After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening of Soviet archives, scholars in the United States began producing new comparative scholarship challenging the boundaries of traditional Cold War area studies (Meyer 2014; Tuna 2015; Khalid 2015). Though work by a new generation of historians, including Samuel J. Hirst’s scholarship on Turkish and Soviet diplomatic and cultural relations during the 1920s and 1930s and James H. Meyer’s research on Turkish students at KUTV, represent important new directions in Russian and Eurasian history, the literary and cultural dimensions of Turkish and Soviet entanglements is yet to be explored. This paper seeks to supplement this gap by tracing the literary and artistic itinerary of the playwright, critic, and caricature artist Abidin Dino (1913-1993) who worked as a set designer (khudozhnik) at Lenfilm from 1934-1937 under the patronage of the influential Soviet film director Sergei Yutkevich. After his return to Turkey in 1938 (via Paris), Dino joined the Turkish Communist Party and emerged as an influential writer in the leftist literary magazines of the period. Through a study of his essays in the journals Yeni S.E.S and Yeni Edebiyat and his controversial paintings about the Balikesir ewers made during the First Country Tour of artists in 1939, this paper argues that Dino’s turn to Turkish folk poetry and handicrafts cannot be understood independently of his work with filmic faktura (including “textures and materials of set design but also its objects,” as Emma Widdis has suggested) at Lenfilm. Through a comparative reading of Dino’s writings and Soviet Eastern films of the period, I show that the tactile Orientalism of Soviet cinema had a distinct influence on Dino’s modernist socialist realist aesthetics. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of Dino’s involvement with peasant theater during his exile in Adana from 1943-1945, demonstrating that Dino’s later writings moved beyond this Orientalism, opening new directions for socialist realist aesthetics both within and beyond Turkey.