Writing in Red
The republic of Turkey and the Soviet Union both emerged from the wreckage of empires surrounding World War I, and pathways of literary exchange soon opened between the two revolutionary states. Even as the Turkish government pursued a friendly relationship with the USSR, it began to persecute communist writers. Whether going through official channels or fleeing repression, many Turkish writers traveled to the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 1930s, publishing original work, editing prominent literary journals, and translating both Russian classics and Soviet literature into Turkish.
Writing in Red traces the literary and exilic itineraries of Turkish communist and former communist writers, examining revolutionary aesthetics and politics across Turkey and the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s through the 1960s. Nergis Erturk considers a wide range of texts-spanning genres such as erotic comedy, historical fiction and film, and socialist realist novels and theater-by writers including Nazim Hikmet, Vala Nureddin, Nizamettin Nazif, Suat Dervis, and Abidin Dino. She argues that these works belong simultaneously to modern Turkish literature, a transnational Soviet republic of letters, and the global literary archive of world revolution, alongside those of other writers who made the "magic pilgrimage" to Moscow. Exploring how Turkish communist writers on the run produced a remarkable transnational literature of dissent, Writing in Red offers a new account of global revolutionary literary culture.
Review: Writing in Red offers a fascinating and vibrant history of global revolutionary literary culture and modernist aesthetics. Beautifully written, this ambitious and original book is based on impressive research and careful excavation of major Turkish leftist writers and their relationship with Soviet Russia. -- Evgeny Dobrenko, author of Late Stalinism: The Aesthetics of Politics
In this marvelously researched book, Nergis Erturk draws on the entangled histories of the Russian and Turkish revolutions to make us rethink the boundaries of the literary space created by the calamitous aftermath of the Great War. A remarkable achievement. -- Adeeb Khalid, author of Making Uzbekistan: Nation, Empire, and Revolution in the Early USSR
Highlighting a long-occluded literary archive, Erturk brilliantly uses the entangled Anatolian and Bolshevik revolutions to unravel persistent binaries such as modernism-realism and nationalism-internationalism. The result is a montage of aesthetic and political projects that together decenter the Soviet republic of letters while smuggling radical futures past into our counterrevolutionary present. -- Steven Lee, author of The Ethnic Avant-Garde: Minority Cultures and World Revolution