Writing in Red

Literature and Revolution Across Turkey and the Soviet Union
Erscheinungsjahr 2024
ISBN: 978-0-231-21484-1
Verlag: Columbia University Press

Buch, Englisch, 360 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm

Reihe: Modernist Latitudes

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 Dervis, 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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Erturk, Nergis

Ertürk, Nergis

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturen sonstiger Sprachräume Literatur des Nahen Ostens & Nordafrikas
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Slawische Literaturen Ostslawische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Naher & Mittlerer Osten
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Europäische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Strömungen & Epochen

Inhaltsverzeichnis

A Note on Translation, Transliteration, and Usage
Acknowledgments
Introduction. Revolutionary Entanglements Across Turkey and the Soviet Union: An Overview
Part I. Genres of Entangled Revolutions
1. The Turkish War of Independence in Literature and Film: Limits of Marxist-Leninist Nationalism and Legacies for the Postcolonial Era
2. Va^la^ Nureddin’s Comic Materialism and the Sexual Revolution
Part II. Marxian Form in the Periphery: Modernist Socialist Realisms
3. The Prostitute Cevriye as Positive Hero: Suat Dervis and the Ethics of the Socialist-Realist Novel
4. Abidin Dino’s Peasant Theater and the Soviet Faktura: Estranging Socialist Realism
5. In the Shadow of Lenin: Nâzim Hikmet’s Prose Poetics of Seriality and the Time of (Post)communism
Conclusion: In the Anteroom of History
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Nergis Ertürk is associate professor of comparative literature at Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey (2011), which received the Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book, and the editor of the journal Comparative Literature Studies.