On the Threshold of Eurasia , livre ebook

O N THE T HRESHOLD OF E URASIA
Revolutionary Poetics in the Caucasus
L EAH F ELDMAN

C ORNELL U NIVERSITY P RESS I THACA AND L ONDON
For my family, who taught me the meaning of hospitality
C ONTENTS Acknowledgments Note on Transliteration Introduction: Heterodoxy and Heterology on the Threshold of Eurasia Part I. Heterodoxy and Imperial Returns 1. Parodic and Messianic Genealogies: Reading Gogol in Azeri in the Late Imperial Caucasus 2. Aesthetics of Empathy: The Azeri Subject in Translations of Pushkin Part II. Heterology and Utopian Futures 3. A Window onto the East: Baku’s Avant-garde Poetics and the Translatio Imperii 4. Broken Verse: The Materiality of the Symbol in New Turkic Poetics Postscript: Latinization and Refili’s “The Window” onto Soviet Azerbaijan Notes References Index
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
Describing the world of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s poetics, the theorist Mikhail Bakhtin wrote, “There is almost no word without an intense side-ward glance at someone else’s word” (1997–2012, 6:227). This vision of authorship as both an intertextual and intersubjective phenomenon not only inspired the writing of this book but structured the process of its composition. To say that I am indebted to the many great mentors, colleagues, family, and friends who have shared their minds with me over the course of writing this book would perhaps not capture the animating force their words played in igniting and guiding my own. In many ways, this book is a set of sideward glances at other people’s words, written and spoken, a collection of moments in which the self fragments into that brilliant multiplicity of scattered thoughts that find their way into a fluid dialogue.
This book would not have been possible without the contributions of several individuals and institutions. The language training, research, and writing of this project were funded by generous contributions from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS), and the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) at the Central European University. I thank the fellows at PIIRS and the IAS for many lively discussions, which have shaped this manuscript.
I hold a deep gratitude for my mentors and colleagues in the field who have provided support and inspiration since graduate school. I thank my mentor and friend Aamir Mufti, who has taught me to approach the discipline with a humanist and yet tirelessly critical and worldly mind; Paul Bové and the Boundary 2 collective who continue to shape my understanding of critique; Anindita Banerjee, who has guided me as a junior scholar, balancing the worlds of Slavic and comparative literature with such generous intellect and professionalism; Bruce Grant, whose mentor-ship in the field and deeply humble, genuine and brilliant scholarship on the Caucasus and former Soviet Union continue to inspire me to become a better scholar; Azade-Ayse Rorlich, who first introduced me to Azeri literature and instilled in me the rigors of a historical approach; Dragan Kujundžić, whose mentorship has sparked a sense of play in my approach to theory; Altay Göyüşov, who continues to teach me about the nuances of Azeri language and history; Omnia El Shakry, whose brilliant mind, deep humility, and genuine curiosity has long set an example to which I aspire, and Elizabeth Richmond-Garza and Tom Garza, for first exposing me to the words of Bakhtin and the practice of academic mentorship. I thank many other great interlocutors whose work continues to push me to think and who have offered insight and support as this manuscript took shape: Ali Behdad, Nergis Ertürk, Rebecca Gould, Stathis Gourgouris, Sam Hirsch, Nilüfer Hatemi, Katya Hokanson, Güliz Kuruoglu, Harsha Ram, Michael Reynolds, and Nariman Skakov.
I thank my colleagues in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago for their mentorship and support. I am especially grateful for my comrades in Chicago who have made the city and the university feel like a home for the past three years, sharing thought, practice, and dreams of communal dwelling: Adrienne Brown, Peter Coveillo, Patrick Crowley, Harris Feinsod, Andrew Ferguson, Adom Getachew, Ghenwa Hayek, Faith Hillis, Rami Jabakhanji, Patrick Jagoda, Anna Kornbluh, Emily Licht, Liz McCabe, Nasser Mufti, Kim O’Neil, Julie Orlemanski, Na′ama Rokem, Zach Samalin, Christopher Taylor, Sarah Pierce-Taylor, and Sonali Thakkar.
Last but certainly not least, I thank my family by blood and love for their ever-abounding patience, care, and sense of humor. To my crew from Cali to NYC and Budapest to Baku for listening to me rant about revolution for many years and for making life fun, interesting, and beautiful: Sara Brinegar, Amy Brouillette, Nassie Elzoghby, Leila El Shakry, Dani Fazekas, Elizabeth Gelber, Krista Goff, Kate Hamby-Goodson, Natalia Janossy, Vladimir Kropatchev, Cetta Mainwaring, Marcy McCullaugh, Marites Naca, Tom Popper, David Ridout, Nina Silove, David Simpson, Dan Stern, Stephen Sykes, Kyle Wanberg, and Sandee Willis. I am also so grateful for my dialogic buddy Hoda El Shakry, who has patiently read so many versions of this manuscript, who shared my early fascination with Bakhtin, and who I feel so lucky to have the chance to continue to think, laugh, and cry alongside. To my grandparents, Evelyn, Ned, and Harold, who encouraged my early curiosity in the world; my cousins, Brittany, Brooke, Erik, Erin, Lily, Melissa, and Robin, and my uncles and aunts, Britt, Barbara, Carol, Doug, Hetta, Jon, Lili, Maurice, and Nedelyn, who have brought much love and laughter to my life. Finally, with all my love to my parents, Henry and Betty, for their unending support, my brother-in-law, Rusty, for teaching me about drill bits, and my sister, Jessica, who inspires me every day.
N OTE ON T RANSLITERATION
Russian transliterations are based on the Library of Congress system, with exceptions made for established English-language spellings, such as Dostoevsky rather than Dostoevskii. Azeri transliteration follows the Latin alphabet adopted by the Republic of Azerbaijan in 1991.
I NTRODUCTION
Heterodoxy and Heterology on the Threshold of Eurasia

