Samuel Hodgkin’s delightful new book, Persianate Verse and the Poetics of Eastern Internationalism, begins with a telling anecdote in which the Soviet Tajik poet Mirza Tursunzada describes his arrival at a border post in Pakistan while traveling as part of a Soviet delegation. The commander, delighted to learn Tursunzada is a poet, orders tea and proudly displays a book of poetry by the Punjabi poet Sir Muhammad Iqbal, at which point Tursunzada astonishes the commander by beginning to recite Iqbal’s verse from memory. “The impact of this on the commander,” Tursunzada wrote, “was such that he even refused to check our passports—poetry was our password” (1). As Hodgkin explains, Tursunzada could do this because he and Iqbal had a shared poetic language, for Tursunzada’s “Tajik” also was a part of the broader Persianate literary commons. Tursunzada’s anecdote matches similar stories told by South Asian writers who visited the Soviet Union. The Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, for example, visited the Soviet Union multiple times. In an account of a trip to the Caucasus recently translated by Lusia Zaitseva, Faiz describes a Dagestani host telling the interpreter to go, “we will talk directly,” and then conversing with Faiz in a mixture of Farsi and Arabic. Hodgkin’s book is an account of the linguistic and literary landscape that lay behind these anecdotes, of the ways in which the legacy of Persian as a literary commons enabled its transformation into a language of Soviet eastern internationalism. The “east” of this internationalism could sometimes mean the colonial world writ large, including the Arab world and East Asia, but in practice it often meant people from Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, the Caucasus, or Central Asia; these were all communities for whom Persian was a prestige language and the Persianate commons a shared cultural touchstone.

Hodgkin’s book is one of multiple recent studies that have relied on Marshall Hodgson’s introduction of the idea of the “Persianate” in his The Venture of Islam to chart a literary and cultural zone that stretched from the Bay of Bengal in the east to the Balkans in the west. Major recent contributions to this scholarship include Alexander Jabbari’s The Making of Persianate Modernity (2023), Aria Fani’s Reading across Borders: Afghans, Iranians, and Literary Nationalism (2024), and a recent special section on the Persianate in the 2024 Proceedings of the Modern Language Association. Hodgkin’s book is centered on the Persianate as it figured into the cultural politics of the Soviet era, and this in turn means his book is focused in many ways on Central Asia, although the work features extensive discussions of both Afghanistan and the Caucasus as well as literary figures like Abu al-Qasim Lahuti and Nazim Hikmet, two writers who are major figures in the literary history of the Soviet Union but who themselves emerged from left revolutionary circles in Iran and Turkey. Hodgkin’s focus on Central Asia means that the various vernaculars with which the Persianate interacts are most often Turkic languages. Hodgkin himself identifies the Persianate as a “system of cultural forms and canonic model texts articulated in a cluster of analogous vernacular literary languages, with Persian as only the first among equals” (8). In Hodgkin’s account, the Persianate was not only a high cultural form shared by an educated class literate in Persian and familiar with canonical Persian literary forms like the narrative masnavi (a poem in rhyming couplets) or the lyric ghazal, but also should be recognized as encompassing what Hodgkin terms “low-Persianate forms,” a range of vernacular verbal arts that circulated, often in oral form, in both rural and urban spaces. As Hodgkin explains, “illiterate or Persian-illiterate men and women sang, recited, and composed verse in Persian and in Persianate languages, in genres and following models from Persianate canons” (10). His first chapter, “Tribunes: The Newspaper Poetry of Eastern Revolution,” is devoted to the newspapers founded by political activists in the Russian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and Iran in the first decades of the twentieth century. In crafting content for these newspapers, Hodgkin shows, writers and activists often turned to folk and vernacular genres of the low-Persianate, and his chapter includes a meticulous exegesis of the rhetoric of revolutionary verse written in the form of lullabies.

In the Soviet era, this literary commons was to be nationalized in two senses of the word: literary heritage was carved up and allotted to the various national republics that comprised the Soviet Union; and literature itself became a zone of production owned and directed by the state. The multiple consequences of this are taken up in the next four chapters of the book, with chapter 2 addressing the fraught relationship between canonical Persian literature and the formation of new national canons; chapter 3 the Persianate and public events; chapter 4 translation and the multiple rhetorics surrounding the work of translation; and chapter 5 examining the Persianate and its fate in the last years of the Soviet Empire. In chapter 2, “Canons,” Hodgkin frames this shift as a movement from the sociality of adab, or a larger system of etiquette and ethics that is inclusive of norms for verbal arts, to adabiyat, which is roughly equivalent to the Western category of “literature.” As Hodgkin explains, “whereas adab is composed of texts and practices, in adabiyat, texts become secondary to authors,” and these authors are in turn understood as figureheads of nations, displayed in expectation of the gaze of other nations (70). These authors were often figures from the classical past, and Hodgkin charts the ways in which Bidil, Firdawsi, Jami, and others were variously rejected as court rather than Soviet poets, reclaimed as voices of the masses, tussled over as part of the patrimony of the Uzbek SSR versus the Tajik SSR versus Iran, and celebrated at official jubilees in the 1930s and 1940s. Bidil, for example, was dismissed by the Tajik writer Nazr-allah Biktash in 1930 as a feudal figure, an intruder from the courtly world of Iran whose elaborate metaphors had no role in the Soviet present (although, as Hodgkin deftly notes, Biktash’s criticism itself displays a subtle knowledge of the conventions of adab). Biktash and others’ rejection of classical poets often took the form of a call to turn instead toward oral and folk literature as the sources for an authentic proletarian art, and Hodgkin documents the rise of ethnographic expeditions to gather folk literature in the 1930s, a project he links with the simultaneous latinization of Central Asian languages. This rhetoric shadowed the reclamation of classical authors as part of Soviet nations’ literary heritage: the mythmaking of both the Firdawsi Jubilee of 1934 and the 1948 Nava’i Jubilee, Hodgkin points out, involved representing each writer as a “founding vernacularizer” who refused the prestige literary language of their time in favor of their own then unrespected Persian and Turkic (96).

