There has been a longstanding tendency within the domain of Turkish and Comparative Literary Studies to associate the history of Turkish modernism with Nâzım Hikmet’s early career in the Soviet Union by focusing on his mediation of the international avant-garde. While his early futurist poems calling for the abolition of traditional verse are frequently cited as illustrating the emergence of Turkish modernism, his prose poems “The Gioconda and Si-Ya-U” and “Why Did Banerjee Kill Himself?” signify the conclusion of a Soviet-inflected Turkish avant-garde. Acknowledging the importance of Nâzım’s early poetics, this chapter provides a more comprehensive and multifaceted account of Turkish modernism’s “Easterly” trajectory. Scholars of Middle Eastern and Comparative Literary Studies refuse to ascribe any literary value to socialist realist aesthetics, immediately dismissing it as Soviet-sponsored dogma. Challenging this critical “prejudice” against leftist literatures (excepting the avant-garde), this chapter demonstrates that the history of Turkish modernism cannot be understood without exploring its entanglements with the histories of socialist realism and Marxian aesthetics.

Through a series of readings in the modernist and non-modernist Persian and Turkic verse of the twentieth-century communist East, both Middle Eastern and Central Eurasian, this chapter explores how different repertories of poetic forms modeled the transregional literary connections in which their authors and texts participated. The modernist poems discussed in this chapter are among the most famous short works of two of the Middle East’s leading modernists, Nâzım Hikmet and Nīmā Yūshīj, while the neoclassical, neoromantic, or otherwise non-modernist poems are more obscure occasional works, although their authors are important in their respective national canons: the Iranians Abū al-Qāsim Lāhūtī and Muḥammad-Taqī Bahār, the Uzbek Zulfiya Isroilova, and the Azerbaijani Samad Vurghun. This latter cluster of poems is chosen in order to show how much the geopoetics of high modernism in Persian and Turkic owed to communist poetic and rhetorical systems that were at least as ubiquitous, but which have received far less attention from Western scholars.

The global turn in Modernist Studies has emphasized the connection between literary modernism’s unique aesthetic practices and the politics of a given modernity. In the Turkish experience of modernity, the question of how to differentiate the identity of the new nation from its predecessor the Ottoman Empire was at the heart of debates about the role of literature and aesthetics. Even though the empire had formally ended with the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923, legacies of imperialism fundamentally shaped debates over how literature of the new nation should be written. In this chapter, Kaitlin Staudt suggests that the relationship between modernist literary aesthetics and the literary representation of imperialism in the early Turkish Republic was rooted in global imperial power relations.

The introduction covers the state of modernist studies within Arabic, Persian, and Turkish literatures today, with reference to broader scholarship on global, transnational, and planetary modernism. It explains the logic behind the seven sections of the book: Adab, Poetry, Prose, Politics, Aesthetics, Easterlies (about connections to Urdu, Russian, and Central Asia), and Comparison. Most extant studies of modernism and modernity in the field focus on singular national contexts in the Middle East in relation to Europe and the Orientalist hangover that the region continues to suffer. Contributors to this volume instead consider instances of modernist connections in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish that exist beyond Western influence and can be traced back through local channels to Arab Islamic turāth (cultural heritage) rather than to literary and artistic encounters with the West. To flesh out the theoretical underpinnings of the volume, the editor discusses major novels and films in relation to time, modernity, modernization, and modernism to begin defining the parameters of the investigations to follow.

In this chapter, the editors of the volume Turkish Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury 2021) work through the entanglements between modernization and modernism in Turkey in the fashion of a broad survey and present a framework to understand the various modernisms in the literary sphere as they convey the country’s unique dynamics. Alkan and Günay-Erkol discuss how various elements of modernism are utilized, appropriated, and transformed in the context of Turkey and examine how the term “modernist” gains different meanings in relation to modernity’s varying but constant powerful drive toward a radical break from the past. To this end, they first establish the essential premise of Ottoman Turkish modernization. They investigate the historical and cultural circumstances of literary production and the responses and reactions to modernity during this period. The chapter thus elaborates on how “modernist” works differ from the more broadly conceived “modern” ones in order to delineate a space for modernism as a literary mode in Turkey.

