa Reisner (1895–1926), and Lev Nikulin (1891–1967)—all members of the Soviet mission of 1921 to Afghanistan and who were sent there both to help with anti-imperialist movements and “to forge new narratives and discourses for the Soviet Russians’ engagement with the East” (125)—is the fact that despite their seemingly anti-imperialist intentions, these authors perpetuated an orientalist vision of the East in their writings about Afghanistan by relying on exoticist tropes from prerevolutionary Russian literature and British imperialist works by H. Rider Haggard and Rudyard Kipling.More importantly, Eurasia Without Borders leaves underexplored the irony of how the leftist anti-imperialist works that the officials and cultural institutions of the Soviet Union promoted as “proletarian” world literature were almost exclusively written by highly educated and privileged intellectuals with little or no knowledge of the cultures and languages of Asian societies. It should come as no surprise that the writers of literary international could not ultimately “bridge the gap between ‘socialist content’ and vernacular traditions,” nor could they successfully translate “European concepts to the different Asian languages,” as Clark acknowledges in passing (20/21).In Forget English! Orientalism and World Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), Aamir Mufti has powerfully critiqued the dominance of an anglophone form of world literature in the Euro-American academy, which has not only perpetuated the hegemony of English as the language of critique and literary studies but also marginalized a large body of literary works from the global South. Although the texts that Clark studies in her book tend to be some of the works that Mufti has in mind in his critique, Eurasia Without Borders falls short of tackling the perennial problem of monolingualism in Euro-American literary studies—in this case, the hegemony of Russian language—in its attempt to rectify the Eurocentrism of world literature. As a result, despite Clark’s consistent claims about the multidirectional nature of literary and cultural exchanges in Eurasia, the type of cultural expressions that were advocated at various Soviet-sponsored congresses and institutions, and executed by Eurasian authors she studies, were firmly grounded in Marxist–Leninist ideology dictated from Moscow and as such constituted a form of cultural imperialism.