On September 1, 1920, the “Congress of the Toilers of the East” opened in Baku, welcoming more than 1,900 delegates to the capital of Soviet Azerbaijan. What precisely counted as the “East,” however, remained open. Only fourteen of the delegates were from India and eight from China. The vast majority came from Turkey and Persia and from the future Soviet republics of Central Asia. The congress, however, articulated an unequivocally Eurasian agenda—what Katerina Clark calls “the dream for a single, Eurasian cultural space” (p. 3)—that would unite an expansive and diverse continent behind a revolutionary mission. Culture, and literature, especially, were to be crucial to that mission.
Clark's book, Eurasia without Borders, traces the history of this grand project, excavating the effort to build nothing less than a Leftist new world literature “intended to rival the established, Eurocentric literary ‘worlds’ . . . centered in places like Paris, London, and Berlin and dependent on the ‘bourgeois capitalist’ order” (p. 9). This lofty project was supported by the Comintern, but it was by no means Moscow-centric; rather, Clark argues, the circulation of people and texts was multicentric and multidirectional, and subject to the competing forces of nationalism and internationalism. Tracing the histories of this literary internationalism, in the Soviet Union and in the nations to which it reached out, is the aim of Eurasia without Borders.
The new culture envisioned at the Baku Congress took shape in the interwar years through a wide array of initiatives. Some of these were “vertical” in nature, sponsored by and directed from Moscow. Others can be characterized as “horizontal,” or products of the cross-fertilization of ideas in a far-flung network of intellectual activists, not all of whom were in direct contact with Moscow. To characterize these processes, Clark speaks of the “literary international,” on the one hand—committed Communists, often Comintern affiliated—and the “ecumene,” on the other—an amorphous body of Leftist intellectuals who shared this cosmopolitan, and often anti-imperialist, vision. The borderline between these groups remained fluid, however, especially as external events impacted the dynamics of literary and cultural flows across the Eurasian continent.
Clark identifies a shift about halfway through the interwar period, conveniently coinciding with the international writers’ conference in Kharkov, Ukraine, in November 1930. After the failure of the Communist uprising in Shanghai in 1927, the emergence of Joseph Stalin as the undisputed leader of the Soviet Union, and the reorganization of Soviet literary life (which would culminate in the formulation of socialist realism), literary internationalism became more centralized. The urgency of the fascist threat provided common ground for activist authors across Eurasia, who became more willing to acknowledge the hegemony of Moscow.
The chapters of Eurasia without Borders are arranged geographically, but also follow the broad chronology noted earlier. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on Turkey, especially Nâzim Hikmet, and Persia and its poetic tradition (through Abdulqasem Lahuti), respectively. Chapter 3 details Soviet writers’ expeditions to and essays about Afghanistan. Chapter 4 scrutinizes India's place in the cultural geography of Eurasia, discussing, among others, M. N. Roy and Rabindranath Tagore. In chapter 5, Clark turns to the Far East, especially the discursive construction of China's “roar”—a motif shared by Sergei Tretiakov, Boris Pilniak, André Malraux, and Qu Qiubai in their theatrical and journalistic writings.
In the remaining three chapters, Clark moves to the second part of the interwar period. Chapter 6 draws connections between Shanghai, Berlin, and Moscow, focusing on the Asia-themed fiction of Anna Seghers, the work of Emi Siao, and the early Mao Dun. A similar writerly network, stretching the length of the continent, is identified in chapter 7, which details Mulk Raj Anand and his interaction with Leftist literary circles in London. Chapter 8 returns to China and brings us to the Chinese Communist Party's wartime holdout in Yan'an, where, according to Clark, the Eurasian internationalism of the interwar era finally unraveled. Leftist travelers to China, coming there from the Spanish Civil War, found themselves—and their cause—increasingly sidelined, as national forms of socialist literature arose, culminating in the publication of Mao's “Yan'an Talks” in 1943.
Eurasia without Borders is a book of enormous reach, synthesizing research from area specialists in a range of different countries and drawing on Clark's decades-long work in the Russian archives. In a work of this scope, it is natural that specialists will find minor disagreements in chapters closest to their own expertise. A larger issue is that the book remains, throughout, somewhat ambiguous about its scope. Clark opens with the Baku Congress and the grand vision formulated there. But, as noted earlier, delegates from key Asian notions were barely present. Was the congress's Eurasian vision, then, a vision of Eurasia or a vision about Eurasia? Was it Asians speaking about themselves, or others envisioning a new Asia? And who and where was the audience of this vision—in Asia, or in the West (including Moscow)? Eurasia without Borders never addresses these questions head-on. Hence, in chapters 3 and 4, readers barely encounter a voice from Afghanistan or India: the chapters’ protagonists are Soviet writers writing about the East (though Clark does note the obvious exoticism of some of these writings). Likewise, the section on Qu Qiubai is a mere two pages long, in the forty-page chapter 5. The final three chapters give comparatively more voice and room to Asian authors, but the larger question, one of literary and cultural agency within the internationalist project, remains unanswered.
Despite these issues, Eurasian without Borders is a major achievement, and it will be required reading for scholars working on Leftist literatures in West Asia, South Asia, East Asia, and Central Asia, as well as in world literary studies. We need to be grateful to Clark for the large synthesis and the original insights the book offers its readers.
