Sadriddin Aini (b. 1878), the “founder of Soviet Tajik prose,” published his final literary work, Reminiscences ( Yoddoshto) in 1949. [1] A poet, essayist, literary critic and fiction writer, Aini produced a large and varied body of work from the years just preceding the Revolution’s arrival in Central Asia up to his death in 1954. Writing in the Persian vernacular of the Ferghana Valley, where he was raised, he helped to create and codify Tajik as a literary language that could give expression...

It is a historic irony that the Bolsheviks, who had demolished the decrepit empire, were the only force able to reconstruct it. In order to survive, the empire needed a new sign by which to justify the new energy of its unificatory yoke. [1] The contemporary return to authoritarian politics and neo-imperial conquest in the twenty years since Soviet collapse has generated an urgent call to attend to what Abkhazian novelist Fazil Iskander described as the “new sign” of the Soviet Union’s...

In the spring of 1927, a few months after his stay in Moscow in the winter of 1926 –27, the German critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin reflects on his travels and his own subsequent literary production in several letters to friends and colleagues. In a short note to the journalist Siegfried Kracauer he mentions his essay “Moscow,” albeit as a side note, and describes it as “keine volle réussite,”

In envisioning alternative futures—utopian, dystopian, cataclysmic—we historicize the present. Marxist critics like Fredric Jameson read science fiction as the new Lukácsian historical novel. [1] Others, turning to a further distant future, elaborate on the new perceptions of time and space offered in SF as visions that push toward cosmic and nonhuman scales. [2] As such, SF shares with the modernism of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce a similar interest in defamiliarization, in the limits or...

By the mid-1930s, the literary works of the aging Russian naturalist author Mikhail Prishvin abounded in the Soviet press, from children’s books to literary journals. [1] But despite a long list of publications, the author has been relegated to a secondary position in the Soviet literary canon. It has only been with the recent publication of his vast and detailed diaries that Prishvin’s authorial persona has sparked growing scholarship and interest. [2] And it was not until December 2015 that...