The Reading of Russian Literature in China: A Moral Example and Manual of Practice (Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History)

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P S  C  I H Series Editors Anthony J. La Vopa, North Carolina State University. Suzanne Marchand, Louisiana State University. Javed Majeed, Queen Mary, University of London. The Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History series has three primary aims: to close divides between intellectual and cultural approaches, thus bringing them into mutually enriching interactions; to encourage interdisciplinarity in intellectual and cultural history; and to globalize the field, both in geographical scope and in subjects and methods. This series is open to work on a range of modes of intellectual inquiry, including social theory and the social sciences; the natural sciences; economic thought; literature; religion; gender and sexuality; philosophy; political and legal thought; psychology; and music and the arts. It encompasses not just North America but Africa, Asia, Eurasia, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East. It includes both nationally focused studies and studies of intellectual and cultural exchanges between different nations and regions of the world, and encompasses research monographs, synthetic studies, edited collections, and broad works of reinterpretation. Regardless of methodology or geography, all books in the series are historical in the fundamental sense of undertaking rigorous contextual analysis.

P  P M: Indian Mobilities in the West, 1900–1947: Gender, Performance, Embodiment By Shompa Lahiri The Shelley–Byron Circle and the Idea of Europe By Paul Stock Culture and Hegemony in the Colonial Middle East By Yaseen Noorani Recovering Bishop Berkeley: Virtue and Society in the Anglo-Irish Context By Scott Breuninger The Reading of Russian Literature in China: A Moral Example and Manual of Practice By Mark Gamsa Rammohun Roy and the Making of Victorian Britain (forthcoming) By Lynn Zastoupil

Carl Gustav Jung: Avant-Garde Conservative (forthcoming) By Jay Sherry Law and Politics in British Colonial Thought: Transpositions of Empire (forthcoming) By Shaunnagh Dorsett and Ian Hunter, eds. The American Bourgeoisie: Distinction and Identity in the Nineteenth Century (forthcoming) By Julia Rosenbaum and Sven Beckert, eds. Nature Engaged: Science in Practice from the Renaissance to the Present (forthcoming) By Jessica Riskin and Mario Biagioli, eds. Sir John Malcolm and the Creation of British India (forthcoming) By Jack Harrington Character, Self, and Sociability in the Scottish Enlightenment (forthcoming) By Thomas Ahnert and Susan Manning, eds.

THE READING OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE IN CHINA A MORAL EXAMPLE AND MANUAL OF PRACTICE

MARK GAMSA

THE READING OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE IN CHINA

Copyright © Mark Gamsa, 2010. All rights reserved. First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–62349–1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: June 2010 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

So, briefly: Flaubert teaches you to gaze upon the truth and not blink from its consequences; he teaches you, with Montaigne, to sleep on the pillow of doubt; he teaches you to dissect out the constituent parts of reality, and to observe that Nature is always a mixture of genres; he teaches you the most exact use of language; he teaches you not to approach a book in search of moral or social pills—literature is not a pharmacopoeia; he teaches the pre-eminence of Truth, Beauty, Feeling and Style. And if you study his private life, he teaches courage, stoicism, friendship; the importance of intelligence, skepticism and wit; the folly of cheap patriotism; the virtue of being able to remain by yourself in your own room; the hatred of hypocrisy; distrust of the doctrinaire; the need for plain speaking. Is that the way you like writers to be described (I do not care for it much myself)? Is it enough? It’s all I’m giving you for the moment; I seem to be embarrassing my client. Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot [1984]. London: Picador, 1995, p. 157.

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Contents

Introduction

1

One

The Russian Classics as a Moral Example 1. Literature as a Conveyer of Morality 2. The Russian Classic as a Teacher of Life

13 13 23

Two

Writers and Readers 1. The Pursuit of Engaged Literature: A Parallel History 2. Ways and Purposes of Reading 3. Beyond the Moral Message

35 35 43 53

Three

The Agents of Soviet Literature 1. Travellers to New Russia 2. Émigrés 3. Emissaries of the Soviet State

67 68 80 86

Four

Soviet Socialist Realism as a Manual of Practice 1. Literature as a Mirror of Life 2. The Masters of Socialist Realism on the Battlefields of China 3. Word and Deed 4. Battles Won and a Battle Lost

95 95 103 116 123

Afterword

131

Notes

143

Select Bibliography

201

Glossary of Chinese Terms

217

Index

221


Introduction

Two of the world’s most distinct cultures exhibit a set of broadly similar characteristics in the conceptions of literature that were prevalent in them during the twentieth century. In both, literature enjoyed a standing of extraordinary importance in society—a position earning it the suspicion and persecution of succeeding political regimes, as well as the esteem and passionate attention of readers. In both, the voice of the writer carried moral weight—and was assumed to be entitled to instruct and edify those to whom it spoke. These two cultures were China and Russia. The purpose of this book is to shed new light on the Chinese discovery and interpretation of Russian classical literature as represented by its outstanding nineteenth-century writers from Gogol to Tolstoy, and the new Soviet literature as represented by the novels of the 1920s that were subsequently defined as the founding works of “socialist realism”. Among the central issues to be discussed below will be the position of writers and “intellectuals” within general culture, and the meanings of “humanism” and “realism” in their Russian and Chinese environments. We shall look closely at the “travelling agents”, Chinese and Russian, who shaped the image of Russia in China and trace the development of a perception of Russian books not merely as works of fiction or vehicles of ideas but as tangible tokens of the country from which they came. Inasmuch as the literary relationship with Russia was bound up with core issues in twentiethcentury Chinese intellectual history, what follows is both a study in the history of reading across cultures and a comparative study of themes in modern Chinese thought.1 As Chinese literature entered the twentieth century, it still relied on the classical language, a medium of writing that demanded a higher degree of educational preparedness from readers and authors than probably any other literary idiom in the modern era. By the second decade

2


of the century, with the collapse of the imperial rule which had been intrinsic to the concept of the Chinese state, the questioning of cultural fundamentals included a growing demand for literature in the vernacular. The “May Fourth movement”, a venerable term in the historiography of modern China, takes its name from the demonstrations against the decision of the Paris Peace Conference on 30 April 1919 not to restore to China the former German concessions in Shandong province, which had been seized by Japan.2 These protests broke out in Peking on 4 May and soon spread to other Chinese cities. Before and after that momentous date, however, roughly from 1915 to 1923, a new current of thought (a more accurate definition than a “movement”) swept with it many, especially among the young, in support of the call for political and social reforms. The success of these reformers in renewing the literary scene, by encouraging writing and translation in vernacular Chinese (which the reformers were not the first to practise), proved the more durable of their achievements. The formation of a new network of young people, in Peking from the mid-1910s and then mainly in Shanghai from the early 1920s, was both a reaction to the threat of the imperialist West and an expression of a shared fascination for it. The “West” presented varied images to them. Some had seen and experienced it for themselves, having recently returned to China from their studies abroad: still a new phenomenon in a society in which foreign travel had never been encouraged, such an experience would have meant any period of time passed at a college or university in the United States, Britain, or perhaps France or Germany. For many Chinese, study abroad did not mean an encounter with the West, but with a neighbouring Eastern culture which had begun a course of Western-inspired modernization some decades earlier than China. By 1920, some among the young men (and still only a small percentage of women) who formed the emerging modern Chinese literary scene would have studied in Japan. None of them would have been to Russia. All of them, including those who did not travel abroad but had “only” moved from their native town or village to one of the two main centres of intellectual ferment in China of the time, went through a process of change. Early photographs taken upon their arrival in Peking or Shanghai show these budding writers, translators and journal editors still dressed in their gowns; a year later, many would be captured in suits and ties—which would not prevent them from returning to the gown on other social occasions. Having left a household in which several generations had lived under

INTRODUCTION

3

one roof, often in a location inhabited by the family for as long as memory could reach, they now settled, on their own, perhaps with a brother or a friend, in rented rooms or student dormitories. Their “West” was not only composed of abstractions but also constructed out of some very concrete, visual images: the sight of foreigners, glimpsed on the street but seldom engaged in conversation; the views also of the Bund, the Art Deco architecture and the British police in Shanghai; the signboards of foreign bookstores. Most of them devoted a number of years to assiduous study of a foreign language in order to be able to enlarge their knowledge of a world which was now perceived, more than ever by any previous generation in Chinese history, to be wider than China alone. The language they learned, their first window onto the outside world, was most frequently English. Little space within their definition of the “West”, a metonym for “modernity”, was given to Russia. We are in 1920. Two years previously, Lu Xun (1881–1936) had published “A Madman’s Diary”, the “first modern Chinese story”, bearing almost the same title as Nikolai Gogol’s story “A Madman’s Notes” (1835). He had read this and many other Russian writers as a student in Japan, in both the Japanese and the German that he had learned. But when, in Tokyo in 1909, he and his younger brother Zhou Zuoren (1885–1967) published the first Chinese-language anthology of foreign short stories (in which Russian stories were included), the bookstore in Shanghai that received the shipment from Japan had not managed to sell enough copies to make the enterprise worthwhile. The anthology would be reissued in 1921 and followed by another in the following year. The translation of Western fiction into Chinese had been going on since about 1900 (some earlier translations had been produced by American and British missionaries) and had picked up pace considerably in the 1910s. Writers of entertainment fiction, whom the people of May Fourth later dubbed disparagingly “the mandarin ducks and butterflies school” because of the frivolous subjects of their writing, began translating foreign literature some time before the new elite of “returned students” would turn this same activity into an article of faith. The absolute majority of translated titles by 1920 were by writers in English, with Russian literature trailing far behind the second source of translated fiction, France. Even French literature was still being predominantly translated from the English. Yet, a glance at the contents lists of the main periodicals publishing fiction and poetry in 1920 and immediately thereafter, such as Xin

4


qingnian (New Youth) and Xiaoshuo yuebao (The Short Story Monthly), reveals that interest for Russian literature was rapidly growing. Within the year, many among the leading figures of new Chinese literature would proclaim their allegiance to it. Undeterred by the language barrier, which would have made literature in English the more obvious choice, they would begin what would prove a long-lasting relationship with Russian literature as translators (typically through English sources, less frequently from Japanese and only rarely from the original), commentators and creative writers. Why Russia, then? Was the special emphasis put on Russian literature, which in China in the 1920s tended to merge with interest in the literature of “weak and small nations”, also one way to rebel against the domination of the West—an expression of disappointment in the promises of a just international order, which had not been honoured with regard to China, and a search for a model of modernity other than the one that the Anglo-Saxon world offered?3 The absorption of May Fourth in foreign literature, Russian literature in particular, proved a major source of inspiration to its participants as in their dual capacities as translators and writers they shaped the canon of modern Chinese literature. The special relationship with Russia would not remain a characteristic only of the writers of the 1920s and the 1930s, whose names will recur below. Already in 1920, the rise of interest for Russian literature was inseparable from the political victory of the Russian revolution, then about to be confirmed with the nearing end of the civil war. By the next year, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would be founded in the foreign concessions of Shanghai, while the first delegation of Chinese students would depart from that city to the Soviet Union. With the gradual turn of Chinese writers to the left under Nationalist rule, and their siding with the CCP in the political struggles of the republican period (1911–49), Soviet literature came, in the eyes of many, to represent the intellectual vanguard of contemporary world literature. After winning power, and for almost another decade until after the Great Leap Forward in 1958, the CCP propagated Soviet literature as part of its overall policy to set up Soviet Russia as the model for the new Communist state. Following the Sino-Soviet rift, Russian literature all but disappeared from China until the end of Mao Zedong’s rule but returned to considerable demand in the early 1980s. By common consent, the literature of no other country had as important and as many-sided an impact on modern China as did the literature of Russia and the Soviet Union.

INTRODUCTION

5

Anglophone research on the reading of Russian literature in China is still limited in scope and has rarely so far ventured beyond tracing the influence of Russian stories and novels on the creative work of Chinese writers. Aiming to understand the place of Russian literature within the larger framework of Chinese thought, this book does not set itself the aim of exhausting the subject, which should and doubtless will be revisited in the future, but rather of directing attention to the neglected cultural dimension in the Russian-Chinese relationship, which until now has been most extensively studied in its political context.4 It will be useful to begin by introducing the wider conceptual contours of the problems, which will be addressed in this book mainly through their literary manifestations.

1. Russia and China in the Twentieth Century: A Perspective on Transmission The passage of post-Enlightenment ideas to China, via the first translations by Yan Fu (1854–1921) in the last decade of the Qing dynasty, has been the subject of much research.5 A more sensitive question, one not often posed, would be to ask what happened to the “ideas” (always a shorthand for the agglomeration of concrete textual and non-textual sources of influence) both on their way and upon their arrival. It is currently fashionable to argue that cultures creatively “appropriate” ideas from the open world market of intellectual wares rather than passively “borrow” them. Yet this comforting conclusion (in which Marxism, turned into Leninism, evolves into “Mao Zedong thought”) may be sustained only at the cost of ignoring historical reality. In truth, ideas have always been part of a package combining elements such as the language, physical environment and historical and intellectual context from which they sprung. Their travel between cultures has been and still remains affected by the vehicles that carry them, the many varieties of which include books as well as people, and by the stops they make on their way; on arrival, their interpretation necessitates a process of conceptual, rather than merely lexical, translation. A state traditionally suspended between Europe and Asia, Russia had always suffered from a “time lag” in its reception of theories first articulated in Western Europe. An Irish literary scholar writing in 1886 put the

6


problem in the following terms, in a book credited with the founding of comparative literature: In this European China, as Russia, with her family sentiments and filial devotion to the Tsar, has been called, French, and afterwards German and English, influences clearly illustrate the difficulties to which a scientific student of literature is exposed by imitative work out of keeping with social life; but the growing triumph of Russian national life as the true spring of Russian literature marks the want of real vitality in any literature dependent upon such foreign imitation.6

The imitation of foreign models has been a familiar charge against modern Chinese literature during most phases of its existence. Speakers for the New Literature in the 1920s did declare, as we shall see, that in order for it to emerge writers in China had first to learn from, even “imitate”, foreign literature. In the following quotation, references to Russia could be easily substituted by China: Both critics and admirers of Russian thinkers have remarked on their tendency to develop Western ideas to their logical (and often absurd) extremes. [. . .] None of these people were scholars or full-time theorists . . . Their knowledge of their Western sources was fragmentary, their attitude to them eclectic: complex arguments were sometimes built on a line or two from an authority often quoted out of context.7

Now, it is one thing to say that the extremes reached were “absurd” and quite another to say that they were “logical”. If the latter be the case, then the effects of imported political theory, on Russia from the mid-nineteenth century and on China from the early twentieth, make the modern history of these countries a sombre warning about the implications of European theories, which their creators perceived as possessing a universal validity. The “universalizing ingredient in European civilization”8 had animated the Christian Church as well as the humanists, the ideas of the Enlightenment as well as of Marx. Russia and China then displayed to the West the reallife shapes that some of its “ideas” could take, and these shapes were terrifying to behold; thus European and American Communist pilgrims to the Soviet Union had to work hard to deny to themselves that the utopia, in which they believed as a theoretical construct, had been shattered in the only attempt at its realization. It was, in turn, the dangerously subversive potential of the Chinese warning (a mirror which the Chinese reality

INTRODUCTION

7

held up to Communist theory) that could not be allowed into discussion in the Soviet Union during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The “Red Guards” accordingly figured in Soviet reports on the events in China only in their meaning-free transliteration as khunveibin; it would have been too painful a reminder of a hitherto eulogized Communist lineage to translate hongweibing as “Krasnaia gvardiia”, thereby to conjure up the image of the Bolshevik Red Guards, who protected Lenin after the October Revolution.9 So radically distant, in the cultural as well as the geographical sense, was China from the acknowledged (Western) epicentres of modernity, that a Russian empire suffering from its inferiority in relation to Europe could plausibly present itself as the harbinger of modern civilization in its Far Eastern periphery, a role which the tsarist state, albeit half-heartedly, assumed in Manchuria from the late 1890s to the First World War. If there were, despite Bolshevik protestations to the contrary, obvious continuities in the territorial and economic ambitions of the Soviet Union in the same region, there was also continuity in the self-perception of Moscow as the enlightened part—the teacher and guide—in its relations with Peking. In a famous address in celebration of Chinese-Russian literary ties, signed on 30 December 1932, Lu Xun summed up their effect with the words: “Russian literature was our guide and friend”.10 This definition by “the father of modern Chinese literature” was tirelessly cited in Soviet narratives of the triumphal march of Russian literature and political thought to China. That there could be no separating these two items in the package sent to Peking from Moscow was a matter of agreement between senders and recipients, and in its original language Lu Xun’s maxim was repeated just as often. Daoshi, the word Lu Xun chose, meant more than the English “guide” can convey; incorporating the shi of “teacher”, it carried the aura of incontestable authority which would make it one of the attributes of China’s own “leader and guide”, Mao Zedong. Delays in the arrival of periodic updates in the Soviet Marxist gospel to its Chinese acolytes, however, presented a problem—one that necessitated much accounting for in Soviet histories: awkwardly headed by Lu Xun himself, the Chinese were still translating the likes of Leonid Andreev and Mikhail Artsybashev (émigré writers and enemies of the Soviet regime) in the 1920s and still quoting the positions of RAPP (the extremist Russian Association of Proletarian Writers, dismantled and denounced in 1932) or, conversely, still mentioning the names of recently

8


purged Soviet writers in the 1930s. After 1949, policies in the People’s Republic of China continued to remind Soviet observers of other discredited chapters of the Soviet past: from the appeal of Maoists to Stalin as a Marxist authority, a habit undiminished by Khrushchev’s denunciation of his predecessor’s “personality cult” in 1956, through the utopian Leap Forward and the harnessing of literary “production” to the economic Five-Year plans in 1958 (an idea reminiscent of orders issued to writers during the first Soviet Five-Year plan in 1928–32 and repudiated soon thereafter), to the Stalinist echoes of the Mao cult and the Chinese “Cultural Revolution” (a term already used by Lenin, it too was identified with the first Five-Year plan but was abandoned in the Soviet Union by the mid-1930s).11 The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, launched in 1966, evoked contempt in the Soviet Union, where, by that time, the scenario of class warfare aimed at the unmasking of counter-revolutionaries was both familiar and disturbingly alien. Seen as reflecting a caricature rather than the implementation of Communism, the Chinese “mirror” in the 1960s nonetheless showed that, at its first home, the revolution was now over.12

2. From Temporality to Epistemology A time lag, of centuries not decades, also characterized the perception of China by the West in general and by Russia in particular. Leo Tolstoy, in chapter 23 of his Kreutzer Sonata (1891), praised China for keeping music “the business of the state. This is how it should be”. The Music Bureau (Yuefu), an institution of the Han dynasty, was revived for the last time in the early twelfth-century court of Emperor Huizong of the Song dynasty. At the dawn of the twentieth century, even as Yan Fu and Liang Qichao (1873–1929) began to urge the Chinese to learn from the progressive spirit of the West, educated Russians began to discover the past-oriented spirit of Confucianism with philosophers such as Vladimir Solov’ev (who feared it) and Nikolai Fedorov (who admired it).13 Even as Chinese youths were dreaming of modernity and revolution in the 1910s and 1920s, luminaries in the West (occasionally, the same thinkers who had stimulated Chinese readers in developing the aspirations just mentioned) were discovering “Eastern spirituality”. Given

INTRODUCTION

9

the chance, they called upon the Chinese not to betray their national heritage in favour of Western cultural imports. Interest in China in the USSR during the period when it was officially considered a brotherly Communist nation was sustained by curiosity—and in individual cases, by a deeper sense of fascination of prominent Soviet intellectuals for traditional (rather than contemporary) Chinese art, literature and theatre.14 Were they at liberty to do so, many of these persons would have abandoned with relief the ritual reiteration of Marxist slogans, which opened and closed their formal meetings with delegations of like-minded Chinese colleagues. It is an accident of history that while he was searching for a way forward for China, European thought was passing through a profound crisis, in which the optimistic rationalism of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century was being swept away [. . .] So Lu Xun was confronted with social theories based on half-understood psychology and sociology, such as are contained in the works of [Max Nordau and Cesare Lombroso] and . . . Nietzsche, whom Lu Xun seems to have regarded as the avant-garde of European thought.15

What was, indeed, the extent of Chinese awareness of the time lag? Did Lu Xun really hold Nietzsche to be the latest word in European thought? Probably no more so than the writer Mao Dun (Shen Yanbing, 1896–1981), who, by the time of the founding of the Literary Research Association (in Peking, in December 1920), was well-informed enough not to look on realism as the “cutting edge” in Western literary theory.16 The assumption that these writers simply did not know about or did not understand the currently most modish “isms” in Europe and the United States is liable to be proven wrong as we find out that, being sufficiently aware of those currents, they chose not to explore them further: Mao Dun wrote a number of articles on Russian futurism but considered it unsuitable for China.17 In explaining this choice, issues of temporality again come to the fore: for Mao Dun as for many others, the borrowed teleological interpretation of history ruled that China had first to “pass through” realism before it could progress to later stages of literary “development”, symbolism being one.18 For access to many aspects of European or American “modernity”, Chinese writers could have turned to the originals or to their translations into English (some were also able to read modernist literature in French or German) and so did not objectively need Russian guides to either point them the way to the West or replace it with their own person. While

10


European symbolism found its appreciative audience among a small group of writers, more writers in China preferred to read Soviet fiction and Marxist literary criticism in translation while shutting their eyes to concurrent intellectual processes sowing confusion, doubt and disillusionment in Europe after the Great War. More were in need of certainties (of the kind which the Leninist blueprint for Marxism offered) than were looking for a challenge and intellectual stimulation. The marked decline by the late 1920s of writers’ interest in the literature of fin-de-siècle and prerevolutionary Russia (works of the so-called Silver age of Russian literature, a period roughly between 1890 and 1915, were most actively introduced in China in the early 1920s) was proof of this, as well as of a thirst for newer trends, belief in literary evolution and non-acceptance of forms of writing dissociated from historical and social reality. Reluctance to allow for the existence of literature outside the borders (geographical and mental) of the nation was, more than the insufficient availability of these works in English translation, the reason for the glaring Chinese neglect of the literature of the Russian emigration. A reader as sensitive and erudite as Lu Xun could have found his way to the first novel of the émigré writer Vladimir Nabokov, but the mere thought (suggested by the appearance of the first German translation of Mary in 1928) produces an anachronistic effect. The following explanation sketch of the process that we approach here may be called the “crooked mirror”, or reductio ad absurdum: conceived in Germany, socialism was first made a state doctrine in Russia and then imitated in China. Its arrival was an accident of history, or of translation. Nineteenth-century Marxism became a travesty/perversion/distortion in Bolshevik Russia, and then in China; much in the same way, the principles of self-determination pronounced by President Wilson immediately after the end of the First World War would degenerate into the caricature of Manchukuo, and then “the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere”, at the hands of the theorists of Japanese imperialism.19 Things are, however, more complicated than that. The word used by Lu Xun in 1926 to describe how the current situation in China would appear “in the eyes of the people of other countries, or those inhabiting a good future China” was the German Grotesk.20 Farce, as in Marx’s well-known comment (on a presumed statement by Hegel) in the beginning of Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte,21 is another term which may have been on Lu Xun’s mind. But the reality of “tragedy” in twentieth-century China, including the suffering inflicted on the nation

INTRODUCTION

11

by the political party that Lu Xun had supported as an alternative to the corruption and “grotesque” collapse of ethical norms under Nationalist and warlord rule, was nonetheless that for being a “farcical” repetition of another social experiment, which likewise had promised salvation through revolution.22 And for those drowned by the revolutionary wave, it did not matter whether that wave was the backwash of another. Summing up the passage of a literary trope from Ethel Voynich’s novel The Gadfly (1897), through Nikolai Ostrovskii’s How the Steel Was Tempered (complete book-form publication in 1935) to the Chinese imitations of Ostrovskii in the early 1950s, Rudolf Wagner proposed an image reminiscent of a mechanical reproduction line: “China, being at the last and receiving end of this development, got the worst of all worlds for it”.23 A similar logic underwrites a study of the Chinese reception of AngloFrench literary “decadence”, the literature of the fin-de-siècle, belatedly celebrated by modernist writers mainly in Shanghai in the late 1920s.24 Offering no proof of the greater depths of Western decadence that Chinese writers ignored, it relies on the common-sense presumption that a copy will always be inferior to the original. Symbolists in turn-of-the-century Russia were also accused of slavishly copying a French model—a critique overrating the reproduction possibilities of “models”, while paying less attention to the local forms they assume in another culture. The Chinese application of the Russian past to their present during the republic and the projection of the Soviet present as the Chinese future in the 1950s need to be examined in a wider and still insufficiently studied context: the history of the transnational circulation of ideas, to which the medium of translation and the act of borrowing are essential.25 It will be seen below that the “problem of temporality”, the time lag characterizing much of the reception of Russian literature in China, was real enough to account for a part of that reception’s history. Far from being limited to China’s relationship with Russia, the problems of late arrival confronted the previously self-sufficient Chinese literary culture as it discovered, all at the same time, the heritage of Shakespeare and Tolstoy along with that of Montesquieu and Darwin. The example for what became the first collection of vernacular verse in Chinese, a signpost of literary innovation in the early 1920s, was provided, as has recently been demonstrated, by conservative English poetry mainly of the nineteenth century.26 This is not to imply that Hu Shi, the collection’s author, viewed this poetry as “the avant-garde of European thought”; rather, it stands to reason that the receiving culture, needing to absorb so much so quickly, should have

12


relied for overall interpretation on the aesthetic criteria available to it—and that, even while aiming for innovation, cultural agents tended to bring in what they could best comprehend. It is not surprising that, consequently, some of the new foreign (including Russian) wine was poured into very old Chinese vessels. Without denying the historical actors the capacity to make sense of imported notions, we need to take into account the mental universe within which they could be accommodated. In view of the identity that mainstream commentators in China established between Russian literature and the moral and political message that it was taken to represent, it also becomes necessary to explore what may be described as “a problem of epistemology”: how and why literature, morality and life became conceptually connected. In line with the conventions of nineteenth-century Russian realism, which “Soviet socialist realism” would take over, traditional Chinese literature had also identified the subject of creative writing to lie in material reality and was little disposed to accept the fundamental premises of modernism: the search of a creative vision within the self and the rejection of outside authority. By citing the Soviet example of a twentieth-century literature firmly associated with realism and with the state, those in China who accepted Russian leadership in matters of politics also gained a safe haven from a potentially disturbing confrontation with aesthetics such as those of Ulysses and The Waste Land—to mention only two baffling literary products of a single year, 1922. Russian, and then Soviet, literature in China was identified with real life, its fictional characters with living men and women and its authors with teachers. This equation, we shall see, was applied to Russian literature more than to any other in the Chinese perception not merely out of political considerations but because (to return to the argument with which this introduction began) of the shared, or similar, postulates in the understanding of literature in both cultures. It was an equation responsible for the inspirational power of Russian literature in China, as for much of the brainwashing done in its name.

Chapter One The Russian Classics as a Moral Example

1. Literature as a Conveyer of Morality The Chinese writers who, looking for direction to the West in the 1910s and 1920s, rebelled against the aesthetics and preoccupations of traditional Chinese literature, nonetheless accepted the age-old premise of literature as the conveyer of morality. Certainly, most of them would argue that their Dao (as in the formulaic expression wenyi zaidao, “literature and the arts carry the Way”) was nothing like that of their predecessors, who had used an effete language to write on irrelevant and antiquated subjects. Indeed, they would shun the conceptual vocabulary of Dao altogether. Like their intellectual forefathers, however, they would say that literature is written to a moral purpose.1 Most first-rank writers in the republican era would subscribe to the idea that literature must teach and improve its readers, and that the latter, in turn, must accept the writer as a teacher entitled to instruct them. As readers and translators themselves, these Chinese writers were consequently most attentive to those authors in world literature who presented their fiction as a lesson and whose novels, plays and stories bespoke a moral or philosophical doctrine. As, in the first years of the republic, readers’ interests shifted from the English and Japanese tales of Russian anarchists and bomb-hurling revolutionaries that had been popular in the last decade of the Qing to the Russian classics, it was in these works that they found their most willing instructors.

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Russian literature was perceived to offer the closest Western parallel to the didactic purpose associated with literature in China.2 The fourcharacter slogan yi E wei shi (“Make Russia the Teacher”) applied to the realm of literature as it did to that of politics. In their search for instruction, it would be the emerging “socialist realism” of the Soviet Union that “progressive” Chinese readers of Russian literature would turn to next. In an article in 1921, Zheng Zhenduo (1898–1958), who would become a prolific critic, editor and translator, expressed the view that there was no real need to render into Chinese the products of what he disdainfully called “professional writing” in English. Neither did Zheng consider it an urgent task to translate the Western classics.3 English was, in fact, the only foreign language that the twenty-two-year-old Zheng knew, but (with the exception of Tagore’s poetry) at that time he employed this knowledge mainly to read and translate Russian literature through English intermediary sources. This was also what he wished to see other translators do; his close friends, the writer Mao Dun and even the American-educated woman writer Bing Xin (1900–99), likewise never translated English or American literature (Irish literature, like the Indian literature represented by Tagore, was again classified differently; the national origin of authors determined attitude towards them more than the language in which they wrote). Zheng Zhenduo’s call reflected the competition between the Literary Research Association (of which Zheng was a founding member) and the group of Anglo-American graduates, headed by Hu Shi and including the writer Liang Shiqiu and the poet Xu Zhimo (1895–1931), who were strongly in favour of translating from the English.4 But there was more to it than that. English literature was rendered into Chinese by Lin Shu (1852– 1924), the prolific if monolingual pioneer of Chinese translation, whose favourites were Dickens and H. Rider Haggard, but only as an exception was it translated by such proficient readers as Zhou Zuoren or Ba Jin (1904–2005).5 These key figures of modern Chinese literature, also highly active as translators, rejected literature coming from Britain and the United States partly because its translation had become so strongly identified with Lin Shu and his successors in the Shanghai entertainment journals—the target of relentless criticism from the camp of “progressive”, ideologically motivated writers, who associated themselves with May Fourth. Beneath the surface, there were resentments against the nations that sent to China their merchants and missionaries, and who

THE RUSSIAN CLASSICS AS A MORAL EXAMPLE

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were to blame for the military conflicts which beginning from the 1840s brought about China’s continuous humiliation. These feelings were most evident in Lu Xun, whose refusal to deal with English and American literature was complete and who in his role as the most important introducer of foreign literature in republican China almost never used his knowledge of German to translate German literature. Instead, he put his German and his Japanese mainly in the service of translating the works of Russian authors. Lu Xun and Zheng Zhenduo turned to Russian literature not only because they considered Russia an acceptable alternative to “the West”. They did so and were willing to disregard Russia’s own well-attested imperialist designs on China because they wanted to be taught, not merely intellectually challenged; May Fourth was for many a time of a serious search for answers to questions as fundamental as the meaning of life. Wishing to use foreign literature not only to enlighten themselves but also to instruct the people of China, they had discerned the potential of Russian literature for moral guidance. Another of Zheng’s friends, Xie Liuyi (1898–1945), later best known as a translator from Japanese, wrote in February 1922 that “the influence of literature consisted in [its ability to] educate the masses”, adding that in this respect there was “none to compare with Russia”. There, literature was “a mediator between the intellectuals and the masses” and “a writer was also an educator”—an example for Chinese writers to follow.6 In this quest for literature with a message, there were three main paths to take. One was to assign didactic intentions to writers who either had none to begin with or whose creative vision was set on the ideal and aesthetic rather than the practical and social realms. Joseph Levenson described the attempts of translators in China to make “teachers and preachers” out of authors such as Gerhart Hauptmann and John Galsworthy (the Nobel Prize laureates of 1912 and 1932 respectively) and even Oscar Wilde and James Barrie.7 A second possible approach was to limit the scope of the literature to which one wanted readers and fellow writers to be exposed: to declare, as we have seen Zheng Zhenduo do, that certain authors or even national literatures did not qualify for translation in China because they lacked the degree of social involvement which true “literature” required. It was on such grounds that Mao Dun and other spokesmen of May Fourth objected to the translation of Oscar Wilde. The most striking example of criticism in this vein concerns a Russian writer with a pessimist view of the world and no inclination for

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preaching. This failure to take a stand made Ba Jin, an admirer of writers such as Turgenev and Tolstoy, sum up his opinion of Chekhov with the words “terror and disgust”.8 This kind of Chinese criticism of nineteenth-century Russian literature was the rare exception, however. Instead, we have a number of statements like the following, undoubtedly deeply felt and sincere words, the very emotional intensity of which makes them in need of an explanation: Lu Xun once said, in his essay ‘Celebrating Chinese-Russian Literary Ties’, that ‘Russian literature was our guide and friend’. As for me, I could say that I grew up suckling the milk of Russian literature. The influence of Russian literature on me is far from being limited to the literary aspect, for it has entered my blood and marrow: the way I see and make sense of everything in the world, even my very soul, are inseparable from the moral instruction and upbringing (taoye xunyu) of Russian literature.9

The author of these words, a veteran academic, is not a Slavist describing his infatuation with Russian culture through a study of Russian language and literature. At the time when he contributed an introduction to his young colleague’s monograph on Chinese-Russian literary relations, Qian Gurong (born 1919) could look back on a long career as a professor of Chinese literature, recently distinguished by an award for lifetime achievement from East China Normal University. Qian’s visceral relationship with Russian literature in translation is representative of the generation of readers which followed that of the trailblazers: figures such as Zheng Zhenduo and Mao Dun. By the time Qian found his way to foreign fiction, while entering university in Chongqing in 1938, the early-twentiethcentury Russian literature that had been widely translated in China in the 1920s was already hard to come by in publishers’ stocks or in the pages of Chinese literary journals. Rather, Qian recalls being first engrossed in the reading of Turgenev, then moving on to Chekhov and from him to Gogol and Goncharov; in all these nineteenth-century writers, he noticed a similar feeling of melancholy and a broad concern with the plight of suffering humanity. It was later that Qian also discovered Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, coming to admire the “boundless love” of the first and to fear the irresistible “cruel genius” of the second. Qian must be counted as a particularly devoted reader of the classics and less representative as a reader in this sense, to have discovered Soviet literature only “after Liberation” (in 1949), as well as in being able to say (in 1997) that, despite some successes and notable impact on China during the first decade of the People’s Republic,


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the aesthetic value of those Soviet works “was far from comparable with [the literature of] old Russia”.10 The rest of our discussion in this chapter will revolve mainly around the names mentioned by Qian Gurong, though we may arrange them in another order: according to a widely cited bibliographical survey, the most published prerevolutionary Russian writers in China from 1907 to 1987 were Tolstoy, Chekhov and Turgenev, with Dostoevsky a distant fourth.11 Another name, arguably the paradigmatic example of “the Russian classic” in China, although he was much less translated into Chinese, will come up towards the end of the next chapter. The grouping together of such very different writers may be justified on chronological grounds (these were indeed the best-known authors of Russian fiction in the nineteenth century), as by the perception in China that these authors expressed the moral voice of Russian classical literature. This was the third path, next to the two already identified: to elevate a single national literature, not the names of individual Western writers, to a pedestal from which its most illustrious representatives would be expected to teach their Chinese readers. The “uniqueness of Russian literature” was proclaimed, early on, by a figure as central as the essayist, critic and translator Zhou Zuoren.12 The opening pages of an essay on Leonid Andreev, translated from the English by Mao Dun’s younger brother Shen Zemin (1900–33), argued that in no other country does literature occupy the same position in life as it does in Russia; nor is there a national literature able to reflect as truthfully the views and the spiritual and material state of the people. Nor is there a second country where literature is considered as important. This is why no other literature is able to exert as great an influence on the life of its people, nay on the people of the whole world.13

A comparison of these lines, here retranslated from the Chinese, with their unacknowledged original (atypically, Shen had not made explicit that he did not write the essay himself), shows not only that, in asserting the influence of Russian literature over “the whole world”, Shen had somewhat got carried away, but also that he was adopting judgements pronounced elsewhere.14 As early as 1918, Li Dazhao (1888–1927), the first Chinese Marxist and soon to become founder of the CCP, drafted a pioneering essay on “Russian Literature and Revolution” (unpublished at the time, this text was discovered only in 1965; its first publication had to await 1979). Focusing

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especially on Russian poetry, Li reached the conclusion that it was distinguished by two main features: its strong social concern and its inherent “humanist” relationship to the political struggle for freedom. Not poetry alone, but Russian literature as a whole was, according to Li, imbued with these concerns and dedicated to this cause, characteristics which made it unique among the literatures of the world; the Russian Revolution was thus the victory of Russian poets as well as of Russian youth.15 An even bolder appraisal was soon made by the young Mao Dun in an article on Tolstoy, serialized in The Students’ Magazine in spring 1919.16 This article eulogized Tolstoy as the towering summit of Russian literature—a literature which, even after his death, he dominated so completely that it could be identified with his name. Accordingly, the Russian literature moulded by Tolstoy was superior to any other in the world (Mao Dun compared it, specifically, with literature in English and French) and so great had been the moral force of the Russian literary awakening that it should be considered the origin of the Bolshevik revolution. Bold as this praise was, little of it was Mao Dun’s invention. Already in 1908, two years before Tolstoy’s death, Lenin called him “the mirror of the Russian revolution” in an article so entitled, which the Communist leader and literary critic Qu Qiubai (1899–1935) would translate into Chinese in 1934. It may be recalled that historians of ideas in the West have long accepted the notion that Rousseau (1712–78) had “prepared the ground” or “set the stage” for the French revolution of 1789; by similar logic, Nietzsche could be blamed for “inspiring” two world wars. What is important for our purpose is the adoption of such teleological notions in China and their continuous application to the perceived impact of the written word upon the real world. The question imposes itself as to why this teleology should have been so attractive. There is a semblance of contradiction between the syncretic ability of the traditional Chinese scholar to accommodate Confucian ethics, Daoist mysticism and Buddhist religious rites and the marked tendency of educated Chinese in the first half of the twentieth century to seek unambiguous answers to contemporary problems in the Western books they read. This tendency may certainly be seen as a reaction against the very syncretism of the traditional worldview, which the New Culture movement (usually understood as synonymous with May Fourth) attacked as lacking in rigour and clarity. Nevertheless, at a time when it was widely felt that the gravity of the new problems that China faced admitted no vacillation between different solutions, this feeling of urgency encouraged the one


