A pluralistic look at Soviet engagement with World Literature

Nikolaos Paraschis provides an in-depth review of World Literature in the Soviet Union edited by Galin Tihanov, Anne Lounsbery and Rossen Djagalov (Academic Studies Press, 2023). Paraschis writes that this indispensable volume provides an excellent opportunity for an entirely new framework for historically and theoretically discussing “World Literature.” 

Owing partly to the many intricacies of post-Cold War academic realities, the undeniably significant and pioneering impetuses and initiatives in the Soviet Union in creating, shaping and/or promoting conceptions and canons of “World Literature” have historically been much maligned in Western academic writing on world literature, anglophone or otherwise. To name just one particularly telling instance, as provided by Maria Khotimsky in her article in the very volume under review, in the few paragraphs afforded to Maxim Gorky’s monumental International Literature (Vsemirnaya Literatura) project, launched just after the October Revolution of 1917, in The Routledge Concise History of World Literature, the project is dismissed as “socialist realist desiderata under the guise of Goethean Verständnis between Europe’s, and later the world’s, various people’s.”¹  The lamentable hastiness of this dismissal is revealed, if anything, by the chronological imprecision that any expert in Soviet literature would be quick to address: “Socialist realism” did not really find its headway as a cultural-ideological literary framework for the Soviet Union until the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, a good fifteen years after the founding of Vsemirnaya Literatura.

Thankfully, the exploration of Soviet efforts in translation and promotion of (its own) conceptions of World Literature in western academia has recently been on the rise. Outside a myriad of dedicated academic articles, edited volumes such as Translation Under Communism (recently reviewed in the CEURB) and monographs such as Natalia Komavnikova’s Made Under Pressure: Literary Translation in the Soviet Union, 1960-1991 have touched on the proliferation of foreign works in the Soviet scene and the conditions of their translation. Of the works focusing on particular languages and/or “nationalities” and their place in the Soviet world literary “system,” Niovi Zampouka’s Sozrealismus erzählen und übersetzen: Von der Sowjetunion nach Griechenland und retour, for instance, offers a case study of the absorption of the Modern Greek national heritage, its sociopolitical ramifications and the many interpersonal, publishing and bureaucratic negotiations involved in its World Literary canonisation.

Partly based on the proceedings of workshops on world literature in the Soviet Union held at Queen Mary University of London and at New York University, the volume under review, however, presents the very first systematic historical and literary-critical investigation of the World Literary projects to emerge from Soviet institutions and actors, from the very foundation of the revolutionary state to its ultimate collapse in 1991 and beyond. This consistent examination of Soviet engagements with world literature is achieved through multiple institutional and disciplinary perspectives and, rather importantly in the reviewer’s opinion, involves the parallel discussion not only of the precedents and equivalents to Soviet World Literature publication ventures in pre-revolutionary Russian and the West, but also the reverberation of such ventures and their collapse in post-Cold War sociopolitical and academic domains. As per the volume’s introduction, the goal of this compilation of texts is to provide a valuable contribution to current debates on world literature beyond Slavic and related studies, enabling the reader to think beyond “the agendas of Anglopohne academe” (p. ix).

In total, the volume offers eleven unique articles from both Western and Russian scholars from the fields of translation studies, history, comparative literature, and Slavic and Eastern European studies, and structurally follows a more-or-less chronological order, moving from 19^th-century Russian novels to the post-Soviet literary Russophone diaspora.

Essentially acting as the volume’s introduction (the actual introductory text, save for an explication of the article contents, is but a paragraph long), Galin Tihanov’s “World Literature in the Soviet Union: Infrastructure and Ideological Horizons” perfectly introduces the field of Soviet World Literature studies by explicating the multiplicity inherent in the concept of world literature and its manifestation in the Soviet project, focused as it variously was on a non-Occidentalist approach. Offering the historical tapestry of the evolution of world literary concepts and their congruence with literary theory from the very founding of the Soviet state, Tihanov identifies three main ideological horizons for World Literary efforts in the Union: the humanistic, the global leftist, and the anti-colonial. He further discusses the function of world literary frameworks in the works of Soviet theoreticians Mikhail Bakhtin and Nikolai Konrad, as well as how world literature discourses affected other related literary debates in the USSR, such as that over Russian Formalism, the existence of a Russian literary (pre)Renaissance and the resurgence of interest in Romanticism.

Shifting focus away from the 20^th and onto the 19^th century, Anne Lounsberry’s “On the Worldliness of Russian Literature” argues for the intriguing thesis that the Russian pre-revolutionary novelistic tradition “predicted” its own exclusion from discourses on world literature by literary theorists of the 20^th and 21^st centuries. According to Lounsberry, the authors of this tradition were keenly aware that they and their works existed in their own spatiotemporal literary dimension, situated neither on the periphery but neither in the so called Parisian literary “centre”, not belonging to the “modern world” in the “eurochronological” sense but not exactly “backwards” either. Among other things, Lounsberry evidences this conclusion through the descriptions of provincial temporal incoherence in such novels, which ultimately casts doubt on any sort of domineering chronological discourse with regards to the state or development of (world) literature.

