World Literature in the Soviet Union

This is the first volume to reconstruct and examine Soviet engagement with world literature from multiple institutional and disciplinary perspectives (intellectual history; literary history and theory; comparative literature; translation studies; diaspora studies); the book is a vital contribution to current debates on world literature in and beyond the field of Slavic and East European Studies.

Galin Tihanov is the George Steiner Professor of Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of six books; The Birth and Death of Literary Theory: Regimes of Relevance in Russia and Beyond (Stanford UP, 2019) won the 2020 AATSEEL Prize for "Best Book in Literary Studies". He is currently working on world literature and cosmopolitanism.

Anne Lounsbery’s scholarship focuses on Russian, European and American prose fiction of the nineteenth century. She is the author of Life is Elsewhere: Symbolic Geography in the Russian Novel (Northwestern Illinois UP, 2019), Thin Culture, High Art: Gogol, Hawthorne, and Authorship in Nineteenth-Century Russia and America (Harvard University Press, 2007), and numerous articles on Russian literature.

Rossen Djagalov is an Associate Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at NYU and an editor of LeftEast. His interests lie in the relationship between culture and Marxism, in Soviet(-bloc) internationalism, and the history of the left, from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. His first book, From Internationalism to Postcolonialism (2020), deals with Soviet-Third-World cultural engagements.

Galin Tihanov is the George Steiner Professor of Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of six books; The Birth and Death of Literary Theory: Regimes of Relevance in Russia and Beyond (Stanford UP, 2019) won the 2020 AATSEEL Prize for "Best Book in Literary Studies". He is currently working on world literature and cosmopolitanism.

Anne Lounsbery’s scholarship focuses on Russian, European and American prose fiction of the nineteenth century. She is the author of Life is Elsewhere: Symbolic Geography in the Russian Novel (Northwestern Illinois UP, 2019), Thin Culture, High Art: Gogol, Hawthorne, and Authorship in Nineteenth-Century Russia and America (Harvard University Press, 2007), and numerous articles on Russian literature.

Rossen Djagalov is Associate Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at NYU and an editor of LeftEast. His interests lie in the relationship between culture and Marxism, in Soviet(-bloc) internationalism, and the history of the left, from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. His first book, From Internationalism to Postcolonialism (2020), deals with Soviet-Third-World cultural engagements.

“[T]he indispensability of such a volume should remain unquestioned. Both theoretically and in terms of its empirical findings, this work will in future surely act as a base effort to be supplemented and enriched by further studies that will take it upon themselves to address some of the volume’s less-explored areas. Herein lies the opportunity for an entirely new framework for historically and theoretically discussing World Literature.”

— Nikolaos Paraschis, CEU Review of Books

"World Literature in the Soviet Union demonstrates persuasively that World Literature can be productively conceptualised and analysed as a set of discrete grand projects, each with its own historically and culturally specific institutional and ideological underpinnings. The volume explores in both breadth and depth how Soviet projects of World Literature developed in tandem with the evolution of the Soviet Union’s more general politico-cultural positioning in the world. It at the same time provides important insights into the role that the idea of World Literature played in Soviet constructions of both internationalism and multiculturalism."

— Professor Andy Byford, Durham University