The Soviet Literary Cosmopolis

The “Soviet literary cosmopolis” is the name of an approach that provokes and challenges both the more traditional approaches to world literature and seeks to go beyond the approaches of postcolonial studies by, on the one hand, taking into account imperial continuities beyond political ruptures (the October Revolution, Stalinism, post-Stalinism) and, on the other hand, identifying actors in literature beyond the boundaries between official and “uncensored” literature that have been set in stone in previous research. The contributions highlight two distinct and yet interconnected trajectories of the ‘Soviet Project for World Literature’: the internal of the “Soviet multinational literature” and the international one, with adaptation, translation, and the implementation of Socialist Realist aesthetics being some of the central strategies for its realization. The combination of case studies on the implementation of the project in Armenian, Georgian, Kyrgyz, Kazakhstani, and Ukrainian literary contexts with analyses of African, American, and East European cases allows the volume to demonstrate how in a period of roughly fifty years, the Soviet State was creating – by means of literature – a new ‘World’ that stood in sharp contrast to and was envisaged as a viable alternative to its Western counterpart, a decidedly Eurocentric and capitalist ‘World’ concept.