In the volume’s first national/language case study, Susanne Frank in “Armenian Literature as World Literature: Phases of Shaping it in the Pre-Soviet and Stalinist Contexts” historically traces and compares two compilations of Armenian literature in the Russian/Soviet space, that of Poeziia Armenia, edited by Valerii Briusov, and Gorky’s Sbornik Armianskoi Literatury, with the latter presented as a partly Armenian-headed effort to re-contextualise Armenian national literature in a world literary register. The spearheading of these efforts by Armenians themselves is a matter of no small importance for Frank, who highlights how most processes of world literary integration either in Russia or the Soviet Union usually involved a top-down, domineering approach. The result was that both projects constituted, in their own way, a double effort on the part of Armenian literati of inclusion into a world literary community and nation-building.

Similarly, Edward Tyerman in “Translating China into International Literature: Stalin-Era World literature Beyond the West” investigates the first large-scale translations of modern Chinese literature into Russian hosted by the International Literature journal and its predecessors. Contextualised in the history of Sino-Soviet politico-cultural relations during the 1920s and 1930s and the intellectuals who shaped them on both sides, Tyerman pays particular emphasis to how the evidently glaring cultural gaps between the Chinese and Russian/Soviet worlds were negotiated and the translation philosophies variously pursued. 

Solely focusing on Gorky’s (overtly) ambitious Vsemirnaya Literature project, Maria Khotimsky explores the early pioneering conceptions of world literature as explicated and suggested in the various paratexts written for its published translations, thereby showing the contested nature of the field of culture in the early post-revolutionary years. Khotimsky also critically explores the continuity between pre- and post-revolutionary efforts in assembling world literary works in the Russian space, showcasing more coherence, and less of a sharp break, between them than has often been assumed. Perhaps most importantly, the almost audacious monumentality of Vsemirnaya Literature is here ultimately done justice by showing how far it exceeded similar efforts either in tsarist Russia or the contemporary West. The article is moreover well complemented by Sergey Tyulenev’s following chapter “The Birth of New out of Old: Translation in Early Soviet History”, which focuses on related translation efforts in the Soviet Union, mostly in the context of the said project.

Acting as a type of continuation of Gorky’s Vsemirnaya Literature was the multi-language journal initiative also called “International Literature,” which is investigated here using digital humanities methodologies by Elena Ostrovskaya, Elena Zemskova, Evgeniia Belskaia and Georgii Korotkov in “International Literature: A Multi-Language Soviet Journal as a Model of ‘World Literature’ of the mid-1930s USSR”. Concentrating on the years 1934 and 1935, the period of the First Congress of Soviet Writers (Moscow) and the International Anti-Fascist Congress of Writers (Paris), the authors present “International Literature” as an attempted “utopian space of world literature” and part and parcel of an imagined “communist commons,” visualising in detail its world-literary networks in the process.

Focusing on related ventures after the Second World War, yet another highlight of the volume is Rossen Djagalov’s “Premature Postcolonialists: The Afro-Asian Writers’ Association (1958-1991) and its Literary Field”. Djagalov traces the history of the Soviet-sponsored “Afro-Asian Writers Association” from preceding interwar efforts to the collapse of the Union, expertly contextualising its activities in contemporary Cold War geopolitical realities. Critically, this article helps to show how ultimately indebted post-colonialist academic dynamics in the Western World and beyond are to past Marxist, pro-Soviet and Third wordlist ideologies and undertakings, of which the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association was a principal element.

Overall, the volume is successful in its stated aims and constitutes a vital inroad into the study and historical placement of pioneering Soviet efforts in World Literature, providing a much-needed counterweight to the broadly acknowledged Eurocentrism of a great deal of World Literature studies. The volume also benefits from the variety of methods and disciplines on display, ranging from historiographical and literary-critical readings to methodologies more relevant to intellectual history and the digital humanities. The reader also gains from a well-distanced historical perspective throughout, with the volume’s constituent studies often contextualising their source material in the history of discourses on and around World Literature, from Goethe and Marx to Damrosch and Moretti. 

If one were to surmise a rather significant macro-historical “takeaway” from the collective reading of this volume’s articles, one could say that the history of World Literature in the Soviet Union can be described as “cataclysmic,” or punctuated by “cataclysms,” both in the neutral and negative senses of the word. The 1917 revolution, and the impetus it provided for a literary (revolutionary) internationalism, the Great Purges and High Stalinism, with the resultant (though not fatal) destruction of, among many other things, the Union’s world literary aspirations, and the Union’s collapse in 1991, heralding the phasing out of literary Third-Worldism in favour of post-colonial discourses, are just three of the more notable “cataclysms” one could speak of.

In terms of drawbacks, the work could have benefited significantly from a lengthier introduction and/or a concluding chapter, positioning the volume’s findings and research trajectories in the history of World Literature studies and prevailing discourses in the field, as well as providing a theoretical framework through which to understand the very concept of World Literature and its history in the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, as was mentioned above, what the reader is left with is a brief paragraph explicating the project with the remainder of the introduction focused on summarizing the subsequent chapters. Another substantial improvement could have been the inclusion of more chapters exclusively dedicated to a particular language and or “national literature” and their absorption and assimilation as part of a Soviet-led World Literature. There is also a marked imbalance in historical perspective, with only two of the eleven articles specifically discussing World Literature initiatives in and by the Soviet Union post-Second World War.

That said, the indispensability of such a volume should remain unquestioned. Both theoretically and in terms of its empirical findings, this work will in future surely act as a base effort to be supplemented and enriched by further studies that will take it upon themselves to address some of the volume’s less-explored areas. Herein lies the opportunity for an entirely new framework for historically and theoretically discussing “World Literature.”