This collected volume sits beside several recent works that seek to rethink the aesthetics of Soviet internationalism, including the monographs Internationalist Aesthetics: China and Early Soviet Culture by Edward Tyerman, Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941 and Eurasia without Borders: The Dream of a Leftist Literary Commons, 1919–1943 by Katerina Clark, The Ethnic Avant-Garde: Minority Cultures and World Revolution by Steven S. Lee, and the collected volume Comintern Aesthetics, edited by Amelia Glaser and Steven S. Lee, while offering something unique—a targeted intervention in World Literature Studies as well as a more systematic and sustained treatment of translation’s role in representing internationalism and creating transnational networks.

The nature of that intervention is articulated in Gilan Tikhanov’s opening chapter to the volume. While Tihanov’s assertion that there are many world literatures might have seemed necessary back in 2019 when the volume was initiated, it is commonly accepted today. That being said, Tihanov’s elaboration of four different models, or “meanings” (2), of world literature and his subsequent discussion of the role of two figures, Mikhail Bakhtin and Nikolai Konrad, in de-westernizing world literature are important and insightful contributions. The still urgent claim made in Tihanov’s chapter relates to the need to integrate Soviet World Literature or a Moscow-led Socialist World Literature into the rapidly expanding field of World Literature Studies, something the volume accomplishes very well, and in a number of different ways, as discussed below.

Indeed, one of the strengths of the volume is the rich variety of approaches to the topic it contains, from chapters focusing on Soviet aesthetic debates as they relate to the Soviet World Literature project (see Clark’s chapter, “The Roles of ‘Form’ and ‘Content’ in World Literature as Discussed by Victor Shklovsky,” and Schamma Schahadat’s “World Literature and Ideology: The Case of Socialist Realism”) to others focusing on the cultural forms and institutions through which the Soviet Republic of Letters was realized. Maria Khotimsky’s chapter, “‘The Treasure Trove of World Literature’: Shaping the Concepts of World Literature in Post-Revolutionary Russia,” focuses on the publishing house Vsemirnaia Literatura, studying its book catalogs and the paratexual material accompanying those published books, while Elena Ostrovskaya, Elena Zemskova, Evgeniia Belskaia, and Georgii Korotkov’s chapter, “International Literature: A Multi-Language Soviet Journal as a Model of ‘World Literature’ of the Mid-1930s USSR,” and Edward Tyerman’s “Translating China into International Literature: Stalin-Era World Literature beyond the West” focus on the important translation journal Internatsionalˊnaia literara, the former offering a broad overview of the works published in the journal while the latter examines works from Chinese.

Another of the volume’s strengths is its double focus—examining the Soviet World Literature project from the perspective of the metropole (Moscow) and from that of the periphery (the Soviet Republics and Soviet-aligned countries). The volume also problematizes the origin of Soviet World Literature in the Bolshevik Revolution. As Sergey Tyulenev argues, the Soviets’ rhetoric of building socialism ex nihilo is contradicted by their reliance on pre-Soviet cultural forms. This point is brought home in Susanne Frank’s excellent study of Armenian anthologies, which relied heavily on pre-Soviet translation anthologies.

The roughly chronological arrangement of the chapters allows one to trace the shifting models of internationalism across Soviet history while resisting any reductive, developmental narrative. The volume’s penultimate chapter, by Rossen Djagolov, however, does offer a provocative coda, tracing how the Soviet Republic of Letters came to an end with the fall of the Soviet Union and the disappearance of the Soviet bloc. That chapter is followed by Maria Rubin’s insightful close reading of poetic works of “global writing created by translingual authors with hybrid identities” (261), offering ways to reconceptualize if not deconstruct traditional concepts of World Literature, founded on the monolingual nation state, while shedding new light on the function of (un)translatability in specific cultural and linguistic contexts.

Among those archive-based studies, Anne Lounsbury’s chapter stands out as something of a different order, a kind of thought experiment; a speculation that the Russians may have written themselves out of world literature. While it is true, and quite remarkable, that Russian literature is consistently ignored in some of the more influential recent studies of World Literature or literature as a world system, such as Pascale Casanova’s World Republic of Letters, the speculative claim that Russians may have written themselves out of World Literature is rather dubious. For example, Anglophone anthologies of World Literature have typically included Russian works. In fact, in the Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction, released in 1917, four of the series’ twenty volumes are dedicated to Russian authors: volume 16 and 17, to Lev Tolstoi (Anna Karenina and “Ivan the Fool”), volume 18 to Fedor Dostoevskii (Crime and Punishment), and volume 19 to Ivan Turgenev (House of Gentlefolk and Fathers and Children). Moreover, studies of world literature from the perspective of the Global South, such as Heekyoung Cho’s Translation’s Forgotten History: Russian Literature, Japanese Mediation, and the Formation of Modern Korean Literature, or Mark Gamsa’s works on China, highlight the central role of Russian literature. The fact that Russian literature was prominent in so many canons of World Literature makes its absence from western models of World Literature all the more astonishing.

That being said, the individual chapters of this volume generally work together well to document diverse aspects of the Soviet World Literature project while also suggesting multiple lines of future research. In other words, this is by no means the final word on Soviet World Literature. Rather, the volume has laid a strong foundation, modeling an array of approaches and perspectives that can be applied to the many other cultures involved in the Soviet Republic of Letters.