European and Russian Cultural Interactions with Turkey: 1910s–1930s

In the aftermath of the Great War the Ottoman and imperial Russian empires came to an end, and new geopolitical formations, what became the Soviet Union and Republican Turkey, emerged. In both countries a search ensued for new cultural identity and new cultural forms. At the same time, there lingered the possibility of creating new transnational formations and alliances. Clark’s article attempts to place the momentous shift from Ottoman to Republican Turkey and the almost simultaneous shift from Russia to the Soviet Union, and the subsequent attempts at cultural rapprochement between the two, within a broader context of cultural interactions with Europe as rival cosmopolitanisms competed for defining the “new Turkey” and also the “new Russia.”