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solution that appeared to hark back to the source: the traditional worship of the written word and obedience to the authority of the teacher. Guidelines on how a person was to live his life had always been presented to the educated Chinese by the key writings of Confucianism, which were memorized so as to serve as a moral compass. In addition to delineating the proper hierarchical relationships in society, the Confucian teaching provided a powerful model for the unquestioning reverence of its central figure: Master Kong himself, whose pictorial image, used as an icon in temples from the Song until the late Ming, was from then on displayed in schools as well as in the frontispiece to his popular illustrated biography.17 The first persons in China to actively seek out answers from foreign texts were ready to question the dominance of Confucius. However, they also tended to favour those written texts in which the answers were set forth most visibly and clearly and they were all too often prepared to forgo critical judgement about the doctrines they encountered—both out of a sense of deference and because they “ardently [wished] it to be true”.18 The fundamental assumption of Chinese tradition was that the scholarofficial class should offer a moral example to the ignorant masses. In the last three decades of the Qing, this requirement was joined with determination to uncover the “secret” of the West by obtaining the knowledge it possessed. Yan Fu, the pioneer translator of Western political and social thought, insisted on reading Herbert Spencer in the prescriptive rather than the merely descriptive key: as a teacher, not as a detached observer.19 He did the same to Darwin, whom he saw through Spencer’s eyes: “[his] theories do not merely describe reality. They prescribe values and a course of action”.20 Yan Fu thereby contributed to China’s absorption of social Darwinism, as applied to the rise and fall of nations, rather than the understanding of Darwin’s biological theory. On recovering, in 1903, the lost manuscript of his translation of J. S. Mill’s On Liberty (1859), he exclaimed in print: “The future of my four hundred million compatriots truly relies on it. I assume that Heaven was unable to bear the sorrow of its loss and did not want to see our people lose access to the wisdom this book offers”.21 While Yan Fu had difficulties with some of the ideas of the Victorian thinkers that he translated, his Confucian background could well accommodate their positivist search for truth.22 When, similarly drawing on both native and borrowed modes of thought, the CCP established its monopoly over all the right answers and “correct views”, it

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did so in the spirit of Confucian moral paternalism as well as in accordance with scientism: the conviction that the world and the rules operating in it may be known in their entirety.23 In a mirror image of the utilitarian perspective that left-leaning writers applied to Russian and Soviet fiction, right-wing writers in republican China missed no opportunity to stress the role of literature in creating patriotic sentiment, while underlining its function in the formation and strengthening of the nation state. In the eyes of Chinese nationalists, no less than in the propaganda of the Communist Party, literature and politics were tied in an irrevocable bind: the individual conceived as but a building block of the collective body.24 The political programme of the Nationalist Party (KMT) hinged on the idea of “tutelage”, positing the Party as teacher of the masses; beginning in 1928, this programme was supported by a call to revere the Sage (Confucius) along with the Generalissimo (Chiang Kaishek). The New Life Movement, launched in 1934, aimed to further this ideology. For their part, leftists attacked such literary critics as the modernist Su Wen (alias Du Heng, 1907–64) and Hu Qiuyuan (1910–2004; later a member of the KMT, who was still quoting Marxist theory in the 1930s), whenever they appeared to be defending the “inviolability” of literary art from the requirements of political propaganda.25 The tenets of “art for art’s sake”, sporadically proclaimed as an aesthetic credo by some, were put to practice by few writers: it is at the margins of the Chinese literary world that we find the much maligned “decadents” of the late 1920s. Still, we shall see that, despite the dominance of the politicized approach to literature that, in the words of C. T. Hsia, caused modern Chinese writers to be “drawn more to the ideology than to the artistic achievement of foreign authors”,26 there were those among them who resisted this trend. The perception of foreign literature as the vehicle of ideas rested on more than an ingrained admiration for the teacher figure. It was joined with the ancient lore of Qu Yuan (traditional dates 340–278 BC), a possibly mythical figure conventionally seen as China’s first great poet and author of the Chuci (the Songs of Chu). In his long elegy Lisao (“Encountering Sorrow”), this rejected minister and poet accomplished a mystical journey to the West. Exiled during the political chaos of the Warring States (481–221 BC), a period in remote history that many educated Chinese recalled in the twentieth century, Qu Yuan was believed to have committed suicide in protest against the policies of his sovereign, the king of Chu (the Chu state was indeed conquered by the Qin in 277


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BC, a year after Qu’s presumed death). In this myth, a poet was seen not as an individual creator but as a “citizen” intimately concerned with the well-being of his state.27 This indigenous model was amplified, rather than contradicted, by the new image of the writer, in so far as that imported image continued to bear resemblance to the role of the literati under the imperial system. The writers of “May Fourth” aspired to be the teachers and moral guides of the people—the same masses which, they claimed, were in need of liberation from the pervasive feudal ethics of self-submission to the figures of authority. Their vision of how this aim would be achieved initially encompassed what has been called both “the tender” and “the martial” images of the poet.28 The former image, associated with the “poetry of art”, pays homage to the lone creator as a misunderstood genius, who is uninterested in the present and writes for the twin soul awaiting him in the distant posterity. The latter image is linked with “poetry of action” and—at its most extreme—requires the writer to live a heroic life and die a hero’s death, as his merit is essentially evaluated in terms of his use for the nation. It was the second, “martial”, image that came to predominate in China. The conjunction of the foreign romantic model with a given capacity for hero worship is exemplified by the string of Western names in Lu Xun’s early essay “On the Power of Mara Poetry” (1908). Mentioned here were Pushkin, Lermontov and Gogol, as well as Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley—who in his famous essay “The Defence of Poetry” (his reply, in the year before his untimely death in 1822, to Peacock’s The Four Ages of Poetry) had called poets “the unacknowledged legislators of the world”. Two other names on Lu Xun’s roll of honour were the Polish national poet Adam Mickiewicz, who abandoned poetry in favour of “direct action”, and the poet Petőfi Sándor, fallen at the age of twenty-six in the Hungarian revolt of 1849.29 The historical “action” taken by such literary figures as Lord Byron was central to their appeal everywhere in the world, not least in Russia where both became immensely popular. In China, however, their identification with moral and social issues (questionable for the English poet, whose life had been a monument to romantic individualism) easily overshadowed their—only partially translated—writings. “Picha”, a transcription of “Beecher”, was at the turn of the twentieth century elevated as a role model for Chinese women on the strength of a book that nobody had read: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s world renown was mistakenly attributed

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in China to The Mayflower, her first work, a comparatively insignificant collection of stories on the descendants of the Pilgrims. Unconnected to the fame of “Picha”, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which Lin Shu translated in 1901, was being credited with achieving the abolition of slavery in the United States.30 The worship of Byron and Shelley found an outlet in A Spring Dream (1924)—a play by the young Zhang Wentian (1900–76), an active translator and commentator on Russian and West European literature in the 1920s.31 In the same year, the hundredth anniversary of Byron’s death at Missolonghi, Zhang also published what would remain his last translation of a literary essay—a chapter on Byron from Main Currents in Nineteenth-Century Literature by Georg Brandes. In 1925 Zhang joined the CCP and was sent to Moscow; he would later become an important political figure. In his own “Brief Outline of Literature”, published in 1927, the romantic writer Yu Dafu (1896–1945) exaggerated literature’s powers so far as to contend that the great European writers had brought about the French revolution—even though all the writers he mentioned in support of this claim, with the sole exception of Goethe, were born after 1789.32 These supposed feats of his colleagues were grist to Yu’s mill, as he continued to proclaim the patriotic mission of the hero-poetcritic in China.33 It was about these same romantic illusions that, years after his essay on “the Mara poets”, Lu Xun wished to caution Chinese writers. As he told the inaugural assembly of the League of Left-Wing writers in 1930 not to expect to be thanked for their troubles once victory was achieved, he recalled (not for the first time) the suicide of the Soviet poet Sergei Esenin. As another example, he cited the hero-intellectual who was ridiculed by mine workers in Alexander Fadeev’s The Rout, a novel he had translated.34 The real hardship awaiting the League’s survivors under the Communist regime was something even Lu Xun could not have imagined. In his speech on “Literature of a Revolutionary Period” in 1927;35 in a letter on “Literature and Revolution” in 192836 and in another speech before Peking students, “Some Thoughts on Our New Literature”, delivered in 1929,37 Lu Xun had raised grave doubts about the contribution that literature in general and current Chinese literature in particular were really able to make to the revolutionary cause. There were, to Lu Xun’s mind, self-declared “revolutionary writers” on the one hand and real, down-toearth revolutionaries on the other—and holders of the pen were inferior to


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those who held the gun. Lu Xun’s friend Qu Qiubai, who had held both, in turn subjected to merciless criticism the presumption of “May Fourth” writers to lead the masses; rather, he argued, intellectuals should have gone among the people, the better to learn from them and serve them before their own ineluctable disappearance as a social class.38 From here the road was short enough to Mao Zedong’s speeches in the Communist stronghold of Yan’an in 1942: the definitive statement on the subservience of the writer to the Party, in which echoes of the martyred Qu Qiubai were heard, if not openly acknowledged. Mao’s literary doctrine, as presented in Yan’an from 2 to 23 May 1942 and published (to coincide with the seventh anniversary of Lu Xun’s death) on 19 October 1943, was extolled as a great Chinese contribution to Marxist literary criticism. By creating “Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought” (Ma Lie zhuyi Mao Zedong sixiang) during the Yan’an period from December 1936 to March 1947, Mao was said to have “sinified” Marxism as a whole. However, the Yan’an “talks” were revised and published between 1950 and 1952 (Bonnie McDougall’s English translation is based on this revised version, in which all references to “Marxism-Leninism” had been replaced by “Marxism”), and, with the knowledge now available, it is very hard to imagine that Mao’s aim in their publication was to break new critical or philosophical ground. If he was at all a theoretician, he was a primitive one. Rather, his statements on culture pursued concrete political objectives and his example in this activity was Stalin.39 In an article more recent than her translation of Mao’s speeches, Bonnie McDougall used the example of Mary Shelley’s suffering at the hands of Shelley and Byron to undermine the romantic view of the poet or writer as a moral authority.40 As a greater dose of idealism about the mission of the writer reached China via the Russian realists than through the English romantics, we shall now look at how these Russian masters and their writings were received and what lessons were drawn from their classes.

2. The Russian Classic as a Teacher of Life The I-hero of Yu Dafu’s “Sinking” (1921) is able to quote Wordsworth, imagines himself as Zarathustra and is seen reading Heine and Gissing, among other Western writers. The only writer mentioned in this novella

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whom the hero does not actually read but instead evokes as a moral (or, rather, immoral) authority is “Gogol, the founder of modern Russian literature”. Discovering that “no less a man than the author of Dead Souls was his fellow sinner”, the tormented youngster is somewhat comforted in his agony over the solitary sin that he commits every morning.41 The example is no less illustrative than it is hilarious. Attention to the biographies of writers was intense and liable to settle on the most anecdotal detail. Before focusing on expressions of this “biographical” approach with respect to foreign, specifically Russian, writers, its use with the model figures of Chinese tradition is worth noting: thus, to provide moral justification for his living with a woman other than his wife, the poet Guo Moruo (1892–1978) appealed in 1920 to the biographies of both Goethe and Confucius.42 Calls for writers in China to follow the path of Gorky, the self-taught sage who emerged straight out of the working class to occupy a place in the front ranks of world literature, were widespread since the 1930s. Arguments about the mission and duties of the Chinese writer in Yan’an in summer 1941, the year before the “Forum on Literature and Art”, naturally evoked this paragon, but also the fact that “Tolstoy, Bernard Shaw and Gandhi were all vegetarians”, while “the Russian writer Chekhov couldn’t write without chicken soup”.43 Next to biography, the physical appearance of the literary sage was part and parcel of his cult, and hero worship—a factor in the reception of foreign literature in republican China. In June 1924, the Shanghai branch of the Literary Research Association organized a collection among its members to cover the costs of printing out a set of six postcards bearing the photographic portraits of famous foreign writers. In the following month, these postcards were distributed to the members, while, through an advertisement in the association’s weekly literary supplement Wenxue, all other “lovers of literature” were informed that postal orders for the complete set could be made by writing to the association’s address in Shanghai’s Zhabei District. The advertisement was entitled “All lovers of literature and art, please buy: Writers’ postcards!!!” It then began with the following words: Every avid reader of the literary works of famous writers is bound to look with reverence (zhanyang) at their graceful appearance ( fengcai). Placed at the head of the table, hung on the wall, these writers’ portraits will not only decorate a tranquil and elegant study, but, for the talented artist whose gaze would meet [the portraits] both morning and evening, they will be likely to stir inspiration and cultivate an appropriate temperament.


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A second postcard set, bearing the images of another six writers, was printed in March 1925.44 The whole idea had apparently come from Zheng Zhenduo, who had been involved in placing the photographs of eleven writers and artists in the special issue, which the journal Xiaoshuo yuebao devoted to Russian literature in September 1921. The writer Ye Shengtao (also known as Ye Shaojun, 1894–1988), Zheng’s friend and fellow founder of the Literary Research Association, stacked the postcards upon two shelves of his bookcase and, as he advertised their sale in the pages of Wenxue, provided readers with his home address in Shanghai. The story is told in Ye’s son’s recollections, published exactly seventy years later: it had been his responsibility as a six-year-old to tear open the envelopes received from the “lovers of literature” and extract the stamps they would enclose in lieu of payment. Fortunately for him, not too many such envelopes ever arrived. It is surely no coincidence, however, that at the outset of Ye Shengtao’s story “A Youngster” (dating to the year when the writers’ postcards were first printed) we see the wall of the main hero’s room decorated with photographs of Andersen, Chekhov and Tolstoy.45 The portraits of foreign writers, whether received from the Literary Research Association or obtained by other means, did reach the writing desks and the walls of Chinese authors: on the wall of Lu Xun’s room, at his second Peking home from May 1924 to August 1926, a memoirist reported seeing a portrait of Leonid Andreev.46 This memory is not corroborated by the recollections of other visitors, but one of Andreev’s main translators into Chinese, a member of Lu Xun’s entourage in Peking, Li Jiye (1904–97), had on his wall a portrait of Tolstoy, shown telling stories to children.47 This form of expressing admiration for a writer was familiar in late tsarist Russia; postcards with the images of contemporary authors48 became widespread when several publishers concurrently printed postcards of Pushkin on the poet’s birth centenary in 1899. The frontispiece with the author portrait, which would remain a typical feature of Soviet publishing, had an unusually long life in Russia. In Britain, having first become common in the early seventeenth century, the frontispiece was often used—until, roughly, the 1760s—to lend support to the English novel’s pretence for telling a truthful story by “portraying” its narrator (the bestknown frontispiece portrait in the eighteenth century was probably that of Robinson Crusoe). “By the late Victorian period the frontispiece was an anachronism, a symbol of style over substance”.49 The use of writers’

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portraits in Russia, however, represented more than a mere publishing convention. A sense of their place in the culture will come across in a reading of a story on books by a mainstream realist writer, such as “The Little Bookshelf ” (1909) by Ivan Shmelev (1873–1950). In this story, as its youthful hero is introduced to the world of books in the house of his uncle, the portraits of Russian writers look down solemnly at him from the upper shelves of the home library; the first lesson that the awestruck boy receives under the portraits’ gaze is that “a book is not written for fun! It must instruct people how they should and should not live”.50 As it was the religious icon that met the eye of a visitor to any traditional Russian household, the portraits just described functioned as its secular replacement. The author portrait was perceived as a novelty in early twentiethcentury China; the association of foreign writers with their photographic images, made by Zhou Shoujuan (1895–1968) in the Anthology of Short Stories by Famous European and American Writers, which he translated and edited in 1917, was considered an innovation.51 China had no match for the Greek and Roman busts and images of rulers on coins, which, revived in fourteenth-century Europe, gave rise to portraits and portrait galleries.52 Already in the Ming dynasty, author portraits could be found in illustrated books, but, like figure portraits in painting, they were considered a lowly genre by the literati in an age when the icons of Confucius in temples were being replaced by inscribed wooden tablets.53 We know now that, besides portraits of deceased family members ordered and used in the cult of ancestor worship, portrait sets of great men of present and ancient times circulated among the Ming elite.54 Photography was known in China from the 1870s, and hanging framed photographs on the wall was less new than the idea of the writer’s portrait.55 When the chronically ill translator of Russian literature Wei Suyuan (1902–32) was hospitalized in a sanatorium in Peking, he brought with him a portrait of Dostoevsky. While visiting Wei, his close collaborator in the Unnamed Society, in May 1929, Lu Xun noticed the portrait on the wall and mentioned it in a letter to his common-law wife and then also in Wei’s obituary.56 It was part of a series of portraits, of Russian and Soviet writers, sent to Wei by his friend the translator Cao Jinghua (1897– 1987).57 When, in the previous year, he was confined to bed in the Peking French hospital, Wei had conveyed through Li Jiye his request to a Russian sculptor, whom both of them knew, to create for him a bronze bust of Dostoevsky.58 Also in Peking, at about the same time, the young aspiring


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poet and translator Cheng Kansheng (somewhat better known under the pen-name He Xi, 1908–99) kept on his writing desk a small portrait of John Keats in a gilded frame. Cheng’s friend the writer Fei Ming noticed it and passed it on to a character in his book.59 Such was the magnitude of the authority attributed to the great foreign writers, that in the eyes of many earnest critics in the 1920s any comparison with them was unimaginable: the possibility of China ever producing a Chekhov or a Gorky, although regarded as an urgent necessity for Chinese literature, was raised only rhetorically so as to demonstrate the futility of hope due to the inadequacy of native talent. Chen Duxiu (1879–1942), journal editor and later prominent Communist leader, initiated the search for “China’s Hugo, Zola, Goethe, Hauptmann, Dickens or Wilde” in his 1917 essay “On Literary Revolution”.60 Expressing boundless admiration for Russian literature, which he believed was superior to any other by virtue of its deep concern for suffering humanity and which to his mind was permeated with the qualities of “Sympathy, Fraternity, Pity, Charity and Love”, the young writer and poet Wang Tongzhao (1897–1957) concluded his quest for the Chinese Chekhov and Gorky in 1921 with an equally rhetorical search for China’s missing Garshin and Korolenko.61 As Wang’s essay attested, the flipside of admiration for foreign literary giants was cultural humility, whether genuinely felt or modishly affected. The widespread reliance on foreign secondary sources for the interpretation of works translated into Chinese was also an expression of this attitude, even as rendering English-language essays on Russian literature into Chinese in order to pass them off as one’s own was, of course, something quite different: a way to receive a writer’s royalties and establish one’s credentials as a literary critic. Those who resorted to these methods continued a Chinese tradition of emulating, copying and borrowing from superior authors; in becoming the object of such acts, the new Western authorities were similarly honoured. Most Chinese translators in the 1920s, however, had no difficulty acknowledging their sources.62 While plagiarism existed, it was not the norm and it may be suggested that writers for New Culture periodicals earned enough prestige from interspersing their writing with long (and most often misspelled) references to foreign publications. There was little incentive for them to run the risk of claiming personal authorship of the same texts. Cultural humility was at its most evident when writers and translators stated that the superiority of foreign literature made Chinese literature

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redundant. It was one thing when this opinion was voiced by Zhang Yiping (1900–47), himself a best-selling Chinese writer, whom the elitist “May Fourth” establishment never did take very seriously,63 or when the translator Wang Tiran (1906–88), another outsider, said in an introduction to his anthology of European and American short fiction that contemporary short stories in Chinese “really did not amount to much” (shizai tai bu cheng dongxi le).64 It was another thing, back in 1920, when the youthful Geng Jizhi (1898–1947), later the main Chinese translator of literature from the original Russian, said that only the systematic introduction of foreign literature could eventually lead to the emergence of a new literature in China, which at the present time included nothing worthy of being called art;65 or when Zheng Zhenduo, preparing to translate Mikhail Artsybashev’s novel Sanin in 1924, presented that book and translation in general as an antidote to the untruthful, fabricated productions of contemporary Chinese fiction.66 It is useful to recall that these statements were made at a time when some in China believed that the superiority of the Western race implied the degeneracy of the Chinese and, therefore, advocated the end not only of Chinese writing but of Chinese procreation itself.67 The highest sanction to such positions was given by Lu Xun. Asked by a newspaper to recommend a reading list for Chinese youth in 1925, the writer advised them “not to read any Chinese books, or to read as few as you can. But read more foreign books. If you do not read Chinese books, you will end up in being unable to write. But what modern youth needs is not to write, but to act.”68 His original text opposed xing (act) with yan (speak or, here, write), thereby alluding to the idiom yanxing yizhi (or yanxing ruoyi): “to match word with deed”. Lu Xun’s habitual mistrust of literature’s ability to “make things happen” was here joined with the belief that, if any literature could do so, it was not literature in Chinese; in a series of essays in the last years of his life, he would mount a famous attack on the Chinese script. What was it then that made Russian literature great? As some of the tributes cited in this chapter have already made explicit, the characteristic of Russian literature that attracted the most widespread admiration was its humanism. This quality was, in turn, perceived as inspiration for (or even the direct trigger of) social action. Below, we shall begin to explore the meanings of “humanism” for the readers of Russian literature in China, so as to return to the discussion of other implications of the association of this literature with humanism in Chapter 2.


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Through the translations and summaries of the mighty trio of nineteenth-century Russian critics Vissarion Belinskii (1811–48), Nikolai Chernyshevskii (1828–89) and Nikolai Dobroliubov (1836–61), Chinese readers and writers received, over and over again, the same three precepts: first, that literature was the reflection of life, nay life itself; second, that it had no other goal than to depict life as truthfully as it could; and third, that it had to serve life if it was to justify its existence. So often were these three masters quoted that, to avoid the need of repeating their unwieldy names, commentators on Russian literature preferred to abbreviate the three collectively as “Biechedu”, after the first syllables of their surnames in transcription and in conformity with the familiar method of uniting under a single appellation such indigenous cultural heroes as the Tang-dynasty poets Li Bai and Du Fu (“LiDu”). Commitment to the three precepts of “Biechedu” was also the lesson taught by the anarchist philosopher and literary critic Peter Kropotkin, with the assistance of translator Shen Zemin, in a chapter on the social engagement of “Russian political literature”, included in his Ideals and Realities in Russian Literature (1901).69 It was the acceptance of this message in China that cemented the identification of Russian literature with “humanism” even before it was to be firmly identified with “realism”. Literature in Russia, Chinese writers believed, subscribed to the ideal of “art for life”: wei rensheng de yishu, the course which, Zheng Zhenduo argued, Russian literature had followed ever since the time of Belinskii70 (Lu Xun would more cautiously place its inception in the reign of Nicholas II).71 The Literary Research Association, as is well known, proclaimed “art for life” on its banner. It then considered itself duty bound to defend these theoretical positions from the “art for art’s sake” claims of the Creation Society and did so through heated polemics that, however, lasted only so long as it took the creationists to convert to Marxism and abandon their romantic insistence on the individuality of the artist.72 Some examples will do:73 “humanism” (rendao zhuyi) was described as the main quality of Dostoevsky by Geng Jizhi (later the translator of several of this writer’s novels) in the first critical essay on him in Chinese, included in the special issue of Xiaoshuo yuebao in 1921.74 In the first Chinese article devoted to Turgenev, in February 1920, Hu Yuzhi described the writers Dostoevsky, Gorky and Andreev as “humanists”, pronounced the “greatest humanist” to be Tolstoy and claimed that because literature was, after all, a form of art and not only a means for the

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expression of ideology, it was as an artist that Turgenev had the most to teach its Chinese readers.75 A decade later, such comments could perhaps be uttered by Hu Feng, whom we shall meet in the next chapter, but no longer (as we shall also see) by Hu Yuzhi. A cluster of meanings and more unrealized hopes became attached to the concept of “humanism” in Chinese writings on literature in the twentieth century. Well before this time, the value of ren (in this case, not the character for “man / person”, but the character translated as “humaneness” or “benevolence”) had been central to Confucianism.76 Some of the concerns associated with “humanism” in the West can be seen in the latter-day interpretation of the Confucian ren by a figure such as Tan Sitong, author of the treatise Renxue (translated as “Benevolence” or “A Study of Humanity”) in 1896 and two years later a martyr of the failed attempt at political reform known as “The Hundred Days”. The idea of “Confucian humanism” has been popularized in the past years in publications by the Harvard University professor Tu Wei-ming, though its application by this and other scholars has come under criticism.77 The sources of “humanism” as a translated foreign concept were not limited to nineteenth-century Russian literature.78 Another strain of the Western doctrine was brought to China by students returning from American universities and (under the name renwen zhuyi) was prominently represented by the translator and literary scholar Mei Guangdi (1890–1945), a student and follower of Harvard professor Irving Babbitt (1865–1933). This founding figure of the New Humanism, a scholar of Indian Buddhism among his many other interests, had impressed on his Chinese students the value of their national heritage and the perils of wholesale imports. Back in China, Mei and his associates at Nanking Normal College published from 1922 to 1933 a Critical Review (Xueheng zazhi), which, in opposition to the May Fourth camp, insisted on the preservation of Chinese culture.79 An advocate for the translation of European literature and thought, which he believed should enrich rather than replace the heritage of Confucian China, Mei Guangdi objected to the emphasis that adherents of the New Culture movement put on Russian novels (he also regretted their exaggerated attention to Maupassant, Ibsen and Shaw—none of whom, it may be added, was favoured by Babbitt). His own selections from the humanist treasure trove included literature as represented by Dante and Shakespeare as well as philosophy ranging from Plato to Leibniz.80 Also a Babbitt student, the essayist Liang Shiqiu made a point of underscoring,


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in an article of 1934, the differences between “humanism” (renwen zhuyi) and “humanitarianism” (rendao zhuyi).81 Another influential keyword came from the university campus in Peking, whose prerogative to set the cultural agenda the Nanking-based contributors to Critical Review contested, and owed its emergence to the eclectic reading and wide-ranging thought of Zhou Zuoren. In his essay “Ren de wenxue” (Literature of Man), in Xin qingnian of December 1918, the examples that Zhou drew from Russian literature intermingled freely with works representative of every other nation (from classical Greece to France and Germany), which, he believed, met his main requirement of affirming human life.82 “Russia and China in Literature”, a speech by Zhou Zuoren in November 1920, was foundational to comparative literary studies in China. Here, as in “Literature of Man”, demonstrating the qualities that Chinese literature lacked was for Zhou as important as describing the great strides made by literature in the West; both his statements reflected the May Fourth tendency to degrade the former so as to advance the cause of the latter.83 The moral commitment of Russian literature, Zhou argued, set it apart from other literatures of the world. Because literatures in both Russia and China developed under roughly comparable conditions, however, and because the Chinese national character had more in common with the Russian character than with that of any other European people, Chinese literature could learn from the social and life-affirming qualities of Russian literature. To illustrate this Russian emphasis on “literature for life” (wei rensheng), Zhou also mentioned, next to the classics of the previous century, the names of contemporary writers Mikhail Artsybashev, Boris Savinkov (by his pseudonym: V. Ropshin) and Fedor Sologub, and he quoted words by Leonid Andreev.84 It was in that rather loose sense of the epithet, as rensheng came close enough to being a synonym of “good” (or, perhaps, still of the Confucian ren), that, in another early exercise in Chinese-Russian comparative literature, the writer Gan Zhexian was able to ascribe the qualities of rensheng wenxue to both Leo Tolstoy and the great fifth-century poet Tao Yuanming.85 It was later, and at the hands of others, that Russia’s nineteenth-century literary classics would be drafted into the service of a literary “humanism” quite different from the meaning Zhou Zuoren had associated with the word: not the empathetic (humanist) description of human life in all its manifestations, but a moralizing effort to mould humans in conformity with the Communist doctrine. But then again,

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the seeds of a utilitarian view of literature at the service of politics were there as early as 1921, inseparable from the quintessential message of May Fourth: Zhou Zuoren’s essay on “Russia and China in Literature” expressed the belief that, in Russia, “life” and “literature” were united, and it concluded with the thesis that Russian literature, by truthfully reflecting Russian life, also influenced it, changing and improving reality. This, Zhou said, should also be the aim of the new literature in China.86 The distinction between “humanism” and “humanitarianism” was obscured not only in republican-period Chinese writing.87 When Zhou Zuoren, Geng Jizhi and their contemporaries in China resorted to rendao zhuyi to describe the sympathy that Russian literature in the preceding century had expressed for the village serf or the exploited city worker, the weak and the downtrodden, they were right in so far as they were telling Chinese readers that Russian literature “since Belinskii” had a strong humanitarian tendency.88 They were treading a more uncertain ground if what they meant (as Zhou appears to have done in the early years of his affiliation with Xin qingnian and with the movement for New Culture) was that Russian literature displayed humanist interest in every man or woman and considered individuals as equally worthy of attention irrespective of their standing in society. They were more wrong than right when they attempted to extend this definition to the literature of Russian modernism. Here was a concrete and local example: should a Chinese writer single out for special empathy the rickshaw, whose services he was likely to engage while moving about town? Long before Lao She’s Camel Xiangzi (1936–37; in its unauthorized English translation as Rickshaw Boy, probably still the twentieth-century Chinese novel best known in the West), Lu Xun did just that in the story “A Small Incident” (Yi jian xiaoshi, 1920), which he would include in his famous collection Call to Arms in 1923. Many “May Fourth” readers shed tears over this story. At the time, rickshaws made many more appearances as a literary topos triggering the author’s humanitarian commiseration: one of the first stories by Zheng Zhenduo was called “An Unfortunate Rickshaw”,89 while Hu Shi, in the pioneering collection of vernacular poetry that we already mentioned in the beginning of this book, reflected on the suffering he would cause a sixteen-year-old rickshaw puller by hiring him for transport. Rickshaws proved to be one of the few subjects on which Lu Xun and Hu Shi agreed: in a widely quoted essay of 1926 and in later speeches, the liberal scholar


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decried their use in China as being characteristic of Oriental backwardness.90 Yet this application of humanitarianism to everyday Chinese reality also aroused some resistance. Hu Shi’s poem earned him the scorn of Cheng Fangwu (1897–1984), at that time a romantic critic within the Creation Society and later the translator of “The Communist Manifesto”, who accused the would-be enlightened poet of chatting about poverty while sitting in a rickshaw.91 Zhou Zuoren took issue with Hu Shi in “Rickshas and Beheadings” (1927), where, recalling Tolstoy’s views on capital punishment, he suggested that the former were less of an urgent problem than the latter.92 In an article sent to China from New York, Liang Shiqiu argued that there was “nothing to be either pitied or admired” about rickshaw pullers, as too many Chinese writers appeared of late too fond of doing in the name of rendao zhuyi; while Liang noted that the same writers also sympathized with the plight of prostitutes and with the suffering of unknown “oppressed nations”, he proposed to call them all “the rickshaw school”.93 The humanist current was certainly important in Russian literature, and it continued to figure prominently in Russian literature’s image of itself even as in actual literary practice it had become displaced with writers’ humanitarian engagement and even as, from the 1920s, the concern for the welfare of the underprivileged was being deformed into ordered paeans to the working class and shrill denunciation of its enemies. While Zhou Zuoren soon abandoned the slogans of May Fourth, the essayistic literature he went on to write under the influence of Chinese more than Western examples may be identified with the minority humanist strain of twentieth-century Chinese arts and letters, to which authors such as Lin Yutang, Liang Shiqiu and the artist-writer (and translator of classical Russian literature) Feng Zikai also belonged.94 Other commentators on Russian literature increasingly expressed a conviction that the “literature of man” and “literature for life” meant portraying the oppressed and struggling to achieve a better future for them. The attribution of warm fraternal love and an ill-defined humane, or humanitarian, concern to Russian writers was in China combined with the call to learn from them. The implication was that successful students of the Russian masters would inherit their mantle: not only the social prestige of hero critics of the Belinskii–Chernyshevskii–Dobroliubov cast, but also the corollary privilege of such ardent lovers of humanity, the right “to teach people how they ought to live” (Zheng Zhenduo, here speaking of Chernyshevskii, author of What Is to Be Done?).95

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There can be no doubt as to the attractiveness of the promise. No longer inhabiting a society in which mastery of the written word led to government service, Chinese writers were still imbued with the scholar’s sense of civic responsibility. Through their fiction, essays and poetry in the vernacular, they sought to provide a moral example to their people; in this effort, some were more sincere than others. Moral leadership in twentiethcentury China could be exerted in the service of the state only with some moral compromise, though it was a compromise that many critics of KMT “literary lackeys” in the republican period would make, as they joined the CCP establishment after 1949. The flourishing literary scene of the 1920s and the 1930s suggested an avenue for realizing this ambition, as well as a way to make a living. It may be asked what part in the consciousness of Chinese writers was taken over by calculation along career-building lines, and what part was swayed by a new message of love and pity for the unprivileged members of society. We should recall that this message, although it also had its opponents among Russian writers, exercised a strong effect on the readers of Russian literature throughout the world. Let us delay the answer to the question of calculation versus conviction and begin with a survey of the process by which literature in Russia associated itself with social and political struggle from the second half of the nineteenth century. This process has been the subject of voluminous research, but a comparison with the emergence of a modern Chinese literature in the 1910s has rarely been attempted so far except within the celebratory framework of Marxist literary historiography. It will be worthwhile to undertake it here.

