“[T]he 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.”

— Nikolaos Paraschis, CEU Review of Books

"World Literature in the Soviet Union demonstrates persuasively that World Literature can be productively conceptualised and analysed as a set of discrete grand projects, each with its own historically and culturally specific institutional and ideological underpinnings. The volume explores in both breadth and depth how Soviet projects of World Literature developed in tandem with the evolution of the Soviet Union’s more general politico-cultural positioning in the world. It at the same time provides important insights into the role that the idea of World Literature played in Soviet constructions of both internationalism and multiculturalism."

— Professor Andy Byford, Durham University

Galin Tihanov is the George Steiner Professor of Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of six books; The Birth and Death of Literary Theory: Regimes of Relevance in Russia and Beyond (Stanford UP, 2019) won the 2020 AATSEEL Prize for "Best Book in Literary Studies". He is currently working on world literature and cosmopolitanism.

Anne Lounsbery’s scholarship focuses on Russian, European and American prose fiction of the nineteenth century. She is the author of Life is Elsewhere: Symbolic Geography in the Russian Novel (Northwestern Illinois UP, 2019), Thin Culture, High Art: Gogol, Hawthorne, and Authorship in Nineteenth-Century Russia and America (Harvard University Press, 2007), and numerous articles on Russian literature.

Rossen Djagalov is Associate Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at NYU and an editor of LeftEast. His interests lie in the relationship between culture and Marxism, in Soviet(-bloc) internationalism, and the history of the left, from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. His first book, From Internationalism to Postcolonialism (2020), deals with Soviet-Third-World cultural engagements.

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Galin Tihanov, Rossen Djagalov, Anne Lounsbery

1.     World Literature in the Soviet Union: Infrastructure and Ideological Horizons

Galin Tihanov

2.     On the Worldliness of Russian Literature

Anne Lounsbery

3.       Armenian Literature as World Literature: Phases of Shaping it in the Pre-Soviet and Stalinist Contexts

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 

Katerina Clark

5.     “The Treasure Trove of World Literature”: Shaping the Concept of World Literature in Post-Revolutionary Russia 

Maria Khotimsky

6.     The Birth of New out of Old: Translation in Early Soviet History

Sergey Tyulenev

7.       International Literature: A Multi-Language Soviet Journal as a Model of “World Literature” of the Mid-1930s USSR 

Elena Ostrovskaya, Elena Zemskova, Evgeniia Belskaia, Georgii Korotkov

8.       Translating China into International Literature: Stalin-Era World Literature Beyond the West

Edward Tyerman

9.     World Literature and Ideology: The Case of Socialist Realism

Schamma Schahadat

10.   Premature Postcolonialists: The Afro-Asian Writers’ Association (1958–1991) and Its Literary Field 

Rossen Djagalov

11.    Can “Worldliness” Be Inscribed into the Literary Text?: Russian Diasporic Writing in the Context of World Literature 

Maria Rubins

Contributors

Index