Writing in Red

Whether going through official channels or fleeing repression, many Turkish writers traveled to the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 1930s, publishing original work, editing prominent literary journals, and translating both Russian classics and Soviet literature into Turkish. Writing in Red traces the literary and exilic itineraries of Turkish communist and former communist writers, examining revolutionary aesthetics and politics across Turkey and the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s through the 1960s. Nergis Ertürk considers a wide range of texts—spanning genres such as erotic comedy, historical fiction and film, and socialist realist novels and theater—by writers including Nâzim Hikmet, Vâlâ Nureddin, Nizamettin Nazif, Suat Derviş, and Abidin Dino. She argues that these works belong simultaneously to modern Turkish literature, a transnational Soviet republic of letters, and the global literary archive of world revolution, alongside those of other writers who made the “magic pilgrimage” to Moscow. Exploring how Turkish communist writers on the run produced a remarkable transnational literature of dissent, Writing in Red offers a new account of global revolutionary literary culture.