In September 1920, around two thousand delegates of thirty-seven nationalities from the newly formed Soviet Union, Asia, and the Caucasus came together in Baku, Azerbaijan. This event, called the “Congress of the Toilers of the East,” was convened by the Communist International (Comintern), which had been formed the previous year, and promised a new anti-colonial orientation for the global communist movement. At the Second Congress of the Comintern, held a few months earlier, Vladimir Lenin had called for communists to support national liberation and peasant movements throughout the colonized world, even where those movements were not communist-led, as a second front in the revolutionary struggle. The Baku Congress was convened to begin to organize the work Lenin called for, and while literature and culture were not explicitly foregrounded in the Congress’s speeches, it is with this event and its global cultural impact that Katerina Clark’s new book Eurasia Without Borders: The Dream of a Leftist Literary Commons, 1919–1943 begins.

Clark, known for her groundbreaking studies of Soviet culture, such as The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (1981) and Moscow, The Fourth Rome (2011), derives from the Congress speech a vision for a radically reconfigured global cultural system. In his speech at Baku, the Soviet poet Mikhail Pavlovich announced this vision with an image that recurs through Clark’s book: a “single common international ocean of poetry and knowledge” created by the “harmonious intermingling” of the literature of “toiling humanity who have been freed from national and class oppression for the first time.” The Baku speeches, Clark argues, amounted to “an idealized and maximalist version of cultural amalgamation,” an imagined “‘red’ Eurasian culture” that would encompass, in Grigory Zinoviev’s words, “not just the European proletariat” but also the “hundreds of millions of peasants who live in Asia, and the Near and Far Easts.” Or, as Karl Radek declared: “Long live the Red East, which together with the workers of Europe will create a second culture under the banner of communism.” This book is a record of attempts to create this “second culture,” a story of individuals who worked to combine Marxist and anti-colonial commitments with national and vernacular traditions.

These “cultural adepts,” as Clark calls them, among them Nâzım Hikmet, Qu Qiubai, André Malraux, and Mulk Raj Anand, were internationalist literary border crossers engaging in adaptation, translation, and appropriation, and the emphasis on the dynamic and translational practices at the heart of this internationalist project make this a book of considerable interest to current debates on “world literature.” Clark characterizes the book as a “prehistory of world literature” that “explores a missing link between world literature as it emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and world literature as it has preoccupied theorists and cultural historians in recent decades.” She seems to mean that the internationalist literary formation the book illuminates sits between the version of world literature associated with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, characterized by the appreciation and assimilation of non-European literature by European writers in the nineteenth century, and the more current understanding of the term as an approach to the global circulation of cultural texts and forms via translation and mediation, with an attendant attention to economies of prestige and the role of institutions. The study offers a very detailed account of how attempts to establish an internationalist, transnational literary commons outside the capitalist marketplace worked in practice, with central questions being the portability of literary forms and traditions into different contexts, translatability, and the power relations between the Soviet Union and non-Soviet countries. For Clark, this envisaged literary international was “intended to rival the established, Eurocentric literary ‘worlds’” centered in Paris, London, and Berlin, which were “dependent on the ‘bourgeois capitalist’ order.”