Chapter Two Writers and Readers

1. The Pursuit of Engaged Literature: A Parallel History The new Russian literature emerged from the decade of arguments on the liberation of the serfs, which preceded the proclamation of this reform by Alexander II in 1861. It developed at the same time with the campaign against autocracy, which would reach a climax in the “Land and Freedom” movement of the 1880s. Yet, it will be an unwarranted overestimation of literature’s influence on political decision-making to argue that the liberation of the serfs, or (a less popular claim) the subsequent assassination of the Tsar-Liberator, was brought about by writers’ efforts.1 The writers and poets of Pushkin’s age had, all but a few, come from the ranks of the aristocracy; it was also they who established the tradition of opposition to the regime by their support of the Decembrist revolt of 1825. As the reign of Nicholas I came to an end in 1855, the aristocratic writer had still not become a rarity in the landscape of Russian literature, but it was rare enough for him not to write critically of his own social milieu. The second half of the century became the age of the raznochintsy, the men of mixed social backgrounds, of whom the Ukrainian-born Nikolai Gogol (1809–52) was the first and Fedor Dostoevsky (1821–81) the second main representative. As would so many of Russia’s best writers after him, the young Dostoevsky became familiar with censorship,

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imprisonment and exile. In the 1870s, Count Leo Tolstoy still rivalled for supremacy in Russian letters with Ivan Turgenev (1818–83), the great European cosmopolitan to emerge out of the old land-owning gentry. The uncontested symbol of Russian literature in the last three decades of his long life, Tolstoy had embodied the preoccupation of this literature with the weak members of society as well as its image of itself as the moral alternative to the state. At his death in 1910, the literary scene he had left was teeming with writers whose names no longer had the ring of his own. Having by then exhausted the topos of the decaying “Nest of gentlefolk” (the estate life portrayed by Turgenev in his novel of 1859), few of the fictional heroes, which the new literature engendered, bore the glittering titles of the heroes of War and Peace (1865–69). By 1920, Russia’s leading poets could be peasants’ sons like Sergei Esenin, women like Marina Tsvetaeva and Anna Akhmatova, or Jews like Osip Mandelstam and Boris Pasternak. Already Anton Chekhov, a writer more than thirty years Tolstoy’s junior, who died prematurely in 1904, was born the son of a ruined provincial shopkeeper and grandson of a serf. The father of Leonid Andreev had been a lowly government employee in Orel, his mother a simple woman who had trouble writing a letter. When in 1898 Andreev’s first important published story drew the attention of a senior fellow writer, this newly found mentor was one whose roots reached still deeper into peasant Russia. More than any other writer at the close of the tsarist era, Aleksei Maksimovich Peshkov (1868–1936), alias Maxim Gorky, symbolized the arrival of the self-educated provincial into the main arena of Russian literature. The status commanded by Gorky after his return to Soviet Russia from Italy in 1928 demonstrated to the entire world the honours the Communist state was ready to shower upon a writer who wedded his talent to its propaganda machine. Looking now at China, we see both similarity and difference. Among the writers of modern Chinese literature, many came from families of the gentry that by the time of the 1911 revolution had reached a state of crisis. Lu Xun’s memories of his childhood visits to the pawnshop are well-known; poverty and clan pressure had driven Qu Qiubai’s mother to suicide, and Ba Jin’s acclaimed novel Family was a largely autobiographical description of the oppressive “feudal” system in the moment of its collapse. This collapse of the old world signalled the dislocation of its younger members: whether by going off for study abroad, by moving from the provincial family home to Peking or Shanghai, or through any one of the other

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possible combinations of these two main choices. It is a generalization that can hardly be proved, but probably a valid one nonetheless, that for many of the young people who joined the literary scenes in Russia of the 1900s and China of the late 1910s the wish to participate in the movement for political and social change came before the decision to do so by means of writing. Not all such budding writers had literary talent or education, and some of them did not necessarily see literature as their vocation. They espoused it, rather, as a means to enter the new public arena enabled by the growth of the press, the alternative “parliament of letters”, in which the progressive elite of their country was debating literature as well as the future of the nation. Typically, writers joined literary circles and associations: such groupings had already been important in the Russia of Pushkin and Herzen, but as a social phenomenon in the emergence of modern literature they have only recently begun to be fully appreciated in academic research.2 The key role of the journal in literary production and public discourse offers another parallel between Russia—where these journals, main vehicles for serialized fiction, poetry and essay writing since the 1840s, are still known as “thick”—and China.3 Contrary to the situation in Russia, however, the Chinese tradition until about the mid-1890s did not expect social activism from the literati. Local gentry would have supported educational and charitable undertakings in the villages by donating to flood and drought relief, but Confucian study was aimed at the self-cultivation of the superior man and was best realized indoors. Such hermeticism was distant from the mindset of the Russian intellectual of the land-owning nobility, who more than his Chinese counterpart came into contact with “the people”, and who inherited the feelings of guilt towards the oppressed that would encourage the development of a literature of collective social repentance and individual moral introspection.4 The very search for radical answers to existential problems, the hallmark of some of the best-known works of Russian nineteenth-century fiction, reflected a tendency towards “maximalism”,5 which contrasted with the Confucian ideal of zhongyong, the cultivated “middle way”. It is also difficult to find an analogue in China of the entrenched sense of opposition to the government which, since the mid-nineteenth century at the latest, passed from one generation of freethinking Russians to the next. Quite the contrary, and even though Chinese history had its rebels and recluses, the educated Chinese person was heir to a tradition which

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fixed the place of the scholar within the state bureaucracy, adapted the process of study to suit the requirements of the examination system—the regular career path for men until 1905—and put the highest emphasis on loyalty to the ruling dynasty. The collapse of the commitment of the literati to the court dated to no earlier than the first decade of the twentieth century. In contrast to the realist literature of late nineteenth-century Russia, whose writers took pride in carrying forward the moral values received from their predecessors (and who spoke of “the golden age” of the Pushkin generation), the Chinese New Culture movement broke with past tradition and entered uncharted territory as it sought to redefine literature’s cultural standing and social function and to change in drastic fashion its language of expression. Although the social ideals and political theories that influenced the Russian intelligentsia in the late tsarist era always reached it at some delay,6 they sprang from the same German and French cultural worlds which had been the founts of literary and artistic inspiration for educated Russians since the time of Peter the Great. But if these theories and trends, including classicism, romanticism and realism, had swept through Russia within a much shorter time than they had taken to emerge and succeed each other in Western Europe, one is entitled to speak of an avalanche of ideas in early twentieth-century China. The Enlightenment, Darwinism and Marxism, the concepts of “science and democracy” and that of the nation state, had all to be absorbed within an even shorter time span and necessitated the invention of new words before they could be accommodated in the Chinese language.7 For many Russian writers of the last generation before Communism, mastering French and German from home tutors and later being trained in Latin and ancient Greek at school were natural stages in their education process. Writers coming from less privileged backgrounds did not read foreign languages, but a well-established translation culture in Russia allowed them to build up an extensive knowledge of world classics and contemporary literature. Gorky was as infamous for being monolingual as he was respected (even by detractors) for his literary erudition. Another writer who did not read in French or English and who was less of a compulsive reader, Ivan Shmelev could nevertheless recall his discovery of Jules Verne and Mayne Reed (a writer of adventure stories probably more widely read in Russian than in English) at the time he entered grammar school

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and could describe himself as a voracious buyer and reader of “the foreign classics” and books by (among others) Darwin, Flaubert, Zola, Daudet, Maupassant and Poe during his first year at university.8 In China, even by the 1920s, educated persons who were thoroughly at home in their own literary tradition were still largely dependent on their often imperfect knowledge of foreign languages for even the most rudimentary acquaintance with Western literature. The very novelty of the “new literature”, which the reformers of “May Fourth” were at pains to introduce through their translations, meant that far more time than was eventually allotted to it by the reformers themselves—arguably, little longer than the fifteen years between the foundation of New Youth in 1915 and that of the League of Left-Wing Writers in 1930—would have been necessary to enable it to attain a following comparable to the one which the European literary model had come to command in Russia since being introduced there in the eighteenth century. A typical early twentieth-century reader in Moscow would have been hard-pressed for names and titles when asked to recall major literary works in Russian antedating the familiar modern examples of rhymed poem, novel, short story, or four-act play (he would surely name the twelfth-century Song of Igor’s Campaign, which, however, he would be unlikely to have read outside of the classroom). Less than a hundred years earlier, some time in the 1820s, a Russian reader would likely have told us that he preferred to read in French. In China, genres newly introduced from abroad had to be assimilated into a literary culture which measured itself in millennia; this made the challenge all the greater. The ancient and the new, the achievements of native and foreign literature (Song-dynasty poetry and, say, the stories of Chekhov), did not, by any inherent logic, need to be antithetical to each other. An independent reader such as Zhou Zuoren proved this much by his readiness to absorb the best of both worlds. Zhou’s eclecticism, however, or Zheng Zhenduo’s decidedly cosmopolitan vision of world literature, in which the sole yardstick should have been literary merit not the historical period or ethnicity of the writer,9 were rare at a time when espousal of one kind of literature and worldview was typically set up as incompatible with loyalty to the other. Even while Guo Moruo insisted on merging Confucius with Marx,10 the inspiration sources of past generations of Chinese literati more often became the object of mockery in the 1920s than they were valued as a

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heritage to be reinterpreted with the help of new ideas. As to the inspiration of Orthodox religion and the influence of the concept of original sin on the worldviews and soul-searching fiction of—most obviously— Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, this could not be compared with the limited impact that Buddhism, Daoism or indeed Christianity had on writers (to be distinguished here from political figures) in republican China.11 Only Confucianism, with its deeply ingrained assumptions about the responsibilities of the individual in society, was of comparable cultural weight and confronted modern Chinese writers with a legacy no less double-edged and contested than that of the Orthodox faith for late nineteenth-century Russians. As the use of the words “literati”, “scholars” and “gentry” in the preceding paragraphs implies, the concept of the “intellectual” was not part of the vocabulary of classical Chinese, the wenyan in which the reformers of May Fourth had acquired their education. By the last two decades of the Qing, the idea of the literati forming “study societies” (xuehui) to promote issues they considered essential for the well-being of the state had finally succeeded in overcoming the traditional mistrust of scholarly “factions”. A commonly shared consciousness of “intellectuals”, as a group of educated persons with not just duties but special privileges of their own, still had to await the dynasty’s fall.12 It is at the point when they begin to imagine themselves as members of a social stratum endowed with both the mission and the right to lead the masses that the obvious differences between the individual Chinese writer and his Russian counterpart become less significant than the broadly comparable senses of collective self-definition that characterized the Russian intelligenty and Chinese zhishi fenzi. The word “intelligentsia” began to be used in Russia in the 1860s as the civic orientation of literature was determined, and education expanded beyond the select circle of the nobility. It was from the Russian that the word later made its way into French and English; however, the particular social group that it denoted did not emerge in like fashion in France, Britain or the United States. In English, we may speak of “the intelligentsia”, collectively, as a community of “intellectuals”. In Russian, the word intelligent differed from intellektual by being associated not only with acquired “intelligence” but also with “conscience” (and in postwar Soviet culture, primarily with “decency”, understood as non-cooperation with some demands of the regime).13 More than a definable social group, “the intelligentsia” was a construction of political language, in which it

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was called upon to perform the changing roles of sympathizer, guide and eventually enemy of “the working class”; this analysis, which has been persuasively developed with reference to Russia,14 is no less applicable to China. In China, the current term zhishi fenzi, literally “knowledgeable elements”, was first adopted by the Communist Party in the early 1930s; under a less Marxist-inflected heading, activists had regarded themselves as “intellectuals” since the 1910s.15 The first Chinese counterparts of Russian intelligenty were, like the latter, self-appointed: admission to both circles was gained not by passing an exam or by the accident of birth (families in which the status of the “intellectual” passed down from one generation to the next would be a later development—a characteristic of the Soviet and PRC eras), but by an act of self-imagining. Allegiance was closely tied with reading and discussing a particular kind of literature in like-minded company: nothing was as important as reading in defining the intellectual and in distinguishing them both from those who did not read and from those who read pulp fiction. Intellectuals were recognizable to each other also through a common code of dress and behaviour (like the newly Westernized elite in Petrine Russia, adherents of modern culture in early republican China adopted an appearance that, through the use of Western dress, set them apart from the rest of their compatriots), as well as by their shared feelings of sympathy for those forces in society working to bring about the reform, or replacement, of the current political order. The Russian intelligentsia, alienated from the tsarist state, lobbied tirelessly for the people, whom it tended to idealize as the repository of innate goodness. This conviction had more to do with the intelligentsia’s sense of guilt than with the capacity for independent critical thought usually associated with “intellectuals” in the West. The function of the intelligentsia as a moral opposition, in turn, does have something in common with the posture of postwar Western intellectuals, and their wariness of close association with the state and with nationalist feeling. No current of Chinese literature or school of art prior to the twentieth century had extolled the virtues of the common people as an example for the elite.16 To the extent that they can be discussed as a group, most Chinese intellectuals were probably opposed to the Nationalists and the warlords.17 However, contrary to the Russian intelligentsia and to Western intellectuals today, they identified unequivocally with the nation, which they hoped to see strong and internationally respected.18

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The impression persists that such wishes, although associated with longing for the radical improvement of the Chinese people, were not divorced from the old literati’s mistrust and apprehension of the masses: these were to be reformed, “awakened” and educated by all means but before the rise of Communism were more often perceived as China’s shame than as its hope. Voices announcing the discovery of grave inadequacies in the Chinese “national character” proceeded to illustrate them by blanket criticism of “nation” and “society”, categories within which peasants naturally constituted the majority. The social criticism of writers in prerevolutionary Russia, by contrast, was typically directed towards the elite, not the worker or the muzhik; few among contemporaries of Gorky, whose class credentials were unblemished, ever allowed themselves the luxury of his broadsides against “the Russian soul”. Few Chinese intellectuals in the republican period—the best-known among them was the Christian educator Dr James Yen (1893–1990)—did “go to the people” (dao minjian qu)19 and their sources of inspiration differed from those of the famous khozhdenie v narod, the “going to (perhaps, more accurately, among) the people”. The Russian movement of the 1870s had been tinged with the ethics of self-denial; for a generation of young men and women, many of them born into the ease of the nobility, it became an initiation process into a lifetime of self-sacrifice punctuated by arrest and exile. Qu Qiubai, whose criticism of “May Fourth” was mentioned earlier, was not far off the mark when arguing that even those Chinese intellectuals who travelled to the villages came there not to live among the people, certainly not to expiate the guilt of their class, but to become “teachers” of the peasants. A form of engagement closer to the Russian precedent was for ethnographers and folklorists to go out collecting “the people’s” songs and recording its customs. Here too, the target of the search was not a superior morality, which peasants were believed to embody and considered capable of imparting.20 The purpose was different: as a living relict of the nation’s past, the “folk” (long imagined as the original creator of the Book of Songs, one of the five Confucian classics) was to furnish the glue that would bind it in the present. For ideologues on the left it would, by rising to the revolutionary struggle, serve as an instrument of political change. Thus the educated elite in both Russia and China constructed “the people” as its paradigmatic “Other”, but if for Russian writers since the 1840s “the peasantry was the . . . equivalent of the noble savage”,21 that savage appeared less noble in the eyes of writers in China.

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For Chinese writers, pitying the “downtrodden” was easier than identifying with them.22 This did not diminish the appeal of classical Russian fiction, but the point must be made that the books of Russian writers which reached China through intermediary translations lost along their way much of their specific origins in the historical and intellectual context, ideological skirmishes and contesting schools of nineteenth-century Russian literature.23 This was another reason why this literature, caught at the receiving end, could be imagined as speaking almost in one voice; critics reliant entirely on translations and confident that their audience expected instruction not ambiguity lumped Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Chekhov together, to say (like “Biechedu”) more or less the same thing. Although more specialized articles were devoted to these writers in China over the years than had been published on writers of the Russian “Silver age” in the 1920s, in the general perception they were admired en masse, hardly more differentiated than by the association of “humanism” mainly with Tolstoy, of “love” and lyrical sensibility especially with Turgenev and of “realism” most typically with Chekhov. Many a Chinese writer claimed to have learned these qualities from “the Russian classics” while giving scant proof of his “learning” in literary practice.24 Superficially understood, the presumed general “message of Russian literature” acquired greater prominence than the concrete aesthetic means used to convey it. It is true, and this too is an important point, that less effort was required to make the writers whose names we have just mentioned appear as speakers for a single doctrine of compassion and humaneness than it would have taken to ascribe such unanimity to the (less easily chosen) literary classics of Britain, France or Germany.

2. Ways and Purposes of Reading We may learn why nineteenth-century Russian literature could lend itself to a uniform presentation from an essay by one of its prominent critics. This essay, not very well known today, does not express thinking that was new or original in its time: its value lies in its typicality, and it offers a succinct formulation of the mainstream view about the civic and educational mission of Russian literature. Its perception of this literature as a

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united field is, furthermore, close to what would become the later Soviet interpretation. Semen Vengerov (1855–1920) considered Russian literature, whose passionate bibliographer and historian he was to remain throughout his life, “the rostrum from which the word of teaching was being uttered”.25 At the age of thirty he had written a History of the Most Recent Russian Literature: From the Death of Belinskii to Our Day and was rewarded by the book’s immediate prohibition, and destruction of the copies already published, on the orders of the Tsar’s ministerial committee. There could have been no clearer way to prove in deed the thesis he had presented in the book itself: that Russian literature since Belinskii and Dobroliubov was closely involved in social life, sympathized with the revolutionary struggle and made it its cause to fearlessly further the progress of Russian society by adhering to the principles of humanism and realism. The book’s prohibition also made plain that the government shared the writers’ flattering assessment of the part which their social pathos played in the revolutionary movement. “In what lies the charm of nineteenth-century Russian literature?” asked Vengerov in a lecture so entitled, which he delivered in Moscow on the occasion of the centenary of the Society of Amateurs of Russian Letters in October 1911 and gathered in a book under the same title in the following year.26 He had chosen the word “charm” (ocharovanie), he said, because he believed that the appeal of Russian literature to its readers could be explained neither solely by the artistic merit of its best works nor merely by the narrow terms of “class struggle”. Rather, Russian literature was seen by Russian readers as “a sacred thing”, deriving its value from an ability “to instil not merely an aesthetic, but a moral emotion”. It abhorred the egoistic search for personal satisfaction; rejecting the happy endings proliferating in European literature, it offered instead the melancholic yet stirring tales of introspection—records of a just struggle not for but against the interests of the writers’ own social class. Also in 1911, in his book The Heroic Character of Russian Literature, Vengerov took care to explain that Russian literature was not only populated by irresolute persons of sterling moral principles: rather, the literature of Russia progressed, “heroically”, together with the nation. This book earned the warm praise of Maxim Gorky. Vengerov was exaggerating when he suggested that no important Russian writer in the nineteenth century would have dared to defend the values of the nobility or the bourgeoisie (Ivan Goncharov, a writer whom

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Vengerov did not like, did that in his novel The Precipice, which Ba Jin’s brother, Li Yaolin, translated into Chinese). It is, though, true that openly conservative Russian writers were a minority. What Vengerov did not say is that, attacking the ills of society and—often at great personal risk—the entire machinery of the tsarist state, most Russian writers would refrain from undermining the “interests of their own class” not as the sons and grandsons of the gentry but as members of a literary fraternity considered the collective speaker for Russian conscience. The status of the Russian writer was suffused with a mystique, which very few of those who had acceded to it were prepared to put in question. Whether writers had the right to teach was too obvious to need discussion, while the right itself was rather spoken of as a “mission” or a “duty”. Far more common than any questioning of the writer’s privileges were attacks on writers who had appeared to stray from the path of “humanist realism”; thus the Marxist critic Vaclav Vorovskii accused Mikhail Artsybashev of no less than betraying (in Sanin, his best-selling novel of 1907, which asserted the sexual impulse at the expense of politics) the moral obligations of the Russian intelligentsia.27 That particular writer, in many respects an isolated figure in Russian literature, did rebel against the self-professed “teachers of life”, the classics he charged with taking advantage of their literary standing to claim a monopoly on truth. Yet, even he was not immune to the authority that the posture of the teacher carried: for him too, the word “writer” had an elevated ring.28 If he was able, as he did in his essay “The Death of Bashkin” (1909), which Lu Xun would translate via the Japanese in 1926, to lash out with vehemence at the actors of the literary scene of his time, it was because he felt that contemporary literary schemers were no longer worthy of a Russian writer’s name. “It was a ‘writer’s funeral’, after all”, he interjected as he described the almost unattended funeral of the modest poet Vasilii Bashkin.29 Artsybashev’s readers would have understood what he meant, even though he had used inverted commas to make sure they also realized that he had his qualms about the idea. They would have been aware—even before the fervour that would sweep Russia following the death of Tolstoy in November 1910—of the public outpourings at the funerals of Dmitrii Pisarev in St Petersburg in 1868 and of Fedor Dostoevsky in the same city in 1881. They would have known, therefore, that when great Russian writers and prominent literary critics died, their coffins were decorated with wreaths expressing “the gratitude of the people” before being carried, on the shoulders of students, to their final rest at specially designated sections of the cemeteries

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in the two capitals. To the “authors’ planks” (literatorskie mostki) sector of Volkovo cemetery, in St Petersburg, Dobroliubov was brought to lie just next to Belinskii; the remains of the émigré Leonid Andreev, who died in what was then Finland in 1919, too would be transferred to this location by the 1950s. Reflecting a closer connection with popular sentiment than the Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey or the Pantheon in Paris, the funerary honouring of Russian writers was a cult that the tsarist regime resisted, but which the Soviet state would later appropriate in staging the grand burials of its own writers, such as Gorky and Ostrovskii in 1936. The interest of Vengerov’s definition of the “charm of Russian literature” lies, beyond its typicality, also in the attempt it makes (long before the coming of “reception theory”) to describe a reader’s psychological response to a book—this in a way that would be valid and applicable to all readers and all books, provided that the former were native readers of Russian and that the latter were written in that language. Two questions arise: is it true, as Vengerov would have us believe, that books in the Russia of his time were read as statements of moral, quasi-religious instruction blurring the borders between literature and life? And, if so, did this way of reading transmit itself in translation? In the rest of this chapter we shall argue that Vengerov was essentially right and that a predisposed readiness for a similar way of reading in China contributed, beginning in the 1920s, to the appropriation of a Russian model of response to literature along with selections from the literature itself. We have already discussed the tendency in China to identify writers with their work and the expectation from them to offer a moral example to their readers. Because its capacity to transmit a moral message was mistrusted, fiction (as opposed to history, poetry or even travel notes) had not been a respected genre in traditional China. The writers of May Fourth were committed to raising the status of the novel and the story but remained believers in the educational responsibility of the written word. Their encounter with the one foreign literature which elevated that same responsibility (both educational and social) to a degree of near-religious sanctity was facilitated by these shared expectations. Once classical Russian literature, its “novels of ideas” in particular, had become popular with that segment of the Chinese reading public who were interested in translated fiction, initially the writers and the translators themselves, it was also able to influence the direction that the new Chinese literature would take. In surveying the characteristics of Chinese literary discourse, it is difficult to say with confidence whether the similarity we find to a number of Russian

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conventions was more than coincidental, and if so—whether these traits should be seen as developments encouraged by the Russian example, or as preoccupations antedating China’s discovery of the West, which were then carried into the modern era partly because of having been identified as similar to Russian concerns. The strong dissatisfaction of Russian “realist humanism” with the existing political system expressed itself in a spirit of denial that was holistic rather than particular in nature. Once the liberation of the serfs had become a fact, there was no agreed platform around which writers could rally. Slogans far outnumbered concrete proposals, and while the improvement of society and care for the destiny of the nation have not been considered literature’s business everywhere in the world, they certainly were perceived as the natural purview of literature in Russia. Preoccupied though it was with social life, Russian literature in the nineteenth century nevertheless excelled most in the psychological portrayal of the individual. Admittedly, even the close analysis of the latter was less an aesthetic end in itself than a tool to arrive at “general truths about the nation”.30 The closest this literature came to treating the subject of political change was through the ambivalent description of “nihilists” and “superfluous men”, as exemplified by Turgenev in Fathers and Sons (1862), and by the juxtaposition of these with the figure of the “new man”—the resolute fighter who could be imagined to bring about the revolution by overcoming the indecision of his predecessor. Notoriously vague in late nineteenth-century Russian literature, “revolution” was not given more concrete features in Russian novels than geming would ever acquire in twentieth-century China. In both cultures, “revolution” became more than ordinarily associated with literature. The movement for “a literary revolution” in China did not set the reform of literature and language as ends in themselves; bound up with the political and social preoccupations of May Fourth, it participated in the introduction of “science and democracy” and raised issues such as the improvement of women’s rights. Even these were conceived as mere steps towards the envisioned transformation (“awakening”) of the Chinese nation. On all such subjects, writers associated with the various literary societies of the 1920s pronounced themselves in essays, as in works of fiction, published in the journals that they themselves edited. Opinion pieces presented arguments for the adoption of any number of European doctrines that seemed to promise literary progress as well as political recovery and balm for the national pride.

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The idea of “a national literature”, understood as a literature conveying the nation’s particular characteristics and interests, has been under a cloud in the West since finding its last articulate expression in the work of F. R. Leavis. “National character”, in turn, as a respectable tool of analysis in English-language academic writing is a concept that is presently conspicuous by its absence. However, “national literature” and “national character”, and the metaphor of literature as “the soul of the people”,31 were rooted in the vocabulary of intellectuals everywhere for the duration of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century.32 British and American analyses of “Chinese characteristics”, from Arthur H. Smith’s book of that title in 1890 to popular fiction and journalism on “China and the Chinese” as published up to the 1930s, are now roundly condemned.33 Yet, the above terms remain alive and in frequent use in Russia and China as part of a cluster of positivist notions, centred on the nation state, which both these cultures have proved reluctant to abandon. Latecomers to the gospel of the European Enlightenment, they are now being late in adopting the alternatives of individualism, cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism and political correctness that have challenged self-identification with the nation in the postwar democratic West. Both cultures have also remained faithful to the premise of social engineering by the state. The idea of scientific progress was in Russia and China freely extended to progress in society and hence to an image of linear development in the humanities in general and literature in particular: books too numerous to mention have argued that there would have been no Gogol without Pushkin, that no Tolstoy could have emerged without Gogol, and so on until Sholokhov and Gorky. In the teleological terms which Marxism had borrowed from German Idealism, time itself was perceived as an impersonal force moving irresistibly forward through the sequential change of “epochs”. In China, the notion of shidai, with its supposedly objective demands articulated by its self-appointed speakers, became central to literary no less than to political discourse.34 In literary and political polemics in twentieth-century Russia and China, writers and critics, therefore, proclaimed their own positions as progressive and branded the views of their opponents as reactionary. But card-carrying Party members were not alone in using such rhetoric: the number of ad hominem attacks in the Chinese cultural scene of the 1920s and the 1930s, the insistence on classifying opinions as “correct” and “incorrect”, with little nuance in between, and the ambition of debaters to silence rather than convince the opposition, are all reasons to dismiss the

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still occasionally encountered nostalgia for an amorphous “May Fourth” as a period imbued with a spirit of “pluralism”, and a readiness for the negotiation of ideas, which would later disappear from sight in the PRC. Pluralism and compromise have had few adherents in either twentiethcentury Russia or China. “Correct” and “incorrect” were, early on, interchangeable with “good” and “bad”; the former had to win over the latter. A public discourse characterized by disagreement on matters ideological and literary was seen as reflecting a stage of immaturity that needed to be overcome so as to enable the achievement of harmonious unanimity. The primitivism of the argument belied its venom, for such black-and-white (“black-and-red”, in Chinese political vocabulary) classification had wide-ranging implications. Books and persons failing to qualify as “progressive”—because they were declared out of step with the present moment, whether this present was defined as a “revolutionary epoch” (one that did not leave room for retrograde thinkers) or as “the era of class struggle” (one that could not accommodate members of the gentry)—forfeited their right to exist.35 As the political victors consolidated their monopoly on power, they were emboldened in their belief of possessing true scientific knowledge of the development of states and the recipe to a glorious future. History itself, they felt, had proven them right; having made an idol of the state, they now identified it with themselves. It was in consequence of this reasoning that allegedly anachronistic literary works were assigned to “the dustbin of history”—to the prison or the labour camp, in the case of their still living authors. For the Chinese Communists before their rise to power, the nation which had established the world’s first proletarian government represented the vanguard of history. Its “heroic” literature, interpreted as both a faithful expression of national character and as the moral guide of the Russian people, was read backwards into the nineteenth century with the purpose of finding in its pages the causes which, by the early twentieth century, would have enabled the revolution. This exercise, begun in the writings of literary historians in Soviet Russia,36 was eagerly adopted by admirers of the Soviet state in China. Little thought was given to the apparent contradiction: if indeed Soviet literature had accomplished so much by expressing the Russian national character, should not the new literature written in China strive more to express the national character of the Chinese people than to rely on a foreign model? When needed, this quandary was typically resolved by overstressing the similarity of the feudal past that both nations

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had experienced; capitalist oppression in Russia, so the argument went, and imperialist exploitation in China, had nurtured in both peoples the same thirst for freedom, which the writers of nineteenth-century Russia had simply been the first to put into words. In addition, the two nations were neighbours and, therefore, naturally friends; as the May Fourth enthusiasts of Russian literature had already said, the Russian and Chinese national characters were close enough to facilitate mutual understanding. Another question that could well have been asked was why the “similarity” was so much more noticed on the Chinese side; why, in other words, did the Chinese (at least the Chinese readers nurtured by May Fourth) read so much Russian literature, while so little literature in Chinese ever caught the attention of readers in Russia? Its alleged closeness to China, of all nations, might have restricted the claim of Russian literature to a universal appeal, another string to its “humanist” bow—but then, from the Soviet perspective, it was possible to argue, when needed, that the oppressed nations of the world were only more susceptible than others to the universal message of truth and justice that issued from Russian and then Soviet pens. As Soviet culture remained Western in orientation, this need arose only in the writings of Soviet Asianists and in communications with China.37 By following the Russian example in literature as well as in politics, Moscow and Beijing concurred, Chinese Communists would be able to set in corresponding motion the heavy wheels of history. They would then advance, from the feudalism in which immobile China was mired (for Marx had said so),38 to the socialist paradise which Russia had already attained. Even though Mao himself told the seventh Party Congress in April 1945 that the Chinese system had to be built in the light of Chinese history just as the Russian system had been built in the light of the Russian, the slogan of the 1950s identified “the Soviet Union today” as “China’s tomorrow”.39 The view of the reception of Russian classical literature in the republican period that was long dominant in the PRC is encapsulated in the following lines, indistinguishable (as late as 1998) from any number of previous statements in Russian and Chinese: The progressive writers of nineteenth-century Russia called forth the mighty wave of the liberation movement; relentlessly carried on the antifeudal-anti-authoritarian struggle; expressed a distinct democratic consciousness, humanist spirit and sense of historical mission. This essence of

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Russian writers and critics, and of Russian literature as standing for society and for life, was very naturally taken up, with the same acute consciousness of a crisis and of the need for salvation, by the pioneers of new Chinese literature, who likewise saw literature as the recipe for curing the ills of society and transforming the national spirit.40

It would amount to accepting these clichés if one gave any credence to the idea that even the political pamphlets of Leo Tolstoy (to say nothing of his novels) had any measurable influence on “the liberation movement” in his country: the “humanist” teaching of Tolstoyan non-resistance found a more adequate reflection in the movement led by Gandhi than in the one headed by Lenin; Tolstoyans were, in fact, persecuted by the Bolsheviks. An important representative of the humanitarian tradition in nineteenth-century Russian literature, Vladimir Korolenko (1853–1921) spent the last year of his life writing futile letters and articles in protest against the brutal acts of class and political violence perpetuated by the new regime.41 Had he lived, he would hardly have been tolerated much longer, but because he died just in time his “humanist” stories were taught at Soviet schools (and continued to be translated in China), while information on his later views was withheld. The notion that the best writers of prerevolutionary Russia subscribed to a common anti-feudal ideal, which they in some way transferred to the “pioneers of new Chinese literature”, and which these similarly homogeneous pioneers were then able to use “to cure the ills” of their own society, is absurd. Tolstoy, for one, wrote in a reply to the arch-conservative thinker Gu Hongming in 1906, that the Chinese nation had to resist Western ideological imports and stay faithful to the Confucian, Buddhist and Daoist teachings, which he himself admired.42 To no greater extent can the dead classics be credited with, or blamed for, the upheaval of 1917. That Russian writers described the “collective character” of the people, provided it with moral guidance and were rewarded by its appreciation was a self-indulging delusion that even Pushkin’s “Exegi monumentum” (“I have erected for myself a monument not made by hand”, 1836) could not avoid and commentators on Russian literature took at face value.43 The last two claims were applicable to a large and growing, mostly urban and educated readership, not “the people” whom the writers had in mind. The people in the villages and the factories did not as much as suspect that these writers existed, for, to begin with, most of them could not read. Of those who did, some would have read popular

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and pulp fiction far removed from “literature”, as the intelligentsia defined it. For similar reasons, only a small elite among the Chinese in the 1920s was aware of the campaign for “New Literature” or took to heart the literary works it produced. Classical Russian literature was read with fear by the Russian censors, with affectionate awe (and a fair portion of self-flattery) by the Russian intelligentsia and with similar awe and admiration by many among the Chinese zhishi fenzi. It inspired and influenced the outlook on life of the sensitive readers of every social origin (not only the elite) who were able and willing to invest the mental effort required for developing acquaintance with this literature either in the original or in translation.44 Where they were listened to, writers had helped to spread a sentiment favourable to an ill-defined “revolution”. Yet, the inhumanity of the revolution, once it came to pass, suggests that the writers had not been “listened to” after all: none of the authors of realist Russian literature, to whom broad moral influence on the masses was retrospectively attributed, had advocated terror; the rare exception in having practised it himself, the modernist writer Boris Savinkov (author, under the name V. Ropshin, of the novel The Pale Horse, which Zheng Zhenduo translated into Chinese in 1922) never stopped questioning its permissibility. A scholar rather too kind on the classic Russian novelists has gone to the extent of arguing that they “never ceased to satirize the intelligentsial faith that ideas, especially borrowed ones pushed to the extreme, would save the world”.45 Some of them were far less critical-minded than that, while apocalyptic visions of the violent end of civilization fed the imagination of Russian symbolists and futurists, who then welcomed the Revolution as the manifestation of their dreams.46 With the exception of Mayakovsky, these were not the writers whom the revolutionaries themselves wished to acknowledge as their ideological forerunners. The theory and strategy of the revolution, including the blueprint for a dictatorship exercised by the Party in “the people’s” name, were elaborated by social thinkers, rather than inspired by novelists and poets, and the few literary writers to have made the transition (the Chinese literati, turned revolutionaries: Qu Qiubai, Zhang Wentian) did not survive the strife to which they too contributed.47 Claims that the written word led to revolution cannot be made without considering what “revolution” has really meant.48 Yet, the responsibility for the crimes that the Communist dictatorships of the past century

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committed against their own people cannot be laid even at the doors of Hegel and Marx. It rests with the political leaders and military commanders, whose reading lists—whether in the original or in second-hand translation—are relevant for the understanding of their public discourse, not the analysis of their motives in the struggle for power and even less their actions after achieving it. Social ideals had, early on, become infinitely flexible pretexts for supporting their claim to absolute authority; literature—past and present, native and foreign—was a quarry for slogans used to achieve the obedience of their subjects and assist in the extermination of real and imagined opponents. Their ideology, in Karl Popper’s terms, was an instrument of power, not a guide for wielding it. To argue that ideas found in books shaped their behaviour (not only their language) is to establish a causal link that cannot be proved; ideas can inspire people, but we do not know how to trace the deed back to the word. We do know that the success of the Russian Bolsheviks as well as the Chinese Communists in wresting political power from its previous holders was due to their adroit use of military force and exploitation of a political conjuncture: armies, not ideas, brought them victory.49

3. Beyond the Moral Message There is no need to draw on the spurious identification of “national literature” with “national character”, much less the “national spirit”, to substantiate the argument that the best achievements of Russian literature in the nineteenth century did have something in common. At the last permissible level of generalization, this literature was (and has often been described as) a literature of compassion. With the political radicalization of the writers, however, the “humanist spirit” that had taken its basic values from the Enlightenment ceased to be empathically applied to all members of humanity. While Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were equally interested in delving into the psyche of a prince, a murderer and a prostitute, by the last decades of the century compassionate literary attention focused all the more on the weakest members of society (and realism had begun its evolution into the representation of the subaltern). The summary view of Russian literature up to 1900 also reveals a moralizing tendency; a generally accepted trust

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in literature’s ability and duty to improve its readers. This credo, based on belief in the perfectibility of the reader and assigning literature a function in social progress, was taken over by the ideologues of the Soviet Union even as “abstract humanism” was not. Because of the moral streak characteristic of classical Russian literature, and because this was (as we have seen in the preceding chapter) the feature most celebrated in Chinese commentary, a history of Russian literature in China must face the question of moral value. The incongruity between high-strung idealism and what so often was a tragic reality may not be resolved by merely stating what is obvious to anyone familiar with the fundamentals of Russian and Chinese history: that idealist literature did not, in fact, “lead” to a brighter future and that (in the person of its proponents) it was itself one of the first victims of the totalitarian regimes in both countries. The answer also does not lie in blaming the ideals which Russian literature had represented and attempted to spread, in the way this was done by Cold War historians of Russian thought in the West50 or, in less congenial surroundings, by the writer Varlam Shalamov: a brutalized victim of Stalin’s camps who expounded the collective guilt of nineteenth-century “humanist” literature (its idealization of “the people” and of violence committed in the people’s name) towards the generations living under “the people’s dictatorship”.51 Nor is a convincing answer to be found in the image of “the people’s” inborn backwardness and indifferent cruelty, as conveyed by Ivan Bunin, later the most eminent writer of the Russian literary emigration, in his short novel The Village (1910)—a ringing protest against tributes to rural simplicity in “progressive” leftist literature. To come closer to an answer it is necessary, contrary to the ambitions of the “life teachers” and those who pronounced themselves their students, to cut the Gordian knot tying literature with social progress. If a common failure can be ascribed to the mainstream Russian writer of the latter half of the nineteenth century and the representative Chinese writer in the first half of the twentieth, it lies not in the patent inability of both to bring about the social change which they envisioned, but in their subscribing to the delusion of being entitled and qualified to do so. The degree to which art can influence reality is ultimately a matter of faith, but in no other culture was this faith so widely shared by the literary circles as it was in pre-Communist Russia and China (it had another late flowering, irrelevant for our present purpose, in the delusions of political grandeur that writers such as Camus and Sartre developed in

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the Paris of the 1950s and 1960s). Did books, anywhere and at any time, “make revolutions”?52 There are grounds to support the proposition that the most obvious outcome of the close association of literature with politics in Russia and China was not to have cleared the way for the revolution but, rather, to have ensured the command exploitation of the written word to political ends. Humanist or compassionate standards could have no place, in either the Soviet Union or the PRC, because of the need of both regimes to classify “elements” of their population as “former people” and “class aliens”,53 or as “demons” and “non-people”.54 In Erich Auerbach’s succinct formulation, made in another context, “everything determined by class is nonhumanist”.55 Once Mao Zedong had denied, in his speeches in Yan’an, the existence of a human nature transgressing class borders, the notion of humanism was crossed out of permissible vocabulary and added to the list of terms whose users were henceforth punishable for ideological deviance. The sporadic post-Yan’an pronouncements on the humanism of Russian literature must, therefore, be read as acts of resistance or political manoeuvring first and of literary analysis second. The major such statement was made during the brief thaw period known as the Hundred Flowers (from early 1956 to June 1957) by none other than Qian Gurong, whose expression of love for Russian literature we have cited in Chapter 1. In his essay of 1957, “On ‘Literature Is the Study of Man’ ”, discussing the humanism of Tolstoy while also associating “humanism” with authors such as Balzac and the poet emperor of the tenth century Li Yu, he argued against using the individual as an instrument in conveying abstract social ideas and spoke in favour of writing on concrete, rather than “classtypical”, persons.56 Officially an extended commentary on Gorky, Qian’s essay also harked back to the “literature of man” of Zhou Zuoren, which it did not mention. Despite his many quotations from Gorky and presentation of humanism as the true expression of socialist realism, Qian was criticized once the “flowers” of constructive criticism were redefined as “poisonous weeds” in the anti-rightist movement that followed. Recourse to “humanism” remained a political offence in the PRC until after the end of the Cultural Revolution, while former proponents and suspected sympathizers had to share the abuse heaped on Russian literature and its translators.57 The notion of humanism, as has already been noticed, was not exclusively associated in China with classical Russian literature. Why, then, were

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attempts at the revival of “humanist” values in Chinese literature, in 1957 and once again in the 1980s, tied with the mention of the Russian classics? Obviously, no headway could have been made by quoting Irving Babbitt— whose Chinese followers would be rediscovered in the PRC only in the 1990s.58 By contrast, in the late 1950s Soviet Russia was still China’s close ally and a fellow socialist state, and the greater degree of freedom, which writers there appeared to enjoy under the Khrushchev Thaw, inspired Chinese hopes for a similar loosening of the political reigns. A common way to try and achieve this result was to argue, adopting the official Soviet line and marshalling the requisite quotations from the Marxist authorities, that the humanism of Tolstoy was carried to ever greater heights by the successors of Gorky. The identity of the persons who connected “Russian literature” with “humanism” belies the supposition that, in the struggles they waged in China, invocation of the Russian example was only a political expedient. Long before Qian Gurong, the indomitable Marxist critic Hu Feng (1902–85), in an article of 1939, praised Gorky for the creation of Soviet humanism while using the occasion to add that writers and their characters should not function as the gramophones of slogans (nor, he argued, should writing only reflect life but rather rely on life in developing hopeful and believable images).59 Hu Feng was also a translator of Gorky and other Soviet writers, and both the translator and author of essays on classical Russian literature.60 He made further attempts to mobilize Russian authorities against what he saw as the over-politicization of Chinese literature until 1955, when he was “unmasked” as a Nationalist agent and imprisoned until 1979. The most prominent advocate for a return to Russian literature in the early 1980s, Ba Jin was the translator and admirer of Alexander Herzen, whom he first read in his student days in Paris. Given the chance to revisit France in 1979, soon after publishing the first volume of his translation (mainly from the English of Constance Garnett) of Herzen’s memoir, My Past and Thoughts, he made a pilgrimage to Herzen’s tomb in Nice.61 Ba Jin’s own essay collection Random Thoughts, which he described as a by-product of his work on Herzen, gives the impression that, in the galaxy of heroes of the elderly Chinese writer, Herzen’s star shone the brightest as that of Kropotkin receded into the distance of youth. But the common ground between My Past and Thoughts and Kropotkin’s Memoirs of a Revolutionist, an autobiography Ba Jin also held in the highest regard

