ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the international dimension of Persian and Persianate canon formation, and the role of canon-building in projects of literary and political reform, through the early career of the Iranian poet and revolutionary Abū al-Qāsim Lāhūtī. Between 1921 and 1924, in Istanbul and the early Soviet Union, he wrote and edited for journals and publication series that attempted to establish an indigenous Persianate genealogy of reformist and revolutionary literature. An examination of publications by Lāhūtī’s circles of radical Turco-Persian intellectuals in Istanbul and Moscow shows that they regarded the enshrinement of a canon of Persian classics as vital for their projects of literary modernization. As classical literature was redefined from a set of models for poetic practice into a shared heritage within the larger imaginary of world literature, the newly distant classical canon became a vital point of reference for modernizers, whether imagined as the basis for an indigenous genealogy of radical positivism or as an admonitory ruin requiring renewal.
