Romanticism, Internationalism, and the National Poet: Genealogies of Second-World Surrogacy

This article considers the national poet as surrogate: the rhetorical and poetic repertory that enables speaking for the national collectivity, and the ease with which this repertory is redirected to speak on behalf of other collectivities. It is a commonplace to attribute to Soviet multinational culture a Romantic nationalist genealogy, but this continuity or revival has generally been located in genre, intertextuality, and theories of the nation. Here, the author focuses instead on the tool kit of representation, and surrogacy in particular, arguing that the Soviet multinational literary system was a crucible that transformed the representational resources of Romanticism for the postcolonial age. The author’s account draws on the distinctively neo-Romantic approaches to representation proposed by Lukacs and Ankersmit to consider the Soviet reception and translation of the major national poets Robert Burns, Victor Hugo, and Taras Shevchenko. It also follows the Soviet Eastern (Kyrgyz, Tajik, and Iranian émigré) writer-functionaries who translated the Romantics through their own acts of surrogate representation in the Third World. The result is an account of how the Soviet Union, simultaneously anti-colonial and semicolonial, bridged the transition from the Romantic figure of the national poet to the postcolonial figure of the literary representative.