“A scheme of which the new is born”: Turkmen literary groups in the journal Turkmenovedenie (1927–1932)

Abstract

The article examines the corpus of literary publications from the journal Turkmenovedenie (Turkmen Studies; since 1932 — For Socialist Turkmenistan) and its literary supplement, as well as relevant archival sources. The journal was published in Russian from 1927 to 1932 and was mainly focused on academic and regional studies (kraevedenie), but it regularly featured literature from Turkmenistan and programmatic articles about it. The journal’s publications, as well as archival sources, allow us to reconstruct the details of literary struggle and the formation of Turkmenistan literary groups. One of the tasks for writers was to create a new proletarian Turkmen literature, but they varied in their understanding of what it should be like. The article explains aspects related to how the journal’s authors and editors described Turkmen literature and what happened in practice. The modernization of the literary process, on the one hand, led to its structuring, and on the other, to conflicts. The texts themselves sometimes retained an “Eastern” quality in presenting Turkmen poetry, but also tended towards “European” modernization in translation. The center had a very fragmented perception of what was happening in Turkmen literary circles, and although the models had features similar to the creation of new proletarian literature in Moscow and Leningrad, local features were added to them. These features distinguished the mechanics of the Turkmen literary process and literary struggle from the central models.