Utopias fail. Utopias of one do not. They are perfect worlds. Yet their success comes at a cost. They are radically singular-and thus exclusive and inimitable.Utopias of One is a major new account of utopian writing. Joshua Kotin examines how eight writers-Henry David Thoreau, W. E. B. Du Bois, Osip and Nadezhda Mandel'shtam, Anna Akhmatova, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, and J. H. Prynne-construct utopias of one within and against modernity's two large-scale attempts to harmonize individual and collective interests: liberalism and communism. The book begins in the United States between the buildup to the Civil War and the end of Jim Crow; continues in the Soviet Union between Stalinism and the late Soviet period; and concludes in England and the United States between World War I and the end of the Cold War. The book, in this way, captures how writers from disparate geopolitical contexts resist state and normative power to construct perfect worlds-for themselves alone.Utopias of One makes a vital contribution to debates about literature and politics, presenting innovative arguments about aesthetic difficulty, personal autonomy, and complicity and dissent. The book also models a new approach to transnational and comparative scholarship, combining original research in English and Russian to illuminate more than a century and a half of literary and political history.

Introduction Utopias of One 1I THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
1 Learning from Walden 17
2 W.E.B. Du Bois's Hermeticism 33
II THE SOVIET UNION
3 Osip and Nadezhda Mandel'shtam's Utopian Anti-Utopianism 51
4 Anna Akhmatova's Complicity 71
III THE WORLD
5 Wallace Stevens's Point of View 91
6 Reading Ezra Pound and J. H. Prynne in Chinese 109
Conclusion Utopias of Two 130
Acknowledgments 139
Note on Transliteration & Translation 141
Notes 143
Bibliography 179
Index 197