There has been little scholarship on Azeri literature in the western academy. This has changed thanks to Leah Feldman, who has taken the study of Azerbaijani literature from zero to light speed in On the Threshold of Eurasia. This book focuses on literature produced in Baku between 1905–1929, discussed within a broad-based but well-integrated theoretical approach. Based on archival research, detailed literary analysis and an impressive critical arsenal, Feldman's book has opened this understudied area to a new visibility.
Feldman brings Azerbaijani literature into broader conversations by uncovering their intertextual relationships with Russian and other literatures. Drawing on Bakhtin's concept of the “threshold,” Feldman works across a number of them in this book, considering Azerbaijan on the geographic threshold of the empire, the Russian Empire on the threshold of the Soviet Period, and language on the threshold of translation from Russian to Azeri and back. The threshold concept unifies the book and helps choreograph the subject of poetics in motion between various languages and imaginary geographies.
The book is divided into two parts with an introduction, the first part focusing on the end of the Russian Empire and the second on the early Soviet Period. The first chapters examine how nineteenth century Russian literature was read by Azeri writers who then translated them into a vernacular poetics of social change. Reading, for example, Nikolai Gogol΄ through the eyes of Jălil Mămmădguluzadă, Feldman demonstrates how Gogol΄’s parody was reimagined in the Azeri context and integrated into the satiric journal Molla Nasreddin. In the second part, Feldman turns to the early Soviet era, connecting Russian romantic with the Soviet utopian imaginary of the Caucasus as it worked through avant garde poetics in Baku. Painting a lively picture of Baku in political transition, Feldman discusses the influence of Vladimir Maiakovskii and other Futurists on the local avant-guard. She then turns to the Azeri collective, the Red Pens, and their attempts to create a new Soviet poetics inspired but not dominated by Russian language models. Feldman ends in 1929, closing her study as she opened it, on another threshold with a poem by Mikayil Refili written on the death of Lenin.
Throughout, Feldman emphasizes each writing act as a dialogic event, not only with Russian but with the Turkic and Persian spiritual and intellectual traditions long integrated into Azeri literature. Feldman treats Azeri poetry and poetics with dignity, her excellent translations and careful readings showing them as intertextual rather than derivative, a space in which new identities were being forged. It is refreshing to see Azeri writers at the center of a critical text and important to see the new conversations this generates.
The book is arranged chronologically and offers a literary history of early twentieth-century Baku, but Feldman's goal is wider. She confronts how the region is viewed in the western academy, seeking ultimately to demonstrate that the “position of the Caucasus on the threshold of the Eurasian imaginary and the Soviet periphery generated aesthetic and political experiments with anticolonial Marxism that preceded the more prominent decolonization movements during the mid-twentieth century” (215). Situating her work in what is becoming a distinguished lineage of new scholarship on Caucasian literatures, including the works of Bruce Grant, Harsha Ram, and Rebecca Gould, Feldman challenges the field of Slavic Studies to revisit the Caucasus with intertextual eyes.
The only dissonance for this reader was the discussion of Nazim Hikmet's poem “Song of the Sun Drinkers.” After having so carefully worked out the dynamics of difference between Russian and Azeri writing, I was disappointed when Feldman collapsed the boundary between Azeri and Turkish poetry into “Turkic” (207). Her analysis of Hikmet's verse is excellent, but she missed the chance to incorporate his place on so many thresholds—as a Turkish writer inspired by Russian poetics encountering Azeri readers—into her wider theoretical net.
However, that is a small dissonance in a groundbreaking work. Feldman's carefully-researched and theoretically-bold approach to literature in the Russian/Soviet periphery should earn a wide readership. In addition, Feldman's enthusiasm for her topic infuses this book with an excitement that is rare in academic writing. On the Threshold of Eurasia is highly recommended and will, I hope, help transform the way the Caucasus are studied, taught, and positioned in Slavic studies and related disciplines.
