This chapter is a synchronic snapshot of the way that poems, speeches, sociability, and bureaucracy coalesced at Stalinist literary occasions. Here, literary representatives made their claims to representative authority and, on that basis, lent legitimacy to the multinational state and the international revolutionary project. The chapter follows the Iranian émigré poet Abu al-Qasim Lahuti through his performances at three multinational and international events over the course of 1934–1935: the First Soviet Writers’ Congress in Moscow; the Congress for the Defense of Culture in Paris; and Stalin’s Kremlin meeting with Tajik and Turkmen collective farmers at which the multinational “friendship of peoples” was declared. Lahuti’s exchanges at these events with writers such as Maxim Gorky, Romain Rolland, and André Gide contributed to the articulation of the role of the Eastern literary representative and the ceremonial of authoritarian mass politics in the Soviet Union and beyond. As Persianate forms left their traditional contexts and entered this Russocentric world literature system, their utility as rhetorical tools for negotiating patron–poet power relations collapsed, and they came to be read in translation as simple flattery. This chapter thus presents Soviet multinational socialist realism as an illustrative early instantiation of institutionalized world literature.

This chapter documents the constellation of films and literary works extending outward from the Eastern international in the late- and post-Soviet years when socialist internationalism pivoted from an east–west to a north–south axis and then dissipated (1960s–1990s). It affirms the enduring coherence of the Persianate literary space, now bound together by Soviet models of literary representation. The chapter samples the occasional poetry produced by Eastern literary representatives involved in Soviet–Third-World cultural diplomacy at Cold War literary congresses, especially through the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association. However, it also shows how artists gripped by classical Persianate forms continued to find and respond to each other after Soviet-backed literary institutions lost international legitimacy. The chapter discusses several Persian and Uzbek texts from the Soviet–Afghan War, including a leading Afghan communist literary bureaucrat’s mystical love poem to an Islamist insurgent, written continuously from 1980–2020. Its other central case study is the impact of the Soviet Armenian filmmaker Sergei Parajanov’s film The Color of Pomegranates as a model for Persianate poetics on film, including in the Islamic Republic of Iran, including in the art films of Muhsin Makhmalbaf. The chapter tempers the elegiac impulse of the post-Persianate left with an affirmation of the tradition’s continued vitality.

The conclusion reviews the arguments developed throughout the book. This summary is framed by a consideration of the changing meanings of the poetic figures of the rose and nightingale in the Persianate twentieth century. Accordingly, each chapter is elucidated through a reading of that chapter’s classical Persian or Turkic epigraph.

This chapter considers civic newspaper poetry in Persian and Azerbaijani Turkic as a site for the establishment of a new radical politics and poetics of representation during and after the entangled Russian, Iranian, and Ottoman revolutions of 1905–1911. In the historiography of Persian and Central Asian literature, these revolutions are generally considered to be catalysts for a literary modernity engaged with European models and genres. This chapter shows how the poetics of new modes of political representation came to be articulated in classical and folk verse forms (qasida, ghazal, lullaby) that had preexisting repertories of tools for establishing, negotiating, and contesting claims to representational legitimacy. Surveying the main types of periodicals (newspaper, literary journal, satirical journal), the chapter shows how poets developed different styles for different venues, focusing on ‘Ali-akbar Sabir, lead poet of the Azerbaijani satirical journal Mulla Nasreddin. The chapter next considers how poets reworked court panegyric to glorify the parliaments and revolutionary parties that contested royal sovereignty, focusing on the newspaper verse of the Iranian poets Abu al-Qasim Lahuti and Adib al-Mamalik. Lastly, the chapter follows the transfer of the allegorical patriotic lullaby from Azerbaijan to Iran, focusing on the role of the Iranian publisher Nasim-i Shumal.

