Writing in Red: Literature and Revolution Across Turkey and the Soviet Union(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 Derviş, 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.

Table of Contents:
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. Vâlâ 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 Derviş 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: Nâzım Hikmet’s Prose Poetics of Seriality and the Time of (Post)communism Conclusion: In the Anteroom of History Notes Bibliography Index

About the Author :
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.

Review :
Writing in Red offers a fascinating and vibrant history of global revolutionary literary culture and modernist aesthetics. Beautifully written, this ambitious and original book is based on impressive research and careful excavation of major Turkish leftist writers and their relationship with Soviet Russia. In this marvelously researched book, Nergis Ertürk draws on the entangled histories of the Russian and Turkish revolutions to make us rethink the boundaries of the literary space created by the calamitous aftermath of the Great War. A remarkable achievement. Highlighting a long-occluded literary archive, Ertürk brilliantly uses the entangled Anatolian and Bolshevik revolutions to unravel persistent binaries such as modernism-realism and nationalism-internationalism. The result is a montage of aesthetic and political projects that together decenter the Soviet republic of letters while smuggling radical futures past into our counterrevolutionary present. Showcases the creative range of Turkish literary responses to the promise of world revolution, challenging any account of global leftist literatures as monolithic and formulaic.