Russian and Soviet Strands in Arabic Literature (original) (raw)

Abstract

Organizers: Spencer Scoville (U Michigan) and Margaret Litvin (Boston U) Chair and respondent: Alexander Knysh (U Michigan) Participants: Spencer Scoville , Alyn Desmond Hine (SOAS), Masha Kirasirova (NYU), and Margaret Litvin For nearly one hundred years, Russian literature provided some of the most important sources and models against which Arabic prose writers developed their ideas and styles. Yet this deep connection has been largely overlooked in western scholarship: occluded by the end of the Cold War, ill-served by departmental cleavages between Slavic and Middle Eastern studies, and marginalized by literary-critical discourses that have either privileged colonial/postcolonial relations or portrayed Arabic literatures as mainly beholden to classical Arabic adab. Important hints of Russian literature’s central role, such as Sabry Hafez’s The Genesis of Narrative Discourse (1992), went unexplored. Only in the past few years have a few historians and literary scholars begun working on Russian-Arab and Soviet-Arab literary connections in earnest. This panel brings some of us together in person for the first time. Going beyond simple “influence studies,” our work addresses Russian and then Soviet education and cultural policy in the Levant and later the broader Arab world; histories and theories of translation and reception; the role of Afro-Asian Writers’ Conferences; the mediation of Central Asian literature; the patterns of Arab study abroad; and the highly personal processes of literary appropriation. What confluence of factors, we ask, made particular works of Russian literature available, attractive, and useful to Arab men and women of letters in different periods? How was Middle Eastern literature, in turn, categorized and metabolized in the Soviet sphere? The stories that are emerging from this research – about the Tolstoyan roots of mahjar literature, the contributions of pioneering cross-cultural scholars like Kulthum Awdah, and the vissicitudes of socialist realism – help to reinscribe modern Arabic literature into the “world literature” conversation now reshaping comparative literary studies. They do so by restoring the fuller context in which modern Arab writers read and wrote, balancing the western tendency to fixate on colonial influences by exploring other, non-western, non-colonial sources of literary inspiration. "

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