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and had translated in 1930, is plain to see: like Kropotkin, “the anarchist prince”, Herzen the writer and memoirist represented belief in ideals and civil courage, the qualities that Ba Jin demanded from himself. Naming two other deities of the Russian literary pantheon, Ba Jin said in an interview of May 1981 that Turgenev and Tolstoy were “the first to teach [him] how to be a good, upright person, to face life honestly and tell the truth to readers”.62 Apart from his long-attested tendency for hero worship, Ba Jin was perhaps laying such stress on the moral example of the old Russian teachers because the Cultural Revolution had made him conscious of having been forced to give up too much of his integrity in the service of the regime. It was thus a positive, life-sustaining message that classical Russian literature offered its devotees in China. However unrepresentative the writings of Herzen might be within the universe of Russian literature, they could be considered its paradigmatic embodiment in China by fitting best the Chinese expectations. Readers drawn by Ba Jin’s name into a challenging intellectual journey through My Past and Thoughts (Ba Jin himself translated only the first fifth of the book, and the task was completed by others) discovered a writer to whom the term “humanist” could be justifiably applied: Herzen was one of the first European thinkers to reject the eschatological view of history as progress and replace it not with religious mysticism or Nietzschean relativism but with what may now be called a “liberal” vision.63 However, in China, protracted association of “Russian literature” with paragons such as Herzen and Tolstoy also rested on ignorance or the suppression of previously available information about some more recent developments in the Russian literary scene. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, the modernist movement in Russian literature that would later become identified with the “Silver age” began to break free of the tradition bequeathed by Belinskii, Chernyshevskii and Dobroliubov. In such dissenting voice—rejecting, along with the rest of Belinskii’s strictures, the subordination of art to political and moral requirements, and affirming the creative autonomy of the writer—spoke Iulii Eichenwald (1872–1928), a critic whose name would have been known in China only because of being frequently cited in Olgin’s Guide to Russian Literature.64 In 1922, Eichenwald was arrested and then expelled from Russia together with a group of other writers, philosophers and scientists.65 In his Berlin emigration, Eichenwald was among

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the first to acknowledge the talent of Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977). The major novel that Nabokov went on to write, The Gift (1937–8), contained a satire of Chernyshevskii of an intensity which even the Paris-based Sovremennye zapiski, the flag literary journal of the emigration, was unable to allow into print. The apolitical stance and stylized aloofness of Nabokov’s fiction made sure that charges of betraying the “humanist traditions of Russian literature” would be levelled at this writer from within the Russian emigration ever since his first stories and novels appeared. In the image of Russian literature that was current in China, writers who, like Nabokov (and contrary to late-life émigrés like Artsybashev or Andreev), began their literary careers or reached their creative peak in the emigration did not exist. Next to such untranslated older writers as Ivan Shmelev, Boris Zaitsev (1881– 1972) and Mark Aldanov (1886–1957), Nabokov’s name would long remain the one most glaring in its absence from Chinese-drawn maps of twentieth-century Russian literature. The books and periodicals that came out of Russian émigré presses in Europe did not find their way to potential translators in China. Only little of this new Russian fiction and poetry would have been available for retranslation from English. Ideologically unacceptable to most members of the Chinese literary field in the 1930s and 1940s, these contemporary works would have presented a problem of taxonomy within the classification scheme which, by that time, drew a clear line between “Russian” (Eluosi) and “Soviet” (Sulian) literature by attaching the denominator “jiu” (old) to the one and “xin” (new) to the other. But before the domination of “socialist realism” in the USSR could be assured by Party directives and the exile or elimination of competitors in the 1930s, innovative and experimental literature challenging the writer’s responsibility for the betterment of society also briefly flourished within Russian borders. Osip Mandelstam, in his collection of reminiscences The Noise of Time in 1925, mocked the civic pathos of the writers of the 1880s as (with the liberty of a distant relative) he ridiculed Semen Vengerov’s statements on the “heroic character of Russian literature”.66 Boris Pasternak, in his first autobiography, Safe Conduct (1931), recalled a home-reading he had attended in Moscow in 1918, with the participation of these poets and writers: “Balmont, Khodasevich, Baltrushaitis, Ehrenburg, Vera Inber, Antokol’sky, Kamensky, Burlyuk, Mayakovsky, Andrei Biely [Belyi] and Tsvetaeva”.67

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Here were assembled Russia’s futurists and symbolists, and although no lesser names would have gathered for a poetry reading in Petrograd, even in the list just cited we may find (and add to the memoirist himself) three of the most original voices in world literature by the end of the Great War: voices no less experimentally innovative than those of Eliot or Joyce. It is true that, out of Pasternak’s eleven, four poets would go into emigration by 1922. His own work was censored and attacked by the regime throughout his lifetime (it was rewarded in 1959 by a Nobel Prize, which he was forced to decline). Mandelstam was sent to perish in the camps already in 1938; Marina Tsvetaeva, returning to the USSR after seventeen years in the emigration in 1939, saw her husband and daughter arrested in the same year, and she hanged herself in 1941.68 Talent and originality, not “literature with a message” (only Vladimir Mayakovsky, until his suicide in 1930, seemed able to combine both), were the qualities appreciated by the battered intelligentsia who had seen the revolution of February 1917 followed by that of October and who had not left Russia in the wake of the latter.69 In the 1920s, the Russian Formalists dissociated “literature” from “life” and separated content from ideas by delving into the language of texts; their supremely sophisticated methods of literary analysis were soon condemned in their country but encouraged the emergence of structuralism elsewhere. Mikhail Bulgakov, whose first plays in the 1920s, although attacked in the Soviet press, were admired by theatregoers, was in 1930 denied a permission to emigrate and then silenced and intimidated up to his untimely death in 1940 (a censored version of The Master and Margarita, the great novel he wrote during the last twelve years of his life, was allowed into publication only in 1966). For some of the more despaired readers, the cult writer of the 1930s was Daniil Kharms, whose trademarks were macabre, occasionally sadistic humour and disrespectful jokes about the demigods of the Russian literary pantheon from Pushkin to Chekhov. Surviving by omission the purges of the 1930s, Kharms was arrested soon after the outbreak of war and died in a psychiatric clinic in 1942. Few other Russian modernists of the 1920s and 1930s (pace Mayakovsky’s call to “throw Pushkin down from the ship of modernity”) were prepared to reject the legacy of classical Russian literature; the future American author of Lolita, for example, whom some today regard as the last in the line of the Russian classics, was a lifelong admirer of Pushkin and Tolstoy. He was, however, attracted to other qualities of nineteenthcentury Russian literature than its ideological, moralizing side.

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In China, writers who appealed to the authority of Russian realism in criticizing modernist currents on the literary home front were not disposed to discover modernism in Russia. But there were also writers and translators whose reading of Russian literature was less ideological or political and more drawn towards what Nabokov, for one, believed was literature’s ultimate test: its ability to tell a story well. Some qualities of this literature were hard to appreciate through retranslations from the English: through the first half of the twentieth century, even the native reader of English did not have adequate access to a Russian masterpiece such as The Government Inspector, a play the handling of which at the hands of its successive translators Thomas Seltzer and Constance Garnett (respectively, in 1916 and 1926) made Nabokov think of “the so-called Thousand Pieces Execution which was popular at one time in China”.70 A reading sensitive to style and turn of phrase was also more demanding than a skimming of the great books for their “great ideas”. Then again, the emphasis which writers of the “May Fourth” persuasion put on the interpretation of Russian literature as conveyer of “ideas” was intended to buttress their own redefinition of literature (wenxue) as a vehicle capable of carrying just such a load. The older purpose of fiction (xiaoshuo) to divert and entertain continued to guide writers of the “Mandarin duck and butterfly” variety, who were consequently attacked by the reformers, and yet divisions between these two camps were not always as clear-cut as reformers wished to present them. Much as the newstyle writers could be attracted to the same stirring tales that captivated the “entertainers” (there was, for instance, a widely shared preoccupation with stories about Russian terrorists), so also not all of them were exclusively interested in the kind of foreign literature that tallied best with their concepts of “literature’s mission”. Nor did authors of entertainment literature read only their presumed foreign counterparts (the English-language popular fiction, criticized by Zheng Zhenduo). It is testimony to the intellectual curiosity of Zhou Shoujuan—the writer of popular fiction, editor in the 1920s of the Libai liu (Saturday) magazine and pioneering translator—as well as to the openness of his readers that they too became involved with foreign literature of various kinds and hues.71 Although they would probably not look in it for the same things as did subscribers to New Youth, it would be quite possible for the same foreign novel and (all the more so) for different works translated from the same language to interest one group of readers and translators for their “message” and another for their style or plot.

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For examples of alternative readings of Russian and Soviet literature, such as those that did not privilege its moral or political messages, let us now look briefly at two among the amateurs of Russian literature who, because of belonging to the wrong camp, have rarely found a place in histories of Russian-Chinese literary relations. A prolific writer, Zhao Jingshen (1902–85) spent a prodigious amount of time and effort retranslating Garnett’s translations of the stories of Chekhov, which Kaiming bookstore brought out in eight hefty volumes in 1930.72 He had his own views on the craft; for daring to suggest that “whether a translation is right or wrong is [only] a secondary question, the most urgent matter being whether the translation is or is not fluent”, he became probably the single most ridiculed translator in republican China.73 Zhao’s harshest critic was Lu Xun, a resolute opponent of “fluent” translations: in 1932, he delighted in mocking Zhao’s rendering of “the Milky Way” as niunai lu (“the cow milk road”) in a translation of Chekhov’s short story “Vanka”. Such was the weight of Lu Xun’s authority that it took over sixty years for Zhao’s choice of words, made in deliberate preference to the overly native associations of yinhe (“the silver river”; the still more ancient term would have been yinhan), to be vindicated by scholars of Chinese translation history as the better solution for the image of the night sky, as it had appeared to Chekhov’s child hero.74 As a member of the Literary Research Association, chief editor at Kaiming and at Beixin Book Company and long-time actor of the literary and academic scenes, Zhao knew many of the translators and commentators of foreign fiction in republican China. In the lively short pieces of recollection that he wrote over the years, some famous and distinguished names were put in unusual contexts: “the four thin and four fat” editors of Wenxue zhoubao (Literature Weekly), for example, included Zheng Zhenduo as representative of the “thin”, with Geng Jizhi, Xie Liuyi and Zhao himself representing the “fat”. He had a sharp eye not only for fellow writers’ physical shapes and there are many details that his jottings add to our knowledge of contemporary appreciators of foreign literature.75 Zhao combined his taste for Russian literature with the writing of stories for children and pioneering research on Chinese vernacular fiction and drama. As a book illustrator influenced by the “decadent” British artist Aubrey Beardsley, Ye Lingfeng (1905–75) got, like Zhao Jingshen, his share of Lu Xun’s bad temper after drawing a satirical Beardsley-style portrait of “old warrior” Lu Xun in May 1928. More than as an artist, Ye is remembered

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as a writer depicting the quick pace of modern urban life and the relations between the men and women of China’s first liberated generation. A sometime member of the League of Left-Wing Writers as well as of the Creation Society and a translator of Gorky next to Schnitzler, he moved to Hong Kong to work as an editor in 1938 and continued to express there his pro-Soviet views.76 In June 1928, Ye was responsible for the anthology Xin E duanpian xiaoshuo ji (Short Stories of New Russia), the very first in Chinese to present five stories by Soviet writers. Its preface was signed “at the Tower of Listening to Cars” (tingche lou), a humorous reference to the translator’s lodgings in the editorial office of his fortnightly journal Huanzhou (Mirage) on a busy Shanghai road.77 The appearance of this anthology opened the gates for five others by March 1930 and the intervening two years were a remarkably fertile period in the translation of Soviet literature in China: the journals now offered in profusion “stories of New Russia”, and whereas only two books by Soviet writers had appeared up to 1927, seven were published in 1928, twenty in 1929 and another nineteen in 1930.78 Not all the readers and translators who participated in this process of discovery espoused the political positions they found in these publications. Next to those who did, we know of translators and writers, such as Ye Lingfeng or the modernist Shi Zhecun (1905–2003), who, sympathizing to varying degrees with the Soviet Union, were interested in the literature of the first Soviet decade primarily because they considered it a part of the new world literature, with which they wished to keep apace. Indeed, in a valuable article on the translation of Soviet literature in 1928–30, the Soviet expert in Russian-Chinese literary relations Viktor Petrov found himself in need of accounting, over some pages, for the embarrassingly large portion which, within the then boom of Soviet fiction, was taken by a completely “wrong” segment of it: too many in China were attracted to those stories and novels of the 1920s that, taking advantage of the freedom of expression still available to Soviet writers before the imposition of socialist realism, initiated the discussion of a “revolutionary” sexual morality.79 Not all such literature was good, but it was still literature. To look back at what we now identify as the best of nineteenth-century Russian prose, these works, of vast amplitude and complexity, gave rise to larger mounds of research: the question of “Turgenev’s political convictions”, for example, was fiercely debated during the writer’s lifetime and still remains open

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today.80 Even with the benefit of hindsight, assessing both the complete corpus of a writer’s work and its subsequent interpretation, it would be impossible to classify certain writers as “ideologues” and others as, say, “entertainers”: the career of Gogol, to give another example, encompassed biting satire (whether more “social” or “existential” is a matter of argument), interest in the occult and periods of commitment to varying currents of thought, culminating in the worship of monarchy and the frenzy of religious mysticism. In a chapter of his book Nikolai Gogol, ironically entitled “The Teacher and Guide”, Nabokov affected despair of ever understanding the “civic reader”, in whose mind “Dead Souls was gently turning into Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, or those critics who, being quite blind to Gogol’s brilliant addiction to the irrational, insisted on calling him a “realist”.81 In being able to accommodate this much variety, literature in Russia up to the 1920s—however influenced it might have been by market demand, on the one hand, and the “moral burden” willingly shouldered by the intelligentsia, on the other—differed in a basic sense from the programme-bound writing that we will be discussing in Chapter 4. Except where decisions on the proper function and interpretation of literature are taken by Party committees, there cannot be a way of reducing to a single “message” the possibilities inherent in the reading of fiction; writers whose books lend themselves to such reduction properly belong in the department of propaganda. However, since in Russia and China the interpretation of literature during much of the twentieth century did stop being a matter of individual judgement by readers, or by the critics of competing literary periodicals, that department is the destination to which we are heading. It will be useful now to distinguish between the lay reader and the professional one. Even in Stalin’s Russia and (from 1949 to the prohibition of Russian literature in the early 1960s) in Mao’s China, readers picking up a collection of Chekhov in a bookstore or a library could find in it everything they wanted, from a message of sympathy with the downtrodden to an engagement with the mystery of the single human life. Some would have chosen this collection, or Turgenev’s love stories, or perhaps still Dead Souls, The Idiot or Anna Karenina, out of identification with the politicized exegesis of these works as was promoted by the state; others—in conscious preference to the latest productions of socialist realism. This would have turned their choice into the kind of non-spectacular protest, of which so little information would ever reach the student of

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literature’s “reception”. It was for this very reason that access to Russian literature was denied to readers in China from about 1962, and émigré Russian literature was not made available to Russian readers under Stalin. Memoirs and studies of the Soviet period attest that, for many at that time, the books of the Russian classics, alongside foreign literature in translation, provided a haven from the abuse of state propaganda. In Mao’s China, the academic study of the masterpieces of classical Chinese literature—even as these too were periodically criticized or banned on ideological grounds— was the occupational refuge of those writers of the 1930s who preferred a change of profession to the choice of producing increasingly dishonest fiction to the Party’s dictation. Reading or translating the classics of world literature which could not be taught in Chinese schools could have a therapeutic function: three years into the Cultural Revolution, Ba Jin began copying and learning by heart (in Chinese) The Divine Comedy.82 Naturally far outnumbering the “professionals”, “lay” readers differed from the former in that they did not say what they had thought of the book. When required to speak up, in class or in an obligatory “study meeting” at the workplace, they would have had to be naïve to tell the truth: it was the affirmation of Party authority not the exchange of opinion which was the meeting’s purpose. As the aim of the state was to mould readers’ preferences, rather than find out what these really were, no reader surveys were conducted in Soviet Russia since the 1930s and in Communist China before 1979.83 When citizens did actively communicate their opinion of a book or any other matter by writing to a newspaper, their letters were either destroyed or stored in the archive; the minority that were published were heavily edited and, therefore, cannot be used today as indicators of their senders’ views.84 It will be wrong to deny readers in the Communist state every capacity for independent thought, but it is also necessary to acknowledge the extent to which ordinary readers were shaped by the state’s intensive effort to limit their horizons, so as to make them unable to form an aesthetic judgement outside the only sanctioned interpretation.85 As to persons for whom reading and writing were a profession, they became, willingly or not, involved in the manipulation of literature to strictly political ends—a process initiated by the Party while it was still struggling for power and completed by the Party-turned-state. Nevertheless, the attempt to remould literature and its readers in the shape of the Party was not ultimately successful. From the mid-1950s in the USSR and from the early 1980s in the PRC, writers taking advantage of the changed political situation found ways to bypass the requirement to

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praise even when they were not at liberty to criticize; thus, there was more than propaganda to be found on the bookshelves of post-Stalinist Russia and post-Mao China. Before moving on to the books that did occupy the Chinese shelves of Russian literature from the 1930s to the 1950s, we must now map out their travel routes: the first physical and intellectual circulation channels of Soviet books from Moscow and Leningrad to Peking and Shanghai.


Chapter Three The Agents of Soviet Literature

The new Soviet fiction was not to be found in the library of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) in Peking, or the Oriental Library of the Commercial Press in Shanghai, where readers such as Zheng Zhenduo borrowed the books of Russian classics and prerevolutionary modernists in English translation in the 1920s. Before 1929, little of it (with the exception of works by Maxim Gorky) would have been available in English at all.1 This literature could not be profitably sought in the foreign-language bookstores in Shanghai, or—as the same Zheng Zhenduo recommended to worldly Chinese fans of Artsybashev’s Sanin in 1924—ordered via those bookstores from publishers in London and New York.2 To gain access to the first major works of Soviet literature as they began to appear in the 1920s, one could turn (as Lu Xun did) to Japanese translations, which, however, were also limited in scope and could not catch up with the rapid developments in the Soviet literary scene. To be able to follow these, one needed to know at least some Russian and (replicating the feat of Tangdynasty translators of Buddhist sutras, famed for the arduous pilgrimages they undertook to find and bring the sacred texts from India to China) to travel to the Soviet Union. At the beginning of the Chinese acquaintance with Soviet literature, therefore, stands a small group of young men—the first literary-minded Chinese able to read Russian. Their importance lies not only in having gone, physically, to obtain the books that would then be translated: together, they shaped patterns of response to Soviet books as well as to Soviet reality. Qu Qiubai, Jiang Guangci and Cao Jinghua all travelled to the USSR and—either already during their stay there or upon their

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return—became agents for Soviet literature in China. The translator Hu Yuzhi stayed only one week in Moscow but used this short time to collect the impressions which soon added up to an influential travel account. Below, we shall discuss such border-crossing “literary agents” and then other channels through which Soviet literature entered China in the 1930s and 1940s: the first contacts established between Soviet writers and their translators, and the influence that was (or was not) exercised on Chinese perceptions of Russian literature by its native readers in China.

1. Travellers to New Russia At the outset of Qu Qiubai’s book Exiang jicheng (A Journey to the Land of Hunger), is a personal, even mystical quest. Tinged with the language of Buddhist metaphysics, it is not yet formulated in terms of a political conviction: as he lets readers follow his long preparations to the journey that would take him to the “Land of Hunger”, the twenty-one-year-old author also allows many pages to elapse before offering a rationalized explanation for his decision. For it was a voyage almost as dangerous as the one of Xuanzang (the famous seventh-century Buddhist pilgrim and translator) that he was about to undertake in October 1920, a voyage leading from Peking, via Tianjin (Tientsin), Shenyang and Harbin, to the border town Manzhouli and thence, aboard the Trans-Siberian train, through the Russian Far East. Stopping in Chita and Irkutsk, he would eventually reach his destination, the capital of Red Russia. In those first pages of the book Qu still follows a “shadow”,3 a call he does not himself claim to understand: yet, even if he cannot explain why he is travelling to Moscow, he feels that he does know well the causes of his previous suffering. Few other Chinese writers of his generation, among whom such feelings were common, were as explicit in presenting their personal history as the reflection of the crisis and collapse of the old Chinese world.4 It is only by the fifth out of the sixteen chapters of his book, the chapter chronologically corresponding to the eve of his departure, that Qu formulates the motivation for his voyage as a need to find out in the world’s first socialist state, both for himself and for the benefit of China, the real meaning of the terms that had been bandied about since the revolution of

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1911 and were most frequently employed in May Fourth: “science” and “democracy”, “socialism” and “materialism”.5 As Qu and his two travel companions board the train in Peking, his friend Zheng Zhenduo, classmate Geng Jizhi and “uncle” (his father’s young brother) Qu Shiying (1900–76) see them off at the station. On their way back, sitting down in a teahouse, Zheng and Geng compose a farewell poem which they will post to their friends, gone “after the red light”; how lucky they are, say Zhenduo and Jizhi, that they would soon be able to see “the life of the new world!” But don’t forget those of us who remain here, in the bleak and desolate land, says Shiying (by his literary “style”, Junong) in a poem of his own, addressed to his nephew’s companions: “become, if not postmen, then honey-gathering bees”.6 Reaching Qu Qiubai in Tianjin, the farewell messages of his friends were also published in the Peking Chenbao (Morning Post), the politically moderate newspaper that had sent Qu as its reporter to Soviet Russia. Qu did not greatly exaggerate the importance of the journey when describing it in his book as the first investigation by a Chinese of the new political system and unprecedented social experiment implemented in Russia since the Bolshevik revolution. After being stranded in Harbin, the mixed Russian-Chinese headquarters of the Chinese Eastern Railway that failed to evoke Qu’s appreciation, Qu and his companions were finally able to cross over from Manzhouli into the Land of Hunger on 16 December. As he did in Harbin, Qu took advantage of all forced stops along the way to collect impressions, improve his as yet inarticulate Russian and (where language did not prove an impediment) talk to the people: at each train station, he is confronted with the predicament of Chinese migrant workers and everywhere he witnesses the misery of the local population. But nothing of what Qu sees or hears (in Irkutsk, sitting at a table on which the hospitable samovar was put, and served a coarse black bread of the kind that “none in China could either imagine or eat”, he had asked a middle-aged engineer if he was a member of the Party and provoked bitter laughter; enquired about the Party programme and heard that all there was were guns and prisons) can challenge his determination to find the red light he is after. He is, though, moved to admit that the gaps between reality and theory are deep, and he promises (to himself and to his readers) to try his best to understand.7 By the time he arrives at the “red capital” and solemnly notes down the time according to both lunar and solar calendars

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(it is 11 pm on 25 January 1921), his only good memory of the long route has been the glimpse he had caught from the train, somewhere at a village in the Urals, of an old Russian man and two small children playing in the snow.8 With the journey’s end, there was less time left for reflection as the author and his companions were effectively taken charge of by the People’s Committee for Foreign Relations. Assigned an interpreter (whose duties would naturally have included reporting on all their movements), they were encouraged, in a meeting with the editor of Pravda, to begin their journalistic work. Qu concluded his book soon after describing an organized visit to the Tret’iakov gallery of art. He wrote with enthusiasm about savouring the dew of Russian national culture, and as he returned to his original search for a “shadow” (yinying), he felt able to say that he had already found some of the “red light” (chiguang).9 Qu followed his first account of the journey that had brought him to Soviet Russia with a second book on his life and impressions there, History of the Heart in the Red Capital.10 Interesting for the narration of the author’s unexpected encounters and not lacking in self-reflection, it allowed less space for wistful comparison between the “reality and theory” of the socialist revolution. By the time it came out in Shanghai in June 1924, Qu had been for over two years a member of the CCP. He had left Russia in December 1922 and was now involved in political work in China. During his time in the Soviet Union, however, Qu had also written the first Chinese-language history of Russian literature, which was to become chronologically the second (after Zheng Zhenduo’s, in February 1924) due to its tardy publication in December 1927. Originally entitled Russian Literature before the October Revolution (Shiyue geming qian de Eluosi wenxue), Qu’s history was coupled with a survey of post-1917 literature by Jiang Guangci. Their joint book appeared under the unassuming title Russian Literature (Eluosi wenxue).11 Like Zheng Zhenduo’s Concise History of Russian Literature, the book by Qu Qiubai and Jiang Guangci was slim in size; both “histories” borrowed heavily from previous studies in English and (with Qu and Jiang) in Russian. When they did not, they were prone to embarrassing mistakes: Zheng Zhenduo had either not read War and Peace or was influenced by a Communist reading of the novel, if he could say that its main hero was the peasant soldier Platon Karavaev. His plot summaries of Anna Karenina and Crime and Punishment were not much better—a reminder of the limited knowledge of those who did


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not pause at offering broad generalizations about Russian literature.12 To point this out is not to deny the considerable effort and the evidence of independent thought in these first book-length presentations of Russian literature to a Chinese audience.13 Neither were some of the odder statements in them the result of the ignorance of their compilers. Qu and Jiang were echoing views associated with the Proletkul’t, which soon thereafter would be condemned as “vulgar socialism” in the Soviet Union: thus, Jiang Guangci, who devoted much of his survey to poetry, called the proletarian poet Dem’ian Bednyi “the best student of Pushkin”, adding that the new Soviet poets were all “collectivists” who rarely used the word “I”.14 A study of Russian Literature before the October Revolution and Qu Qiubai’s other writings on the subject has shown (while underestimating somewhat the derivative nature of Qu’s comments) that his literary taste did not happily merge with his political theory. In the book, Qu echoed the familiar cliché that Russian literature expressed the voice of the people but did not explain by what means the contact between writers and the masses should have been achieved; he also revealed his admiration for the kind of literary greatness that did not necessarily carry a revolutionary message.15 It is indeed difficult to reconcile Qu’s lifelong allegiance to the literary (as distinct from the ideological) accomplishments of nineteenthcentury Russian writers with his essays, in which he urged Chinese writers to simplify their language and restrict their range of subjects so as to allow their works to reach the widest popular audience. The explanation probably lies in the fact that, in the eyes of Qu and his associates, the literature of every country had to obey the rules of history, or the teleology of revolution: the writers of the gentry have performed their presumed role in advancing the inevitable victory of the proletariat, but now that the age of revolution has dawned, their aesthetics had to clear the stage as historical progress demanded a new kind of literature from a new kind of author. Such views on Russian literature as were expressed by Chinese writers and critics committed to the Communist cause were governed by political not literary criteria, the latter being fully subservient to the former: they had trained themselves to praise a bad book if useful to the cause and to condemn a book they may have liked, if it was not. Qu Qiubai is too convenient an example of the contradictions plaguing a sensitive reader whom political convictions lead to advocate the

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“proletarization” of his native literature but who then turns to translating a tale of romantic love such as Pushkin’s narrative poem The Gypsies.16 In Qu’s case, we have what is unavailable elsewhere, his famous prison-written introspection Superfluous Words, in which there is every reason to believe both the speaker’s regret over a wasted life and his expression of love for classical literature, Western and Chinese, in its most challenging best. Less than a month before facing the firing squad at the orders of Chiang Kaishek, he parted from the world with a reader’s last, hurried tribute to three works of Russian fiction (Gorky’s Life of Klim Samgin, Turgenev’s Rudin and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina), another three in Chinese (Lu Xun’s “True Story of Ah Q”, Mao Dun’s Vacillation and the eighteenth-century Dream of the Red Chamber) and a condemned man’s evocation of “China’s tofu, delicious, the best food in the world”.17 Even where it was not made as (retrospectively) explicit, the selfcensorship that Chinese Communists learned to apply in their public pronouncements on Russia and Russian literature can be sensed between the lines of intelligent commentators, some of whom had read and translated Russian writers of the nineteenth century or of the “Silver age” in the 1920s, and who less than ten years later were praising thinly decorated political propaganda.18 From among the reports on Russia that were most influential in shaping Chinese opinion, let us take as our second example another travelogue from “the red capital”, this by the pen of Hu Yuzhi in 1931. The first in China to introduce the fiction of Turgenev, Hu Yuzhi (1896–1986) became later in the same year, 1920, also the first to translate a story by the contemporary author Mikhail Artsybashev. He remained highly active in translating foreign literature alongside his work as a journal editor through the better part of the 1920s. In 1927, Hu Yuzhi left China for three years of study in Paris. It was on his return journey that he reached Moscow by train in late January 1931. He was able to spend an eventful week in the city, which he documented in detail in his little book Impressions of Moscow, published in Shanghai in August. As Hu would write on the occasion of a re-edition more than half a century later, very soon after its original publication the book was banned by the Nationalist authorities, but by that time it had already circulated far and wide.19 Hu was also a committed Esperantist, and most of his conversations in Moscow were conducted in this language with comrades in the


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internationalist Esperanto community: a group of persons who, in the Soviet Union of the time, were beginning to feel the pressure of the state that would soon crush them (the Union of Esperantists, founded in 1908, would be dissolved in 1932). Esperanto apart, Hu was most interested in visiting factories and schools. His book makes little mention of Russian literature, certainly far less than what one would have expected from a journalist who, in the previous decade, had been a prolific translator and critic. It should have been even more surprising, but foreknowledge of the conformity of Chinese intellectuals to the Party line makes it less so, to find in a book by this well-travelled reporter nothing but praise (much of it naïve and misinformed) for every aspect of life in the Soviet Union and a parallel readiness to explain away, dissimulate or pass over in silence every temporary difficulty in the realization of the Communist ideal. Describing a visit to a grain factory in Moscow on 31 January, Hu expresses regret that cold weather had prevented him from examining the achievements of Soviet agricultural reform in the villages: the collectivization of 1929–30, to which he adverts as a joint effort of the whole Soviet people, a feat equal in importance to the Revolution and the staunchest challenge to world capitalism.20 The disastrous consequences of this policy, which cost the lives of millions in the Russian countryside, are too well-known to need elaboration here, but success in concealing the hunger of the 1930s even from the eyes of non-partisan visitors was one of the main “achievements” of Soviet cultural diplomacy.21 Travel reports such as Hu’s were no more blinkered than, for example, Theodore Dreiser’s Dreiser Looks at Russia (1928), although the worldfamous American writer (1871–1945) at least drew on some extensive voyaging and confided his less reverent “impressions” of Soviet reality to a diary, co-authored with his secretary and lover (and published only in 1996).22 They may be compared, also, with the reports about Mao and the Chinese Communist Party that a number of leftist American journalists, in particular Edgar Snow (1905–72), posted to the West from the Party’s holdout in Yan’an.23 By contrast, as early as 1922, after a stay of two years in the country, the Russian-born American anarchist Emma Goldman (1869–1940), known as “Red Emma”, had spoken loud and clear in a book given the title My Disillusionment in Russia: “I found reality in Russia grotesque, totally unlike the great ideal that had borne me upon the crest of high hope to the land of promise”.24

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Leaving no room for surprises, the political pilgrim Hu Yuzhi will go on praising everything he sees, conveying to readers who may have credited him with a capacity for critical judgement the picture of a robust forward-moving society. Improbably enough, he even seems to believe his own words. His impressions on 2 February 1931 began with a visit to a car plant, where the socialist idea of involving workers in constant collective activity appeared to him fully achieved: allowing employees no time for idle privacy, the plant was, in Hu’s opinion, providing all their material and spiritual needs. Signing a visitors’ book, offered to him at the plant’s nursery, he congratulated the workers’ small children on growing up in “a free and peaceful air, unfamiliar with the world’s sorrows”.25 On the same evening, more interestingly for our purpose, Hu visited the Bol’shoi Theatre.26 Hu had already become acquainted with Soviet theatre (as well as with Soviet cinema) in Paris: he had seen the best achievement of the Vakhtangov theatre troupe, Princess Turandot; the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre’s 200,000 by Sholom Aleichem, and Meierhold’s version of Gogol’s The Inspector.27 The performance Hu now attends in Moscow is though no modernist reinterpretation of the classics, but the first-ever “revolutionary ballet”. According to Hu, the four-act piece is called The Red Flower and is set in China, to Chinese music and with the support of elaborate Chinese decorations (these last Hu found especially impressive). The ballet tells the story of Chinese struggle against imperialism: coolies in the Shanghai port, assisted by the crew of a Soviet ship, beat up promiscuous Anglo-Saxon sailors who had assaulted an innocent Chinese bride. The bride’s comprador father then schemes to poison the Soviet captain and crew but is defeated by the class alliance formed between his servants and the coolies. A “red light” rises in the East in the last act, as the curtain falls. The dormant literary critic in Hu seems awoken, as he describes The Red Flower as no mere propaganda but sophisticated symbolism, “worthy of Maeterlinck and Rostand”. He takes care to add that, although the ballet employs symbolist technique to achieve its ends, it remains firmly realistic and thus incomparable with decadent “new romantic” theatre. It is only natural, in Hu’s opinion, that, as Soviet theorists of theatre have concluded that Western theatre has completely lost its social meaning, they should have turned for inspiration to Japan and China, where the national characteristics of theatre have been preserved. Hu agrees that European theatre had reached a dead end (restaging the classics,


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theatres in Western Europe have been able to show few new masterworks); the new Soviet theatre will certainly shape the future direction of the art. To indicate only one and surely the most harmless of Hu Yuzhi’s many “ellipses” (the term used by Ellen Widmer in her analysis of Qu Qiubai’s reports from Moscow), the revolutionary ballet that Hu saw performed on the stage of the Bol’shoi was actually called Red Poppy (Krasnyi mak), not Red Flower. In 1949, a first delegation from Red Beijing considered it opportune to protest the revolutionary use to which the symbol of opium was put in this creation by the Soviet composer Reinhold Gliere, and the ballet’s name was indeed changed to Red Flower, but only as late as 1957 (the year after the composer’s death).28 It was obviously no time for the assertion of cultural pride back in 1931; rather, as Hu wrote in a preface to his book, the astonishing achievements of the Soviet Union “should fill us all with shame”. Parting company with a former wide-ranging commentator on Western politics, history and literature, whom we now leave at the start of a long career as political/cultural agitator, it will not be amiss to add that, although the composer of this revolutionary ballet was to receive every decoration the Soviet state had to offer,29 his set designer, whose work Hu admired, was arrested already in 1932, would spend six years in the Gulag from 1941 to 1947 and kill himself in 1963. The celebrated theatre director Vsevolod Meierhold, whose troupe Hu had watched in Paris and who hosted the star actor of traditional Chinese theatre Mei Lanfang (1894–1961) on his Moscow tour in 1935, perished along with innumerable other artists (including the director and most of the actors of the Yiddish Theatre), besides remnants of the prerevolutionary elite, Communist Party members and ordinary people from all walks of life, in the purges of the Stalin era.30 At the time, Hu Yuzhi could have known nothing of this. From today’s perspective, however, these are necessary reminders that the rhetoric of a literature at the service of the people, the ever optimistic new Soviet art, whose willing messengers men like Qu Qiubai and Hu Yuzhi became, was itself a theatrical production staged and directed by a terror state.31 The lives of its participants are highly relevant for an understanding of Soviet art: not only those that ended in execution or physical self-destruction, but also the many more lived out to their natural end through varieties of cynical conformism which, for the talented, implied the crossing out of integrity and could mean suicide of the soul.32 Thus, it was not the “honey” of a society that had realized

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the dream of equality (to recall the poem addressed to Qu, on his leaving China in 1920, by his uncle, who may or may not have been alluding to Erasmus’s classical image of the humanist), but a poisonous lie that Qu and other “cultural agents” of Soviet Russia carried back with them from Moscow and a grotesque reality which they learned to dissimulate by lies and silences of their own. Our third and in many respects the most prominent literary agent of Soviet Russia in China is Cao Jinghua (1897–1987).33 Born like Hu Yuzhi into a provincial family that had bred the scholar officials of old China, he too was “awoken” by May Fourth. Aged twenty-three, in the year 1920, he arrived in Shanghai from his native Henan, to study Russian at a school of languages newly opened by the Socialist Youth League. In the following year, having first moved to Peking and attended more Russian courses at Peking University, he went with a delegation of the League to study at the new Communist University of the Toilers of the East in Moscow.34 Cao’s was the first batch of Chinese students in red Russia, and it included future Chairman of the PRC Liu Shaoqi (1898–1969), future romantic revolutionary writer Jiang Guangci and the future translator of Russian literature Wei Suyuan. Together with Wei, whom he met in Shanghai, Cao made the dangerous railway journey via Harbin, Vladivostok (where they were robbed and nearly killed by Chinese bandits popularly known as “red beards”) and Khabarovsk.35 Together with Qu Qiubai, Cao would soon wander the streets of “the red capital”. Back in late 1921 (Wei would return in 1922, Jiang only in 1924), Cao spent another two years at Peking University before joining the Nationalist Army as an interpreter for Soviet military advisors. He had already become a member of Lu Xun’s Unnamed Society in Peking, which engaged in the translation of Russian literature, and he would maintain close contacts with its members. With the break-up of the United Front, he returned to the Soviet Union in summer 1927, to serve for six more years as instructor at the Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow and teacher of Chinese at the Institute of Languages in Leningrad. His daughter Suling, a future translator of Soviet (later, American and English) fiction, was born in Moscow in 1930.36 With his young family, Cao was back in Peking in autumn 1933, plunging into translation and teaching work; his friendship with Lu Xun now led to more meetings in Shanghai and collaboration in literary journals, and after the writer’s death also to Cao’s participation


