Dear all,
I am glad to invite you to take part in a special issue of Slavonica, entitled Translation, Modernism and Communist World Literature.
We are looking for 3–4 additional contributors for the issue. Contributions addressing translation, reception and/or criticism in the Soviet Union and Central and Eastern Europe are welcome, with particular encouragement for contributions on the GDR, Central Asia, the Caucasus and other less-represented Soviet/East European contexts. This special issue of Slavonica is edited by Zachary Murphy King (Assistant Professor, Bilkent University) in coordination with Slavonica editor Zsuzsanna Varga.
Abstracts of no more than 200 words should be submitted by October 15, 2026. Authors whose abstracts are selected will be invited to submit articles of 6,000–8,000 words by February 15, 2027 in accordance with Slavonica’s style guide and subject to peer review. Abstracts and any questions can be sent to zachary.king@bilkent.edu.tr. The call for papers is below.
“How can the various attempts to formulate and implement Marxist aesthetics in the reception and translation of modernist modes and methods of writing be reevaluated today, beyond the familiar binaries of Cold War cultural history? What happened when translators, critics, and readers confronted literary forms that challenged prevailing assumptions about realism, representation, temporality, narrative, montage, fragmentation?
This special issue of Slavonica examines how literary modernism, particularly modernisms that emerged from Western capitalist societies, was negotiated in translations into languages of the USSR and Eastern Bloc. Although recent scholarship has substantially complicated Cold War accounts of cultural exchange, the reception of Western modernism in socialist contexts is still often narrated through a binary of ideological repression and individual resistance. The special issue builds on recent scholarship in translation, internationalism and world literature in the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc which has demonstrated the importance of literary networks, translation institutions, and individual translators to Soviet cultural life and to the formation of a canon shaped by emancipatory and transnational concerns. The wealth of translations and exchange itself has received excellent scholarly attention, yet the work, lives, and choices of translators and critics themselves remain insufficiently understood.
How were unfamiliar approaches to literary form evaluated and mediated in relation to changing conceptions of realism and socialist aesthetics? How did translators and critics reconcile, appropriate, contest or transform modernist techniques? How did translation and the construction of canons of world literature participate in competing visions of social and aesthetic possibility?
Contributions may address the Soviet Union or Central and Eastern Europe and may draw on a range of languages, periods, genres and approaches. We particularly welcome work that brings archival or less-known sources to questions of translation, literary reception, socialist aesthetics, internationalism, and the circulation of world literature. Contributions focused on the GDR, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and other contexts that have received less attention in English-language scholarship on Soviet and socialist literary exchange are especially encouraged.”
