My dissertation focuses on a set of writers and filmmakers who helped give the newly created region of Soviet Central Asia a cultural identity in the 1920s and 1930s. By analyzing the texts these artists produced and the institutional roles they played, my study tells the story of how narratives for the new Soviet Central Asian republics were created. Along the way, I chart new territory in the study of Russian imaginative geography, Soviet cultural production, and Soviet imperial poetics. At the same time, I shed fresh light on under-explored works by Nikolai Tikhonov, Vsevolod Ivanov, Viktor Turin, and others.