If adab assumed texts circulated within a community skilled in interpreting the rhetoric of poetry, adabiyat conversely assumed the texts would be read by a larger mass audience. Hodgkin explains the resultant hollowing out of literary sociality through a concept borrowed from media studies, “context collapse,” or the misinterpretations that spring from folding multiple audiences into a single mass audience. In chapter 3, “Occasions,” he illustrates this through the story of Abu al-Qasim “Lahuti,” an Iranian revolutionary writer who emigrated to the Soviet Union and in the Stalin era became perhaps the most famous Persian language writer in the Soviet Union as well as an important bureaucrat. Lahuti therefore also exemplifies the second sense of nationalization: literature as a state-directed activity run by writer-bureaucrats through a network of writers unions and state-owned publishing houses. Much of chapter 3 is concerned with the elaborate public events and rituals that characterized Stalinist civic life. As a writer, Lahuti also made Persianate genres and images part of Soviet literary discourse, including the panegyric and the motif of Stalin as a gardener. In 1938, Lahuti sent Stalin a poem entitled “The Tale of the Rose,” which praised Stalin as gardener, only for Stalin to reject the manuscript as a “sycophantic thing,” in an exchange that both humiliated Lahuti and his wife Banu and created an image of Stalin as a leader modestly rejecting too slavish praise. As Hodgkin shows, the poem was anything but: Lahuti’s praise, when read by those skilled in decoding the ways in which Persian panegryic could be used to deliver advice to rulers, was in fact an appeal to Stalin on behalf of a friend of Lahuti, the Yiddish playwright Solomon Mikhoels. The context collapse at work here meant that Lahuti was crudely mischaracterized as a sort of Soviet Pangloss, offering little more than praise of Stalin as the best of all possible gardeners cultivating the best of all possible gardens.

Although Hodgkin employs context collapse to describe the Soviet-era misreading of Lahuti, the book as a whole also is concerned with a similar kind of context collapse among scholars of Soviet literature, a fact that both chapter 4 and chapter 5 make increasingly clear. In chapter 5, “Translations,” Hodgkin surveys the work of translating literature back and forth between Russian, Persian, Turkic, and other languages. As Hodgkin shows, this could be understood as a kind of gift, as a form of hospitality, or as an act of love. The chapter is replete with detailed and thoughtful interrogations of different forms of translation, not only between languages but also between generic forms and eras, with Hodgkin’s analysis of the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet’s stage adaptation of the story of Farhad and Shirin emerging as a particularly effective model of close reading. His work in this chapter is in sharp contrast to scholars of Soviet literature who locate the creativity and agency in translating from Persian or Turkish into Russian largely on the Russian side of the exchange and who argue that Russian translations were a kind of “gift of empire” that fantasized national literatures where none in fact existed. As Hodgkin writes, “In its academic form, the notion that Soviet multinational literature came into existence when it entered the Russian language is ultimately a fantasy that Soviet literary scholarship can remain monolingual without cost” (138).

Persianate Verse and the Poetics of Eastern Internationalism represents a compelling counter to this argument. Throughout the book, genres, poems, authors, and modes of reading are in constant and often dizzying movement across eras and between languages. The final chapter, “Recognitions,” brings this story through the late Soviet period and up to the present day, showing the legacy of Persian as a language of internationalism through examples from the Caucasus, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, with the Afghan poet Sulayman Layeq and the Armenian filmmaker Sergei Parajanov both given significant attention. Here as elsewhere, Hodgkin’s analysis relies on minute examination of words and images, all interpreted against a detailed knowledge of Persian and Soviet literary culture. Yet one of the enduring legacies of the Soviet partition of the literary commons is that, all too often, these writers are now encountered not through the medium of their words but through the media of the streets, parks, theaters, statues, and even cities named in honor of the writers’ continued roles as national figureheads. In this respect, Hodgkin’s devotion to close reading can read as an homage to the sociality of adab, a quixotic defense of a world in which writers mattered because words mattered.