This chapter reads the work of experimental poets who emerged in the 1950s in Turkey. The loose poetic movement known as İkinci Yeni (the Second New) was radical in the context of mid-century Turkish letters for its dense language, unusual images, and intentional flouting of conventional grammatical and syntactical rules. When this new style of poetry appeared around 1956, İkinci Yeni gave rise to a vigorous and sometimes vicious debate between its defenders and detractors. In hindsight, the central locus of this conflict can be seen as positions taken for and against aesthetic autonomy, the sine qua non of literary modernism. In order to challenge Eurocentric narratives of modernism that take concepts such as aesthetic autonomy for granted in terms of when and how they appeared, this chapter attends to the ways local histories of capitalist modernization and political developments help shape the appearance of modernist literature in geographies like the Middle East.

In conversation with recent scholarship which has revised the relevance of the Islamicate adab culture for Middle Eastern modernities, this chapter revisits the history of modern literature in the late Ottoman Empire. Conventionally, Ottoman/Turkish literary modernity is placed within the framework of Tanzimat (reorganization) which refers to a process of state-led politico-economic structural reforms across the empire. As in other kindred political–cultural reawakening periods overshadowed by Eurocentric comparative methodology, modern Ottoman/Turkish literature has largely been characterized as a set of anti-Islamicate gestures whereby the shared Perso-Ottoman literary culture was heavily criticized and rejected. In an attempt to counter this narrative, this chapter advances adab, Sufi poetics, and hermeneutics in particular, as the conceptual infrastructure of Ottoman literary modernity. After establishing how modern Ottoman/Turkish literature embodies hermeneutical practices associated with Sufi poetics, the chapter situates Ottoman literary modernity within an ethical–aesthetical tradition and calls for understanding modernity from the perspective of literary ethics.

The revisionist school has asserted that pre-colonial indigenous polities were fluid shadow entities and that pre-British South Asian regimes had no law. This line of argument claims that unique conditions of India prevented the emergence of states with well-defined contiguous territories possessing centralised governments. Ironically this view is reminiscent of colonial British scholars’ argument about pre-colonial India. The argument that pre-British India had no laws and that the ruler’s will was the ultimate authority is incorrect. Rulers of pre-British indigenous polities did not operate in a vacuum, but had to take into account long-established practices, existing procedures and the presence of local powerbrokers. Arabic discourse for the Delhi Sultanate and Turko-Mongol conventions for the Mughals, along with local custom, shaped the legal history of medieval India’s militaries. Overall, the political theorists of the Delhi Sultanate, the Mughal Empire and the ‘Hindu’ dynasties accepted the pivotal role of the monarchy and the army in shaping the structure of interpolity relationships.

Language is a symbolic system, but it is often used metarepresentationally for indexical conformations of communal sharing, iconic conformations of authority ranking, and concrete operation one-to-one correspondence conformations of equality matching. Speakers of English, Mooré, Chinese, and, apparently, Proto-Indo-European and Turkish, rely on words whose original, nonsocial-relational meaning concerns dimensions or magnitudes. There are several reasons why typological study of lexicons is illuminating with regard to conformations. Language always provides the opportunity to convergently validate the other kinds of evidence available for any society. Also, there may be conformational dimensions apparent in language that are not easily seen in other media. Language also conforms third-party relationships that are otherwise difficult to conform, and makes it possible to formulate complex ideas about conformations. Finally, language provides enormous samples of metarepresentations of conformations, permitting analyses that could not be done with the smaller available samples of conformations themselves.

This chapter argues that from late Stalinism to the Khrushchev Thaw (1941–1964), Eastern poets and orientalist translators inflected multinational and international translation with a distinctively Persianate ethics of love and hospitality. The chapter develops an account of a mid-century internationalist sentimentality grounded in translation, which prefigures subsequent attempts in feminist theory to reconfigure the patriarchal idea of translation as possessive love into a more receptive model of translation. The opening section challenges the established Soviet and Russian studies narrative in which multinational literature is said to have been invented in Russian translation, showing Eastern poets’ active involvement in programming their own reception. A series of case studies follow. One section considers the collaborations of Uzbek and Russian poets on bilingual poems of hospitality for the Jewish refugees flooding Tashkent during the Second World War. Another shows how the embedded sonnets of Romeo and Juliet were brought into the ghazal mode in Tajik translation. Another shows how the Turkish poet Nazım Hikmet’s theater adaptation of the classical romance Farhad and Shirin sparked Thaw literature debates in Russian and Turkic translations. Poets discussed include Ghafur Ghulam, Anna Akhmatova, Konstantin Simonov, and Zhala Isfahani.