At the height of literary nationalisms in the twentieth century, leftist internationalists from Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, India, and the Soviet East bonded over their shared love of the classical Persian verses of Hafiz and Khayyam. At writers' congresses and in communist literary journals, they affirmed their friendship and solidarity with lyric ghazals and ruba'iyat. This book shows how Persianate poetry became the cultural commons for a distinctively Eastern internationalism, shaping national literatures in the Soviet Union, the Middle East, and South Asia. Furthermore, It demonstrates how the connection between Persianate and Soviet literature provides a pattern for literary representation in the decolonizing world. In the archive of Persian, Tajik, Dari, Turkish, Uzbek, Azerbaijani, Armenian, and Russian literature from the century-long entanglement between communism and Persianate culture, this book finds a vital alternative to world literature.