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in the editing of Lu Xun’s first Complete Works. With the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war, the Cao family was once again on the move. Arriving in Wuhan, Cao Jinghua joined the All-China Association of Literary Resistance. In Chongqing from 1939 to 1946, and then until 1948 in Nanking, Cao taught Chinese to Soviet diplomats37 and was involved in the activities of the Sino-Soviet Cultural Association, on which more will be said below. After the establishment of the PRC, he was appointed to head the Department of Russian at Peking University. This post he held, with the interruption of the Cultural Revolution, from 1951 to 1983 and was able to combine it with the extensive translation of Soviet literature (there were the obligatory “Stories about Lenin”, “Stories about Stalin” and outpourings of adulation for Gorky, next to quite a lot of Chekhov), essay writing and the publishing of his reminiscences of Lu Xun. His official functions increased once he joined the CCP in 1956, and what with his extensive contacts in Soviet literary and academic circles, no other individual in Communist China during Cao’s lifetime was as closely identified with the words “Russian literature”. Cao had begun translating from the Russian as early as in 1923, but it was especially during the second half of his six-year teaching term in Soviet Russia, while living in Leningrad from late 1930 to 1933, that he played a pioneering role in acquainting Chinese readers with Soviet fiction.38 At a time when Soviet literature was supposed to be forbidden in Nationalist China, Cao posted package after package from Leningrad to Lu Xun in Shanghai.39 These contained Cao’s letters (he was among Lu Xun’s most devoted correspondents),40 manuscripts of his translations, the woodcuts that were Lu Xun’s passion, Soviet posters, journals and books which Lu Xun could not read but delighted in collecting. Lu Xun would pass on some of these books to other translators. Very few translators in China, however, were able to rely directly on the Russian texts: among those who could do so in the republican period were the prolific Geng Jizhi and the short-lived Wei Suyuan, both of whom only rarely turned to Soviet literature. As the absolute majority of translations were done from the English, the original texts were—if at all—used only for “verification” against the intermediary sources. Lu Xun himself liked to have by him the Russian copy received from Cao Jinghua while translating Fadeev’s The Rout from the Japanese in 1930, and, as was his wont, “comparing” the Japanese text with translations of the same novel into German

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(which he knew almost as well as Japanese) and English (in which he was on far less certain ground).41 Cao Jinghua, by contrast, knew Russian and would turn out to be almost as productive in his work on Soviet writers as Geng Jizhi was with writers of the nineteenth century. The manuscript of Cao’s translation of The Iron Flood by Alexander Serafimovich reached Lu Xun in June 1931. With Lu Xun’s close editorial and organizational involvement, it was published by the Uchiyama Kanzō bookstore in Shanghai in 1932. Lu Xun’s friendship with the Japanese bookseller and main intermediary in pre-war Sino-Japanese cultural relations is well-known; the Neishan bookstore (in the Chinese reading of the owner’s surname) was the place where Lu Xun—a Shanghai resident in the last eight years of his life—and other returned students from Japan, such as Guo Moruo, Xie Liuyi and the dramatist Tian Han (1898–1968), obtained both original books in Japanese and the Western and Soviet books in Japanese translations, which they would later retranslate into Chinese.42 In autumn 1932, Lu Xun considered visiting the Soviet Union and then Germany, the country where he had wanted to continue his education at the end of his studies in Japan in the 1900s.43 Invitations to the USSR were offered to him repeatedly from 1930, partly through Cao Jinghua, but he refused all of them.44 He was neither to set foot in Europe, nor to see with his own eyes the triumph of Communism or the rise of National Socialism. It is proof that the postal connection worked as well from Lu Xun’s end of the chain that Cao Jinghua, as he was visiting the author of The Iron Flood at his dacha near Moscow in December 1932, was able to present him with two copies of the Chinese book. The contact thereby established between the writer and his translator paved the way for the special introduction, which Serafimovich would contribute to a subsequent Chinese edition of The Iron Flood in 1933. In this introduction the Soviet author assured Chinese readers that the heroic victory of the Red Army, which his novel described, could be achieved in every bourgeois state; everywhere, he believed, “workers and peasants [were] bound to defeat their blood-sucking enemy and build a new society, in which all power, and all the wealth created by the workers, would belong to none but themselves”.45 This form of direct address to readers in China was not strictly limited to Soviet authors, even though other Western authors tended to write to translators, rather than to their nations,46 nor was it the first of its kind. Cao had already obtained an introduction from Boris Lavrenev to a translation


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of two of his stories that the Unnamed Society published in June 192947 and he would later collect more such texts, which typically pledged friendship and support to the Chinese people on behalf of the Russian. As more of these Soviet addresses to Chinese readers appeared, they created (along with a translation accomplished directly from the original by a translator personally acquainted with the writer) a product quite different from previous retranslations of Russian fiction on the basis of books published, often without the knowledge of their authors, in Tokyo, London or New York. That Cao’s translation of The Iron Flood was published not only in Shanghai but also in Khabarovsk (in 1932) attested to the importance that decision makers in the Soviet Union attached to the distribution of the book among potential Chinese readers on the Russian side of the Amur River border as well.48 The new image of the translated Soviet book certainly enhanced the appeal of Soviet literature in China. The question imposes itself (for example, when we are told that Serafimovich used to “tenderly caress” the translated Chinese book received from Cao Jinghua as he was showing it to his friends)49 as to how real were the unfailing displays of interest by Soviet writers towards their translation in China: for almost all of them, the fellow struggling nation, soon to become a “brotherly socialist neighbour”, was the ultimate Other. Some of them, like Boris Lavrenev and even the invalid Nikolai Ostrovskii, expressed a wish to travel to China50 but never did realize their intentions. Mayakovsky, ever the revolutionary romantic, celebrated in a poem the taking of Shanghai by the united Northern expedition in 1927, but he too did not see the scene of the events: the mass travel of Soviet writers to China would begin only with the establishment of the People’s Republic.51 It would be too ungenerous to attribute all displays of this kind to factors that doubtless loomed large in Soviet writers’ responses to communications from socialist parties from all over the world: their obligation to spread their books as tools of propaganda for the Soviet state and the prestige that accrued to them at home for so doing. If there was inevitable posturing in missives they penned to the labouring masses of Korea or the peasants of Egypt, it was also natural for writers, denied the opportunity of free travel, to enjoy the thought of their work reaching parts of the world which they had never seen and which, with the help of their books translated and rewritten in exotic scripts, they could now visit either in person or in the imagination. Friendships with foreign, including Chinese, writers and artists did develop: born in an informal atmosphere, in the

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hours following the official speeches in which visiting delegations and their hosts solemnly recited to each other the current political slogans on the friendship between their respective “great peoples”, they could be real and endure for many years. Some Soviet writers with a Far Eastern connection, moreover, regarded China differently than they did other “exotic” locations. More than most of their colleagues, they were aware that Russian books were read in China not only in translation but, at least until the 1940s, also in the original by a considerable audience of native speakers. By the 1920s, China, primarily Harbin and Shanghai, had become home to the largest concentration of Russian émigrés in Asia. At the same time, under the policy of the United Front between the Chinese Nationalist and Communist parties, Soviet advisors could be found in the ranks of the Nationalist Army and Soviet teachers among the staff of some of the main universities. These groups too should be questioned for the impact they may have had on the reading of Russian literature in China.

2. Émigrés For Alexander Fadeev, for example, China was unlike any other distant land in which The Rout was translated by admirers of the system he served. He had spent some time in Harbin during the civil war in the Russian Far East in 1920 and had made Chinese friends while living in Vladivostok. Chinese and Koreans, as well as the Japanese invaders, figured in his 1926 novel, which gave the war its most famous literary representation. If Fadeev’s memoirs of Harbin preserved in his mind an “image of China”, this was not an image his Chinese translator shared: in a preface to a book by the northeastern writer Xiao Hong (1911–42), in November 1935, Lu Xun would say quite frankly that he felt that he and the people of Harbin “lived in different worlds”.52 The difficulty in extending the idea of China beyond the Great Wall was familiar to Qu Qiubai, who on his way from Shenyang to Changchun was moved to exclaim, “Now I have entered Manchuria and have left China; while I seem to remember from textbooks of geography that those three provinces of Manchuria are still part of China, why is it that as soon as one has passed through


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the Shanhai guan and arrived in Fengtian [. . .] one already feels as if in another world?”53 In the young city of Harbin, founded by Russia as headquarters of the Chinese Eastern Railway (CER) in 1898, there existed by the 1920s a large Russian-speaking community. Composed of railway employees who had settled there still in the tsarist period, their children born already in Manchuria and more recent refugees from the revolution and civil war, this community generally kept its distance from the Chinese migrants from China’s northern provinces Shandong and Hebei, who made up the majority of Harbin’s population. Within both these groups, few readers would have been found for the works of Fadeev, either in the original or in translation: most émigrés were strongly anti-Soviet, while among the Chinese there were still not many literate and fewer literary-minded persons. Harbin’s Russians found their sustenance in the Russian classics, literature locally written and published and the works of the Russian literary emigration in Europe, which were available in Harbin libraries and bookstores. A Northern Chinese writer and former employee of the Harbin postal office recalled that, until 1945, all the Chinese correspondence to Europe passed through Harbin: the Trans-Siberian postal route lasted only 12 days, compared with the 24 days via the Suez Canal. All European books and journals also arrived in Harbin first—which is how, in Chen Jiying’s opinion, the city became the receiving point of European culture in the Far East.54 He could have added that thousands of Russian books, re-editions of the classics as well as much contemporary poetry and fiction by Russian authors resident in China, did not need to be imported from abroad as they were printed in Harbin itself.55 The memoirs of writer Chen Jiying (1908–97; in Taiwan from 1948), a founding member of Harbin’s first Chinese literary society, certainly contrast with Qu Qiubai’s report from Harbin in 1920: at the time, Qu had described local Chinese newspapers as a bad joke, although he had singled out Guoji xiebao (The International Gazette) as the best. The editor of that paper told Qu that few of Harbin’s Chinese were literate; in the bookstores, one could not get even a decent copy of Zhuangzi, while new books and journals were extremely scarce.56 The Budding Society, as it was called to mark the youthful age of its members, was established in 1928, three years after Chen Jiying had arrived in Harbin from his native Hebei province.57 Chen and his friends

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(the small society counted only six or seven persons) all worked in the bank or the post office; they were also part-time journalists and devoted their spare time to literature. Chen emphasized that society members used their writing “to expose Red and White imperialism”; for example, when military conflict with the Soviet Union erupted in Northern Manchuria in 1929, they did their share by publishing anti-Russian articles in the Guoji xiebao.58 However, coming to describe the Budding Society’s pursuits, Chen said that its very emergence in a place as remote as Harbin had been made possible by the beneficial cultural and economic effects of the Russian presence. Society members thus attended Russian concerts and dance performances at the Russian Commercial Club, gathered to listen to music in the main CER church, collected “old Russian books”, appreciated Russian painting, took Russian language lessons and associated with Russian friends. Having delivered this rather astonishing information, Chen embarked on a lengthy rhapsody on Russian cuisine, only to stress, once more, that he and his friends were well aware of the imperialist designs of both Communist Russia and Japan in the Chinese Northeast; moreover, no one in China knew better than Harbin intellectuals what it meant to live under “imperialist attack”.59 If Chen leaves us to puzzle out his inconsistencies, the perspective he offers does show that curious individuals were able to enjoy the insight into another culture which life in Harbin could provide. The activities Chen described (more than their retrospective interpretation) bespeak a pragmatic distinction between the private and the public spheres, such as was still possible in China before the 1940s. It would have been quite appropriate in the 1920s (though not after the Japanese invasion in 1931, which forced Chen Jiying, too, to leave the Northeast) for Russian Harbin to have become a Mecca for Chinese fans of Russian literature. Nowhere else in their country would Chinese translators and readers of, for example, Leonid Andreev have had the opportunity to attend performances of this writer’s theatre plays or exchange views on their interpretation. At least five of the eleven plays by Andreev—almost all of which were retranslated in Peking and Shanghai from their English versions—were staged in the original language in Harbin.60 There is, however, no indication that readers and translators of Russian literature in metropolitan China were even aware that such possibilities existed.


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Because almost none of them knew Russian, they depended on the English translations imported by the sea route to Shanghai’s bookstores and would have had no use for the Russian-language books that reached Harbin via the Trans-Siberian railway. Even in Harbin, the “language lessons” mentioned by Chen Jiying provide the only hint that more than one of the members of the Budding Society would have been able to read the “old Russian books” they all collected.61 With the help of Cao Jinghua and other friends, Lu Xun, too, built up a small Russian library next to his sizeable collection of Russian books in Japanese and German translations, in spite of the fact that his knowledge of Russian did not extend much beyond the Cyrillic alphabet.62 For its admirers, “the Russian book” could function as a fetish—an object invoking respect independently of an owner’s ability to put it to its designated use and one which, already in the 1930s, was endowed with the aura of authority that would develop new features during the next two decades. Unable to read it in the original, Chinese devotees of Russian fiction also had no common language with the Russian speakers they encountered in Shanghai: the second centre of the Russian emigration next to Harbin and the refuge of many former Harbin residents after the Japanese occupation of Manchuria. English, which only few among the Russians and many more members of the new generation of Chinese writers and translators did read to varying degrees of comprehension, could be used in conversation by few within both groups (as French was more widely spoken by the Russian intelligentsia, Ba Jin would have enjoyed an advantage denied to his colleagues, were he less taciturn than generally remembered). Some Russian émigrés spoke German; but Lu Xun, almost the only one to translate Russian literature through that language, had difficulties using it in oral communication.63 The literary life of the émigré community in multicultural Shanghai was more modest in scope than in Russian-founded Harbin. But there as well, it remained closed even to those Chinese, for whom Russian literature was a fount of creative inspiration. The absence of contact was due to the language barrier (there was somewhat more contact in art and music, where language posed no obstacle) as well as to the entrenched Chinese attitude to emigration as a moral failure incompatible with the preservation of national culture. It is this last cause, more than the paucity of accessible translations into English, that can best explain the lack of Chinese interest in the new literature of the Russian emigration in Europe.

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Something of the fascination that found little outlet in direct communication was put into fictional form by Jiang Guangci in his novel Poor Liza (1929). Borrowing the title of Nikolai Karamzin’s sentimental short novel on the love of an innocent flower seller, Jiang described the suffering of a “White Russian” prostitute in Shanghai. This “plea for the White Russians, who, after all their counter-revolutionary activities, are treated as if they were deserving of the readers’ sympathy” was condemned in the above terms by the Communist press, as it announced the expulsion of the author from the Party in the year following the novel’s publication.64 There was a strong tradition to ignore foreigners, and full-length descriptions of them in fiction were few and far between; for all their curiosity, Chen Jiying and his friends in the Budding Society do not appear (though a closer check would be needed) to have been interested in Russians as a subject matter for their literary work. A number of writers did treat the subject of Russians in China: among those who addressed the Harbin scene we may mention the Shandong-born Wang Tongzhao and the less well-known author Jue Qing (1917–62) from Jilin. Within fiction on the Russian émigrés in Shanghai, Ba Jin’s story “The General” (1933) is justly familiar. Its main protagonist, Fedor Novikov, makes claims to a false rank (he had never reached higher than lieutenant) and squanders on drink the money that his wife Anna earns by prostitution. The continuity with Poor Liza is noticeable: Jiang’s eponymous heroine was the wife of a defeated White Army colonel and had also walked the streets of the alien Asian town before putting an end to her own life. At the close of Ba Jin’s more subtle story (as an impostor, his “general” is more pathetic than the aristocrat whom Jiang portrayed as Liza’s husband), Novikov is questioned by a Chinese policeman who has found him sprawling on the ground. He says only “nichevo” (nothing; the only such transcription in the text) at first and then tells the policeman and a crowd of onlookers that all he wants is to see Anna and go back to Russia. The last words of the story are an elegant and moving solution to the problem of representing “the other”, here an émigré who, as Ba Jin’s readers knew, did not speak the same language as they. “But everything he said was in Russian, and so nobody understood him”.65 “The General” attested to the Chinese writer’s interest in the people he observed on the streets of Shanghai, even as his story described the


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émigrés as anything else than ambassadors of Russian culture or heralds of a bright socialist future in the East. Life in emigration, Ba Jin firmly believed, was a tragedy.66 It is instructive to compare this story with another available in English translation, which like Ba Jin’s is due to an admirer of Russian literature. In “Goats” (“Yang”, the title story of a collection published in 1935), the Liaoning-born writer Xiao Jun described two émigré Russian boys from Shanghai, thrown into the narrator’s prison cell for trying to sneak without tickets onto a ship bound for the Soviet Union. Within the few days that the children spend in the company of the narrator—so far as we can guess, a political prisoner— they are heard to recite “Tolstoy’s poem ‘Homeland’, as well as the poems of Pushkin and Lermontov”. They cling for dear life to a dog-eared copy of a journal containing more poems and images of Moscow; by the time eleven-year-old Alyosha begins to chant Pushkin’s “My Nurse”, the narrator (significantly, able to appreciate Russian poetry without the intermediary of translation) is moved to tears. By the story’s end, the children write from Harbin, reporting, much to the narrator’s joy, that they are about to return to their homeland.67 In a chapter of his book on the art of performance, entitled “The Russian Restaurant”, the famous theatre actor Yuan Muzhi (1909–78) recalled his preparations for the role of Uncle Vania in 1930.68 Believing he would have to play a Russian peasant (the misconception is evident, as Chekhov’s Ivan Voinitskii bore all the traits of a city intellectual), he had initially been full of apprehension: having never seen a Russian peasant, he naturally had no idea how they looked, dressed or behaved. Yuan then came up with an original solution: for the three months that the Xinyou theatre troupe rehearsed Uncle Vania, he spent his weekends dining at a Shanghai Russian restaurant and observing its patrons—members of the city’s émigré community. This silent observation (nothing suggests that Yuan ever entered into conversation with the people sitting at the other tables) provided answers to all his questions and enabled him to perform his role confidently. However, Yuan reports that soon after the performance (obviously unattended by Russians, who would have noticed the more disturbing oddity of Uncle Vania the peasant) director Zhu Rangcheng conveyed to him the critical remarks of a colleague. This critic said, first, that the trousers in which Vania appeared on stage looked like riding breeches of a kind that were not worn by prerevolutionary Russian peasants and, second, that the

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peasants in question would not have held their head as low as Yuan’s Vania did. Yuan had to agree: on the first point, although he remembered seeing many poor Russians in breeches of that sort in the Shanghai restaurant, it only later occurred to him “that they had probably bought those clothes in the second-hand stores on Wusong Road or Peking Road, and that their clothes could no longer be representative of Russia”. On the second point too, although his acting had been based on his direct observation of the restaurant goers, he “only later realized that these were White Russians, the prerevolutionary ruling class; they had been chased out of the country and even if they are now dressed like beggars, they are still steeped in sorrow. Their sorrow is the sorrow of capitalists bemoaning the past; and it is obviously a mistake to adopt them as models for prerevolutionary Russian peasants”. Indeed, as Yuan put it, “prerevolutionary peasants were the oppressed class and they could not have hung their head low in this manner: first, because there were ideals and hope for the future in their hearts, and second, because had they hung their head so low, there would have been no revolution in Russia”. The possible influence of émigrés on the Chinese reception of Russian literature may be ruled out in view of remarks such as these. They could have had no say in the matter and, even in Shanghai, the potential role of émigré writers and journalists as cultural mediators was not taken advantage of by Chinese translators, writers and publishers—nor, with few exceptions, did this role appeal to the émigrés themselves. We shall still see that some of them, working as teachers of Russian, did have a long-term impact on their Chinese students.

3. Emissaries of the Soviet State In his editorial column in the end of the eighth issue of the journal Benliu on 30 January 1929, Lu Xun reported words that the Peking University professor A. Ivin had said to him “four or five years ago”: “while you Chinese talk of Sologub and his kind as ‘fresh’, to our own ears such names sound as if they were a hundred years old”. Lu Xun politely agreed that, in a country developing as quickly as Russia does, ten years could surely amount to more than a whole century in China: we cannot tell if he was thinking here of Tennyson’s adage “Better fifty years of Europe than a


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cycle of Cathay”. But Lu Xun explained that even about such writers as Fedor Sologub the Chinese were still “only talking”; no more than a few short stories by him have been translated and still not his famous novel Petty Devil (1905). Contrary to many other writers, Lu Xun continued, Sologub (who died in the previous year) had not gone to exile but had stayed in revolutionary Russia. It is true that he did not write any more, but neither could he, a writer famous for praising death, have been published in the Soviet Union. “The Glimmer of Hunger” was a good piece to remember him by.69 As Lu Xun’s reference to a personal conversation attests, in his attempt to influence the choices of the most influential translator and promoter of Russian literature in republican China, A. Ivin (pseudonym of Aleksei A. Ivanov, 1885–1942) would not have required an interpreter. A teacher of Russian and French at Peking University until mid-1920s, Ivin had studied Chinese in Paris. There he had embraced Communism and returned to Russia in 1917.70 His publications included two books of propaganda describing the Soviet-inspired socialist struggle in China71 and a partial translation into Russian of the Qing satirical novel The Scholars. A number of Soviet sinologists spent long periods of time in China in the 1920s: contrary to their émigré colleagues in Harbin, among whom interest in contemporary Chinese literature was negligible, some of them succeeded in establishing ties with Chinese writers. Most of them, regardless of personal inclination, were under orders to do so. Of special interest is the Chinese passage of the writer, poet, playwright and futurist theoretician Sergei M. Tret’iakov (1892–1937), who was an active “agent” for the new Soviet literature while a teacher of Russian at Peking University in 1924–25; Lu Xun’s article mentioned him, next to Ivin, as “an excellent guide”. Tret’iakov, not an academic scholar of China, produced upon his return to Moscow a string of works on Chinese issues: the propagandist play in nine acts Rychi, Kitai! (Roar, China!), staged by Meierhold’s theatre in 1926 and performed in translation worldwide;72 essays collected under the title Zhungo (after “Zhongguo”, China) in 1927; and Den Shihua, the “autobiography” of a Chinese student he had known in Peking and Moscow, in 1930.73 Tret’iakov still had time to befriend and translate Bertolt Brecht and to facilitate the performances of Mei Lanfang in Moscow and Leningrad in spring 1935, before being tried, condemned and shot as a “Japanese spy”, all within a single day in September 1937.74

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In spring 1925, Boris Vasil’ev (by his Chinese name, Wang Xili), a student of the doyen of twentieth-century Russian sinology, Vasilii Alekseev,75 met Cao Jinghua in Kaifeng and soon asked him to pass on to Lu Xun his request for explanations about “The True Story of Ah Q”, which he wanted to translate. Cao later dated the beginning of his own correspondence with Lu Xun to that first communication containing Vasil’ev’s queries. He also recalled Lu Xun’s detailed answers, over several letters, to his Russian translator, complete with a drawing by his own hand of folk gambling in Shaoxing—an example of the many Lu Xun letters that did not reach us.76 Writing in 1965, Cao gave the life dates of “Wang Xili” as “?—1937”. His Russian friends would have provided him with the information: like most of his colleagues, Lu Xun’s pioneer translator did not survive the 1930s. But the dates of executions were not announced in the Soviet Union any more than they were in the PRC, and the final destiny of disappeared persons remained uncertain.77 The year Cao indicated may, therefore, have been meant to hint at the end of Wang Xili without spelling it out. He was right, as Boris Vasil’ev was indeed shot in November 1937.78 The contacts which brilliant young people such as Vasil’ev and Tret’iakov established with academic colleagues and fellow intellectuals abroad (contacts of the kind that enabled Vasil’ev to produce the first translation of Lu Xun into Russian) were later incriminated to them in the years of terror as absurd espionage charges were being trumped up in Stalinist prisons. But even in their inception, these contacts were in some cases not quite what they seemed: Vasil’ev, for one, was a specialist on the traditional novel The Water Margin as well as a wide-ranging translator of Chinese fiction, but his approach of Lu Xun in 1925 is difficult to dissociate from his concurrent service as secretary of the Soviet consulate general and his later position, up to his departure from China in 1927, as secretary to the Soviet military attaché.79 Soviet literature was also distributed in China through the Sino-Soviet Cultural Association, set up in Nanking in October 1935 by the son of Sun Yat-sen, the American-educated former mayor of Canton, Sun Ke (1891–1973).80 Cao Jinghua’s work in this organization (unlike Sun Ke, he would continue to the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association, founded in October 1949) brought him into collaboration with another Soviet sinologist in China, also a future translator of “The True Story of Ah Q”, who, unlike so many others, was to pass unharmed through the purges of the


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1930s. Vladimir Rogov (Luoguofu; 1906–89) was not, like Vasil’ev or Ivin, a student of classical China drawn into the maelstrom of political agitation; he chose that career for himself and was successful in it. Born in Astrakhan, on the River Volga, Rogov joined the Communist Party in 1927 and was first sent to Harbin in 1930. Returning to the USSR in 1934, he was again delegated to China, this time as a correspondent of the Soviet Union Telegraph Agency (TASS) in Shanghai. Transferred to direct the TASS branch in London during the Second World War, he was appointed director of the Shanghai branch in 1946 and was later TASS correspondent in Beijing from 1949 to 1951.81 In 1941, Rogov launched in Shanghai the Shidai chubanshe (Epoch Press), which, operating under Japanese occupation and thereafter under Nationalist suspicion, published within the period from November 1942 to July 1949 two newspapers and a range of journals, including the monthly Sulian wenyi (Soviet Literature and Art). On board was a team of up to twenty translators, all of whom worked with the original Russian texts: one of these was Ge Baoquan (1913–2000), who would become the bestknown translator of Soviet fiction after Cao Jinghua as well as the main PRC historian of Russian-Chinese literary relations. Putting the emphasis on Soviet literature, Sulian wenyi also presented the “classics” and works by selected early twentieth-century (though not émigré) writers.82 Whether or not Epoch Press was as closely directed from the underground by the CCP as Chinese accounts of its history would have it, its activity claimed possession of Russian prerevolutionary literature on behalf of its “correct”, Communist interpretation. The first specialized journal of its kind in China, Sulian wenyi also meant to draw the curtain over the age of retranslations from the English and reliance on the prefaces of British and American translators: if there were words in a Russian book that a Chinese translator did not understand, Russian colleagues were now at hand to assist him. They were also there to help choose texts for translation and monitor the opinions expressed in the new introductions and postscripts. Most of the books that Shidai published were not, in fact, literary fiction but political pamphlets and (to a lesser extent) texts in the fields of medicine and linguistics, partly issued in other languages than Chinese. The literature translated included seventeen winners of the Stalin prize from 1942 to 1950.83 In October 1949 the Epoch Press moved its main office to Beijing but apparently was met with mistrust by the new authorities. In December

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1952, TASS agreed to transfer ownership of the Press to the Chinese government and although books bearing the name Shidai chubanshe went on appearing until 1958, by that time its infrastructure had been divided between several state publishers.84 Direct translations from the Russian had amounted to only 16 of the 87 titles translated during the last decade of the republic and made up no more than 36 of the 119 new translations published between October 1949 and 1955.85 While the method of retranslation was superseded in the PRC only in the later 1950s, among the young talents who made their first steps at Epoch Press and Sulian wenyi one finds the name of Cao Ying (born 1923), a translator of both Soviet and classical Russian fiction who had learnt the language from an émigré teacher in Shanghai and became known for his Quiet Flows the Don as much as for his War and Peace.86 At least two more of the Epoch Press translators had spent their younger years in Harbin and studied with “White Russians” there, a biographical detail that was not freely avowed in the Mao period: Jin Ren (1910–71), the earlier translator of Quiet Flows the Don,87 and Jiang Chunfang (1912–87), the translator mainly of Russian and Soviet theatre and poetry.88 Sulian wenyi, relaunched in 1980 and renamed Eluosi wenyi (Russian Literature and Art) in 1993, is still the mainstay of Russian literary studies in the PRC. As the activity of TASS attested, the spread of Russian literature had its place on the Soviet Union’s agenda in China. In the mid-1930s, the Soviet Plenipotentiary Representative Office in Shanghai received regular shipments of Russian books in multiple copies. One copy would always be presented to the library of the Sino-Soviet Cultural Association. After the Oriental Library of the Commercial Press (the library where Hu Yuzhi, among many others, used to read his Russian books in English translation) was destroyed in the Japanese bombardment of Shanghai in January 1932, the Soviet Union met a Chinese request for help in its reconstruction. In 1937, when Shanghai was occupied by the Japanese army, the Soviet Union passed on to the Chinese 1,500 to 2,000 volumes: a contribution by VOKS (the All-Soviet Association for Cultural Contact with Foreign Countries, created in 1925), the organization whose Oriental section was responsible for China. The Plenipotentiary Representative Office was also in charge of organizing exhibitions of Soviet books on subjects such as “Education in the USSR” and “Constitution of the USSR”. Both of these were put on show in the dread year of 1937. The Soviet PR target of that year, however, was to overshadow by ever more impressive means the commemoration of the


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death centenary of Alexander Pushkin, which the émigrés in Shanghai were determined to stage on their own.89 This was one of the very few issues on which, even in the year of the great terror, upright Soviet citizens, “enemies of the people” and émigrés were still able to agree: no political divisions could challenge the standing of Pushkin as the personification of Russian culture. In every centre of the Russian emigration worldwide, after a decision on this was adopted in 1924, the Russian Culture Day was annually marked on Pushkin’s birthday, 6 June. In Harbin, in February 1937, the centenary of the poet’s death was honoured with pomp and ceremony and with due tribute paid to the Manchukuo government; far more grandiose in scale were the celebrations concurrently held in the Soviet Union, where they were tied to the twentieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.90 Beyond the political rhetoric, which enlisted Pushkin’s glory in support of every requisite ideology and which among the Russians in Manchuria served mainly to bolster a sense of self-esteem severely undermined by the reality of émigré life under Japanese rule, there were by-products that would have escaped the eye of the poet’s Russian devotees. Gao Mang, born in Harbin in 1926, dates to Pushkin’s centenary his own lifelong devotion to Russian literature: as a translator of numerous works encompassing Russian and Soviet poetry, fiction and theatre; as a writer and critic and also as a painter of writers’ portraits. Copies of nineteenth-century paintings of Pushkin and his contemporaries were at the focus of the centenary events in Harbin in 1937.91 A Russian teacher at the Harbin YMCA school, where Gao was one of the few Chinese pupils, suggested to the boy that he might try to draw Pushkin, and Gao Mang (except during the years of turmoil) appears never to have stopped since. At the age of sixteen, he published his first translation—a story by Turgenev. A frequent traveller to Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, he has made pilgrimages to literary tombs including Pushkin’s and has met with the poet’s descendants. The forms in which he pays his homage to these writers are reminiscent of the elderly Ba Jin’s translation of Herzen and journey in his footsteps in France.92 If some readers in the 1920s visualized Russian writers with the help of the photographs and portraits that were distributed in China at that time as copies from foreign sources, contemporary readers may associate them with the portraits by Gao Mang, which are reproduced by the periodical press and appear on books’ covers. Gao—a past associate of Ge Baoquan in the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association and of Mao Dun in the Ministry of Culture, a painter of the

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images of Pasternak and Akhmatova as well as of Marx and Engels, a decorated cultural functionary recalling with pride and nostalgia his meetings with Soviet writers and artists in the 1950s, and an author in 2007 of a book on the prerevolutionary “Silver age”—is the “agent number one” of Russian literature in China today. His example shows some of the distinctive characteristics of the Chinese “reading” of Russia through its literature, from the republican era, through the Maoist period, to the twenty-first century.93 The more specific legacy of Russian Harbin also lives on in Gao Mang, as in other former pupils of the native-speaking teachers of Russian, who remained on the staff of Harbin University (formerly the Harbin Foreign Languages Institute) until the 1950s. When these teachers left China they were succeeded by their local students, a number of whom became translators of Russian literature.94 Back in Shanghai in 1937, all interested persons may have been able, after attending a French reading of Pushkin at the Alliance Française on 5 February, to assist at the unveiling of Pushkin’s monument in a park on the corner of rues Pichon and Ghisi on 11 February; both cultural manifestations were organized in the territory of the French concession by the “White Russians”.95 Either before or later, a Chinese reader of Russian poetry could have passed by the exhibition on Pushkin at the Soviet Representative Office; on 10 February he or she may have been spotted at the Isis theatre, where, in another Soviet-managed event, Pushkin’s poems were recited in Chinese translation and a chorus sang a Chinese “cantata” on the poet.96 In taking their impressions of the poet where they found them, Chinese readers in Shanghai would not have needed to absorb the monarchist nostalgia of émigré “agents” of Russian literature any more than become prey to the propaganda of Soviet cultural emissaries. Indeed, 1937 entered the annals of Russian literature in China as “the Pushkin year” not only because of the publications in Chinese that were enabled by the SinoSoviet Cultural Association, but also due to the independent translations that the centenary occasioned. The latter, eight books published within three months, included the special Pushkin issue of Yiwen (Literature in Translation, the first Chinese journal fully devoted to foreign literature, founded originally under the editorship of Lu Xun in September 1934), the first translation of Eugene Onegin and a collection of Pushkin’s short fiction by the publishing house Culture and Life, established with Ba Jin as chief editor in 1935.97


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Important though they were, the targets of assuring the correct reading of the classics or discouraging the translation of the symbolists (recall Ivin’s advice to Lu Xun on Sologub) remained lower on the scale of Soviet priorities than the translation and popularization in China of the new canon of Soviet literature. It is to a particular aspect in the Chinese interpretation of these books from the 1930s to the break-up of relations between the PRC and the USSR that the rest of our study is devoted.


Chapter Four Soviet Socialist Realism as a Manual of Practice

1. Literature as a Mirror of Life Since the days of Thucydides, the Western mind was trained in the distinction between two “ways of talking”: the mythical/fictional, in which (to give an example closer to our time) Sherlock Holmes lived in Baker Street, and the historical/truthful, in which he did not exist.1 In traditional China, the cultural prestige of history (shi) was always above that of fiction (wen), but the borders between these two “ways of talking” were far from clear. Comparing Thucydides (460–400 BC) with the Qingdynasty historian Zhang Xuecheng (1738–1801), Anthony Yu concluded that Zhang lacked the Greek’s understanding of the inevitable subjectivity in the writing of history, hence of the gap between the word and the event.2 Two millennia later, Zhang saw as “events” what were manifestly “words”: ancient Chinese accounts of the Yellow Emperor were no more reliable than the Greek myths from which Thucydides wished to distinguish his own writing. The persons who brought Russian literature to twentieth-century China, its agents and translators, those who read it and those who wanted to use it for political ends did not operate in a void. This chapter starts out from the presumption that established Chinese knowledge of the meaning and destination of literature came to have an impact beyond its original sphere—the understanding of literature native to the culture; entering

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into a close relationship with another literary system, such as the Russian, entailed the extension to it of epistemological conceptions drawn from the Chinese worldview. Among these, the question of fictionality was key: were Russian novels or stories the fruits of literary invention, or were they something else—a true historical account, the reflection of lived experience? Could they be both fiction and history at once? The first Chinese novel to consciously defend its fictionality from the demands of historicity (to which the four literary masterpieces of the Ming still deferred), Cao Xueqin’s (1715–63) Dream of the Red Chamber has been treated in the course of the twentieth century “as virtually an historical document” by scholars in China set on reconstructing both Cao’s mansion and the politics of his time from the book’s pages.3 Because the works of the Confucian canon were considered as referents to reality, their scrupulous analysis by the proponents of “evidential scholarship” in the Qing could aim at achieving a transformation of the physical world through the lexical correction of texts and “rectification of names” (zhengming). The subject is too vast to be entered into here, but we do not see in late imperial China the demarcation lines that in the post-Enlightenment West separated the disciplines of philosophy and history, religion and science.4 Scholars of European literature, unlike scholars of philosophy and historiography, do not look as far back as Thucydides: Dennis H. Green dates to the twelfth century what he calls “the complicity between author and audience in fictionality”; it was still much later that Samuel T. Coleridge, in Chapter 14 of his Biographia Literaria (1817), defined “that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith”. Green prefers the term “make-believe” to Coleridge’s “suspension”, explaining that “the make-believer adopts a dual point of view. At one and the same time he believes that Mr Pickwick is bald and also that there never was a Mr Pickwick, so that he cannot have been bald”.5 Indeed, the ability to compartmentalize “fact” and “fiction” has been no obstacle to the construction of monuments to the heroes of the Western literary canon: to Juliet in Verona, to Tartarin in Tarascon, to d’Artagnan in Gascony and to Don Quixote everywhere in Spain. There is irony in the latter example, for the fictional Don Quixote was drawn by his author (in 1605) as a person attempting to act out chivalric fiction; his illness, we know, consisted in failure to distinguish fiction from reality.6

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In Russia, tour guides will show you around the Moscow of Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita and walk with you through the Petersburg of Dostoevsky’s heroes. Readers of Russian literature know that the first admirers of Nikolai Karamzin’s short novel Poor Liza (1792), a founding work, made pilgrimages to the pond in which its heroine had drowned herself. This response to a fictional tale was encouraged by the author’s presentation of it as a true story related to him by Liza’s lover. Trained though we are in distinguishing between fiction and history, “poetic faith” often takes a stronger grip on us than reality can, and it is in this that the power of fiction lies. As an early twentieth-century commentator of Russian literature put it, “Russians learned to appreciate Peter the Great through Pushkin’s Poltava more than through all the textbooks of history”.7 For Russian readers, the iconic image of Pushkin himself, and of such other figures as Lermontov or Tolstoy, was inseparable from these writers’ literary work. To look now beyond Russia, historical characters such as Joan of Arc are best known to us through their representation in literature; others, such as Mary Stuart and Mme Roland, present a more uncertain mix of history (she was beheaded / guillotined) and literature (she became the subject of novels and plays / she left famous memoirs of the French Revolution). Some fictional heroes seem always to have “been there”: they are long past being associated with an author or a text. Children still write to Father Christmas, and Sherlock Holmes continues to receive his fan mail at Baker Street, London.8 Loose borders between reality and fiction are thus no particularity of the Oriental mind (how well do television audiences in the contemporary West distinguish politics from entertainment?). Moreover, the epistemological premise of Chinese fiction may be formulated not in terms of a failure or an absence, but as a conscious refusal to differentiate between “real and unreal” and thus as an anticipation of the aesthetics of “surrealism and magical realism” long before their emergence in the West.9 Even this recent interpretation would leave us with the conclusion that, in their ready integration of the fantastic with the everyday, writers and readers in traditional China either did not set themselves one of the most pivotal questions that have preoccupied their Western counterparts, or if they did, they refrained from answering it in a way that would place “fiction” and “truth” on two sides of a conceptual divide. There is no ontological difference between the behaviour of young Russian readers imitating Sanin, the emotional response of German

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readers to Werther, and Chinese readers’ copying the dressing code of the romantic hero of “Sinking”.10 Where difference does reside is in the perception of written texts by these reading audiences: in China, it has often been pointed out, neither a distinction between history and fiction nor an expectation from literature to act in the fictional (as distinct from the factual) realm had developed by the early twentieth century.11 The translator Lin Shu, for one, compared the Lady of the Camellias with the legendary ministers of Chinese antiquity. It is uncertain whether he perceived both as real (he and his collaborator “wept profusely” over the suffering of the French heroine, whose tale they were rendering into Chinese),12 or whether he considered the comparison possible because both were not clearly defined in his mind, hovering between fact and fiction. In any event, both the characters of Western novels and the heroes of native literature were long looked on as historical personages or as living human beings.13 Because Chinese fiction was perceived in a similar way, we should not treat examples of belief in the reality of fictional characters as merely the result of the importation of Western literature as a new medium. Nor should we interpret the tears of Lin Shu in quite the same way as we do the naïve reactions of first filmgoers in the West to the lifelike figures projected on the screen before them. When Lin Shu attached the word shi (history) to the Chinese titles of Oliver Twist and The Pickwick Papers, or the word zhuan (biography) to that of Joan Haste, he both conferred on his translations cultural respectability and purposely conveyed to them the air of truthful accounts. So also were the investigations of Conan Doyle’s hero originally presented to readers in Chinese as a potential “textbook for the self-taught detective”—a definition falsely attributed to the British writer by his Chinese translators.14 The ontological status of fiction and its utilitarian or educational potential were closely interconnected: it was because they did not set up a barrier between fiction and reality that the reformer Liang Qichao and his followers were able to exaggerate so much the power of literature in effecting social and political change.15 The introduction of Western realism from the late 1910s, as the means by which the gap between word and deed should have been closed (and a “new China” created), may accordingly be separated from its own insistence on its “newness”: to the extent that May Fourth fiction presented a didactic and moralistic description of reality, this is what respected writing in China had been expected to do all along.


