Nâzım Hikmet and Soviet Literary Anticolonialism (Rossen Djagalov, 16 Ocak 2023)

One of Hikmet’s most appealing and enduring characteristics is his consummate internationalism, with his poetic and personal engagements stretching from East Asia to the Horn of Africa. Of course, that internationalism wasn’t divorced from the main national contexts with which he was associated -the Turkish and the Soviet ones- but was rather, based on them. He engaged the literary spaces of Africa and Asia as a specifically Turkish national poet, familiar with underdevelopment and the workings of Western colonialism. What enabled his engagement in the first place was Hikmet’s place in the infrastructures of Soviet literary internationalism. Indeed, by following Hikmet, as he entered the Soviet orbit first in the 1920s and then in the 1950s and 60s, I will draw the contours of a veritable anticolonial republic of letters that sought to forge literary links between Africa and Asia and connect these with Soviet culture.

Bio: Rossen Djagalov is an Associate Professor of Russian at New York University. He is a historian of leftist culture, interested in the linkages between cultural producers and audiences in the USSR and abroad. His book From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature and Cinema between the Second and the Third World (2020) uncovers the Soviet trace in postcolonial literature, film, and ultimately, theory. His second book project, “The People’s Republic of Letters: Towards a Media History of Twentieth-Century Socialist Internationalism,” examines the relationship between the political left and the different media (proletarian novel, singer-songwriter performance, political documentary film) that at different times played a major role in connecting its publics globally. He is a member of the editorial collective of LeftEast.

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