WORLD LITERATURE IN THE SOVIET UNION: INFRASTRUCTURE AND IDEOLOGICAL HORIZONS

This text wants to pursue a somewhat different direction in the cur- rent con­versation on world literature; it seeks to ‘multiply’ world literature and demon­strate that there is no world literature per se, but rather different world literatures, because at different times different communities produce different constructs that they label as world literature. In my title, I signal that here we are dealing with answers to the questions what world literature is and how to write its his­tory that come from Soviet Russia, encompassing a period of some seventy years. My emphasis is on the lessons one could learn from the Soviet atten­tion to world literature; foremost amongst these is the compelling determina­tion of Soviet intellectuals to conceive of world literature in a systematically non-Occidentocentric manner. With this, the Soviets were pioneer- ing an approach to world literature that foreshadows our current concerns, as I will try to demonstrate. But there is also another lesson emerging from the Soviet preoccupation with world literature: the conversation on world literature does not proceed in a vacuum, it is constantly interacting with, impacting on, and being impacted by, the conversation societies have about national literatures and literary theory. I begin by briefly adumbrating four historically attest- able meanings of ‘world literature’ that are still at work in the Soviet debates; I then identify three different cultural and ideological horizons (or frameworks) of thinking about world literature in the Soviet Union and, significantly, locate their common ground, the glue that bound them together, in the master approach of de-Westernizing the very notion of world literature, an attitude consistently enacted by Soviet intellectuals engaging with the history of world literature.