On the Threshold of Eurasia: Revolutionary Poetics in the Caucasus by Leah Feldman (review)

The traditional inclusion of humanistic scholarship on modern Transcaucasia within Russian and Soviet nationalities studies rather than Middle Eastern studies is, at least in the first instance, not an intellectually motivated categorization but an accident of the contiguity between area studies boundaries and imperial borders. As such, it has sometimes elided relevant cultural and philological context, and occluded productive comparisons in favor of more tenuous ones. In other cases, scholars focused on the Transcaucasia-Russia relationship have produced brilliant scholarship reflecting deep situated knowledge of at least one Transcaucasian language and cultural tradition, which suggests new insights and avenues of investigation for Middle East scholars focused on the Turco-Persian cultural zone. On the Threshold of Eurasia is this latter kind of work: one of very few major comparatist studies of Turkic literary modernism, which is, because of disciplinary boundaries, at risk of being overlooked by scholars of late Ottoman and Turkish Republican literature.

Insofar as the book is concerned with Turkic Muslim and Russian literature produced in Transcaucasia between the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the consolidation of Stalinism in the late 1920s, both its periodization and its axis of exchange and comparison are Russo-Soviet. But Feldman's reading of this corpus takes seriously the entanglement of both Russian revolutions with contemporaneous transformations in the Ottoman/Turkish and Qajar/Pahlavi domains, and many of the book's central texts participate in that entanglement. Discussing Celil Memmedquluzade's 1909 adaptation of a Nikolai Gogol play, which recounts an unscrupulous Isfahani mullah's con of an ignorant Azerbaijani village, Feldman shows how Azerbaijani writers and critics used Shi'ite taziye to align revolutionary politics with the Schillerian ideal of theater as ritual. A transnational Turkic genealogy of Futurism emerges from her consideration of uses of the folk ballad (türkü) genre by the Azeri poet Süleyman Rüstem and his more famous Turkish colleague Nâzım Hikmet. Throughout, a touchstone for Feldman and her subjects alike is Mirze Feteli Axundzade/Axundov, who had played such a transformative role in the literary and language politics of Romanov, Ottoman, and Qajar domains in the previous century. Through a reconsideration of his epistles and his famous mersiye on the death of Pushkin, the book moves beyond national historiographies of literary modernization to give us a heterodox but intertextually situated Axundov that should become essential reading for scholars of Turkish and Iranian literary modernity.

Part I of the book is a reception study of the Russian literature of empire, focusing on that tradition's immensely productive misreadings and reworkings by Azerbaijani subjects. The first chapter takes as its case study the reception of Gogol in the circle of writers surrounding the satirical journal Mulla Nasruddin, while the second shows various ways that Pushkin was repurposed. Part II presents an early Soviet study in contrast through two asymmetrical chapters. The third chapter is concerned with the avant garde art and theory produced by Russian exiles in Baku during and after the Civil War, and it implicates this avant garde in the ideological translatio imperii from Romanov to Bolshevik rule. The fourth chapter, focused on the literary grouping of the Red Pens (Qızıl qelemler), celebrates the praxis instantiated by the "brief period of avant-garde Azeri poetry," which "in its very confusion of forms between languages and poetic traditions, produced the very sort of organic synthesis and worldly poetic experiments that the Russian futurists had imagined" (p. 215). Note the asymmetry: this synthesis and these experiments, though Russian modernists could theorize them, were beyond their capacity to create, as they instead carried the voice and tropes of empire into the postrevolutionary world. Meanwhile, the national writers of Transcaucasia were busy realizing these theories as literary practice, largely unbeknownst to the Russian avant-gardists who lived among them.

The book's political wager for the present, declared most explicitly in the introduction, is that in a time...