Revolutionary road

In October 1922 five members of the recently banned People’s Communist Party of Turkey disguised themselves as Russian sailors, boarded a Russian submarine and fled Anatolia across the Black Sea to Sevastopol. Among them was a young journalist and novelist named Nizamettin Nazif. In Nergis Ertürk’s engrossing Writing in Red: Literature and revolution across Turkey and the Soviet Union, this opening image offers an allegory for the book’s central questions of translation and transnational poetics. Was this exiled Turkish writer who dressed up as a Russian sailor to cross the Turkish-Russian border simply embracing a ready-made model of revolutionary culture? Or did his engagement with Soviet literature and thought transcend mere imitation to make original contributions to the global canon of twentieth-century leftist writing?

Nazif was just one of Ertürk’s cast of “writers on the run”, Turkish authors sympathetic to communism who travelled to the Soviet Union and brought Marxist-Leninist theory and Soviet aesthetics back into Turkish literature. Other such literary pilgrims included the poet Nâzım Hikmet, who studied in Moscow in the 1920s; the novelist Suat Derviş; and the artist and playwright Abidin Dino, who worked in the Soviet film industry in the 1930s. The past decade has seen a surge of scholarship on the transnational field of leftist exchange and aesthetic practice shaped by the Russian Revolution. These accounts reveal a multifaceted network of writers, artists and intellectuals drawn together by the promise of the Soviet experiment, yet never fully subordinated to the hegemonic ambitions of the Soviet state. Contributing with polemical vigour to this conversation, Ertürk warns against understanding international socialist culture as a process of diffusion whereby works and theories from the Soviet centre were reproduced as pale copies in the Turkish periphery. Instead she sees her writers as engaged in a creative practice of “Marxist-Leninist literary translation”, both as translators of Russian literature and through their own reworking of Soviet literary models to fit Turkish social realities and political imperatives.

The Russian Revolution, Ertürk notes, was “foundational to the emergence of modern Turkey”. The Bolsheviks provided vital support to Mustafa Kemal’s nationalists in their fight against western incursion during the Turkish War of Independence (1919–22). Turkish leftists greeted the First Congress of the Peoples of the East, convened by the Bolsheviks in Baku in 1920 as a rallying call for “revolt against the imperialist West”. Yet once in power Kemal’s nationalist government would repress domestic communists while maintaining relations with the USSR and holding up its neighbour to the north as a model for industrial modernization. Ertürk’s protagonists represent a countermovement to this history of interstate relations: communist- affiliated writers who sought, under conditions of censorship and persecution, to introduce Soviet ideas and aesthetics into Turkish literature.

Paradoxically, Ertürk shows that this experience of revolution defeated or deferred led to innovation by allowing these Turkish writers to transcend the rigid strictures of Soviet cultural orthodoxy. Nâzım’s “epic novel in verse”, Human Landscapes from My Country, and his late prose work Life’s Good, Brother, draw on Lenin’s writings about the agitational power of newspaper writing to develop their own distinct “poetics of seriality”. Derviş’s feminist novel Phosphorescent Cevriye, which tells of the asexual love between an Istanbul prostitute and an underground activist, rewrites Maxim Gorky’s classic proto-socialist realist novel Mother to undermine the phallocentrism of Soviet revolutionary culture. Dino’s peasant plays give voice to rural Anatolia through an “interweaving of formalist-modernist and socialist-realist aesthetic sensibilities” that was becoming increasingly inconceivable in official Soviet culture of the early 1940s.

Nergis Ertürk’s intricate, often dazzling close readings draw extensively on the resources of psychoanalytic, poststructuralist and postcolonial thought: a theoretical retranslation, in a sense, of the translated Marxism of the book’s subjects. Working across multiple languages and literary archives, Writing in Red showcases the creative range of Turkish literary responses to the promise of world revolution, challenging any account of global leftist literatures as monolithic and formulaic.

Edward Tyerman is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Internationalist Aesthetics: China and early Soviet culture, 2021

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