At the twentieth-century height of literary nationalisms, leftist internationalists from across Eurasia bonded over their shared love of the classical Persian poets. At writers’ congresses and in communist and third-worldist literary journals, the poets of Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, South Asia, and Soviet Central Eurasia addressed each other in ghazals and ruba‘iyat that affirmed their friendship and solidarity. This book shows how Persian poetry became a commons for Eastern internationalism in the early twentieth century, just as the last Persianate empires dissolved into new nation-states and Soviet republics. It considers the relationship between national literatures and internationalism in Eurasia over the course of the century when the fates of communism and the Persian cultural heritage were intimately linked. The result is a proper accounting of the modern fate of Persianate culture. The disruptive effects of nationalization and vernacularization, usually understood as the end of the Persianate, here become legible as a process of sublation that turned the transnational community of Persophone writers and readers into the constituency for a distinctively Eastern internationalism. In the archive of poetry and criticism that this community produced, Persianate Verse finds a vital alternative to world literature as we know it.

This chapter argues that from late Stalinism to the Khrushchev Thaw (1941–1964), Eastern poets and orientalist translators inflected multinational and international translation with a distinctively Persianate ethics of love and hospitality. The chapter develops an account of a mid-century internationalist sentimentality grounded in translation, which prefigures subsequent attempts in feminist theory to reconfigure the patriarchal idea of translation as possessive love into a more receptive model of translation. The opening section challenges the established Soviet and Russian studies narrative in which multinational literature is said to have been invented in Russian translation, showing Eastern poets’ active involvement in programming their own reception. A series of case studies follow. One section considers the collaborations of Uzbek and Russian poets on bilingual poems of hospitality for the Jewish refugees flooding Tashkent during the Second World War. Another shows how the embedded sonnets of Romeo and Juliet were brought into the ghazal mode in Tajik translation. Another shows how the Turkish poet Nazım Hikmet’s theater adaptation of the classical romance Farhad and Shirin sparked Thaw literature debates in Russian and Turkic translations. Poets discussed include Ghafur Ghulam, Anna Akhmatova, Konstantin Simonov, and Zhala Isfahani.

The introduction sketches the history of literary internationalism in the communist East. Throughout much of Central Eurasia, South Asia, and the Middle East, modern socialist and anticolonial revolutionary movements have drawn on a shared non-European political, intellectual, and artistic culture whose canonical forms and models were born in Persian. For this reason, throughout the twentieth century, the fate of Persianate culture was deeply intertwined with the fate of communist internationalism in Eurasia. This introduction establishes the basis for the book’s basic conceptual categories: Persianate, Eastern, transnational, multinational, international, and world poetics. The Persianate functions in this book as a repertory of cultural forms rather than a civilizational unity. The distinction between transnational and international is also crucial to the book that narrates the process by which a transnational cosmopolitanism of ordinary people was replaced by an international friendship between nations performed by an elite corps of literary representatives and the practical commons of Persianate forms turned into the reified political unity of the revolutionary East. For this process, the introduction provides a periodization based on generations of Eastern internationalist writers, each illustrated by several short biographical examples.

This chapter traces the transformation of the Persian poetic classics from a living textual corpus into a pantheon of heritage objects for the use of national literary institutions. Its focus is on the creation of national literatures for the Soviet eastern republics of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Azerbaijan from their establishment until the late Stalin period, but it shows how those literatures coevolved with Iranian and Turkish national canons, and with cosmopolitan and international post-Persianate canons. In its readings of the major classical poets Rudaki, Firdawsi, Khayyam, Nizami, Nava’i, and Bidil in modern anthologies, commentaries, and theatrical adaptations, the chapter emphasizes the asynchronous intervention of the classical poets themselves in their reception. The creation of these national literatures was a successful contestation of the representative authority of Western orientalists by national scholars, writers, and cultural officials, which would be widely imitated by postcolonial state cultural bureaucracies during the Cold War. The chapter’s central episodes are a series of anthologies published in Istanbul and Moscow in the early 1920s for Turcophone readerships; the founding Tajik anthology composed by Sadr al-Din ‘Ayni; the attack on the canon mounted by Central Asian radical folklorist–critics; and the Stalinist jubilees for classical Persianate poets.