Abu al-Qasim Lahuti: Persian and Soviet Cosmopolitan
Panel 135, 2013 Annual Meeting
On Saturday, October 12 at 8:30 am
Panel Description
In 1922, the Iranian poet and soldier Abu al-Qasim Lahuti (1887-1957) fled across the border from Iran into Soviet Azerbaijan after the failure of his attempt to establish a revolutionary government in Tabriz. By 1934, he was one of the most important figures in the Soviet literary bureaucracy, and the founding poet of the young republic of Tajikistan. This panel, in conjunction with a round-table to follow at the conference of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, will attempt a comprehensive view of this elusive figure. It will address his importance to both Iranian and Soviet literary history, as well as the ways that his biography (and his various autobiographical revisions) narrate the upheavals that he survived.
The panel will begin with an exploration of internal Comintern trials of Lahuti, as a way of showing how and why Soviet surveillance and information gathering were used to evaluate immigrants' lives before and after their arrival to the Soviet Union. She will explore what these trials and investigations tell us about the structure of Soviet power and the reach of the Comintern's networks in regions under the purview of the Comintern's Eastern Section, especially in Iran.
Next, it will examine the bureaucratic roles Lahuti played as the preeminent "Eastern" poet in Moscow in the 1930s, drawing on both published and archival sources. The paper will concentrate on Lahuti's public performances, including his declamations of poetry and his hosting of events dedicated to the national republics, but will situate them in the context of his organizational work for the Soviet Writers' Union.
The third paper will examine the nature and reception of Abulqasim Lahuti's translations of Russian classics, particularly into Tajik in the 1930s and into Persian in the 1940s. Through an analysis of his translation work, it will ascertain how Lahuti's translations introduced Russian literature to a larger Persian-speaking audience, how these works were received in Iran and connected with similar translation movements by leading Iranian intellectuals of the time, and the role of these translations in promoting WWII era Russian-Iranian relations.
Finally, it will provide a reassessment of Lahuti's place in the history of Persian poetic modernism. A reading of his less well-known formal experiments, written from the early 1920s to the mid-1950s will reveal his ecumenical conception of poetic form.
The most famous of Abu al-Qasim Lahuti’s poetic works, from the Iranian, Turkish, and Soviet chapters of his career, have tended to be those qasidas and masnavis in which he harnessed a Persian classical form to serve his political message. Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak has done much to complicate scholars’ excessive focus on the most obvious trappings of form in tracing the development of Persian poetic modernism, preferring a nuanced view of how images, tropes, and unities were reworked even in ostensibly neoclassical poems by poets such as Lahuti. However, a reexamination of Lahuti’s importance to Persian “new verse” [shi’r-i naw] must go further. From his time in Istanbul through the whole of his Soviet career, Lahuti also experimented widely with non-classical forms, in some respects anticipating the later experiments of Iranian innovators such as Nima Yushij and Ahmad Shamlu.
Lahuti’s formal experiments were relatively little-imitated by his literary followers in Soviet Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, who preferred his heroic masnavis, and they also appear to have made little impact in Iran, where his lifelong absence limited the role that he could play in the new literary circles. Furthermore, his lifelong commitment to working simultaneously in neoclassical and experimental styles was unusual, even bewildering, in the context of mid-century Persian culture wars between those who declared themselves for and against the entire classical tradition. In this respect, he more closely resembles younger generations of poets such as Mahdi Akhavan-Salis or Sa’id Sultanpur, for whom classical and new forms simply served different purposes. A re-reading of Lahuti’s Soviet corpus of “new verse” in the context of his contemporaneous neoclassical works will provide, in miniature, an alternate history of the birth of Persian poetic modernism.
This paper examines the nature and reception of Abulqasim Lahuti’s translations of Russian classics, particularly into Tajik in the 1930s and into Persian in the 1940s. Through an analysis of his translation work, this paper ascertains how Lahuti’s translations introduced Russian literature to a larger Persian-speaking audience, how these works were received in Iran and connected with similar translation movements by leading Iranian intellectuals of the time, and the role of these translations in promoting WWII era Russian-Iranian relations. Ultimately, this paper aims to pinpoint the role of Soviet translators in the history of Russian-Iranian cultural exchange.
This talk will explore Comintern trials of the Iranian émigré poet, Abdulqasim Lahuti (1887-1957), as a way of showing how Soviet surveillance and information gathering were used to evaluate immigrants’ lives before and after their arrival to the Soviet Union. Lahuti—who had fled to the USSR in 1922 after launching a failed rebellion against the Iranian government—was immediately incorporated into Soviet politics through the Comintern bureaucracy, with which he remained connected until the institution’s dissolution in 1943. During this period, the details and narrative of Lahuti’s biography, including events of his life that took place both in Iran and the USSR, were subject of multiple controversies throughout the 1930s, 40s and 50s, producing special investigation committees and evaluations, and yielding a highly politicized biographical narrative.
Using archives of the Comintern, the Union of Soviet Writers, and interviews with Lahuti’s surviving family members I will address such questions as: How did personal information of Comintern employees circulate and through what channels? What was at stake in the Comintern’s evaluations of an Iranian emigrant close to the leadership of the Comintern Eastern Section and the Iranian Communist Party in the mid-1930s, before the Great Purges? What do these trials and investigations tell us about the structure of Soviet power and the reach of Comintern’s transnational connections, especially in geographical regions under the purview of the Eastern Desk, and especially in Iran?