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Probably due to the difficulty which readers still had in passing into a world of the imagination—we could, just as well, speak of their reluctance to adjust themselves to foreign conceptions—literary genres that preserved the convention of telling a true story were also the more successful. Evidence of this were the short novel in diary form (whether the translated Savinkov of The Pale Horse or the original Ding Ling of The Diary of Miss Sophie, 1928) and the love novels of the “Butterfly” school.16 An example of the effect of “the true story” was provided by the student readers who, identifying Yu Dafu with his destitute I-hero, organized a collection for the writer at a time when Yu was busy building a villa in Hangzhou.17 Writers’ hesitatation to subject their readers to the still unfamiliar “suspension of disbelief”, and their awareness of the advantages of blurring the distinction between reality and fiction, life and art,18 can explain the proliferation in the 1920s, and into the 1930s, of literary works delivered by a firstperson narrator. Normally considered an innovation in twentieth-century Chinese literary writing, the first-person narrative thus also appealed to traditional sensibilities. Such insistence on authenticity was criticized by Lu Xun—a sharp critic also of the claims to truth advanced by traditional historiography— for implying that fiction had no other justification than being a true record, and for entailing “the loss of illusion”. Objections on the grounds of vraisemblance amounted, in his opinion, to “being dissatisfied with The Dream of the Red Chamber just because traces of the Garden of Grand Vision were nowhere to be found”.19 Unwillingness to allow room for imaginative literature lent support to the demand that writers write only from their own experience; echoing the theories of the Proletkul’t (the radical Association for Proletarian Culture, established in 1918 only months after the October Revolution and dissolved in autumn 1921), some critics in China maintained that the emerging “proletarian literature” could only be written by the Chinese working class. Heroes of traditional Chinese novels became enshrined as gods in the pantheon of popular religion in the same way as were historical emperors and ministers. Religious and secular/historical narratives were not meant to be read in different ways in China—unlike the West, where a growing number of readers by the nineteenth century would have approached their New Testament with a “suspension of disbelief ” which still did not make them abandon the book. 20 This distinction proved alien to the first educated Chinese coming into contact with

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Europeans abroad: some late-Qing diplomats expressed astonishment at the gullibility of their conversation partners and recorded their attempts to explain to the latter that the “resurrection” described in Christian scriptures was no more plausible than the feats of wizardry narrated in Chinese popular fiction.21 Traditional novels with martial themes, adopted by the popular village opera, provided the inspiration for real-life military action by the Boxers in 1900. These became “possessed” by such gods as the Monkey King from The Journey to the West and the hero general from The Enfeoffment of the Gods (Fengshen yanyi).22 As Joseph W. Esherick concluded, there was no “functional division between religion and theatre in Chinese society”.23 A close relative of the novels he mentions, the great fourteenth-century novel The Water Margin (also known as Outlaws of the Marsh) became a source for emulation for both bandit gangs and the Workers and Peasants Red Army.24 The translators and propagators of foreign fiction in the early 1920s yearned, they too, to see translations serve as guides for action. In 1921, in his introduction to a translation of Turgenev’s On the Eve by Shen Ying (1901–76),25 Geng Jizhi wrote: This novel was a spur for the struggle of the Russian youth. Everyone who read this book understood that his responsibility lay not in indulging in empty talk, but in really going out to reform society. As soon as this book appeared, many young men and women in Russia were awoken and vied to learn from the examples of Insarov and Elena [. . .] From this it can be seen that literature, society and life are indeed very much interconnected.

There were some dissenters: browsing through Literature Ten-Daily of 1923, one comes across an article in which the unidentifiable author begs to differ with the argument that literature was a reflection of life. He thought, rather, that literature only obstructed a person’s path to life: when encountering the problems of reality, people who spend too much of their time reading will be bound to imitate their literary heroes. Quoting (in English) Hamlet’s “Words, words, words”, this contributor to the organ of the Literary Research Association concluded with a call upon writers “to write less and to explore more the taste of real life”.26 But then even he believed in the close connection between reading and behaviour. The hopes of Liang Qichao and his successors in the New Culture movement were, in a sense, realized by the Chinese Communists: true to


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the relentlessly didactic spirit of exhortations “to learn from” everything currently approved as positive and “to denounce” everything presently branded as negative, Mao urged fellow Communists “to learn from Wu Song” (a character in The Water Margin).27 During the Long March, after the expulsion of the Communist forces from Jiangxi in October 1934, Mao is reputed to have implemented the military tactics of traditional novels;28 the persistence of this claim is more important than establishing whether he actually used novels to that effect. As “instructions for action”, translations were not necessarily preferred to indigenous texts; the end result, the successful achievement of a political or military target, was more important than the means. When, as so often in the 1940s and 1950s, the means was “learning from Soviet Russia”, the learning material was sought in Soviet literature. The traditional identification of fiction with reality was here joined with an interpretation of literary “realism” (an outgrowth of the Western notion of mimesis) as a reflection of reality and then with a cult of “reality” under the heading of “life”. C. T. Hsia summed up the traditional attitude to literature in China as follows: “defenders and governmental proscribers of fiction alike regard the reader as totally impressionable—he is as ready to imitate bad characters as to take warning from their punishment”.29 Thus, a number of contemporary critics of Yu Dafu’s “Sinking”, among them Zhou Zuoren, urged that the novella be prohibited lest it damage its younger readers.30 Much in that particular work would have met the same reaction from critics concerned with the moral health of readers elsewhere, but its critique in China was made with the presupposition that readers were bound to imitate the literary protagonists. It mattered little whether these protagonists were good or bad, heroes or anti-heroes. In the absence of an epistemological distinction between literature and history, one that would have granted the former genre of writing a dimension of creative freedom, from which the latter would have been required to abstain, fiction became endowed with history’s presumed capacity to instruct, educate and civilize.31 This endowment was, we may argue, a case of wishful thinking. But it was also a matter of political necessity, and politicians who may have had their doubts about the ability of writers to actually influence the behaviour of readers, whether for the better or for the worse, nonetheless resorted to that argument in order to keep writers in check. While the banning (and burning) of “dangerous” books, such as The Water Margin, had a venerable history in imperial China, belief in the

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possibility of transforming individual and mass consciousness through propaganda became the general premise of modern totalitarian regimes. The transformation of consciousness was the stated goal of the Communist political system, which, emphasizing the voluntary participation of all citizens in the enterprise of state-building, persistently used literary fiction to illustrate that same transformation process. Because they were expected to be so transformed, the readers of literature could not be conceived of as anything else than empty vessels, ready to be filled with whatever contents the engineers of new China chose to pour into them. In a widely quoted statement of 1958, Mao spoke of the Chinese as “a blank sheet of paper” on which a beautiful new text could be inscribed. A recurring phrase in speeches at the first All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers, held in Moscow in August 1934, called writers “the engineers of human souls”. Adopted and turned into a commonplace of literary discourse throughout the Communist world,32 the notion behind it “pervaded the literary politics of socialist China”.33 To further the indoctrination of mass reading audiences, one way to proceed was to keep to the domain of literature: a former member of the Chinese League of Left-Wing Writers, Zhou Libo (1908–79), who, in 1936, translated into Chinese Mikhail Sholokhov’s novel Virgin Soil Upturned (1932), wrote his own massive land-reform novel—The Hurricane (Baofeng zhouyü, 1948–9)—in the same key and, after its translation into Russian, was rewarded by the Stalin prize in 1951. Virgin Soil Upturned was also the model for Ding Ling’s (1904–86) short novel The Sun Shines upon the Sanggan River (Taiyang zhao zai Sangganhe shang, 1948)—a winner of the Stalin prize in the same year.34 Another method was to translate the “socialist realist” book, once rendered into Chinese, from the literary sphere in which—by being a book—it perforce resided, back to the “real life”, with which socialist realism was, after all, at such pains to merge. For, next to glorifying the collective battle of Party-guided workers against the elements of nature, socialist realism centred even more persistently on the heroic war waged by Communists against their enemies within and without. Now if a Soviet classic was indeed, as it always claimed to be, a faithful description of the struggle of the Reds against the Whites in the Russian civil war, or (two decades later) a true image of the resistance of the Red Army of the Soviet Union to the German invasion, should it not contain the recipe of the Russian Communists’ victory in both these


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titanic clashes? If so, this recipe could be used, by Communist soldiers in China, as a manual of practice in the fight against their own enemies—the Nationalists and the Japanese.

2. The Masters of Socialist Realism on the Battlefields of China The term “socialist realism” was first promulgated in the USSR in 1932, shortly after the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (abbreviated as RAPP), the organization which, in 1925, had replaced the defunct Proletkul’t and had risen to great power after 1929, had been dismantled in its turn on Party orders. Already in 1933 an enthusiastic article by Zhou Yang brought socialist realism to China and presented it as the most recent development in the theory of literature and art.35 Condemning the “mistakes” of RAPP, Soviet socialist realism was extended retrospectively to include the key works of the first revolutionary decade, though it proved necessary to reach as far back as 1907 in order to establish that the first novel of socialist realism avant la lettre had been Gorky’s Mother. The favourite of many revolutionaries (including Lenin), Nikolai Chernyshevskii’s What Is to Be Done? (1863) could not formally enter the annals of the genre but was considered another precedent and an argument in support of the continuity of Russian “progressive” thought. In a formulation that became notorious for its ambiguity, in the Writers’ Congress of 1934 Stalin’s commissar of education Andrei Zhdanov instructed Soviet writers to “depict reality in its revolutionary development”. The corresponding requirements from writers in China were, prior to the adoption of the Soviet term in 1953, gathered under the heading of “proletarian realism”; it was this last term that Mao had employed in the original version of his Yan’an Talks in 1942. As championed by Zhdanov’s counterpart Zhou Yang and made into holy writ by Mao, the Chinese interpretation did not differ greatly from the Soviet model: it too defined the correct standpoint of the writer as that of the proletarian class (compare with the Soviet demand for klassovost’, the “class character” of literature) and the purpose of writing as serving the masses of “workers, peasants and soldiers” (compare with narodnost’, “national character”), and it underlined

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the absolute precedence of political over creative considerations (the Soviet partiinost’, “Party spirit”). The slogan of “socialist realism” was reaffirmed after the Communist victory in 1949. Socialist realism in both China and the USSR thus depicted labour heroes—fighting against the brute forces of nature and sabotage attempts by class enemies and manifesting their devotion to the state’s great engineering projects, coal mines and oil fields. The classic of the genre was Cement (1925) by Fedor Gladkov (1883–1958), known as the “first Soviet novel of the working class”. First translated into Chinese under the transcription Shimintu in 1929, this industrial novel became the object of emulation, as attested by Zhou Libo’s The Molten Iron Rushes Out (Tieshui benliu, 1955). When, in 1953, the first five-year plan of the PRC concentrated on steel production, “literary workers” were required to describe steel factories. In the Great Leap Forward of 1958, quotas were also set for “literary production”. It heralded no increase in literary freedom, but a further decline in the plausibility of the heroic protagonists depicted by Communist fiction when, by mid-1958, in anticipation of the break from Soviet tutelage, the requisite form of writing was redefined as “a combination of revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism”.36 More naturally than in the factory, the coal mine or the oil field, “heroes” were portrayed in action on the real (not the metaphorical) battlefield. Here too, they were shown waging anti-imperialist war against the enemy without and defeating political adversaries within. The battle theme became the staple of fiction in the socialist state both because it legitimized, in glowing terms, the ascendancy of the regime to power and because (the presence of hidden saboteurs and counter-revolutionaries notwithstanding) fellow members of the reader’s socialist society could not provide as many negative characters as could be furnished by the enemy. Addressing the First Congress of Literature and Art Workers in July 1949, Zhou Yang reported that, in the liberated areas of North China, “of 177 new works, 101 dealt with war themes”.37 By the end of the first decade of the PRC, even as “the line that separates production from war, work from play, the present from the legendary past, or reality from fantasy, has all but disappeared”, the military lexicon of “fight”, “struggle” and “battle” had expanded to cover every domain in the individual’s life.38 As T. A. Hsia further remarked, “to obtain the best effect of the metaphors and legends, the people must not only use them in speech, think of them or even believe in them, they must act them”.39 During the Great Leap Forward, civilians were indeed armed and forced into militia units.


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The formula that came to be known in China as “three in one” stipulated that, in the process leading to the creation of a work of fiction, the Party supplied the correct thought, the masses their life experience and the writer his literary skills. In accordance with the Stalinist “no-conflict theory”, shortcomings were admissible only in negative characters; in positive heroes, deficiencies could be shown only on their way to being gloriously overcome. The classification of characters as positive or negative was determined by their class background. “Individualist” subjects, such as love, were discouraged, and so was “intellectual” writing that would not be easily comprehensible to the masses. The quandary of the socialist realist writer, in the USSR as well as in the PRC, consisted in his inability, even when doing his utmost to follow the party line and predict its future direction, to protect himself from abrupt changes in that line—changes that might condemn much of the earlier literature along with its still living authors. In China, the most radical of retrospective revaluations came to pass in the Cultural Revolution. The promulgated works of socialist realism were used for political indoctrination in the Red Army of the Soviet Union.40 Soviet military advisers were present in China in large numbers at the time of the first, Soviet-orchestrated, United Front between the young Communist Party and the KMT in 1923–27. The organization of the Whampoa military academy, south of Canton, was their best-known contribution. Expelled by Chiang Kai-shek following his anti-Communist coup in 1927, the Soviets returned during the second United Front, created in October 1937 soon after the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war;41 3,665 such Soviet specialists were stationed in China in 1939—their total number from November 1937 to early 1942 is given by a recent source as “over 5,000”.42 But there is no evidence that, in either of these two stages, Soviet military and political representatives resorted to literary fiction to inculcate the political message that accompanied military training. Quite the contrary, in the late 1930s not even libraries in the “liberated areas” under Communist control were receiving books published in the USSR. Soon after the Soviet Union had become involved in war with Germany in June 1941, the supply of literary journals, too, had ground to a halt, prompting Cao Jinghua to write to the chairman of VOKS, and personally to several Soviet writers, with requests for the most recent works about the war, which he wanted to translate into Chinese.43 There is no indication, therefore, that the idea of carrying Soviet books to the Chinese battlefield, which we are about to consider in detail, was fostered by the Soviet side.

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Let us now see how this should have happened, by looking closely at an essay of 1956 by the critic and bibliographer Ah Ying (pen-name of Qian Xingcun, 1900–77).44 During the years of the War of Resistance against Japan and the War of Liberation . . . in the struggle in the enemy’s rear, the important spiritual sustenance (jingshen shiliang) in terms of literature was the translated literature of the Soviet war of defence. The dozens of volumes of Soviet Literature and Art (Sulian wenyi) and some separately published books became reading material that no intellectual in the Eighth and the Fourth armies could do without. Among them, A. Tolstoy’s They Fought for the Motherland [the author was actually Mikhail Sholokhov; 1943], Simonov’s Days and Nights [1943–44], Fadeev’s The Young Guard [1945], Gorbatov’s The Undefeatable [1943], Leonov’s The Invasion [a play, 1942] and Simonov’s Russian People [a play, same year], had a great effect helping us, in the rear, to persevere and trust in victory. Every one of these works’ heroes stood next to us as if alive, lived in our hearts and as a model encouraged each of us. However, in the rear one often had to move, and as people only had a single knapsack and it was difficult to carry these works around, many comrades had no choice but to cut off the books’ borders and even do away with their covers; having reduced their weight, they could then march with them. Comrades fighting in the front would take them out to read during ceasefire and would often read or discuss them in the trenches; even books of which only incomplete pages remained were very much treasured. It was most impressive when books, either shot through with bullets or stained with blood, were found in the pockets of fallen comrades, who even in death did not part from them.

Ah Ying went on to describe how the translation of Alexander Korneichuk’s play The Front (1942) by Xiao San was transmitted by wireless from the Party Centre in Yan’an at the rate of “two to three thousand characters a day”. Received in code, it was deciphered and prepared for publication—work in which Ah Ying himself took part—and then printed and widely performed. “The figures of Gorlov and Ognev”, Ah Ying said, “had an enormous effect on our whole Party and army”. He added that he witnessed the influence of Soviet poetry on his own son, who “fell ten years ago; in papers he left, many [poems] were noted down, and some copied in such careful calligraphy that one could imagine how moved he was by them”. Ah Ying finally recalled the essays of Il’ia Ehrenburg, “each like a bullet piercing through Hitler’s liar”, which “we relished rereading on the rice paddies, to the light of a soybean oil lamp . . .”


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The description of Soviet literature as a reservoir of moral support in wartime China is here followed by the assertion that Communist soldiers brought with them copies of translated Soviet books to the field of battle. It is then concluded with a metaphor (of the kind that the Soviet author in question often employed himself), in which a literary essay is equalled to a bullet. As will be demonstrated, in other Chinese statements on Soviet literature this three-tiered argument was advanced to a fourth level, where a direct link was established between the weaponlike quality of Soviet literature and the location, to which Soviet books were ostensibly brought: now finally shedding its metaphorical cloak, the “weapon” here functioned in the way that a real weapon should. On this, fourth level, the books helped to win real battles. It will be useful to consider first the play by Alexander Korneichuk (1905–72), which Ah Ying mentioned, because official approval of it at the highest level of command generated a chain reaction that can be regarded as exemplary. Like all but one of the works Ah Ying listed, The Front was a winner of the Stalin prize.45 After the translation by Xiao San (also known as Emi Xiao, 1896–1982)46 was serialized in Jiefang ribao (Liberation Daily) from 19 to 26 May 1944, Mao himself commented on it in the paper’s editorial column on 1 June, under the title “What We Can Learn from Korneichuk’s The Front”. Within the week, on 7 June, he assigned The Front, along with a historical play by Guo Moruo, for distribution by the Party’s Propaganda Department. In addition to being widely reprinted, the Soviet play was performed in Yan’an and also staged for troops in the battle areas. Mao’s instruction to learn from the fictional model commander Ognev and denounce his opposite Gorlov was put to use in the Party’s ongoing “rectification campaign”. Another campaign, launched in the liberated areas in 1947, used the slogan “to oppose Krikun”—a minor, caricatural figure of a news correspondent in Korneichuk’s play. The party line was echoed by army generals who, often in the same breath, praised Ognev and condemned Gorlov and Li Zicheng (1605–45): a rebel against the Ming, whom Guo Moruo had cast as his villain.47 How, then, did generals like Ognev lead Chinese fighters to victory? Claims to this effect are found both in Chinese and in Soviet-era publications on the reception of Soviet literature in China. They are most densely present in a book of 1963 by Roman Belousov, then an emerging specialist in Russian-Chinese literary relations.48 As this book told its readers,

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Chinese revolutionaries smuggled Gorky’s Mother to Nationalist prisons (14–16). On the Long March that would end in Yan’an, Communist soldiers carried in their knapsacks Serafimovich’s Iron Flood (35–7). Chinese partisans took with them to battle and would never part from Boris Lavrenev’s [1891–1959] The Forty-first (121), a short novel of 1924 on the impossible love of a Communist woman fighter and a White officer. During the civil war, Communist fighters were handed out the pages of Konstantin Simonov’s [1915–79] Days and Nights, a short novel on the battle of Stalingrad, “in lieu of instructions”, while all soldiers were required to read Alexander Bek’s [1903–72] Volokolamsk Highway (125–26), a novel on the defence of Moscow.49 There was always room in a soldier’s knapsack for these two books, as well as for the classics of the 1920s, Fadeev’s The Rout and Serafimovich’s Iron Flood (127). The Belorussian writer Ianka Kupala [1882–1942, winner of the Stalin prize for poetry in 1941] helped Chinese Communist troops to win a battle in Shandong, in 1945 (128–32). Ostrovskii’s How the Steel Was Tempered, also taken to battles, inspired patriotic writers (169–83). Belousov’s accounts were presented as the retelling of memoirs and testimonies in Chinese. Exemplified by Ah Ying’s article, the presence of Soviet books in the knapsacks or kitbags of Chinese Communist soldiers was indeed asserted in the early years of the PRC. In greetings that Mao Dun, the chairman of the Union of Chinese Writers, offered to the Second All-Soviet Congress of Writers as it was about to convene in Moscow in 1954, he said that Chinese soldiers were able to “overcome difficulties and heroically carry out their missions” by carrying with them copies of Days and Nights, Volokolamsk Highway and Aleksandr Matrosov. The last book, a novel for the youth by Pavel T. Zhurba (1895–1976), was first published in Russian in 1949 and translated by Jin Ren at Epoch Press as recently as 1952; Mao Dun was mixing the periods before and since Liberation, and his reference to Aleksandr Matrosov may have been made under the impression of seeing the film, which reached China before the book did. His article, published in Pravda, included the mantra of the time: “ ‘To learn from the Soviet Union’—this is the task now facing our entire nation”.50 In the pages of the same newspaper, Cao Jinghua had already in 1951 presented the thesis that, more than a source of ideological inspiration, the Soviet book was a manual of practice. During the War of Resistance against Japan, Cao said, the “short novels and stories of Sholokhov, Lavrenev, Ehrenburg and others”,


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hand-printed in unbelievably difficult conditions in the partisan areas of the Taihang mountains, were regarded by fighters as precious as life and as necessary as a weapon. In the most difficult moments of battle, having to abandon everything behind them, they kept only two things: a gun and the Soviet books, with which they fought their way out of enemy encirclement. During the war against the gangs of Chiang Kai-shek, the works of Soviet writers about the Great Patriotic War were read by all commanders in the People’s Liberation Army. These books were valuable not only as exellent literary works. From their heroes, one learned how to defeat the enemy. PLA generals Liu Bocheng, Xu Xiangqian and others called upon their men and commanders to read the books of Soviet writers. [. . .] During the battle for Shijiazhuang, the forces of General Nie Rongzhen especially studied the chapter from Simonov’s book Days and Nights, describing Captain Saburov’s command of his battalion in Stalingrad. On the eve of the assault on Taiyuan, this chapter was reproduced and spread among the men as a manual of street fighting.51

In a follow-up in Russian, Cao Jinghua extended the claim of military usage beyond Days and Nights, to cover also The Iron Flood, The Rout, Chapaev (1923; a novel by Dmitrii Furmanov about a Communist hero of the civil war, it was made into a successful film in 1934) “and many other” Soviet books: “Often, during difficult battles, separate chapters and excerpts of these works were printed in the form of leaflets, serving fighters as instructions for carrying out this or another combat task”.52 How should such statements be understood? Consider, to begin with, the alleged appeal of Soviet literature to Chinese hearts and minds at wartime.53 People accustomed to reading would, at a time of national crisis, look for succour in favourite books of their own culture, works of fiction and poetry familiar to them since their youth: in the Soviet Union, many returned to War and Peace during the most difficult days of the Second World War.54 An argument such as Cao’s, however, blends into a seamless narrative the function of literature during war against an invading foreign army and in a confrontation with an inner political enemy. The degree of solidarity with the Soviet Union (and with the CCP) is posited here as having been much higher than is known to have existed and than could have caused general readers in the 1930s and 1940s to seek emotional comfort in newly translated Soviet books. As applied to the army, the idea had its antecedents in the image of socialist fighters clutching their copy of a translation of, say, Ethel Voynich’s novel The Gadfly, on their way to battles against the Whites in Russia of

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the early 1920s, or against the fascists in Spain in 1936–39 (a war in which a volunteer like George Orwell was one of many writers to have traded the pen for the gun). The book’s contents were supposed to unite all believers in the Communist message and, cutting across language barriers, render the nationality of the author irrelevant; like earlier cross-national movements in literature and art, socialist fiction claimed the ability to build bridges between nations. Unlike romanticism or expressionism, however, its expansion depended on the patronage of the state. Were, then, books of any kind (native or translated) taken by Chinese soldiers into battle? Attributing these honours to the books of Soviet writers, Mao Dun may have recalled a character in Midnight, his own bestknown novel of 1933—an officer who had carried with him “a tattered copy of The Sorrows of Young Werther in Chinese” through all the military clashes of the 1920s. Between the book’s pages was “a faded white rose”.55 The romantic ring is familiar, but, while English poet soldiers carried their Keats into the trenches of the Great War and volunteers from across the world may have brought their favourite books to civil-war Spain, most Chinese foot soldiers were illiterate.56 These were the peasants, who during the Long March learned to recognize Chinese characters (by means of an original system devised by Zhang Wentian) from the backs of comrades walking in front of them.57 The contents of the books, which soldiers supposedly read, must raise another question. European war novels typically described soldiers reading poetry and pacifist literature. In Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), the doomed protagonist’s only attempt at reading, not even at the battlefront but on a short home leave, proved mentally impossible. In English literature, Siegfried Sassoon’s emphatic rejection of patriotic cant outlived the “War Sonnets” of Rupert Brooke, who, contrary to Sassoon, did not live to see the real face of battle. This is another way of saying that readers of English poetry today are more comfortable with the bitter poems written after the Battle of the Somme than with the idealistic ones that preceded it.58 It has been pointed out that, while the First World War “put an end to the glorification of the warrior in modern Western literature”, Chinese Communist fiction showed “no trace of war weariness”.59 Neither, of course, did the Soviet system: producing literature on war in rapidly increasing quantities since the early 1930s, it denounced the “abstract humanism” of anti-war writing both at home and abroad (eventually banning the publication of Remarque’s novels).60


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Descriptions of the senseless horror of battle—such as contained in two famous works of Russian literature, Vsevolod Garshin’s story “Four Days” on the Russo-Turkish war of 1877–78 (translated by Lu Xun in Japan in 1909) and Leonid Andreev’s novella “The Red Laugh”, written during the Russo-Japanese war in 1904 (two partial and four more complete translations of this work into Chinese, from 1914 to 1929, were followed by an obscure last translation in 1938)—did not suit the purposes to which Russian literature was mobilized during the anti-Japanese and the later civil war. Neither did War and Peace, certainly not in an interpretation such as put forth by Zhou Zuoren in an essay of 1922;61 nor an anti-war Spanish novel such as Vicente Blasco Ibanez’s The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1916), which the journal Xiaoshuo yuebao presented to its readers in summer 1924. The poignant irony in the title of Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero (1929), a novel on the inglorious path of a British soldier, could scarcely be imagined in China. Yet, despite criticism from the left, Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and his subsequent The Road Back (1931) were instantly retranslated into Chinese from English and enjoyed remarkable commercial success,62 creating the kind of reader demand that puts in doubt claims that Chinese Communist soldiers read only fiction that raised their motivation to carry on the war effort. What we know of the entertainment demands of Soviet troops would also lend little circumstantial credence to that claim, as it appears that attempts at political indoctrination during the Second World War met with some resistance.63 Even if blood-soaked Soviet classics could be found in a fallen soldier’s kitbag and put on display in a Chinese war museum, they would not be proof enough that the soldier could have or would have wanted to read the book. He may have been handed a copy by the Party instructor64 along with other propaganda material, all of which he was ordered to carry even if he did not understand what it meant. One way to disseminate a book’s contents among the soldiers of a peasant army—assuming that time for such activities could be found—would have been for the educated commander or Party instructor to read aloud or perhaps retell the book to soldiers around the campfire. But these are not the scenes we find in our sources, which (with the only notable exception of a play, The Front) describe Chinese soldiers as avid readers of Fadeev, Serafimovich and Ostrovskii. Interestingly, memoirists did not attempt to make what would have been the somewhat more plausible claim: to say that soldiers were reading

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The Rout and The Iron Flood in the form of traditional (“chapter”) novels. Such adaptations were produced, according to a literary historian, by members of the League of Left-Wing writers;65 yet memoirists speaking of How the Steel Was Tempered or Volokolamsk Highway did not argue that these novels were read in abridged or “popular” versions.66 They thereby dissimulated the debates, which had preoccupied Chinese educators since the early twentieth century, on the alternative (aural and visual) media by which political literature could reach “the masses”.67 Soldiers in Chinese armies, we know, were susceptible to moral education through song and the staging of plays; it would have been the officers who read books, although little information about their reading is available.68 In the passage we have cited, Ah Ying insisted that model Soviet works were read in the tangible shape of books (recall the “books, either shot through with bullets or stained with blood, [. . .] found in the pockets of fallen comrades”), although he had just said that the same novels and plays were available in issues of Sulian wenyi. Indeed, all of them were published in that journal of the Epoch Press before coming out in book form: not only would a journal have been easier to carry, but, through it, a translation would have reached distant readers at wartime far sooner than a book edition could.69 Describing the reality of war, however, was not the purpose of the accounts we are analyzing here: it was, rather, to mythicize war so as to make it fit the requirements of a political narrative.70 This is not to deny that these Soviet works were read and enjoyed popularity in late republican China. The writer Wang Meng (born 1934) said that they circulated among students even in the areas under Nationalist control: he too spoke of Serafimovich’s Iron Flood, Gladkov’s Cement and Ostrovskii’s How the Steel Was Tempered (a book he especially admired).71 These books were more likely to be “popular” among the students, to whom Wang referred, than among soldiers. Of the generals of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), one, whom Cao Jinghua mentioned, stands out for being more receptive to education by Soviet literature than probably any other of his peers: trained in Moscow in 1928–30, Liu Bocheng (1892–1986) went on to translate Soviet writings on military strategy.72 An innovative recent study of Chinese field diaries, although limited by definition to the literate minority and focused on the published and manuscript diaries of Nationalist rather than Communist soldiers, found scarcely any mention of Soviet literature in them.73 Exploring the range of printed matter that could reasonably appear on a Chinese battlefield, one may yet


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think of the ancient military handbook Sunzi bingfa (conventionally translated as Sunzi’s Art of War): but even this book, read and commented upon by Mao and perused by Chinese military commanders through the ages, seems a most unlikely candidate for being carried by soldiers, who were never its intended audience. The intriguing claim that pages from model Soviet books were handed out to soldiers on the eve of a battle is most prominently made in relation to Simonov’s short novel on Stalingrad, Days and Nights. An official history of “the Chinese-Russian friendship” describes the publication of this book in translation by the PLA and repeats what we have already heard from Cao Jinghua: that a chapter of it was studied for combat purposes prior to the battle for Shijiazhuang and that, during the later battle for Taiyuan, excerpts of the same chapter were distributed as leaflets to the advancing troops.74 All these accounts derived from a single common origin: an article on the contribution of Soviet literature to the victorious war of the People’s Liberation Army, signed in Beijing on the third day of the founding of the People’s Republic by the obscure Communist reporter Yao Yuanfang. In the Chinese version of his Pravda article, Cao Jinghua pointed to this as the source of his own report on the military uses of Simonov’s novel.75 Although they are unlikely to be true and were not repeated after the end of the 1950s (predictably, Soviet novels or the Soviet Union do not appear in the memoirs of the commander of the PLA forces in the Shijiazhuang battle of November 1947),76 it is important to ask why these stories could make sense to those who told them. We have here the full identification of the signifier (paper) with its signified (the contents of the book). If soldiers did receive those pages, were they expected to read them, or just to pack them in their bags? If they were unable to read, was it important to give them Chinese translations, or did the Russian originals, being “the real thing” and not having to wait on the work of translators, count even more? This last question may be answered in the negative: the powers which paper with writing on it (zizhi) could exercise even on the illiterate would largely have been determined by its bearing Chinese characters. Rather than be rolled for cigarettes77 or employed for such natural needs as might arise in the open field, the uses to which fragments or pages from a translated Russian book could be put and the attitudes which they could inspire can be deduced from the reverence for writing in Chinese tradition and from the widespread belief in its magical efficacy.

