World Literature, Institute of

(full name, M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR), a literary research institution founded in 1932 in Moscow on the initiative of M. Gorky.

The institute consists of the departments of comprehensive theoretical problems, foreign literature, and Russian classical literature and Soviet literature, as well as sectors studying related problems. The institute includes the Gorky Museum and Archives and a collection of manuscripts of Soviet and foreign writers. The institute’s periodical publications are Literaturnoe nasledstvo (Literary Heritage) and Voprosy literatury (Problems of Literature; published in conjunction with the Writers’ Union of the USSR). The institute holds all-Union forums on current problems of world literature and socialist realism.

Among works written at the institute have been histories of a number of foreign literatures, essays on the history of the literature of peoples of the USSR, and the multivolume works History of Soviet Multinational Literature and History of Russian Soviet Literature. The institute has published scholarly editions of the ancient epics of the peoples of the USSR and collections of works on problems of literary theory. Collections of works by classic Russian and Soviet writers have been published and are being prepared for print.

Among the directors of the institute have been I. K. Lupol, V. F. Shishmarev, I. I. Anisimov, and B. L. Suchkov (since 1967).