The Soviet concept of “world literature”: post-revolutionary publishing practice and cultural policy of the 1930s.

The article is devoted to the Soviet notion of “world literature”, the study of its conceptual contours and implementation in the framework of modern Western theories that aim at reinventing the previous representations of the idea in a historical perspective and in the current humanitarian field. The translations of foreign literature published by “Vsemirnaya Literatura” in the 1920s were chosen as a material. The conducted analysis of the editorial politics of the publishing house makes it possible to state that publishing in the Soviet period served as a method of appropriating «world literature» through fitting it into the current ideological context. Thus, the educational goals of the project were combined with the political pragmatics of the new state. In the 1930s the idea of “world literature” in the wake of anti-fascist sentiment throughout the world played a key role in the process of rapprochement of the USSR with the countries of the West. The materials of the Soviet press (newspapers “Pravda” and “Literaturnaya Gazeta”) and the transcripts of The First Soviet Writers’ Congress demonstrate how the concept became widely used in the cultural and political discourse of that decade. In its Soviet interpretation, the concept was thought of as a process that covered the actual literature of the USSR. Thus, socialist literature and classics were regarded as a whole. Thus, the realization of the idea of “world literature” in the form of the 1920s accessible editions laid the foundation for the internationalist trends for the Soviet literature of the 1930s.