The Great Persian Poet in the Land of the Soviets: The Millennium of Ferdowsi in the Soviet Union in 1934

• In Event: Building (and Resisting) Nation and Empire: Folklore, Oral Tradition, and Cultural Heritage as Usable Pasts

Abstract

In 1934, the millennium of the birth of the Persian-language epic poet Ferdowsi was celebrated not only in Tehran and the poet’s native Tus but also in Moscow, Leningrad, Kyiv, and across numerous culturally Persianate ethno-territorial entities of the Soviet Union, most notably in Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Tajikistan. Albeit labeled a Tajik national poet in the later decades, Ferdowsi was still officially considered an Persian/Iranian poet at the time of the Millennium Jubilee (and until the early 1940s). Owing as much to the enthusiastic instigations of Soviet Armenian linguist Hovsep Orbeli, who was then director of the Hermitage, as to friendly relations between two rapidly modernizing neighboring states–the Soviet Union and Iran, the grandiose Jubilee involved the active participation of Soviet leaders, prominent Soviet scholars, and the wider Soviet public on an unprecedented scale. Taking place in the immediate aftermath of the First Congress of Soviet Writers, the Ferdowsi Jubilee marked a watershed in the Soviet approach to the pre-Bolshevik literary and cultural heritage of the non-Slavic nations of the Soviet empire. The foreignness of Ferdowsi notwithstanding, this paper explores how the Jubilee set the ideological and organizational paradigm for future literary jubilees of the national literary figures/works of Soviet nations, particularly in the Soviet republics of the South Caucasus and Central Asia.

Author

• Diego Benning Wang, Harvard U