Persianate Verse and the Poetics of Eastern Internationalism

One night, the moth began to shareIts tale of love to those who were there:“Since I spread my wings in flight,The candle was my heart’s delight.And from the hour it stirred my soul,I made a vow and made it my goal.I swore as long as life shall stay,To worship it, come what may.”Any reader with modest familiarity with Persianate poetry would recognize the poem’s central metaphor in English translation: “the moth and the flame,” or parvāneh o shamʿ. It symbolizes the self-annihilating love that follows fatal attraction in the epiphanic moment. Unlike the premodern tradition it draws upon, this poem does not apostrophize an object of desire—whether earthly or divine—but instead exalts a sociopolitical cause:Ahmad Nazhaev, with a tongue so bright,A weaver of tales, a mystic seeker of light.Like the candle, you too are blind to sight,But let not sorrow turn your fate to spite.In this world, among the base and small,Many have eyes—yet their hearts see not at all.You are that candle, lit within the eye,A bearer of arts that no wealth can buy.You are the candle, and your motherland, your homeAround you, the people are moths, where they roam.. . .To that fever in your head, the fever of Lenin,To that light in your heart, the light of LeninOur dear, our companion, our ally,Stalin, our Joseph, our leader, our guide.These poetic excerpts are from a Persian-language masnavi or rhyming couplets by the influential Iranian–Soviet poet Abolqāsem Lāhuti (d. 1957).1 Composed on December 20, 1939, the poem commemorates Ahmad Nazhaev (Ахмад Нажаев; d. 1937), the Chechen-language bard. Samuel Hodgkin’s erudite study, Persianate Verse and the Poetics of Eastern Internationalism, offers a dynamic and critical account of how Persianate poetry and communism together shaped literary models for cultural decolonization that outlived Soviet imperialism. Persianate Verse asks, what allows Lahuti and his cohort, writing across genres and languages, to weave Persianate aesthetic norms (i.e., metaphors and imagery) into the fabric of a distinctly Soviet cultural framework? How did the Persianate “cultural commons” function within the ideological and aesthetic frameworks of Soviet literary internationalism?Persianate poetry played a foundational—and until now poorly understood—role in shaping the Soviet literary internationalist project. Hodgkin defines the “Persianate” not as a civilizational unit—often rooted in cultural singularity—but as an embodied Eurasian “cultural commons of primarily oral verbal arts and folk traditions” shared among such literary traditions as Persian/Tajik, Urdu, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Uzbek, and Turkish (45). Hodgkin’s monograph is part of a growing body of scholarship from the last decade that uses the Persianate as a distinctly transregional, multilingual, and cross-disciplinary category of analysis. In doing so, it challenges both the historiographical boundaries of area studies and the methodological limits of comparative literature.Persianate Verse demonstrates how Persian, a prestige language in Transcaucasia and Transoxania, supplied the Soviet literary system—which was built on clearly defined, hierarchically structured nations—with the essential components to shape its own conception of world literature. Lahuti’s masnavi exemplifies how Persianate poetry—and the broader system of etiquette and cultivation known as adab—fostered fellow-feeling, solidarity, and friendship among Eastern poets and helped create the basis for “mutual recognition across national boundaries” (10). Unlike most other studies, adab here does not serve a merely descriptive function. Instead, adab acts as a connective tissue, showing how poetry, patron, and platform interacted with and shaped one another.The chapters of Persianate Verse trace the evolution of Persianate poetry within the political and cultural shifts of the twentieth century. Thematically, the chapters move from the early, revolutionary uses of poetry in the Iranian Constitutional Revolution (1905–1911) to its later transformations in the Soviet context, exploring how Persianate forms interacted with changing political ideologies and cultural systems. Chronologically, the book begins with the turn of the twentieth century, examining the entanglement of Persianate poetry with revolutionary politics in the Russian, Ottoman, and Qajar empires, and then shifts to the Soviet era, spanning the 1920s to the Cold War. This structure allows the book to illustrate how Persianate literary traditions experienced both continuity and rupture as they responded to the pressures of empire, nationalism, and socialist internationalism.In Chapter 1, “Tribunes,” Hodgkin puts Iranian poetic modernism in conversation with Russian and Ottoman revolutionary poetics. Newspapers served as a key medium for poetic experimentation and political representation and were shaped by the revolutionary press, party politics, and the transregional movement of writers and ideas. Hodgkin highlights how genres like the qasida (encomium), lullaby, and satirical verse were transformed by periodical culture and its attendant forms of sociability. Poets such as Lāhuti, Sābir (d. 1911), and Sayyid Ashraf al-Din Husayni Gilāni (d. 1934) appropriated Persianate forms to address, represent, or critique monarchs, parliaments, and revolutionary committees. Rather