Palestinian author and intellectual Khalil Baydas (1873-1949) is often heralded as a pioneer of modern Palestinian literature. He is frequently highlighted in discussions of Palestinian identity and nationalism because of his activity in anti-British and anti-Zionist movements in the region. As a graduate of the Russian school in Nazareth, and later an administrator at the same institution, Baydas’ political and literary careers were heavily influenced by his lasting connections to Russia and Russian culture. This paper seeks to examine more closely Baydas’ use of the term waTan in his translations of Russian literature and his essays to trace his shift in identity - from Ottoman citizen to Arab Palestinian. Examining texts from various stages of his career shows a shifting understanding of the term waTan. Exploring this shift in his literary translations reveals some clear, yet unexpected, connections between Russian foreign policy in the Levant and the early expressions of nationalism in the region. When Khalil Baydas writes eloquently the importance of serving one’s waTan in his first literary translations, published in 1898, his enthusiasm for the concept of patriotic service to one’s homeland is clear. Ten years later, in his literary journal al-Nafa’is al-‘aSriyyah, we find him still declaring his love for his waTan, quite clearly defining himself in both cases as an Ottoman citizen. In the period immediately following the 1908 Ottoman constitutional reforms, when Baydas began his literary career in earnest, many Arab intellectuals in the Levant were thrilled with the new freedoms and possibilities granted them. Even during this early period, however, we find textual evidences that Baydas’ conception of al-waTan had begun to shift from a broad Ottoman identity to a more local Palestinian identity. Later in his career, he again emphasizes the concepts of patriotism and national identity in the translated novel “al-‘ursh wa-al-Hubb,” though by this time Baydas had become an outspoken advocate of independence from foreign rule and the establishment of modern Arab political structures. Through a close reading of Baydas’ literary translations, this paper investigates the shifting meaning of the term waTan evident in Baydas’ writings. I argue that Baydas’ shift to Arab/Palestinian conceptions of al-waTan begins much sooner than has been assumed by many scholars of Palestinian nationalism. In doing so, his writings highlight the understudied influence of Russian culture on developments in the Levant before World War I.

In his famous 1904 letter to Leo Tolstoy, Islamic modernist and Mufti of Egypt Muhammad `Abdu addresses “the great wise man Monsieur Tolstoy” (al-hakim al-jalil musyuu Tulstuy) as a universal spiritual thinker, not a Russian novelist. “You are known to us in spirit if not in person,” `Abdu writes. “The light of your thought has illuminated us, and the suns of your ideas have risen in our skies, drawing the souls of intelligent people close to yours.” Four years later, sitting on his dormitory bed in Poltava, Ukraine, Lebanese-born schoolboy Mikhail Nu`ayma writes a rather similar love letter to Tolstoy in his private diary: “I am indebted to you for so many thoughts which filled with light the darkness of my spirit,” the future /mahjar/ modernist confesses. “Your recent works that I read last year were a great source of inspiration which illumined my life. Indeed, you have come to be my teacher and guide, a fact of which you are unaware.” However, like surprisingly many towering figures of modern Arabic letters, Nu`ayma would ultimately draw lessons from Tolstoy that were as much about literary form – the artistic representation of reality – as spiritual orientation. Building on new Nu`ayma scholarship by colleagues on this panel, my paper will explore Tolstoy’s changing function in twentieth-century Arabic letters. Attracted to the Orient and ambivalent about westernizing modernity, Tolstoy made a perhaps paradoxical bearer of modern literary forms. How did his role go from prophet to realist short story writer and novelist? What can that transition tell us about the figure of the writer-prophet so central to modern Arabic literature’s narrative about itself?

My paper will explore the problems of drawing cultural boundaries of the USSR at the height of Cold War tensions. In particular, I focus on Tajik and Iranian claims on legacies of Persian classical literature. These competing claims complicated the definition of an ideological divide that cut across culturally, linguistically, and historically linked regions during a period when Soviet cultural strategy abroad favored international exchange. Using archival documents from the Russian State Archive of Contemporary History, I focus on the period of escalating tensions following the Mossadeq coup in the mid-1950s, when Soviet attempts to increase their cultural presence in Tehran through the Soviet Cultural Center, its literary magazine, and film-screenings were met with increased resistance and outright attacks by Iranian state authorities. Inside the Soviet Union, such international tensions lent gravity to disputes over the status of Persian cultural heritage taking place the highest levels. The 1954 Iranian publication of a fraudulent biography of Iranian leftist poet Abulqasim Lahuti – who fled from Iran to the USSR in 1922 and acquired the status of “Tajik National Writer” – triggered a high-level investigation into the status over Persian literary legacy. Lahuti used his denunciation of the autobiography before the Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov, the Second Secretary of the TsK Mikhail Andreyevich Suslov, and First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev as an opportunity to air his problems with the Tajik Orientalist and First Secretary of the Tajik TsK Bobojon Ghafurov. According to Lahuti, Ghafurov insisted that classical Persian literary figures like Firdowsi and Omar Khayyam were the exclusive inheritance of Tajik population, and Lahuti’s disagreement with the First Secretary led to the censorship of the poet, and other problems for him inside Tajikistan. Lahuti’s status and experience in the Communist International and his language of international solidarity helped the Central Committee decide in his favor and led to an official reprimand of Ghafurov, implying that internationalist dimensions of Soviet cultural politics with Iran, which emphasized aspects of their shared past. Iranian nationalists also made claims to literary figures from across the Persian-speaking world in the 1950s. Using Iranian press, Persian-language biographies of Lahuti, and other literary publications I will explore Iranian perceptions of Lahuti, an Iranian-leftist-internationalist reinvented as Soviet-Tajik-national hero, and compare Iranian nationalist claims on Persian literary classics with Tajik ones as a way of exploring differences between the two forms of nationalism.

During her academic career, Kulthum cAwdah rose to the rank of professor of Arabic language and literature at Moscow State University and, along with the outstanding Russian academic and fellow collaborator, Ignaty Krachkovsky, helped to instigate early scholarly research of modern Arabic literature outside the Arab world by introducing authors such as Amin Rihani and Tawfiq Hakim to Russian readers. In spite of this, Kulthum cAwdah’s contribution to the study of modern Arabic literature is little researched and understood outside Russia. As a student in the Beit Jala Seminary run by the Imperial Orthodox Palestine Society, cAwdah translated short works of Russian literature into Arabic that were then published in Khalil Baydas’ innovative literary journal, al-Nafa’is al-casriyyah. After marrying a Russian doctor and initially moving to Kronstadt, cAwdah eventually began her academic career at St Petersburg, where she worked closely with Krachkovsky and published several volumes on modern Arabic literature and Arabic language. Kulhum cAwdah’s life and intellectual trajectory were highly complex because of political contexts and the cultural environments in which she found herself. Ill health and imprisonment meant that cAwdah had to negotiate her way around a multitude of impediments to deliver her work to her Soviet readership and, as her correspondence reveals, her private life often entailed having to traverse the boundaries of cultural expectations. Drawing upon theories of translation that concentrate on interaction between both cultures and texts, such as Apter and Damrosch, this paper shall argue that cAwdah’s life and works necessitated processes of translation that prompted a dialogue between a number of different world-views and saw her occupy a liminal space between Russia and the Arab world. The paper shall examine how cAwdah became pivotal to the dialogue between the two cultures by translating across languages and times and offering a unique perspective on the Arab world in the Soviet Union. We shall see how her perception of modern Arabic literature was identifiable within her published works, such as her anthology of Lebanese writings, and what this conveys to us about changing Russian and Arab identities in the early twentieth century.