Abstract
Visualizing Soviet internationalism as a student dormitory, this essay identifies a new transnational subgenre, the Soviet dormitory novel, and analyzes four examples: Nazim Hikmet’s Life’s Good, Brother (Turkish, 1964); Ismail Kadare’s Twilight of the Eastern Gods (Albanian, 1978); Sonallah Ibrahim’s Ice (Arabic, 2011); and Yurii Andrukhovych’s Moscoviad (Ukrainian, 2000). These works each depict a different decade and come from different locations on the concentric map of Soviet influence: the Afro-Asian world, Eastern Europe, and the non-Russian USSR. Together, they reveal some shared formal features of the dormitory novel and some unintended consequences of Soviet internationalism, including the various racisms it rejected but helped perpetuate.