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This belief finds only a partial equivalent in what has been described as “the written word’s traditionally sacred status” in Russian culture.78 In China since the Ming dynasty and until the beginning of the twentieth century, reverence for the written word gave rise to volunteer associations of “word cherishers”, whose aim was the collection and salvation of paper bearing writing on it. Not only books, but any scrap of lettered paper, however insignificant the actual text it carried, could not be randomly destroyed or used for recycling but had to be collected and subjected to ritual burning in specially designated furnaces. By the Qing, “this instrumental understanding of books on the part of the educated classes has spread and intensified, transforming itself in the process into an impressive variety of instrumental understandings of paper with writing on it characteristic of nearly every level of Chinese society”.79 The custom of collecting and burning scraps of such paper “continued even to the 1940s or early 1950s”.80 The isolated fragment of a text was even more appreciated than the whole of which it had been part because the religious merit earned by “saving” scraps of paper from accidental loss was considered greater than that attaching to the similar “salvation” of entire books.81 The alleged distribution of pages torn out of a book, or excerpts printed out as leaflets, should also remind us of Daoist paper charms (daofu, also translated as “amulets” or “talismans”), which upon their receipt by believers were used in any one of these four ways: burnt and inhaled as smoke; burnt and drunk with water; swallowed whole before battle; worn on the body as protection against enemy weapons. Such charms or amulets, consisting of short formulaic texts imitating the language of imperial edicts, or of particular Chinese characters to which magical powers were ascribed, were widely used by rebels and members of secret societies, as well as by government and warlord soldiers in China, from ancient times to the midtwentieth century.82 The religious side to the reception of Soviet books is apparent, inasmuch as, in the images of them that have been cited above, these foreign books were endowed with spiritual value. The book that armies and soldiers in the Christian West took to battle was the Bible:83 there are descriptions of wounded men reaching out for their Bibles as they lay in the field, awaiting medical aid that might not come,84 and stories about Bibles (and such other religious attributes as icons, crosses and amulets) that, carried on the body, miraculously saved a soldier’s life by taking the bullet of the enemy.85


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The image of the Chinese soldier as inseparable from the Soviet novel mixed concepts from Chinese religion and Christian martyrology, elements that were also welded together to form the political religion of Maoism. In the early 1950s this image was mobilized to create a Chinese equivalent for a myth of European descent that (born in countries with higher degrees of mass literacy) had been appropriated by Soviet propaganda and was then meant to unite the Communist world. The hero soldier or the model worker, holding on to his battered copy of the socialist realist novel and by his death in battle or stupendous achievement in socialist production giving the ultimate proof of having put his reading material to practice, had early on become absorbed in the mythology of the world’s first socialist state. Like few others, this myth could project to the population at large the complete identification of the model individual with state propaganda and of the model book with real life. Instead of Bibles, fallen Soviet soldiers (denied, in death as in life, the right to individual belief ) were described as having in their knapsacks the books that the regime wanted them to read. Ah Ying, a journal editor at wartime, imagined the same books in the pockets of fallen Chinese comrades. There can be no doubt that some soldiers did identify with books so ubiquitously praised, and that, along with hidden Bibles and crosses, some such books were brought in military knapsacks to the fields of the Second World War. Among them would have been copies of How the Steel Was Tempered—that canonical book by the invalid real-life author / repeatedly wounded main hero whose state of health had forced him to exchange the gun for the pen, and which in its last pages completed its transformation from a novel into “a new weapon” in the arsenal of the Party.86 At the time of its writing, Ostrovskii’s “steel” was being tempered not only in the mind of the novel’s fanatically devoted protagonist, Pavel Korchagin; it referred also to the furnaces of factories (such as those in Magnitogorsk, a town in the southern Urals founded with the express purpose of producing steel in 1929 and touted as a model of Stalinist social transformation) and alluded to the steel (stal’ ) in the name of the Leader. Repeatedly rewritten by a team of editors, Ostrovskii’s book was honed into a Party tool, the perfect “masterpiece of socialist realism”.87 It is now established that Party propagandists were also responsible for fabricating a large part of the claims on the inspirational power of sanctioned literature among the soldiers of the Soviet Red Army.88

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3. Word and Deed There are broader issues involved. The identification of the written word with the military sphere ran counter to an important traditional dichotomy, that between wen (literature, culture) and wu (the martial/military). The “cultured man”, or “literatus” (wenren), did not engage in warfare; if he became a general to save a dynasty (toubi congrong—“put down the brush and join the military”, as an ancient adage had it), he thereafter returned to his poetry and calligraphy since there was no notion of bi and rong becoming one. Soldiers, for their part, did not read books or write them. China’s difficult modernization process, begun in the last decades of the Qing, included many steps towards the redefinition of professions (the medical doctor, engineer, journalist and lawyer were some of the occupations that gradually came to be considered respectable in Chinese eyes, after having being treated as culturally inferior or morally suspect), but literature did not then follow suit to “rehabilitate” the figure of the soldier. The tendency to paint him in ever more glowing colours in the 1930s, especially after the Japanese invasion in 1937, arose from leftist political positions (and, in another guise, from a regionalist perspective).89 It went against the grain of the literary culture despite the transformation which this culture had undergone since “May Fourth”. It was still one thing to sympathize in print with the simple rural soldier, and another to merge culture and the military, the book and the weapon, as this was done in the Soviet socialist novels that began to be translated in China after 1929. In twentieth-century Chinese fiction written beyond the reach of Mao’s directives, what comes to mind is the immensely popular “martial arts fiction” of Jin Yong (born in 1924, he has lived in Hong Kong from 1948). It has been remarked that this author of a corpus of novels initiated (in 1955) with The Book and the Sword must have felt the Chinese cultural heritage to be in some danger to have turned it into a weapon in his fiction, and that his unusual celebration of tradition in martial terms may be seen as a response to the challenges of Western-induced modernity.90 His writing may perhaps also be interpreted as a reaction (and possibly as an unconscious debt) to the merging of wen and wu in the socialist fiction produced on the mainland under the influence of Soviet examples. While the association of the written word with magical powers had its sources in Chinese tradition, the association of literature with a weapon may accordingly be seen as an innovation in twentieth-century China. Its


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proliferation in publications of the 1950s, also an indication of the growing stress on military discourse in Maoist language as a whole, was due in large part to its frequent appearance in Soviet sources. It was by developing the statements of Soviet authorities, whom he read in Russian, that the Marxist ideologist Ai Siqi (1910–66) arrived, already in the 1930s, at a conceptualization of correct political ideas as “magical weapons”.91 Leaving “magic” aside, where from did the identity of word and weapon come to Russian Communist language, in which its constant rise can be followed since the speeches of Lenin? The European origins of this association are well described in a recent study addressing attitudes to language and literature from Cicero to the Italian humanists. It was Cicero who used “images of weaponry to describe the skills of the orator” and who consistently argued that eloquence could and should be measured in terms of its political efficacy. Cicero’s rediscoverer Petrarch endorsed and elaborated on his arguments, which Italians would apply directly to the political scene of their time. In the close of the fourteenth century, the ruler of Milan, Duke Giangaleazzo Visconti, was said to have complained that “the eloquence of . . . propagandizing pamphlets” by Coluccio Salutati (the Florentine chancellor who was regarded as the leading humanist after the death of Petrarch) “had done [his army] more harm than a troop of cavalry”.92 The pervasiveness of this discourse led to the vision of the philologist or poet (the master of language) as a potential military commander, something which Lorenzo Valla, the renowned translator of Greek historians into Latin, may have been the first to propose in these terms in a textbook of 1471.93 The further European development of the link between the written word and military action has not been made, or so it appears, subject to a full-length study.94 By the age of nationalism, the exchange between a writer’s pen and a soldier’s weapon was an image that readily suggested itself to any patriotic writer and orator. Thereby was established the metaphoric relationship that was put to such extensive use in Communist propaganda. Far from being a mere tool of rhetoric, metaphor has been recognized for its potential to structure thought—to be enacted in and eventually to constitute reality.95 The recurrent likening of books to weapons (what we have called the third level of the argument—just before the fourth, in which the metaphor would be realized) became all the more necessary in China if literature was to supply warfare the cultural respectability that it lacked. Under the system of total control, military metaphors would overtake the vocabularies of Russian and Chinese writers, hastening the

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evolution of erstwhile bards of the nation to “engineers of human souls”, and from that to “soldiers of the Party”. But already Chen Duxiu’s vision of “a literary revolution” in 1917 was supposed to be advanced by an “army”, equipped with “the largest cannon in the world”.96 In 1928, critic Li Chuli (1900–94), a Creation Society member, demanded to replace the “literature of blood and tears” (a notion put forward by Zheng Zhenduo in 1921) with a literature of “machineguns and trench mortars”.97 Writing in 1934, the writer and translator Yang Sao (1900–57) presented “literature is a weapon” as an axiom which had long become common knowledge (it is true that, earlier in his essay, he declared himself a friend of Li Chuli).98 References to literature as a form of warfare were, indeed, ubiquitous in the discourse of the 1930s99 and featured also in writings coming out of “lonely island” Shanghai during the war with Japan.100 The collective patriotic response of Chinese writers and reporters to the Japanese invasion, manifested in the creation of the All-China Association of Literary Resistance in 1938, was another important step in the subjugation of the written word to military needs.101 When Mao, in his “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art”, later extended the function of “a powerful revolutionary weapon” to culture itself,102 he did not thereby proclaim a new idea. More concretely, Mao in 1942 ordered writers to plunge into the heat of the real not the metaphorical battle: a demand for immediate contact with life, not for literary “realism” as merely an accurate reflection or even reproduction thereof. In opposition to the romantic image of the writer, such as could still be cultivated by the Chinese admirers of classical Russian literature and its hero-critics, Mao quoted Lenin’s words on literature being “a screw in the whole machine of revolution”.103 In this key moment in the transformation of writers from leaders of men (Lu Xun’s “Mara poets”) into screws in a machine, we can see how the romantic urge “to blur the boundary between art and life”104 was first combined with and then fully overshadowed by the “realist” urge to do away with “art” altogether, the better to uncover the “life”, which art was meant to serve (did its practitioners not say so?). Lu Xun, replying only two months before his death to demands that he accept the Party’s recent change of direction and support the creation of a second “united front” in literature and the arts, was anxious to maintain at least a semblance of independence even as (stressing the following words) he answered that he had joined unconditionally, because of being not only a writer but


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a Chinese. The language he used to defy the “call to order” received from young Communist critic Xu Maoyong (1910–77) attested, however, that, in his eyes too, art was to be practised only so long as it could not be supplanted with something more effectual. “Joining this united front, what I use is naturally still the pen, and what I do is still write articles and translate books. When the time comes that this pen is no longer needed, I do believe that in using other weapons I should not prove any worse than Xu Maoyong and his like!”105 It followed that, even as propaganda, literature was in a basic and deep sense inferior to action, as the word was to the deed: “not to write, but to act” had been Lu Xun’s oft-repeated advice to literary-minded youths since the mid-1920s. If the fictional characters of literature had value at all, it lay in depicting real people; conceived of as types in society rather than as individuals, the people “depicted” could though be only as “real” as would be useful for the purposes of social engineering. This left little room for aesthetics, either in the writing or in the analysis of fiction: already the youthful nineteenth-century critic posthumously adopted as a precursor of socialist realism, Dmitrii Pisarev (1840–68) had called for the destruction of “false aesthetics” and its replacement by the only “true aesthetics”, one that is able to directly influence life.106 Life was indeed the magic word, and the subject of a literary cult long antedating the socialist realists; Chernyshevskii, in what became his most frequently quoted statement, called literature “a textbook of life” (uchebnik zhizni). Much has been said about the ambition of Russian literature to shape no less than to depict Russian reality, a tendency which early criticism in Russia as in the West traditionally explained as the natural outcome of political oppression. More recent research, however, has directed attention to the inner dynamics of a literature which, from as early as the mid-nineteenth century, grew accustomed to regarding itself as creator of a higher reality than the one in which its readers led their actual lives. In this perspective, rather than equip readers for life through the educational mission which it considered its duty and prerogative, Russian literature may be seen to have encouraged the Russian intelligentsia to inhabit an unreal world of its own invention—an imaginary moral universe, in which “word became the synonym of deed ”. These were the idealistic presuppositions which some writers of the 1900s and early 1910s sought to escape, in an effort to get to terms with the murky and confused “reality” of those years. Their quest was curtailed by the outbreak of the

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war and their questioning voices were excluded from legitimate literary discourse by the revolution, which then installed its own unassailable set of moral certainties.107 In Soviet literary theory, a necessary measure for a successful literary work was its presumed acceptance by the masses: if not directly useful as a weapon in the military or social “struggle” (the daily life of the socialist nation was, as has already been noted, habitually described in terms borrowed from the language of military conflict), a book not immediately concerned with the army or the factory was praised for its alleged spontaneous spread among the people, a process in which the book was virtually transformed from a written text into a spoken, oral one. An ideal circle was implied, as literature was charged with delivering back to the people an image of their own life: for, inasmuch as it is in the lives of the common people that a writer should draw his material,108 it is for the people that he writes his books.109 The continuity with nineteenth-century theories of literature as an expression of the national character was self-evident: Pushkin’s genius lay in absorbing—some said, with the milk of his wet nurse—the spirit of the people, and these people, his countrymen, then supposedly recognized themselves in his poems, going so far as to mistake his fables for genuine folktales. In the same way, Communist leaders were supposed to listen to and then faithfully realize the collective will of the people in whose name they governed. In Yan’an, by 1941, there was no longer a basic disagreement between the positions of Zhou Yang (soon to be given the ultimate sanction by Mao) and of his opponents, headed by Xiao Jun, on the necessity for writers to go out to the battlefield.110 That the “opposition” to this requirement was as weak, and that it spoke the same language as the Party reflected the extent to which the fixation with “life” had become accepted in literary discourse. It might still be asked, whether the writers gathered in Yan’an had not made proof enough of their devotion by joining Mao at that last outpost of the Communist Party, the front line of political battle in China. Certainly not all of them were opportunists, and they could have remained (as not a few Chinese writers did) in Japanese-occupied territory, gone elsewhere so as to escape the ravages of enemy occupation or left Yan’an once they had become aware (like many of the idealistic youth who had arrived there before them) of the discrepancy between ideal and practice. But by the early 1940s the writers of “new literature” in China were trapped in the rhetoric which they themselves had helped spread since at least the late 1920s. For it was they who had argued that deeds were more


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important than words, and that the first duty of the writer was to “express life”, merge with “the masses” and participate in the revolution.111 They had “matched word with deed” by joining the Northern Expedition and later in the Civil War may have literally “traded the pen for the gun”.112 It was only a matter of time until the revolutionaries would draw the natural conclusion, equating “writers” with propagandists and turning books— both native and translated—into the “weapons” of thought control. In quick response to the demands of the Yan’an Forum, the writer Zhao Shuli (1906–70) came out with a perfect solution: in his novella The Rhymes of Li Youcai (1943) the hero’s “rhymes” did, in fact, transform into a weapon, the words of his folksong made to carry coded messages on behalf of the Communist army.113 But this ingenious method could hardly have been adopted on a regular basis by Zhao’s colleagues, nor would even this lauded service to the Communist cause prove able to guarantee the physical survival of Li Youcai’s creator in Mao’s China. Works of Chinese fiction written under the influence of the Soviet military novel appeared both before and after Yan’an.114 In the first decade of the PRC, the translation of Soviet literature reached unprecedented heights.115 What in the 1950s was presented as spontaneous popular acceptance of the model literary works supplied by Soviet Russia (a parallel to concurrent recollections about the contribution which the Soviet classics of the 1920s had made to the moral uplifting and military success of Communist fighters in the 1930s and 1940s) concealed a more complex reality. There were two sides to the reception in China of books such as Galina Nikolaeva’s (1911–63) short novel Story about the Director of the MTS and the Chief Agronomist (1954; MTS being the abbreviation for Machine Tractor Station), which within less than a year of its appearance in the USSR was serialized in Yiwen in the translation of Cao Ying. On the one hand, some readers of this novel used it as leverage in their attempt to promote a greater measure of independence for the educated young within the Communist administrative hierarchy. On the other hand, although it is unclear how many readers would have found their way to this specialized journal (the reading of unassigned materials by students was a potentially punishable behaviour), many more were required to read the Chinese translation once it came out in book form. Its approval for emulation, as the “spirit” of its heroine Nastia was put forward as yet another spotless behavioural model for “young people” by the Propaganda Department of the Youth League Central Committee, unleashed a campaign of the kind that soon assumed the dual form of

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individual letters to the journal Zhongguo qingnian (The Chinese Youth) and organized collective addresses to the Soviet author. In these, representatives of the Chinese youths, masses and toilers pledged to be ever faithful to the book’s bright ideals.116 While most of the literature of the republican period was condemned by the new regime (with such exceptions as Lu Xun or Mao Dun, fiction of the 1920s and 1930s was not reprinted in the PRC until the 1980s) and as the literary models were largely borrowed from the Soviet Union, these models were inculcated not as mere examples of progressive literature but, much more than that, as guides for life. Life in China in the 1950s had thus to be narrated in print in terms and conventions borrowed from the Soviet Union—and the life of the young, in particular, was merged with fiction to the extent that it had to be lived in conformity to the behaviour of the positive heroes of Ostrovskii’s How the Steel Was Tempered, indeed as “a quote from” that book.117 Early at the outset of the Korean War, in which the PRC took part as a close ally of the USSR, the Soviet film version of the same novel (a wartime production of 1942) was dubbed and shown to wide Chinese audiences, including the soldiers now expected to “learn from Pavel’s spirit”.118 The first Soviet film to have been dubbed in China in 1950 was a remake for the screen of another novel we have mentioned, Zhurba’s Aleksandr Matrosov; no longer in need to be described as having read the book, as the first “Chinese Pavel” had still been,119 Chinese imitators of this hero’s feat (Matrosov had blocked the enemy’s fire with his body) could now be said to have been inspired by the film.120 The principle remained the same when, in late 1955, Ostrovskii’s Pavel was updated by Nikolaeva’s Nastia.121 In a way reminiscent of the May Fourth quest for “the Chinese Chekhov and Gorky”, Chinese Pavels and Nastias (more chillingly: Matrosovs) were sought; as the search announcements were now posted by the state rather than by literary critics, local reincarnations of these figures of socialist cult were, indeed, “found”. It may be added that Russian literature entered Chinese life in yet another way: many boys born in the 1950s were given the name Haiyan (petrel) in direct homage to the “Petrel of Revolution”, Maxim Gorky. The Russian text was also quoted, by the few who dared, in support of subversive Chinese positions. We have seen Qian Gurong do that, as he mobilized Gorky the better to argue his case for “humanism” in literature. In another such attempt on the eve of the Hundred Flowers campaign, young journalist Liu Binyan (1925–2005) hosted in Beijing the


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then famous writer Valentin Ovechkin (1905–68), a main figure of the Soviet “reportage” genre that blossomed under the high patronage of the Khrushchev Thaw. Drawing on the Russian he had learned in Harbin and Shenyang, the Manchuria-born Liu translated, from the spoken original, Ovechkin’s formulation of the writer’s duty as the readiness to “delve into” or “intervene in life”. He would pursue that duty with a tenacity greater than that of his adopted mentor, turning the stock phrase of theoretical dogma against its inventors: truthful and fearless writing “on life” was what the Party had always demanded, but what if a writer were to respond to that demand while feigning to ignore the nod and wink that had always accompanied such exhortations—to report only on such “reality” as fitted into the bright picture of society that the Party wished to present? Liu Binyan followed that strategy as a writer of investigative reportage long after the protection of Ovechkin, or of Nikolaeva, had proved illusory, and he could be stopped only by expulsion and exile from post-Mao China.122

4. Battles Won and a Battle Lost No set of “writers’ postcards”, nor the portraits of Russian authors that had decorated the walls of some Chinese readers in the 1920s, could have satisfied the craving for authority as fully as did the images of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, whom Chinese readers discovered on the covers of smuggled Soviet publications in the 1930s. These images were then prominently displayed, next to the portraits of Mao Zedong and his commander-inchief Zhu De, in CCP visual propaganda beginning from 1943.123 No moral recipe (the Christian love of Dostoevsky, or the “non-resistance” of Tolstoy) were a match for the Communist Party’s scientific Marxism, all the more so once every dissonance in the interpretation of the doctrine had been silenced—by the early 1930s in the USSR and by the early 1940s in China. Where the “superfluous man” of a Turgenev novel had hesitated and ended his days consumed by tragic doubt (and the hero of a story or a play of the Russian “Silver age” had turned inward, to the exploration of the perennial riddles of life and death), the socialist hero of Fadeev or Serafimovich provided resolute answers to the problems of the day: he accepted the leadership of the Party and joined the national struggle. By their beguiling simplicity, these answers convinced many readers in the

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original and in translation, but in no other country was socialist realism able to win as large an audience as it did in Soviet Russia and Communist China. The reason was that, in both countries, the regime spared no effort in promoting Soviet socialist literature as a tool of political indoctrination. It also took steps to ensure that those literary works that did not meet the requirements of Communist political correctness be either reinterpreted in the right key or withdrawn from circulation. As the “eternal friendship” proclaimed between the brotherly socialist nations of China and Russia gave way, by the early 1960s, to bitter hostility and the severing of cultural and political ties between Mao and the “revisionist” heirs of Stalin, orders were issued from Beijing to criticize what had been praised so eagerly before. This decade saw no more recollections of prize-winning Soviet novels being carried into battle by pre-Liberation Chinese soldiers. Yet the experience gained in manufacturing admiration was not lost, merely relocated onto Chinese ground. The CCP campaign to promote the books of Soviet writers from the 1930s to the 1950s had proved a laboratory (one among several, to be sure) for a new cult of the writings and persona of a single Chinese author. If the worship of the Soviet book was abandoned and forgotten after the Sino-Soviet rift of 1960, its quasi-religious attributes were greatly amplified as worship was transferred to new sacred texts. Beginning in 1963, military training in the PRC emphasized Mao’s call “to learn from comrade Lei Feng”: the apocryphal diary of this “model soldier”, who had died on duty in the previous year, expressed boundless love for the Chairman and an ardent wish to become “a screw” in the machine of socialist society. Lei Feng’s chief advantage over the previously extolled heroes of Russian fiction lay in his coming not from Moscow but from Hunan province; the superhuman virtues posthumously attached to this new Chinese hero otherwise amounted to a caricature of the paragons of Soviet socialist realism. From 1964, the required reading for all PLA soldiers was Chairman Mao’s own “lao san pian” (his “three old” speeches, written between 1939 and 1945). The route from metaphor to reality was fully accomplished in the Cultural Revolution, embarked on in summer 1966. Words, so often likened to bullets before, now proved their ability to kill.124 In Western research on this period in the history of modern China, the causal relationship between word and deed has not, until quite recently, received the attention it deserves. The argument has been made, for example, that by being reduced to the form of ritualized slogans, words in the discourse


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of the Cultural Revolution were detached from any relation to the real world.125 Although this observation is correct, it isolates the absurd proclamations of the time from the preceding process, by which (incrementally since the early twentieth century) the pressure exerted on written and then on spoken language in China to “reflect” an imagined, politically conditioned reality had brought about its deterioration into the very tool that it was required to become. It bore no more relation to reality, because for too long it had been asked to lie. As a useful study has argued, the extreme violence of Cultural Revolution language, its “metaphors” branding victims as demons and ghosts, and anything from worms and vermin to dogs, cannot be dissociated from the literal practice of killing the people so designated.126 The violent rhetoric epitomized in the speeches, newspaper articles and books of Maoist China should also be related to the preceding search of modern Chinese writers for a way of expression in which the written word could directly influence society. Many of them had willingly espoused the model offered by the triumphant Communist novels of the Russian revolution and civil war, before discovering (like the authors of those same books) that the Party had taken command of their writing as of their lives. By the 1960s, ambiguity and nuance lost whatever limited space that had still been theirs in Chinese discourse. The gap between signifier and signified was closed, much as it had been in Stalin’s Russia: because a portrait of the Leader was the Leader himself,127 whoever could be accused of giving insufficient homage to the former became guilty of conspiring against the latter. Back in the campaigns of the 1950s, damning political labels were attached to intellectuals (including such faithful singers of the Party’s praises as Ding Ling, in 1957) through a process familiarly known, and vividly captured in caricatures, as “capping” or “putting a hat” (kou maozi). A decade later, the virtual “hats” had materialized into the long dunce’s caps that persons accused by the Red Guards were made to wear while being paraded from one “struggle” session to another.128 Books, people in China were told, were “weapons in the hands of the masses”. In the Cultural Revolution, hardcover books, obtained from ransacked libraries, were being hurled as “projectile weapons” by members of rival revolutionary groups.129 The most potent weapon of the Revolution, its symbol and totem, was a book that no Red Guard would have dared to throw at another, although it was certainly endowed with the power to win battles both

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military and ideological. A little red book first published in May 1964, it was no longer a translated Russian import but proudly China’s own. The words contained therein were copied onto every available public surface and learned by heart even by the illiterate; the benevolently smiling image of the book’s author, long since universally visible on the street, now also entered the home to be placed where the family altar had once stood and be given daily obeisance. Beneath the portrait of this author, a “precious book table” was set and copies of the same author’s works were reverently stacked—if not necessarily read. Upgraded from the status of this-worldly weapons such as bullets, guns and bayonets, the Little Red Book, officially named Quotations from Chairman Mao (Mao zhuxi yulu) but also called The Red Treasured Book (Hong bao shu), was equalled to weapons magical and supernatural (for it assisted soldiers in extreme conditions and rescued citizens facing natural disasters) and even to “a spiritual atom bomb”.130 The battles for a new China had been won. Lost by the time of the Chairman’s death was the struggle for the integrity of art, a struggle in which works and representative authors of Russian literature had been the teachers, allies and companions of some writers in China. Next to those who publicly cast Russian writers in such roles, most often in the role of “the teacher”, for which there was a strong pull to place writers in both cultures, there were many more Chinese authors, and a greater number of non-writing readers, for whom Russian literature remained precisely that: “literature” and no more. But no less, too: whether reading it had influenced them, in any of the subtle ways in which literature is capable of changing its individual readers—whether some Russian books taught them, gave them pleasure or made them angry—is a private affair which most readers kept to themselves. An exile from the Soviet Union to the United States, awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in Stockholm in 1987, said on that occasion: If art teaches anything—to the artist, in the first place—it is the privateness of the human condition. Being the most ancient as well as the most literal form of private enterprise, it fosters in a man, knowingly or unwittingly, a sense of his uniqueness, of individuality, of separateness—thus turning him from a social animal into an autonomous ‘I’. [. . .] A work of art, of literature especially, and a poem in particular, addresses a man tête-à-tête, entering with him into direct—free of any go-betweens—relations.


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It is for this reason that art in general, literature especially, and poetry in particular, is not exactly favored by champions of the common good, masters of the masses, heralds of historical necessity. For there, where art has stepped, where a poem has been read, they discover, in place of the anticipated consent and unanimity, indifference and polyphony; in place of the resolve to act, inattention and fastidiousness. In other words, into the little zeros with which the champions of the common good and the rulers of the masses tend to operate, art introduces a ‘period, period, comma, and a minus’, transforming each zero into a tiny human, albeit not always a pretty, face.131

Repeating that “a novel or a poem is not a monologue but a [very private] conversation of a writer with a reader, a conversation [in which] a writer is equal to a reader, as well as the other way around, regardless of whether the writer is a great one or not”, he asserted that this conversation, the memory of reading, “remains with a person for the rest of his life [. . .] and sooner or later, appropriately or not, it conditions a person’s conduct”.132 Surely, this was a surprising conclusion: what kind of “conditioning” could he have had in mind, after rejecting an analogous ambition by the totalitarian state? It turned out that what he meant was neither this, nor the hoary pretences of the nineteenth-century Russian classics to serve as “teachers of life”. It was, rather, a more modest and yet a firm belief that literature had a function “as a form of moral insurance . . . much more dependable than a system of beliefs or a philosophical doctrine”; that “for someone who has read a lot of Dickens, to shoot his like in the name of some idea is somewhat more problematic than for someone who has read no Dickens”—though within this careful definition, too, he felt a need to separate (and he was none too convincing in doing that) “literature” from “literacy or education”. After all, “Lenin was literate, Stalin was literate, so was Hitler; as for Mao Zedong, he even wrote verse. What all these men had in common, though, was that their hit list was longer than their reading list”.133 On his acceptance of the prize, he then rephrased his statement, reducing it to a purer and an essentially negative minimum, as if to assure that he was understood: rather than tell people how to live, literature (and “poetry in particular”) imparts to the people it reaches an instinctive feeling of what is wrong and should not be done to them or to others. Alluding to Faulkner, he said, “I am not so sure that man will prevail [. . .] but I am quite positive that a man who reads poetry is harder to prevail upon than

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one who doesn’t”.134 With a lesser extent of self-deprecating irony, an exiled Chinese writer resident in France expressed similar thoughts about the power, aims and limitations of literary art in “The Case for Literature”, a lecture delivered in the same hall in 2000.135 The process of reading became less than a private conversation with the author once schools, factories and work units were assigned their reading matter—which was the way people in China were most likely to encounter a Soviet book in the first decade of the People’s Republic (by the end of the same decade, it will be remembered, they were unlikely to encounter any). That much of their audience was a captive one does not mean that these books could not, like the nineteenth-century “classics”, appeal to many readers, but the fact that the option of criticizing them was nonexistent makes it difficult to distinguish forced paeans from genuine appreciation. One of the many avowed admirers of Soviet socialist realism in China, Lao She called himself “a soldier, whose weapon is the pen”.136 I am a soldier on the battlefield of literature [. . .]. I use the pen as a weapon and bleed onto paper. [. . .] A soldier will not master the military strategies of a general, but I trust that I have accomplished what a soldier should have done. [. . .] On the day I step into the burial chamber, I hope to be given a short tablet, inscribed: ‘A soldier, who has fulfilled his responsibility in the literary world, sleeps here’.

Red Guards (schoolgirls using their fists, belts and sticks at first, then taking up confiscated “Ming era swords and halberds”) assaulted the aged writer, driving him to suicide, in 1966,137 but the Lao She Memorial and Museum, created over thirty years later in Lao She’s house in Beijing, prominently displays that self-definition—even though it is certainly not as a literary foot soldier of the Communist Party that Lao She is now remembered and still being read. When, in a trial drawing the final curtain over the Cultural Revolution and the Mao era in 1981, the former literary critic Yao Wenyuan (one of the loudest to proclaim Mao Zedong thought as “an ideological weapon”) was convicted along with other members of “The Gang of Four”, he was described in China as “the man who used the pen as his weapon to kill people”.138 This, in the end, was only the most logical use to which a pen, or thought, “turned into a weapon” could be put. However, Yao Wenyuan, the son of Yao Pengzi (1905–69), a minor poet and translator of Russian and French modernists who in a preface


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to a collection of his poetry in 1929 urged his readers to “put down this boring little booklet, and take up [their] weapons of battle”,139 acted from a position of political power, which few writers in China or Soviet Russia ever attained. Contrary to his, their words did not affect reality. Rather than transform into bayonets or other weapons of battle, they served the wielders of the non-metaphorical bayonets until the time came when they were no longer needed.


Afterword

I In accepting “socialist realism” as the rightful successor of nineteenthcentury realism, and in promoting a new “socialist humanism” as heir to the humanism of Russian literature in the late tsarist era, Soviet and Chinese literary doctrines converged. In their imitation of a Soviet myth about the iconic powers of books, a myth designed to illustrate the potency of the new socialist literature and its direct influence on “life”, Chinese literary critics and propagandists drew on a premodern native conception of the relationship between literature and history. Disseminated at home and returned to what should have been an appreciative audience in the Soviet Union, the myth was meant to uphold the efficiency of the Soviet book by projecting it on the domain most important to the regime: the wars that had solidified the Party’s identification with “the nation”. Soviet Russia and Communist China displayed further unity in carrying into the late twentieth century positivist notions about the moral authority of the writer (a perception with strong roots in the native literary cultures of both countries) and in enforcing, for as long as they could, the concomitant requirement that the—potentially all too powerful—written word be subjected to surveillance and control by the state. The Russian book, as a tangible symbol of the culture from which it had sprung, also possessed a genuine power of attraction in China—“a charm”, as S. A. Vengerov would have put it. This was the kernel of truth in the fabrications of the 1950s about Soviet books having been literally taken to the battlefields of the previous two decades. The manipulation of literature, foreign and native alike, continued through the Mao era, reaching its peak in the Cultural Revolution. The virtual Russian “teachers”

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were then pulled down from their pedestals, along with Chinese teachers at schools and universities, writers and all other “authority” figures. Many of those who, as translators and commentators, had introduced Russian literature in China were made to pay a heavy personal price.1 The Cultural Revolution was, though, the culmination (both “logical” and “absurd”) of another Russian teaching, which for many years had been presented in China as cognate with the “teaching” of Russian literature: the political doctrine of “revolution”, which had been put to use in justification of Stalinist terror.2

II In the years immediately following Mao’s death, the gradual return of banned Russian books progressed along with the partial exoneration of the period’s real-life victims. The writers of “scar literature” were the first to test the limits of permissible criticism by cursing the “fascist” Gang of Four while emitting pledges of loyalty to Chairman Mao Zedong and Chairman Hua Guofeng. One leading proponent of the genre supported the narrative of a short story by describing a bookshelf that once again allowed space for “The Selected Works of Mao Dun, The Selected Works of Goethe, Eugenie Grandet and Three Hundred Poems from the Tang Dynasty”—next to the Selected Works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao. Not yet standing on this model shelf, but now being cautiously promoted by the teacher hero of the story (a representative of the ever-patriotic intelligentsia) for readmission into its select company, were War and Peace and a Soviet children’s book in the translation of Lu Xun.3 Speaking before the Fourth Congress of the All-China Federation of Writers and Artists in Beijing in November 1979, a recent returnee to the literary scene, Liu Binyan, boldly defined the new “call of the times” as “putting man in the centre”.4 Invoking the authority of other world classics, along with the “teachings” of Marx and of Mao, he did not yet refer to Russian literature even as he called to remove the taboo on the word “human”. With the backstage support of Russian classics, such as Pushkin, appeals for humanism in the 1980s were made by the woman writer Dai Houying (1938–96).5 The understandable expressions of concern for the individual person in Chinese literature after the ordeal of Maoism were not

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necessarily indebted to ideas found in Russian literature, even when they chose to cite them. Party control over the literary field was sporadically tightened and loosened. Russian literature, however, benefited from the general boom in translation that accompanied the process of China’s opening to the outside world. Some of the “new” translations from Russian in the 1980s were late bloomers of the 1950s, the time when Russian was most extensively taught in the PRC; and the new discovery of the West was also the rediscovery of old names. As Chinese publishers were busily reprinting the classics of nineteenth-century French literature in the translations of Fu Lei, who had killed himself at the outset of the Cultural Revolution, the “rehabilitated” veteran Ba Jin paid his own personal homage to the Russian classics Herzen and Tolstoy.6 It was in the very different atmosphere of the years 1993 to 1995 that a public debate on “humanism”, using the more up-to-date language of renwen rather than rendao, flared up. Speakers for “post-modern” criticism disparaged the search for a “humanist spirit” as passé, whereas the fashionable “hooligan” novelist Wang Shuo (born 1958) reminded fellow writers “that they were not necessarily the conscience of the society or the voice of the people”.7 By the year of Ba Jin’s death, bookstore shelves in the People’s Republic of China offered everything from Alexander Solzhenitsyn to Joseph Brodsky. When Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita was published in December 2005 and advertised as “the first complete Chinese translation” of the émigré Russian writer’s great American novel, critics were quick to point out that it was, in fact, the tenth (eleventh, counting the earliest translation published on Taiwan) and not necessarily the best.8 Earlier in the same year, to mark the sixtieth anniversary of victory over Japan, Chinese presses rolled out new and old translations of Soviet war novels; among these, The Living and the Dead by the threetime winner of the Stalin prize Konstantin Simonov was a deservedly remembered, complex trilogy of the 1960s, but Mikhail Sholokhov’s novel They Fought for the Motherland (1943), originally published in China by the Epoch Press, was a piece of wartime propaganda, which the most decorated author of the Soviet Union attempted (but was not permitted) to rewrite in the early 1960s by adding the background of pre-war Stalinist repressions. In a market economy, books must find their readers, and these can at present make their choices according to literary taste and personal inclination. The almost uninhibited access to world literature that readers in

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Chinese now enjoy may be a sign that the Party has tacitly admitted its error, realizing, contrary to its own propaganda, which for decades had attached a vital importance to the contents of literary works, that books have little power to make revolutions (“poetry”, as W. H. Auden put it and Lu Xun had always suspected, “makes nothing happen”). It is either this or surrender to the sheer impossibility of maintaining an efficient grip over the enormous quantities of printed matter currently being released into the Chinese book market.

III Post-Soviet Russian literature finally abandoned the determination to instruct—and turned to nihilism and hermeticist experimentation instead. So repellent has the old gospel of moral “teaching” become, that it is now mainly the specialty of the literature of the occult, a genre occupying a large segment of the Russian literary market. In mass fiction since the 1990s, sex and violence have been widespread, while the current appeal of the language and behaviour code of the underworld presents a mirror image of the function of the criminal in the novels of Dostoevsky and his contemporaries: the former “downtrodden” are now set up for emulation and envy, not for humanitarian pity. It has been suggested that the blatant disrespect for human life in mass fiction as written today could partly be seen as the after-effect of the approach formerly taught in Soviet schools under the heading of “Soviet humanism”, with its descriptions of tortured patriotic heroes and justly eliminated enemies.9 The spread of “sex and violence” in contemporary literature in China has been interpreted (rather than as a form of protest against the prudery of a Communist ideology that now survives but in name) as an ingredient in a more complex mixture of escapism, “dissent” surviving by grace of an unspoken collusion with the establishment and the hankering of writers after a new “post-modern” modernity.10 There is, of course, also much of lasting value within what is being written in Russian, as in Chinese, today. As it moves away from “teaching” and the civic mission, with which writers in both countries were long content to identify themselves, literature in China and in Russia is coming closer to the less morally elevated position assigned to literary fiction in the sceptical West. At the same time, in both of these, formerly militantly atheist countries (as well as in the post-

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Communist Asian republics in which new authoritarian regimes have risen since the 1990s), the search for answers and need of belief have increased the appeal of religious creeds and mystical healers. What, then, is the place of Russian and Soviet literature in a postideological China? Do the titans of the past who inspired the young men and women of May Fourth and retained their audience in China through the turbulences of the twentieth century still have anything to say to the young and the not so young readers of Chinese in the beginning of the twenty-first? Have the vintage literary products of the Soviet Union become discredited by their close association with the value system and state, which dissolved in unison in 1991? Pursued up to the last years of the Soviet regime, the cult of Nikolai Ostrovskii’s hero Pavel Korchagin thereafter “collapsed as precipitously as many other symbols of the totalitarian era”.11 Book readers were then rediscovering the suppressed heritage of émigré and “Silver age” literature, which was in great demand in the early 1990s. Interest in this literature (and in Soviet-period “samizdat”) has subsided since, but much of Russian cultural nostalgia remains turned to the imperial past and finds its expression in the proliferation of books (fiction and non-fiction) describing Russian popular customs, religious life and society as they were before the watershed of 1917. A distinct tendency of some publications on these subjects is their nationalist and obscurantist bent. When the nostalgic gaze is turned to the Soviet era, it is most often to celebrate victory in the war against Germany, but even under this heading there has been no noticeable return to the literature of socialist realism, most of which is out of print. Even the most famous of them all, How the Steel Was Tempered, is no longer part of the obligatory reading programme for Russian schoolchildren; since the early 1990s, this and other former Soviet classics have all been relegated to the secondary, optional book list. The Ostrovskii museum, created in 1940 in the Moscow apartment in which the tormented writer expired on 22 December 1936, was in 1992 given a new name and has been known since as “The N. A. Ostrovskii State Museum—The Humanities Centre ‘Overcoming’ ”. Formerly at No. 40, Gorky Street, the house also has a new address, although it had not had to move from its original location: a visitor to Moscow should look for it on Tverskaia 14. A part of the museum’s current exposition tells the story of the house when, between the years 1824 and 1829, it hosted the literary salon of Princess Zinaida Volkonskaia. The main section, still devoted to Ostrovskii, presents him now as a talented person who realized his dream of becoming a writer

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despite a debilitating disease, and as a humanitarian whose love of life inspired others. His friendship with writers enjoying respect today, among them victims of the purges, is emphasized at the expense of the ideological component dominant in his own writing. The exhibition stand describing the posthumous contribution of How the Steel Was Tempered to the war effort in the 1940s has been left unchanged; among other images, it includes the photograph of a book cover pierced through by shrapnel and coloured by blood. The same image is found in the special pamphlet on this aspect of the Ostrovskii heritage, issued by the museum in 2001. In it many soldiers’ letters from the front are quoted, typically comparing Ostrovskii’s book to a powerful weapon, and the following statement is made: “The history of world literature knows no comparable case of the impact of a literary work upon life”.12 Much room in the museum, however, is now given over to the life stories of other invalid writers, painters, artists and sportsmen who like Ostrovskii did not allow disability to prevent them from creative self-expression. Exhibitions of such artists’ works and visits by groups of disabled persons are a permanent feature of the restructured museum’s work. In the PRC too, there was a period of intense interest in what may be called émigré Chinese literature. The “fever” surrounding the renewed publication on the mainland of works by Zhang Ailing (Eileen Chang, 1920–95) was one example of this. But, native Taiwanese literature apart, there was not very much more to rediscover. Comparing the success of the Soviet and Chinese Communist parties in securing the loyalty of key literary figures after 1917 and 1949, reveals far greater complicity with the regime by writers in the PRC than in the USSR. The relocation mainly to Taiwan and Hong Kong (and thence, as with Zhang Ailing, to the United States) of some writers with ties to the Nationalist camp is no parallel to the mass exodus of the Russian intelligentsia in the wake of the October Revolution, while such names as Guo Moruo, Mao Dun, Ba Jin and Lao She represent the willing identification of important republican-era writers with Communist state propaganda. The relaxation of the Party’s grip on the cultural scene in the past decade did not, contrary to the situation in post-Soviet Russia, result in the rejection or substantial redefinition of the symbols most closely identified with the era of militant Communism. So firmly are these symbols associated with China’s present well-being that Mao is in no need of the rehabilitation that, progressively since the year 2000, the image of Stalin has been undergoing in Russia along with the continuing celebration of the tsars.

