At the height of literary nationalisms in the twentieth century, leftist internationalists from Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, India, and the Soviet East bonded over their shared love of the classical Persian verses of Hafiz and Khayyam. At writers' congresses and in communist literary journals, they affirmed their friendship and solidarity with lyric ghazals and ruba'iyat. Persianate poetry became the cultural commons for a distinctively Eastern internationalism, shaping national literatures in the Soviet Union, the Middle East, and South Asia. By the early Cold War, the literary entanglement between Persianate culture and communism had established models for cultural decolonization that would ultimately outlast the Soviet imperial project. In the archive of literature produced under communism in Persian, Tajik, Dari, Turkish, Uzbek, Azerbaijani, Armenian, and Russian, this book finds a vital alternative to Western globalized world literature.

Winner, 2025 USC Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies, Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies

‘A groundbreaking account of the intertwinement of Persianate poetics and Soviet politics from the transregional revolutionary days of early 20th-century Russia, Iran, and the Ottoman Empire to the fragmentation of the Persianate zone through the Soviet state-building projects in Transcaucasia and Central Asia, the collapse of the USSR, and the post-Soviet era in Eurasia. … ‘Persianate Verse’ addresses a long-standing need in world literature studies for alternative models of ‘worlding’ literature and is a timely reminder of the enduring power of poetry to bridge divides and create a sense of shared humanity across borders and ideologies.’

Kayvan Tahmasebian Source: International Journal of Middle East Studies

‘The book should be required reading for serious comparatists of all stripes … Persianate Verse models for us what serious comparative scholarship should look like as we head into the middle of the twenty-first century and the dreams and aspirations of the Eastern International fall further out of sight but - hopefully, to end on the same optimistic note Hodgkin does - not out of mind.’

Levi Thompson Source: Review of Middle East Studies

‘… delightful… Throughout the book, genres, poems, authors, and modes of reading are in constant and often dizzying movement across eras and between languages … Hodgkin’s analysis relies on minute examination of words and images, all interpreted against a detailed knowledge of Persian and Soviet literary culture. Yet one of the enduring legacies of the Soviet partition of the literary commons is that, all too often, these writers are now encountered not through the medium of their words but through the media of the streets, parks, theaters, statues, and even cities named in honor of the writers’ continued roles as national figureheads. In this respect, Hodgkin’s devotion to close reading can read as an homage to the sociality of adab, a quixotic defense of a world in which writers mattered because words mattered.’

Gabriel McGuire Source: Iranian Studies

‘Though Hodgkin’s encyclopaedic and multilingual erudition can be at times dizzying, the book’s extensive apparatus and clear prose - theorized, yet not theory-burdened - anchors readers. For postcolonial-studies readers, this book is essential, since it provides a vital service: for too long, a west-fixation has blinded scholars to the vast (and often communist) literary, cultural, and political interconnections across the space bounded roughly by Istanbul, Bombay, Tbilisi, and Tashkent, and often in Moscow’s shadow.’

David Chioni Moore Source: Journal of Postcolonial Writing