World Literature in the Soviet Union

WORLD 
LITERATURE 
IN THE 
SOVIET UNION

Studies in Comparative Literature and Intellectual History
Series Editor
Galin Tihanov (Queen Mary University of London)
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For more information on this series, please visit:
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WORLD 
LITERATURE 
IN THE 
SOVIET UNION
Edited by 
Galin Tihanov, 
Anne Lounsbery, 
and Rossen Djagalov 
B O S T O N
2 0 2 3

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023042825
Сopyright © 2023, Academic Studies Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN 9798887194158 (hardback)
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On the cover: Maksim Gorky with the staff of Vsemirnaia Literatura, 1919.  
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Contents
	
Acknowledgments
vii
	
Introduction
ix
	
Galin Tihanov, Anne Lounsbery, and Rossen Djagalov 
1.	 World Literature in the Soviet Union: Infrastructure and 
Ideological Horizons
1
	
Galin Tihanov
2.	 On the Worldliness of Russian Literature
25
	
Anne Lounsbery
3.	 Armenian Literature as World Literature: Phases of Shaping 
it in the Pre-Soviet and Stalinist Contexts
35
	
Susanne Frank 
4.	 The Roles of "Form" and "Content" in World Literature as 
Discussed by Viktor Shklovsky in His Writings of the 
Immediately Post-Revolutionary Years 
67
	
Katerina Clark
5.	 “The Treasure Trove of World Literature”: Shaping the 
Concept of World Literature in Post-Revolutionary Russia 
91
	
Maria Khotimsky
6.	 The Birth of New out of Old: Translation in Early Soviet History
119
	
Sergey Tyulenev
7.	 International Literature: A Multi-Language Soviet Journal as a 
Model of “World Literature” of the Mid-1930s USSR 
137
	
Elena Ostrovskaya, Elena Zemskova, Evgeniia Belskaia, Georgii Korotkov

  8.	 Translating China into International Literature: 
Stalin-Era World Literature Beyond the West
165
	
Edward Tyerman
  9.	 World Literature and Ideology: The Case of Socialist Realism
189
	
Schamma Schahadat
10.	 Premature Postcolonialists: The Afro-Asian 
Writers’ Association (1958–1991) and Its Literary Field 
207
	
Rossen Djagalov
11.	 Can “Worldliness” Be Inscribed into the Literary Text?: 
Russian Diasporic Writing in the Context of World Literature 
237
	
Maria Rubins
	
Contributors
263
	
Index
267

Acknowledgments
The volume is based, in part, on the proceedings of workshops on world literature in the Soviet Union held at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) 
and at New York University (NYU). The London workshop was organized 
under the auspices of the Open World Research Initiative (OWRI) funded by 
the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The New York workshop was sponsored by the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia at 
NYU which also provided a generous subvention that made the publication of 
the book possible. The editors extend their gratitude to both the UK AHRC 
and the NYU Jordan Centre for the Advanced Study of Russia. Thanks also to 
Academic Studies Press (ASP) for accepting this volume in its series on comparative literature and intellectual history, to Alessandra Anzani and Ekaterina 
Yanduganova for their expert editorial assistance, and to Alana Felton for her 
excellent work as copyeditor.
 

Introduction
Russian interest in world literature predates 1917, but it was the October 
Revolution that gave special impetus to this attention so that it could begin to 
materialize, not least through generous state support.1 The contributions to this 
wide-ranging volume, the first to consistently examine Soviet engagement with 
world literature from multiple institutional and disciplinary perspectives (intellectual literary; literary history and theory; comparative literature; translation 
studies; diaspora studies, to name but a few), focus on Soviet Russia, encompassing a period of some seventy years, while not neglecting the post-Soviet 
space where preoccupations with world literature continue to be relevant in the 
context of Russophone (often diasporic) writing. Our emphasis is on the lessons one could learn from the Soviet attention to world literature, both institutionally and intellectually; as such, we hope that the present volume would 
make a significant contribution to current debates on world literature beyond 
the field of Slavic and East European Studies and would foreground the need to 
think of world literature pluralistically, in a manner that is not restricted by the 
agendas of Anglophone academe.
***
The opening chapter of the volume, by Galin Tihanov, seeks to ‘multiply’ 
world literature and demonstrate that there is no world literature per se, but 
rather different world literatures, because at different times different communities produce different constructs that they label as world literature. Foremost 
amongst the lessons one could draw from the Soviet engagement with world 
literature is the compelling determination of Soviet intellectuals to conceive of 
world literature in a systematically non-Occidentocentric manner. With this, 
the Soviets were pioneering an approach to world literature that foreshadows 
our current concerns. But there is also another lesson emerging from the Soviet 
preoccupation with world literature: the conversation on world literature does 
1	
For earlier accounts of the Soviet engagement with world literature, see the literature in 
Galin Tihanov's contribution to this volume (esp. page 5 footnote 4).

x
I n t r o d u c t i o n
not proceed in a vacuum, it is constantly interacting with, impacting on, and 
being impacted by, the conversation societies have about national literatures 
and literary theory. The chapter begins by briefly adumbrating four historically 
attestable meanings of ‘world literature,’ some of which can be seen at work in 
the Soviet discourse on world literature; it then identifies three different cultural and ideological horizons (or frameworks) of thinking about world literature in the Soviet Union and, significantly, locates their common ground—the 
glue that bound them together—in the master approach of de-Westernizing the 
very notion of world literature, an attitude consistently enacted by Soviet intellectuals engaging with the history of world literature.
The second chapter, Anne Lounsbery’s “On the Worldliness of Russian 
Literature,” opens with an inventory of Russia’s omissions from world literature 
scholarship. Rather than viewing them as a lapse (because it seems implausible 
to assume that all these scholars simply forget about, say, Tolstoy), Lounsbery 
asks what has made this sort of erasure possible—or perhaps even necessary? Could serious acknowledgement of Russia throw a wrench into western 
models of World Literature? Must Russian literature be absent from systems 
like Casanova’s? Her answer to this question grows out of nineteenth-century 
Russian literary texts themselves. These texts reveal an inchoate awareness that 
a category like World Literature—as it is articulated in the West—will not be 
able to accommodate them. In effect, classical Russian novels predict the neglect 
they will suffer at the hands of such systems, which is precisely the neglect that 
the Soviets’ new conceptions of World Literature will aim to redress.
Most of the following chapters in this book are devoted to the Soviet project for World Literature. A consistent theme in some of them, however, are the 
continuities between Soviet and pre-revolutionary conceptualizations of World 
Literature and practical efforts to realize them. Thus, focusing on the example 
of Armenian literature, Susanne Frank’s chapter “Armenian Literature as World 
Literature: Phases of Shaping It in the Pre-Soviet and Stalinist Contexts” reconstructs the modelling of the national canon of Armenian literature from 1915 
throughout the twentieth century and demonstrates that already in the late 
imperial period, Armenian literature was conceptualized as “world literature.” 
The chapter also asks what happened to the canon when Armenian literature 
was reshaped as part of Soviet multinational literature and its most important 
contemporary representatives fell victim to Stalinism. It ends by retracing the 
phases of their re-canonization in later Soviet Union and in post-Soviet times.
By contrast, Katerina Clark’s chapter, “The Roles of ‘Form’ and ‘Content’ 
in World Literature as Discussed by Viktor Shklovsky in his Writings of the