Baku, Literary Common

Nergis Ertürk

The First Congress of the Peoples of the East, convened in the Azerbaijani city of Baku in 1920, had to address complex problems of plurilingualism and translation. Comparative Literature might reclaim the history of this congress as an alternative genealogy for the discipline, an experiment in displacing the discipline's other founding stories: Goethe’s invention of Weltliteratur in conversation with Eckermann, Leo Spitzer and Erich Auerbach’s missed encounter with an Orientalized Istanbul.