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Liubovnye romany: A Suat Derviş Novel in Russian Translation
Abstract
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 Cold War Soviet itineraries of the influential exilic Turkish communist writer Suat Derviş, who lived in exile in Europe between 1953 to 1961 and maintained close contact with the Soviet Writers’ Union and the Russian translator Radii Fish. Through a study of her novel Liubovnye romany (Moscow: Molodaia Gvardiia, 1969) that has to date not appeared in Turkish and other Soviet archival materials documenting her previously unknown visit to the Soviet Union in March 1961, this paper will address the transnational publication history of this work and its reimagination of socialist realist aesthetics. Composed sometime during the 1950s in exile and chronicling Derviş’s life during the 1944 and 1946 communist crackdowns (including her miscarriage under police investigation), this fictional autobiography traces the daily struggles of a persecuted writer who spends her days composing “thoughtless” romances and translating French detective fiction in a desperate attempt to support herself and her jailed twin brother Fuad, a communist. Contextualizing this novel in relation to Derviş’s other works, I will argue that Derviş used the technique of metanarration to counter Turkish “police aesthetics” of the 1940s and 1950s, and in doing so, made a valuable contribution to the global canon of socialist realism. Among other things, Liubovnye romany shows that Turkish literary history of the early Cold War years cannot be understood without tracing its neglected literary entanglements with the Soviet Union.
Discipline
Literature
Geographic Area
Turkey
Sub Area
Translation