GNS+ Lecture: Nergis Ertürk, “Translating Socialist Realism: Revolutionary Encounters Across Turkey and the Soviet Union”

Beginning with a short overview of the literary relations across Turkey and the Soviet Union in the early twentieth century, my talk will focus on what I call the second moment of intensified communist translation and literary production in Turkey during the late 1930s and 1940s. Whereas scholarship on the Soviet literary international has tended to write off the period of Second World War as a moment of contraction and retrenchment, I will argue that the 1940s witnessed some of the richest experimentation with Marxian form and socialist realist aesthetics in the Turkish corner of the Soviet republic of letters. Examining in detail the contributions of Suat Derviş, one of the most important communist women writers, my talk will explore the creative reimagination of the socialist realist novel in Turkey. Born into a prominent Ottoman family, Derviş came to socialism both by way of her experiences in Weimar Germany and through her involvement with the Illustrated Monthly (Resimli Ay) literary collective in the late 1920s. Traveling to the Soviet Union as a journalist in 1937 and again in 1939, she republished her serialized travel essays as a book titled Why am I a Friend of the Soviet Union? (Niçin Sovyetler Birliğinin Dostuyum?) in 1944. Imprisoned during the 1944 communist crackdown, Derviş composed brilliant socialist realist novels that thematized her clandestine participation in the Turkish Communist Party (TKP) underground during the 1940s. Substituting the figure of the prostitute for the originary maternal “positive hero” of Maksim Gorky’s The Mother (Matʹ), her exemplary 1948 novel Phosphorescent Cevriye (Fosforlu Cevriye) depicts the transformation of an illiterate, urban subaltern sex worker (who aborts her child) into a revolutionary actor. Examining the language politics of this novel as well as its erotic subplot, I will argue that Phosphorescent Cevriye should be read as an innovative modernist-feminist rewriting of the socialist realist “master plot” and as a crucial contribution to Marxist feminism in its imagination of a new communist ethics of the Act. First serialized in Turkey in 1948, Phosphorescent Cevriye (along with Derviş’s other feuilleton novels) made its first appearance in book form in Russian translation in 1957. Tracing the publication history of this work and Derviş’s exilic itinerary, my talk will conclude with a discussion of her legacy for the Cold War era.