Persianate Verse and the Poetics of Eastern Internationalism
Hodgkin, Samuel (Yale University, Connecticut)
At the height of literary nationalisms in the twentieth century, leftist internationalists from Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, India, and the Soviet East bonded over their shared love of the classical Persian verses of Hafiz and Khayyam. At writers' congresses and in communist literary journals, they affirmed their friendship and solidarity with lyric ghazals and ruba'iyat. This book shows how Persianate poetry became the cultural commons for a di...