than viewing Persian literary modernity as belated or nationally isolated, Hodgkin situates it within a dynamic and multilingual ecosystem where vernacularization, print culture, and political upheaval reshaped the functions and forms of verse.Chapter 2, titled “Canons,” explores how classical Persian poetry was reinterpreted, repurposed, and contested in Soviet Central Asia (1920–1950). Hodgkin shows how classical figures like Bidil (d. 1720) and Khayyam (d. 1131) were rejected as elitist relics, only later to be reclaimed as precursors of revolutionary and materialist thought. Hodgkin shows how poetic occasions like bidilkhvani gave rise to new forms, such as socialist reinterpretations and anthologies, reflecting broader processes of canon formation tied to language reform, folkloristics, and the quest for cultural legitimacy. Ultimately, the reconfiguration of the Persianate classical canon was not a simple rejection or appropriation but a complex negotiation between tradition and modernity, national identity and transregional heritage.“Occasions,” the third chapter, examines how the cultural system of adab was appropriated, reconfigured, and ultimately constrained within the Stalinist system of Soviet multinational literature during the 1930s. Focusing on the figure of Lahuti, Hodgkin shows how Persianate epideictic genres like panegyric and occasional verse were mobilized to articulate loyalty, manage political relationships, and enact Soviet cultural rituals such as the “friendship of peoples.” Lahuti’s poetic and bureaucratic career illustrates both the reach and the limitations of Persianate poetics in a multilingual and authoritarian literary system where Persian verse was translated, misread, or politicized to serve hegemonic purposes. This chapter illustrates how literary roles were bureaucratized, how poetic speech acts were shaped by speech act theory, and how the performance of ethnicity, nationhood, and allegiance was stage-managed through ceremonies, translations, and symbolic gestures like giving robes of honor. While Persianate poetics offered powerful tools for creating emotional resonance and communal identity, their potential for political critique was undermined in a system that collapsed context and delegated interpretive authority to a narrow elite.Chapter 4, titled “Translations,” analyzes the role of literary translation within the Soviet Eastern internationalist project, framing it as a site of both emotional intimacy and political complexity. Literary translation between Persianate and Russophone traditions served not just as a vehicle for cultural transmission but also as a sentimental and often gendered space of desire, frustration, and hospitality. Hodgkin challenges the dominant Russocentric narrative that views Soviet-era translation as mere appropriation, highlighting instead the agency of Eastern writers who shaped their reception through translation. Through case studies like the poetry of Ghafur Ghulam (d. 1984) and the collaborative works of Nazım Hikmet (d. 1963), Hodgkin shows how translation enabled shared feelings and solidarities across national and linguistic divides, while also exposing the asymmetries and tensions within the Soviet literary system.The final chapter, “Recognition,” explores how Persianate literary forms and practices of mutual recognition shaped cultural and political exchanges during the Cold War. Hodgkin surveys how figures like Zulfiya (d. 1996), Faiz Ahmad Faiz (d. 1984), Sulayman Layiq (d. 2020), and others used Persianate forms like the mushaʿira or poetic assemblies to reimagine socialist internationalism as grounded in Eastern cultural traditions rather than imposed Soviet models. These gatherings enabled symbolic acts of mutual recognition among national poets, who spoke not just for their nations but for a broader, transnational revolutionary identity—though often within constraining ideological frameworks. Hodgkin critiques the romanticized idea of global literary solidarity by showing how Cold War geopolitics and the demands of representation frequently distorted writers’ agency. Through extended case studies—from the Afghan–Soviet exchange of prison poetry to Layiq’s uncompleted Mardi az kuhestān مردی از کوهستان, Hodgkin reflects on both the possibilities and the limits of poetic internationalism in the wake of empire and revolution.Persianate Verse is a remarkable study for the range of critical lacunae it fills across multiple fields. For comparativists, it offers a robust methodological alternative to Eurocentric paradigms, which remain prevalent in comparative literature. For scholars of Soviet and Russian literature, it brings to the fore literary traditions—such as Persian and Uzbek—that have long remained peripheral in Anglophone scholarship. And for Persian studies, which continues to grapple with a methodological nationalism centered on modern Iran, the book forges underexplored pathways for understanding Persian’s role as a world-making language in the twentieth century—at a moment when it had already relinquishing much of its former Eurasian reach. Ultimately, Hodgkin’s groundbreaking study demonstrates that Russophone literature cannot be fully understood without accounting for its deep entanglement with the Persianate tradition—just as the Persianate itself is profoundly shaped by its incorporation into Soviet cultural frameworks and aesthetic sensibilities.