You’re Komsomol, I’m “nonaligned”
But my heart is yours
Inseparable from your light.
Though I’m an idler of the revolution
My road is the wide one that you traveled
And our word is “ready!”

Sən komsomol, mən—“bitərəf”…
Fəqət mənim qəlbim sənin
Nur çəşməndən ayrılamaz,
Mən inqilab tufeylisi olsam belə bir az
Yenə yolum sən getdiğim geniş yol
“Hazır ol!” bizim parol…
(Refili 1929, 45)
In the poem dedicated to the death of Lenin, the poet and translator Mikayıl Refili outlined the position of Azerbaijan in the tumultuous period of the Bolshevik revolution and the consolidation of the Soviet multinational empire. Refili defines himself in relation to the state bureaucracy as “nonaligned,” drawing on the hybrid Persian-Arabic loan word “biteref,” literally without sides. Pledging his heart to Lenin and the Soviet cause, Refili’s verse marks the inseparability between early Soviet politics and romantic poetics. The imagery of the heart, spiritual light ( nur ), and the open road, tropes of classical Arabo-Persian poetry, contrast Refili’s use of the Latin script and free verse. For Refili, the parol , password or promise, weaves his lyric subject and Lenin into an intimate dialogue across political and cultural lines through the Soviet Komsomol, the Franco-Russian parol (word), and its Turkic rhymed command hazır ol (be ready). 1 In so doing, Refili locates political awareness not in party membership but in a space of romantic love, without or between ( biteref ), and in the process of an aesthetic, semantic, and political negotiation across the Russian, Persian, and Turkic cultural divides that surround the Caucasus. Refili’s poem from his 1929 collection The Window ( Pencere ) offers an alternative view of the Bolshevik revolution and consolidation of the Soviet empire in the south Caucasus.
The Bolshevik revolution of 1917 remains a mythic turning point marking the moment when St. Petersburg—which Peter the Great declared the center of imperial Russia’s modernization and westernization, its “window onto the West”—was swept away by the formation of a new empire centered in communist Leningrad. The legacy of these twin empires as a translatio imperii, or imperial succession, still looms in the shadow of the Cold War and Putin’s 2014 interventions in Ukraine. However, the imperial imagination always seems to return to the topos of Eurasia.
Following Emily Apter’s invocation of translation zones as both the process of imperial transition, translatio imperii , and translation studies, this book unfolds a series of Russian and Turkic intertextual encounters, which expose the construction of literary modernism as central to Soviet empire building, through the transnational circulation of texts and ideas between Russia and the Caucasus. 2 Rather than replicating the orientalist imaginary of Eurasia, as Russia’s infamous Janus-faced vision of an empire trapped between the geopolitical and ideological constructs of Europe and Asia, I offer an analysis of understudied Turkic archives, placing them into dialogue with the Russian works that were monumentalized into a Soviet world literature and cultural canon. 3 While structural differences underlie comparisons of the state formations of imperial Russia and the Soviet multinational empire, the formation of political subjectivity in Turkic Muslim literature produced during the revolutionary transition offers insight into discursive continuities in the translatio imperii , as well as the role of literature more broadly in the creation of alternative forms of political subjectivity on the imperial periphery. I argue that the topos of Eurasia exposes nodes of intersection between discourses of Soviet national identity and Russian and Soviet orientalism, as well as th