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Abstract

In September-October 1934, the millennium of the birth of the Persian-language epic poet Ferdowsi was celebrated not only in Tehran and the poet’s native Tus but also in Moscow, Leningrad, Kyiv, and across numerous culturally Persianate ethno-national territorial entities of the Soviet Union, most notably in Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Tajikistan. Albeit labeled a Tajik national poet in the later decades, Ferdowsi was still officially considered a Persian/Iranian poet at the time of the Millennium Jubilee (and until the early 1940s). Owing as much to the enthusiastic instigations of Soviet linguist and archaeologist Hovsep Orbeli, who was then director of the Hermitage, as to friendly relations between two rapidly modernizing neighboring states–the Soviet Union and Persia (renamed Iran several months after the Jubilee), the grandiose Jubilee involved the active participation of Soviet leaders, prominent Soviet scholars, and the wider Soviet public on an unprecedented scale. Taking place in the immediate aftermath of the First Writers’ Congress, the Ferdowsi Jubilee marked a watershed in the Soviet approach to the pre-Bolshevik literary and cultural heritage of the non-Slavic nations of the Soviet empire. The foreignness of Ferdowsi notwithstanding, the Jubilee set the ideological and organizational paradigm for future literary jubilees of the national literary figures/works of Soviet nations, particularly in the Soviet republics of the South Caucasus and Central Asia. It is particularly worth noting that some of the most enthusiastic advocates of the popularization of Ferdowsi's legacy in the Soviet Union were members of the Soviet Tajik national intelligentsia. In spite of Ferdowsi's official identification as a Persian/Iranian cultural figure, these celebrated writers, journalists, and translators capitalized on the momentum of the Jubilee to cement the incipient Tajik nation's claim to Ferdowsi's legacy, which eventually proved conducive to an official reassessment of Ferdowsi's national identity less than a decade later. Not only did the 1934 Ferdowsi Jubilee reaffirm the profound cultural ties among the Persianate ethno-national territorial entities of the Soviet Union, it also paved the way for the consolidation of the Tajik national identity in the Soviet context.