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.

This book shows how Persianate poetics and communist internationalism brought together 20th-century writers from across Eurasia.

The republic of Turkey and the Soviet Union both emerged from the wreckage of empires surrounding World War I, and pathways of literary exchange soon opened between the two revolutionary states. Even as the Turkish government pursued a friendly relationship with the USSR, it began to persecute communist writers. Whether going through official channels or fleeing repression, many Turkish writers traveled to the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 1930s, publishing original work, editing prominent literary journals, and translating both Russian classics and Soviet literature into Turkish. Writing in Red traces the literary and exilic itineraries of Turkish communist and former communist writers, examining revolutionary aesthetics and politics across Turkey and the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s through the 1960s. Nergis Ertürk considers a wide range of texts—spanning genres such as erotic comedy, historical fiction and film, and socialist realist novels and theater—by writers including Nâzim Hikmet, Vâlâ Nureddin, Nizamettin Nazif, Suat Derviş, and Abidin Dino. She argues that these works belong simultaneously to modern Turkish literature, a transnational Soviet republic of letters, and the global literary archive of world revolution, alongside those of other writers who made the “magic pilgrimage” to Moscow. Exploring how Turkish communist writers on the run produced a remarkable transnational literature of dissent, Writing in Red offers a new account of global revolutionary literary culture.

This book engages with Naipaul's literary corpus and reconceptualizes what it means to be a writer of world literature.

This book is a radical reimagination of the idea of the literary through colonial histories and world literature.

'Poetic speech is a pearl, connected to the king's ear.' This statement gestures to words as objects of material value sought by those with power and resources. The author provides a sense for the texture of the Persian world by discussing what made poetry precious. By focusing on reports on poets' lives, they illuminate the social scene in which poetry was produced and consumed. The discussion elicits poetry's close connections to political and religious authority, economic exchange, and the articulation of gender. At the broadest level, the study substantiates the interdependency between cultural and material reproduction of society.

Through a series of insightful and sophisticated readings, this book reveals the worldliness of premodern Persian poetry. It traces the political role of poetry in shaping the prison poem genre (habsiyyat) across 12th-century Central, South and West Asia. Bringing theorists as wide ranging as Kantorowicz, Benjamin and Adorno into conversation with classical Persian poetics, this book offers an unprecedented account of prison poetry before modernity, and of premodern Persianate culture within the framework of world literature and global politics.