I draw on Benedict Anderson's study of the role the 19th-century novel played in constructing a national community, but apply it to a political community coterminous with the globe and its main genre: the proletarian novel, characterized by its representational interest in proletarian lives and formed in "the alliances between writers and the socialist movement at the beginning of the twentieth century." Mediating that relationship of genre and politics are two other terms: political imaginaries and international literary institutions. Thus, after a brief account of the proletarian novel's triumphant march through the Soviet Republic of Letters--my term for the Moscow-centered international literary field from the late 1920s to the late 1950s--this essay explores the literary figures and narrative patterns through which that novel imagined the contemporary left.