The discipline of comparative literature has at long last definitively opened up to non-European literary traditions. What remains to be seen is what influence engaging with literatures beyond the West will ultimately have on the field. Samuel Hodgkin’s Persianate Verse and the Poetics of Eastern Internationalism breaks ground in this direction as he takes up Persian, Turkic, Russian, Armenian, and other literary traditions that formed what he refers to as the “Eastern International,” which is neither an institutional appellation nor a result of “the imperial aspirations of the Soviet state apparatus” but rather “a century-long archive of texts and cast of characters” that he presents “as a single lineage … assemble[d] under the banner of the Persianate” (7). The book is on the one hand a tour de force of erudition and an exemplar of what the new comparative literature can do when we set aside Europe, and even Moscow and Tehran in the Russophone and Persophone contexts, as the primary progenitors of twentieth-century culture. On the other hand, Hodgkin’s careful attention to the lives and motivations of his subjects, the writers who populated the Eastern International, and his insistence on our appreciation of the rhetorical and sonic features of the poetry he analyzes, constitute a consequential ethical lesson for how outsider critics ought to treat emic and difficult to translate features in the objects of our studies.

Persianate Verse fits nicely alongside recent works that push the boundaries of comparative literature decisively beyond the Anglophone, including my own Reorienting Modernism in Arabic and Persian Poetry (in the same Cambridge Studies in World Literature series), C. Ceyhun Arslan’s The Ottoman Canon and the Construction of Arabic and Turkish Literatures, and Alexander Jabbari’s The Making of Persianate Modernity: Language and Literary History between Iran and India, among others. “Born as a middle term between the cultivation of nations and their transcendence,” Hodgkin invokes a similar theoretical position as these authors when he posits that “the Eastern International was thus a sublation of traditional Persianate cosmopolitanism” (6; italics added). Hodgkin bookends his study with this sublation of the Persianate into new cultural forms during the early Soviet period at the beginning and “a poetics of sublation, the Sufi project of transcendence-through-annihilation [as] a similarly valuable addition to the 1990s discussions about the fate of communism that followed the Soviet collapse” at the end (193). Such a theoretical perspective allows Hodgkin to explore the various retentions and rejections of Persianate poetics that shaped literary developments in Central Asia over the twentieth century.

Hodgkin organizes the book thematically and chronologically across an introduction, five chapters, and a conclusion. After clarifying the bounds of his engagements and defining his terms (“Persianate” and “Eastern International” among them), the chapters address newspaper poetry from 1905 to 1925, literary institutions from 1921 to 1948, “context collapse” at the height of the Stalinist period (1934–1938), sentimental internationalism from 1941 to 1972, and the place of the Persianate during the decline of the Soviet empire from 1958 to 2023. By context collapse, Hodgkin means “the flood of misinterpretations (or reinterpretations) that occur when multiple audiences are collapsed into one, all assuming a single community capable of mutual comprehension,” which led to instances of misapprehending Persianate adab (etiquette practices) in the Soviet core (109). As in all the chapters, Hodgkin here follows the experience of a luminary during a telling point in their career as he explores the historical poetics of the Eastern International. In this case, the rise to prominence and later sidelining—following a rebuke from Stalin himself—of Abu al-Qasim Lahuti (d. 1957) takes center stage. Other notable names we notice on Hodgkin’s playbill include the Uzbek intellectual Abd al-Ra‘uf Fitrat (d. 1938), Iranian modernist Sadiq Hidayat (d. 1951), Tajik intellectual and memoirist Sadr al-Din ʿAyni (d. 1954), famed Turkish poet Nâzım Hikmet (d. 1963), Lahuti’s wife, translator, and poet in her own right Tsetsiliia Banu (d. 1998), and Afghan communist and poet Sulayman Layiq (d. 2020), along with many others we might not be so familiar with.

Although Hodgkin occasionally includes some usual Western literary theory, including Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence and the work of Pierre Bourdieu, he for the most part offers a fresh perspective for Western readers by developing his method from the context within which his subjects are situated. Persianate Verse’s bibliography guides us to key literary and theoretical texts in a number of Perso-Turkic languages and many sources in Russian, alongside essential contemporary Anglophone scholarship, such as Francesca Orsini on “significant geographies” and Karen Thornber on “literary contact nebulae” (27). Another highlight is how Hodgkin purposively situates his readings around Persianate forms, literary norms, and rhetoric, including the famed rubaʿi (quatrain), nazirah (poetic response), sharh (commentary), talmih (allusion), mushaʿirah (poetic recitation), anjuman (literary gathering), lullabies and other popular verse, and tadmin (sampling), that is, when “the old text is not imitated (as in nazira), but preserved intact inside a new, larger text” (183). Such tadmin quoting also plays a defining rhetorical role in the development of modernist Arabic poetry, and Hodgkin’s analysis of the practice in the Persianate context is illuminating: “In late and post-Soviet Eastern internationalism, classical poetic texts appear as samples … . These samples brought with them artistic and political possibilities that had not survived in the conventionalized internationalist practice of the Persianate classical forms themselves” (184). Hodgkin’s comments here lead us into his virtuoso reading of Soviet Armenian director Sergei Parajanov’s (d. 1990) 1969 film The Color of Pomegranates, which, in Hodgkin’s analysis, functions as a tadmin “of the lyric verse of the eighteenth-century Armenian bard Sayat’ Nova, who composed songs in Armenian, Georgic, and Turkic” (184). Such theoretical framing treats the creative output of the Eastern Internationalists within its proper historical and cultural contexts while advancing the book’s primary argument that “the communist project of an anti-hegemonic world literature has its most important non-European foundations in the Persianate tradition” (25).

The book should be required reading for serious comparatists of all stripes. The prose is refreshingly limpid and practically devoid of errors, in the body text as well as the transliterations, at least as far as this reader can tell—truly an achievement in light of the wide variety of languages across which the author works. Despite the ease of reading experts will experience, the sheer amount of information and necessary contextual background required to appreciate the book’s cogent analyses makes it a stretch for the undergraduate and possibly some graduate classrooms without substantial pedagogical scaffolding. Overall, Persianate Verse models for us what serious comparative scholarship should look like as we head into the middle of the twenty-first century and the dreams and aspirations of the Eastern International fall further out of sight but—hopefully, to end on the same optimistic note Hodgkin does—not out of mind.