Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on March 3, 2025 in order to attend this event.
Please join the Harriman Institute for a lecture by Diego Benning Wang. Moderated by Taylor Zajicek.
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 an 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.
Diego Benning Wang is a historian of the Caucasus, Armenia, Central Asia, and the Russian North in the modern period. Benning Wang received a PhD in History from Princeton University, an MA in Russian Studies from the Harriman Institute of Russian, Eurasian, and Eastern European Studies at Columbia University, and a BA in Russian and Slavic Studies from New York University. Benning Wang is currently a visiting scholar at Harriman Institute and an adjunct professor at Kean University and Union County College.