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Bearing in mind that the tourist industry in the East German birthplace of Karl Marx is now largely supported by tourist groups from the PRC will make it easier to understand why “Pavel” (Bao’er) too is still alive in China—if almost nowhere else. A twenty-chapter television series based on How the Steel Was Tempered was produced in cooperation with the Ukraine and broadcast in early 2000; when in March that year the Ukrainian actors arrived in Shenzhen (a capitalist boomtown that Pavel Korchagin could not have imagined) to sign copies of the script then concurrently being printed by several Chinese publishers, “it is said that the queue was over two hundred metres long”.13 In 2001, the Youth Theatre in Beijing once again staged the play Pavel Korchagin, which Gao Mang introduced into China when he first translated it in Harbin in 1947. A senior guide in the “Museum of Overcoming” in Moscow considers China the unchallenged leader among the three countries of the world today in which Ostrovskii’s novel is still read and discussed, the other two being India and Cuba. The museum displays more translations of How the Steel Was Tempered into Chinese than into any other language and visitors from the PRC bring in new copies of the novel each year. Chinese students also gather in the museum to celebrate Liberation Day, and a recent expression of the museum’s close contacts with China has been the 2007 exhibition of Gao Mang’s portraits of Russian and Soviet writers, among them Ostrovskii. The break-up of the Soviet Union has been overwhelmingly perceived as a warning in China. Not only in the eyes of official observers, the merits of “perestroika” failed to outbalance the subsequent disintegration of state borders, spectre of disorder and damage to Russian national pride. Indeed, Chinese pride could be swelled by those voices coming out of the new Russia, which reacted to the crisis of mismanaged privatization of national assets in the 1990s by calling, for the first time in the history of relations between the two countries, “to learn from China” the strategy of a less traumatic transition to a capitalist market.14 The time lag thus overcome and the quondam teachers reduced to a humbler stature, it became easier to allocate to their once forward-pointing literature the same treatment presently accorded to the products of the none too distant years when Chinese literature was also replete with political propaganda. While their social pathos may now be passed over with an indulging smile, the cultural standing of Mao Dun and Guo Moruo, or the authors of socialist realist fiction in the 1950s, has declined far less in the PRC than the status of Gorky and Fadeev in present-day Russia (where many

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would regard Sholokhov as unacceptable or irrelevant and wince at the mere mention of names such as Korneichuk, emblems of a bygone age). One reason for these divergent assessments of the literary past is simply that, unlike its Russian counterpart, the Chinese Communist Party remains in power. Another political system, however, operates on Taiwan, where an exhibition on Russian literature, opened in Tainan in November 2006 and shown in Taipei from January to March 2007, was built around three writers: Pushkin, Tolstoy and Sholokhov. A better explanation for such all-embracing inclusivism may be sought, therefore, in the longevity of Chinese literary memory: the attachment of readers to a small body of traditional literature dating from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries and the respect accorded to a wider range of earlier poetry and philosophical works must also influence attitudes towards Western classics of the nineteenth century. While “humanism” may still be associated in China with the likes of Victor Hugo, the tolerance that current reading audiences show for Communist (both Chinese and Soviet) literature reflects unwillingness to re-evaluate another established canon. Because books in China tend to have a longer “shelf life”, the same Chinese bookshelf can accommodate both Sholokhov and Pushkin. In their present-day cultural dealings, Russia and China pay tribute to what officials in the two countries regard as the uncontested common ground: a policy exemplified in the event programme of the “year of China in Russia”, launched in March 2007. Within the framework of increasing Russian-Chinese collaboration, which had already yielded many cultural manifestations across China in 2006, “the year of Russia in China”,15 the State Russian Museum in St Petersburg hosted two exhibitions of Chinese art in September and October 2007 (at the same time, the Malyi Theatre in Moscow lent its stage for the Sichuan State Theatre’s dance musical, “The Brilliant Tang Dynasty”). The one, a selection of modern oil paintings, did not claim a special Russian connection. The other, an exhibition of carved seals by Li Lanqing, presented a harmonious vision of Chinese-Russian friendship which, harking back to the undisputed values of both cultures, passed over in silence the more controversial chapters of their Communist heritage in order to express patriotic enthusiasm about the present and confident optimism in the future—of China, mainly, but by association, perhaps, of Russia as well. Born in 1932, Li Lanqing was trained in the Soviet automobile industry in Moscow in the 1950s and was subsequently involved in the creation,

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with Soviet help, of the first Chinese car plant in Changchun. He rose to the positions of trade minister and member of the Politburo in the 1990s and, while retaining the latter function, has been devoting himself in the past years to the ancient art of seal carving (zhuanke yishu). Visitors to the Russian Museum’s wing at St Michael’s Castle could admire seals bearing the names—transcribed in Chinese characters—of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Glinka (“Father of Russian music”), Tchaikovsky and, somewhat unexpectedly, Shostakovich (a composer fondly referred to in China as Old Xiao, laoxiao, so the caption announced), next to those of Mozart, Beethoven, Li Bai and Du Fu. The artist’s comments on the Tolstoy seal revealed that War and Peace was the first foreign novel Li had ever read; on his arrival in the Soviet Union in 1956, he hastened to pay his respects to the writer’s memorial in Iasnaia Poliana, the former Tolstoy estate. A seal honouring The Inspector was introduced with the information that the artist and his comrades had staged Gogol’s play at middle school so as to mock the corruption of the Nationalist Party. A seal dedicated to the famous 1950s Soviet song “Evenings under Moscow” attested to yet another talent of Li Lanqing’s. A long PRC documentary about Li, projected at the entrance to the exhibition hall, showed him singing that very song in the convivial company of Iurii Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow—a flashback, one would have suspected, to receptions in the Friendship Associations half a century ago, had not the bright colours of the film pointed to much more recent times.

IV The best-selling writer Chi Li (born 1957) offers a more hopeful vision to her readers than do most other notable authors of contemporary Chinese fiction. If she may be called a humanist, she is no naïve Dai Houying; by finding meaning in the non-spectacular events of everyday life, now fully dissociated from the claims of Communist ideology, she has much more in common with the highly popular (and, incidentally, well-familiar through translation in China) contemporary Russian writer Liudmila Ulitskaia. In 2005 Chi Li was awarded the Lu Xun prize for a novella entitled “Tolstoy’s Scarf”.16 Written in the first person and couched as a record of the author’s own experience of living in an apartment block in Hankou (part of Wuhan city) from 1995 to 2002, this is the story of a middle-aged

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man whom the house tenants had got to know under the nickname “old shoulder pole” (lao biandan). Like thousands of other villagers, he had come to the city to try to earn a living in manual labour, and like all those others he is despised and feared by the urbanites. But “old shoulder pole”, so we find out along with the narrator, is not just another nameless tramp: he is a person with notions of right and wrong and one who maintains his dignity and integrity even as others assign him to the lowest rung of society. Starting out as a coolie, he becomes a waste collector and as he gathers and stacks old newspapers, journals and books, the tenants of the apartment block come to realize that he is literate. It is only after “old shoulder pole” has died in his village, on one of his home visits for the New Year, that tenants also learn about the origin of the scarf he used to wear: “old shoulder pole”, they discover, had read in a newspaper that Leo Tolstoy wore a long scarf when (in that last attempt to reconcile “word and deed”) he left his estate and family, setting off in October 1910 on the road that would soon end in his death.17 “Old shoulder pole” wanted the scarf to be buried with him, but—so the tenants now hear from his son—his widow did not comply with this wish, objecting to the waste of good material. In the end of the story, in accordance with the custom of burning paper money and symbolic objects for the use of the dead, one of the tenants has prepared a paper-made scarf. Uncertain about the correct Chinese characters with which to render the Russian writer’s name, she asks Chi Li to help her inscribe “Tolstoy’s Scarf” on the offering. One could compare Chi Li’s story with Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude (1980), a short novel which showed the redeeming powers of books through the first-person narrative of a book-pulper. The president of the Lu Xun Literary Award committee that honoured “Tolstoy’s Scarf” put the emphasis elsewhere, however, saying that the writers whom the prize panel had selected were carrying on “the message of May Fourth” and thereby “fulfilling an important moral purpose. Representing the weak . . . is the responsibility of authors and the prerogative of literature.”18 Inseparable from the tortuous history of its reception in China, Russian literature, no longer inculcated or denounced, remains imbued with a meaning that even today’s more sceptical generation is able to recognize. The dignity and value, which Chi Li insists that every person’s life must have, are well-served by the humanism (more properly, the humanitarianism) of the Russian master—now a freely chosen ally, rather than a teacher and guide. Chi Li’s choice of summoning the spirit of Tolstoy, to help

A FTERWORD

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convey her anti-materialist message, is proof that the old “charm” has not yet faded away. There is still more to this story, whose protagonist collects scraps of lettered paper in the streets of the modern city. By being identified in it with an object worn on the body—a piece of clothing that, posthumously turned into paper bearing Chinese writing, becomes invested with the aura of sacrality—the moral values associated with the spirit of humanism take the form of a fetish. And if the portraits of writers stood in a metonymic relation to their books19 and were perceived in Russia through the religious intermediary of the icon, it is the concept of the fetish that affords us a prism through which to view the attribution of immaterial qualities and material power to the Russian book in twentieth-century China. In Chi Li’s story of 2004, the reverent burning of a paper effigy of “Tolstoy’s scarf”— the last grace of a Chinese religious rite administered by the rewriting of a Russian name in Chinese characters—is both an affectionate glance at and an ironic reminder of the extended literalized metaphor which Russian literature in China was, the fetish that was the Russian book.20


Notes

Introduction 1. It is not a history of the translation process, which I have tried to address in detail elsewhere. See Mark Gamsa, The Chinese Translation of Russian Literature: Three Studies (Leiden: Brill, 2008). 2. See chap. 9 in Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Here and below, the spellings Peking and Nanking will be used in historical reference to Beijing and Nanjing before the foundation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). 3. Cf. Song Binghui, “Ruoxiao minzu wenxue de yijie yu Zhongguo wenxue de xiandaixing” (The Translation and Introduction of Literature by Weak and Small Nations and Chinese Literary Modernity), collected in idem, Fangfa yu shijian: Zhong-wai wenxue guanxi yanjiu (Shanghai: Fudan daxue chubanshe, 2004), at p. 118. The translator of Shakespeare, Liang Shiqiu (1902–87), recalled with approval an explanation once given by the literary reformer and May Fourth leader Hu Shi (1891–1962): Liang remembered Hu Shi saying that those Chinese who knew English did not translate English literature (but, rather, used English as an intermediary to retranslate French and Russian works) because the language of original English fiction was so much more difficult than that of translations. Liang Shiqiu, “Fanyi” (Translation, 1928), quoted in Ping Baoxing, Wusi yitan yu Eluosi wenxue (Xining: Qinghai renmin chubanshe, 2004), p. 134. 4. While the cultural dimension to Russian-Chinese relations remains neglected, contacts and/or similarities between the two literatures have been discussed in sinological research, albeit without recourse to Russian-language material. Rudolf G. Wagner, Inside a Service Trade: Studies in Contemporary Chinese Prose (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), takes what we might call the “contacts” approach in studying the appropriation of contemporary Soviet literature in the Chinese literary scene of the 1950s. The analysis by Perry Link of literary bureaucracy, writers’ conventions and strategies mainly in the post-Mao “thaw”, The Uses of Literature: Life in the Socialist Chinese Literary System (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), notes “similarities” with

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5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

NOTES

the functioning of the parallel system in the USSR and the literature of the thaw that followed the death of Stalin. The latest study, Max Ko-wu Huang, The Meaning of Freedom: Yan Fu and the Origins of Chinese Liberalism (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2008), highlights the Chinese foundations of Yan Fu’s response to European thought with an emphasis on J. S. Mill. See also Douglas Howland, Personal Liberty and Public Good: The Introduction of John Stuart Mill to Japan and China (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005). Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett, Comparative Literature (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1886; reprint 1970), p. 85. On this author and his book, see David Damrosch, “Rebirth of a Discipline: The Global Origins of Comparative Studies”, Comparative Cultural Studies, vol. 3, nos. 1–2 (2006), pp. 99–112. Aileen M. Kelly, “Introduction”, in her Toward Another Shore: Russian Thinkers between Necessity and Chance (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 6, my emphasis. Compare (repeating the experiment of replacing “Russia” by “China”) with the following passage in Erich Auerbach, trans. Willard R. Trask, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 523–24: [M]odern European and especially . . . German and French forms of life and thought . . . in all their power collided in Russia with a society which, though frequently rotten, was wholly independent . . . and which above all was hardly yet prepared for such an encounter. For moral and practical reasons it was impossible to avoid coming to terms with modern European civilization, although the preparatory periods which had brought Europe to the position it then occupied had not nearly been lived through in Russia. The process of coming to terms was dramatic and confused. [. . .] The very choice of the ideas and systems over which the struggle takes place is somehow accidental and arbitrary. Then too, nothing but their final result is extracted, as it were, and this is not evaluated in its relation to other ideas or systems [. . .] but is immediately evaluated as an absolute, which is true or false, an inspiration or a devilish delusion. Immense theoretical countersystems are improvised. The most complex phenomena, fraught with historical premises and very difficult to formulate in a clear synthesis—phenomena like “western culture”, liberalism, socialism, the Catholic Church—are judged in a few words, in accordance with a particular and more often than not erroneous point of view. The quotation is from John M. Headley, The Europeanization of the World: On the Origins of Human Rights and Democracy (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008), p. 27; on the integration of China, as perceived through the reports of Jesuit missionaries, within the expanding European concept of the civilized world, see his chap. 2, “The Universalizing Principle and the Idea of a Common Humanity”. See Elizabeth McGuire, China, the Fun House Mirror: Soviet Reactions to the Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966–1969 (Berkeley: Berkeley Program in Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies Working Paper Series, 2001), p. 17. Mao’s Red Guards,

NOTES

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

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in fact, were not based on Lenin’s: Barend J. ter Haar, “China’s Inner Demons: The Political Impact of the Demonological Paradigm”, in Woei Lien Chong, ed., China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution: Master Narratives and Post-Mao Counternarratives (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), pp. 27–68, esp. p. 52 ff., argues that they occupied a symbolic space made vacant by the Communist Party’s destruction of popular religion. The colour red was borrowed from the vocabulary of Chinese millenarianism; the Red Guards became divine soldiers. We shall return to discuss Maoist political religion in Chapter 4. “Zhu Zhong-E wenzi zhi jiao”, collected in Nanqiang beidiao ji (Mixed Dialects, 1934), in Lu Xun quanji, in 18 vols. (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 2005) (hereafter: LXQ J), vol. 4, pp. 472–80; translated as “The Ties between Chinese and Russian Literatures” in Lu Xun, trans. Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang, Selected Works, in 4 vols. (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1980), vol. 3, pp. 209–13. See Maurice Meisner, “Iconoclasm and Cultural Revolution in China and Russia”, in Abbott Gleason et al., eds., Bolshevik Culture: Experiment and Order in the Russian Revolution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), pp. 279–93. “Ideologues who questioned China’s legitimacy as a socialist country because it was poor, undemocratic, and repressive could not have known that these categories would be applied in the future with fatal force to the Soviet Union”. McGuire, China, the Fun House Mirror, p. 36. Vladimir Solov’ev’s Short Tale of the Antichrist (dating to a short time before the author’s death in 1900) is among his best-known writings. See Susanna Soojung Lim, “Between Spiritual Self and Other: Vladimir Solov’ev and the Question of East Asia”, Slavic Review, vol. 67, no. 2 (summer 2008). Cf. Nikolai Fedorov’s (1828–1903) article of 1901, “What the Most Ancient Christian Monument in China Can Teach Us”, available in English in idem, trans. and ed. by Elizabeth Koutaissoff and Marilyn Minto, What Was Man Created For? The Philosophy of the Common Task (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1990), pp. 196–204. Haun Saussy, “Mei Lanfang in Moscow, 1935: Familiar, Unfamiliar, Defamiliar”, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, vol. 18, no. 1 (spring 2006), pp. 8–29, shows how the master of traditional Chinese theatre, harshly criticized as a conservative by modernizers at home, was applauded as an artistic revelation by the most sophisticated directors of Soviet theatre on the eve of the Stalinist purges. J. D. Chinnery, “The Influence of Western Literature on Lu Xun’s ‘Diary of a Madman’ ”, Bulletin of SOAS, vol. 23, no. 2 (1960), p. 318; my emphasis. Marston Anderson, The Limits of Realism: Chinese Fiction in the Revolutionary Period (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 36. Also in 1920, the journal editor and translator Hu Yuzhi, whom we shall meet again below, showed himself aware of realism’s decline, but he too believed that China was not ready for such, more advanced, current writing as “mysticism” or

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17. 18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

NOTES “symbolism”: see the conclusion of his “Jindai wenxue shang de xieshi zhuyi” (Modern Literary Realism, 1920), in Hu Yuzhi wenji (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1996), vol. 1, pp. 48–60. Anderson, The Limits of Realism, p. 134. The young translator and critic Xie Liuyi rejected symbolism for this same reason, in the conclusion to his “Wenxue shang de biaoxiang zhuyi shi shenma?”, Xiaoshuo yuebao vol. 11, no. 6 (June 1920). Peter Duus, “Introduction”, in Duus et al., eds., The Japanese Wartime Empire, 1931–1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. xix– xxiv. Manela, The Wilsonian Moment, p. 13, uses the positive images of “dispatch and energy” to describe the “Egyptian, Indian, Chinese, and Korean nationalists”, who seized on the American president’s rhetoric to promote their political struggles in 1919. He considers “somewhat incongruent” the concurrent Japanese claims that “due to the material development of Korea under Japanese rule and the ‘racial kinship’ between the two peoples, the Japanese annexation of Korea . . . represented ‘the perfection of the principle of self-determination of races’ ” (p. 198; cf. pp. 210–11). “ ‘Ah Q zhengzhuan’ de chengyin”, in Huagaiji xubian de xubian (Sequel to the Sequel to Splendid Cover Collection; 1927), in LXQ J, vol. 3, pp. 394– 403, here pp. 398–99. Cf. the freer translation of this text in “How The True Story of Ah Q Was Written”, in Lu Xun, Selected Works, vol. 2, at p. 318. Quoting Hegel to have said that “alle grossen weltgeschichtlichen Tatsachen und Personen sich sozusagen zweimal ereignen würden”, Marx quipped: “das eine Mal als Tragödie, das andere Mal als Farce”. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, ed. Elizabeth Knowles, 5th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 500, translates as follows from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, noting that “the origin of the Hegel reference is uncertain”: “Hegel says somewhere that all great events and personalities in world history reappear in one fashion or another. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce”. On literary responses to the betrayal of these promises in Russia, cf. Kevin M. F. Platt, History in a Grotesque Key: Russian Literature and the Idea of Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). Cf. comments on “the grotesque” in chap. 7 of Ban Wang, The Sublime Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth-Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), and in Geremie R. Barmé, In the Red: On Contemporary Chinese Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. xx. Rudolf G. Wagner, “Life as a Quote from a Foreign Book: Love, Pavel, and Rita”, in Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer, ed., Das andere China. Festschrift für Wolfgang Bauer zum 65. Geburtstag (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1995), here p. 476. Its argument may be summarized as follows: 1. The literary decadence imported to Shanghai was then sinicized under the residual influence of traditional fiction. 2. The end result was a deficient version of the European

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original, because it concentrated on the physical (sexual and hedonistic) strain of Decadence while neglecting its deeper aspects. Xie Zhixi, Mei de pianzhi: Zhongguo xiandai weimei—tuifeizhuyi wenxue sichao yanjiu (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 1997), esp. pp. 251–52. 25. “The leaders of one revolution have often seen themselves as re-enacting an earlier one. The Bolsheviks had their eyes on the French Revolution, for instance, the French revolutionaries thought of themselves as re-enacting the English Revolution, and the English in turn saw the events of their time as a replay of the French religious wars of the sixteenth century”. Peter Burke, What Is Cultural History? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), p. 124, adds the rather gnomic caveat: historians need to “incorporate such views, without of course repeating them uncritically”. Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900 (London and New York: Verso, 1998), argued in his concluding pages that the French and English models of the novel were the object of worldwide imitation, but that their diffusion also produced two “paradigm shifts”: the novel of ideas in Russia (1860–90) and, a century later, magical realism in Latin America (1960–90). Moretti returned to the uneasy “compromise” between borrowed literary form and local reality “in cultures that belong to the periphery of the literary system (which means: almost all cultures, inside and outside Europe)” in his “Conjectures on World Literature” (2000), now in Christopher Prendergast, ed., Debating World Literature (London: Verso, 2004), esp. pp. 152–59 (quoting p. 152; emphasis in the original). Criticism of this position, on grounds of method by some and political incorrectness by others, led Moretti to modify it in “More Conjectures”, New Left Review, no. 20 (March–April 2003): “no [national] literature [is] without compromises between the local and the foreign”, he now stated (p. 79), though he still pointed out that the influence of the Anglo-French model on other literatures had been stronger than that of the Spanish or German novel on the English and French. 26. Daniel Fried, “Beijing’s Crypto-Victorian: Traditionalist Influences on Hu Shi’s Poetic Practice”, Comparative Critical Studies, vol. 3, no. 3 (2006).

One The Russian Classics as a Moral Example 1. Link, The Uses of Literature, pp. 104–5, considers the following three “basic assumptions” central to modern, as to traditional, Chinese literary culture: 1. Written Chinese embodies moral and political power. 2. A literary intellectual has a responsibility to help set the world in order. 3. A literary intellectual can reasonably expect that the state will utilize his talents. 2. This is noticed also at the outset of Wang Jianzhao, Zhong-E wenzi zhi jiao: E-Su wenxue yu ershi shiji Zhongguo xin wenxue (Guilin: Lijiang chubanshe, 1999), pp. 4–8.

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3. “Mangmu de fanyijia” (Blind Translators, 1921); reprinted in Zheng Zhenduo quanji, in 20 vols. (Shijiazhuang: Huashan wenyi chubanshe, 1998), vol. 3, pp. 491–92. Mao Dun, in “Eguo jindai wenxue zatan” (Random Remarks on Modern Russian Literature, 1920), collected in Mao Dun quanji, in 41 vols. (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1984–2001), vol. 32, pp. 124–32, also expressed the opinion that concern for the underprivileged classes was far more convincing in Russian literature than were parallel attempts by writers in English and French. See Sun Naixiu, Tugeniefu yu Zhongguo: Ershi shiji Zhong-wai wenxue guanxi yanjiu (Shanghai: Xuelin chubanshe, 1988), p. 32; cf. on this Li Shixue, “Tuo’ersitai yu Zhongguo zuoyi wenren” (Tolstoy and China’s Left-League Literati), in his Zhong-Xi wenxue yinyuan (Taipei: Lianjing, 1991), here p. 151. 4. Wang Yougui, Fanyijia Lu Xun (Tianjin: Nankai daxue chubanshe, 2005), pp. 138–41. 5. Ibid., p. 143; for the following remarks on Lu Xun, cf. ibid., pp. 292–95. See more in the chapters on Mao Dun and Bing Xin as translators in idem, Fanyi Xifang yu Dongfang: Zhongguo liu wei fanyi jia (Chengdu: Sichuan renmin chubanshe, 2004); on Zhou Zuoren in idem, Fanyijia Zhou Zuoren (same publisher, 2001). 6. Xie Liuyi, “Wenxue yu minzhong” (Literature and the Masses, 1922), as cited in Qiu Yang, Xie Liuyi pingzhuan (Guiyang: Guizhou minzu chubanshe, 1997), pp. 73–4. In an essay praising contemporary literature in Russia, where “the proletariat is now in actuality imitating art in its fleshand-blood human life”, Yu Dafu, “Class Struggle in Literature” (1923), as trans. in Kirk A. Denton, ed., Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 267, also pronounced: “The English literary world is the most conservative and most accommodating of all”. 7. Levenson, Revolution and Cosmopolitanism: The Western Stage and the Chinese Stages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), p. 42. 8. These words are put in the mouth of the first-person narrator in Ba Jin, “Sinking Low” (Chenluo, 1934), trans. Perry Link, in Joseph S. M. Lau et al., eds., Modern Chinese Stories and Novellas 1919–1949 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), pp. 310–11. Attacking the reading of Chekhov by a bourgeois professor, the narrator displays the “correct” view on the behaviour and reading matter of intellectuals at a time of national crisis. However, Ba Jin later thoroughly revised his views: on the evolution completed by his anniversary essay “Women hai xuyao Xiehefu” (We Still Need Chekhov, 1954), see Dai Yi, “Cong bu liaojie dao re’ai: Ba Jin yu Xiehefu” (From Misapprehension to Love: Ba Jin and Chekhov), in Zhi Liang, ed., Bijiao wenxue sanbai pian (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 1990), pp. 454–58. 9. Qian Gurong, “Xu” (Introduction), in Chen Jianhua, 20 shiji Zhong-E wenxue guanxi (Shanghai: Xuelin chubanshe, 1998), p. 1. 10. Ibid., pp. 4–5.

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11. Li Ding, “Eguo wenxue fanyi zai Zhongguo”, in Zhi Liang, ed., Eguo wenxue yu Zhongguo (Shanghai: Huadong shifan daxue chubanshe, 1991), pp. 346–49. These statistics refer to individual book titles; the inclusion of reprints would change the order, making Turgenev the most published Russian writer in China, followed by Tolstoy, Chekhov and (still at some distance) Dostoevsky. The most published “Soviet” author, from 1928 to 1987, was naturally Gorky (ibid., p. 337). 12. An early example of this view is the untitled article following his translation of the short story “Ben-Tovit” by Andreev. See Zhou Zuoren, trans., “Chitong”, Xin qingnian, vol. 7, no. 1 (December 1919), p. 69. 13. Shen Zemin (signed Ming Xin), “Enteliefu wenxue sixiang gailun” (Outline of Andreev’s Literary Thought), Xuesheng zazhi, vol. 7 (1920), no. 5, p. 2. 14. This was how the article’s author, a Russian-born American critic, had put it: “For in no country is literature so much part of life as it is in Russia, in no country does it so faithfully reflect the ideas and the spiritual and material conditions of the people, nowhere is literature taken so seriously, and nowhere, therefore, does it wield so great an influence”. Thomas Seltzer, “Introduction”, in Leonid Andreyev, ed. Seltzer, The Seven That Were Hanged (New York: Boni and Liveright, The Modern Library, 1918), p. viii. 15. Li Dazhao, “Eluosi wenxue yu geming”, in Li Dazhao wenji (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1984), vol. 1, pp. 581–88. Commentary on this article is in Chen Jianhua, 20 shiji Zhong-E wenxue guanxi, pp. 55–8, and Lin Jinghua, Wudu Eluosi: Zhongguo xiandaixing wenti zhong de Eguo yinsu (Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan, 2005), pp. 187–88. 16. Mao Dun, “Tuo’ersitai yu jinri zhi Eluosi” (Tolstoy and Today’s Russia), in Mao Dun quanji, vol. 32, pp. 14–37; discussion in Chen Jianhua, 20 shiji Zhong-E wenxue guanxi, pp. 63–4; Lin Jinghua, Wudu Eluosi, pp. 188–89. Excerpts appear also in Beijing daxue bijiao wenxue yanjiusuo, ed., Zhongguo bijiao wenxue yanjiu ziliao (1919–1949) (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 1989), pp. 1–4. 17. On this subject, see the publications of Julia K. Murray: a useful synopsis is her “Portraits of Confucius: Icons and Iconoclasm”, Oriental Art, vol. 47, no. 3 (2001), pp. 17–28. 18. Benjamin Schwartz, In Search of Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and the West. Western Thought in Chinese Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), p. 239. 19. Ibid., pp. 36–7. 20. Ibid., p. 45. 21. Huang, The Meaning of Freedom, p. 95. 22. J. S. Mill wrote in On Liberty, which Yan Fu translated in 1899, that “it is the duty of governments, and of individuals, to form the truest opinions they can” (quoted and commented in Howland, Personal Liberty and Public Good, pp. 43–5; emphasis in the original). As Huang, The Meaning of Freedom, p. 58, puts it, “For Yan, the wrongfulness of wrong ways of thinking was obvious”.

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23. Demanding submission to truth, scientism leaves no room for subjectivity and excludes pluralism. See Tzvetan Todorov, “Totalitarianism: Between Religion and Science”, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, vol. 2, no. 1 (summer 2001). 24. On the ideology of “national literature” as expressed by one of its proponents, the writer Chen Quan (1905–69), see Ursula Stadler, “Chen Quans Beiträge in der Zeitschrift Zhanguo ce”, Asiatische Studien / Études Asiatiques, vol. 56, no. 1 (2002), esp. pp. 183–88. 25. See Hu Qiuyuan, “Do Not Encroach upon Literary Art”, and Su Wen, “Regarding the Literary News and Hu Qiuyuan’s Literary Arguments” (both 1932), trans. in Denton, Modern Chinese Literary Thought, pp. 363–75. Cf. on these polemics: Wang-chi Wong, Politics and Literature in Shanghai: The Chinese League of Left-Wing Writers, 1930–1936 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), pp. 129–33; Anderson, The Limits of Realism, pp. 57–60. 26. C. T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, 3rd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), p. 22. 27. For an argument that the model, set by Qu Yuan’s moralizing didacticism, had deleterious effects on modern Chinese literature, see Bonnie S. McDougall, Fictional Authors, Imaginary Audiences: Modern Chinese Literature in the Twentieth Century (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2003), pp. 66–7. 28. Victor Erlich, The Double Image: Concepts of the Poet in Slavic Literatures (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1964) is the founding study of this dichotomy in the Russian and Polish contexts. See pp. 23–4 on “tender” versus “martial”; p. 52 on “poetry of art” versus “poetry of action”; p. 71 on the “Parnassian” versus the “Dionysian” concepts of the poet. 29. Lu Xun, “On the Power of Mara Poetry”, partly trans. in Denton, Modern Chinese Literary Thought, pp. 96–109. On the desire for military fame of another “national poet” and his avowed regret at having ridden Pegasus rather than a horse in battle, see David M. Bethea, Realizing Metaphors: Alexander Pushkin and the Life of the Poet (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), pp. 79–80, 228–30. Bethea explores Pushkin’s struggle with the image of Gavrila Derzhavin, Russia’s foremost poet of the eighteenth century, who had earned glory both as an army commander and the bard of Catherine the Great; an example of such double excellence in the nineteenth century was the poet and general Denis Davydov, Pushkin’s friend. 30. See Xia Xiaohong, “Ms Picha and Mrs Stowe”, and Chu Chi Yu, “Lord Byron’s ‘The Isles of Greece’: First Translations”, esp. pp. 79, 102, both in David E. Pollard, ed., Translation and Creation: Readings of Western Literature in Early Modern China, 1840–1918 (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1998). T. A. Hsia, The Gate of Darkness: Studies on the Leftist Literary Movement in China (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1968), p. 76, said of the poem that the Communist romantic Jiang

NOTES

31. 32. 33. 34.

35.

36. 37.

38.

39.

151

Guangci (1901–31) wrote on the hundredth anniversary of Byron’s death that “Byron the poet and Byron the hero who died for Greece became indivisible in his imagination”. Cf. Leo Ou-fan Lee, The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), pp. 289–92. Qingchun de meng, in Zhang Wentian zaoqi wenji (1919.7–1925.6) (Beijing: Zhong gongdang shi chubanshe, 1999), esp. pp. 337–43. Yu Dafu, Wenxue gaishuo, as cited in V. S. Adzhimamudova, Iui Da-fu i literaturnoe obshchestvo “Tvorchestvo” (Moscow: Nauka, 1971), p. 25, n. 16. Ibid., pp. 39–40, 64. “Thoughts on the League of Left-Wing Writers” (1930), in Lu Xun, Selected Works, vol. 3, pp. 103–8 (“it is certainly not the duty of the working class to give poets or writers any preferential treatment”, p. 105). See “Duiyu zuolian zuojia lianmeng de yijian”, collected in Erxin ji (Two Hearts, 1932); LXQ J, vol. 4, pp. 238–44, at p. 240. Lu Xun repeated here thoughts he had already expressed on the shattering effect of a real revolution upon poets who had dreamt about it. In his essay “Zai zhonglou shang” (December 1927), collected in Sanxian ji (Three Leisures, 1932), ibid., pp. 29–39 (at p. 36), such ruminations had led him to conclude that the suicides of poets Esenin and Andrei Sobol’ (respectively, in 1925 and 1926) were proof of the Revolution’s progress. See “In the Belfry”, in Selected Works, vol. 2, pp. 367–76 (p. 375). Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 334–41; “Geming shidai de wenxue”, in LXQ J, vol. 3, pp. 436–43. The venue of this speech was, significantly, the Huangpu (Whampoa) Military Academy. Lu Xun, Selected Works, vol. 3, pp. 25–8. See the reply letter to translator Dong Qiufang, collected in Sanxian ji; in LXQ J, vol. 4, pp. 83–7. Translated in Selected Works, vol. 3, pp. 51–6 (“though devotees of art like to claim that literature can sway the course of world affairs, the truth is that politics comes first, and art changes accordingly”, p. 52). See “Xianjin de xin wenxue de gaiguan”, also in Sanxian ji; in LXQ J, vol. 4, pp. 136–42. See, on Qu Qiubai’s criticism, Paul G. Pickowicz, Marxist Literary Thought in China: The Influence of Ch’ ü Ch’ iu-pai (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 119, 154–55, 163, 176. Lu Xun’s instinctive suspicion of “intellectuals” is well attested: a memoir by his associate, the Communist critic Feng Xuefeng (1903–76), “Huiyi pianduan: guanyu zhishi fenzi de tanhua”, Wenyi fuxing, vol. 2, no. 3 (May 1946), can be trusted fully where it reports his strictures against “the book readers” (dushu ren), and only somewhat less where it describes his love for “real” revolutionary fighters. For the speeches, see Bonnie S. McDougall, Mao Zedong’s “Talks at the Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art”: A Translation of the 1943 Text with Commentary (Ann Arbor: Michigan Papers in Chinese Studies, 1980). On Mao’s poor knowledge of Marx and embrace of the Stalinist model, cf. A. James Gregor, Marxism, China, and Development: Reflections on Theory and

152

40. 41.

42.

43.

44.

45.

46.

47. 48.

49.

NOTES Reality (New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Transaction Publishers, 1995), pp. 33–6, 213–14. “The Anxiety of Out-fluence: Creativity, History and Postmodernity” (1993), collected in McDougall, Fictional Authors, Imaginary Audiences. Yu Dafu, trans. Joseph S. M. Lau and C. T. Hsia, “Sinking”, in Lau and Howard Goldblatt, eds., The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Literature, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), here p. 42. Xiaoming Chen, From the May Fourth Movement to Communist Revolution: Guo Moruo and the Chinese Path to Communism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), pp. 26, 29. Kyna Rubin, “Writers’ Discontent and Party Response in Yan’an before ‘Wild Lily’: The Manchurian Writers and Zhou Yang”, Modern Chinese Literature, vol. 1, no. 1 (1984), pp. 84, 93. The last two arguments were brought up in mock fashion, but the writer Xiao Jun (1908–88) still saw fit to mobilize “biographical” details of this sort in his polemic against the Party literary theorist Zhou Yang (1908–89). Ye Zhishan, “Wenxue yanjiu hui de ‘wenxuejia mingxinpian’ ”, Xin wenxue shiliao, no. 3 (1994) (quotation from p. 20), identifies the first set of postcards with the images of Tagore, Byron, Yeats, France, Hauptmann and Dostoevsky. Of the six writers included in the second set, Ye names Shakespeare, Hugo, Tolstoy, Bjørnson and Emerson. He also recalls having seen a postcard of Chekhov—who may have completed the second set rather than belonged to a possible third, of which Ye can supply no information. These three writers were probably the author’s own favourites at that time. Ye Shengtao, “Yi ge qingnian”, collected in Ye Shengtao ji, in 26 vols., eds. Ye Zhishan, Ye Zhimei and Ye Zhicheng (Nanjing: Jiangsu jiaoyu chubanshe, 2004), vol. 2, p. 111, tells readers that the photographs “attested that the master of the room was a lover of literature”. The story, first published in Xiaoshuo yuebao in February 1924, entered Ye Shengtao’s collection Xianxia (Below the Horizon) in 1925. From the memoirs of Shaoxing writer Xu Qinwen (1897–1984), “Zai laohu weiba de Lu Xun xiansheng” (Lu Xun at Tiger’s Tail; 1959), in Xu Qinwen daibiao zuo (Beijing: Huaxia chubanshe, 1999), p. 349. “Tiger’s tail” was a Peking dialect expression for a room at the back of a living compound, which Lu Xun happily adopted. Li Jiye, Lu Xun xiansheng yu weiming she (Lu Xun and the Unnamed Society), in Li Jiye wenji (Tianjin: Baihua wenyi chubanshe, 2004), vol. 2, p. 73. The most widely pictured and photographed writer was doubtless Tolstoy. Postcards of Andreev, offered for sale in the 1900s, are reproduced in Richard Davies, Leonid Andreev: Photographs by a Russian Writer. An Undiscovered Portrait of Pre-Revolutionary Russia (London: Thames and Hudson, 1989), p. 130. Janine Barchas, Graphic Design, Print Culture, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), at p. 19; see p. 28 ff.

NOTES

50. 51.

52. 53.

54. 55.

56.

57.

58.

59.

153

on frontispiece portraits of Captain Lemuel Gulliver and Robinson Crusoe. On early spread of the portraits in the 1610s (when they were still not necessarily placed to face the title page), see Sarah Howe, “The Authority of Presence: The Development of the English Author Portrait, 1500–1640”, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, vol. 102, no. 4 (December 2008). “Polochka”, in Ivan Shmelev, Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Russkaia kniga, 1998–2001), vol. 2, pp. 95–107, quoting p. 97. Zhou Shoujuan, Oumei mingjia xiaoshuo congkan (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1917), in 3 vols. See Gamsa, The Chinese Translation of Russian Literature, pp. 294–95. Peter Burke, “The Renaissance, Individualism and the Portrait”, History of European Ideas, vol. 21, no. 3 (May 1995), pp. 393–400, here p. 396. In the 1920s, the propagator of Western literature Zheng Zhenduo was also prominent among the scholars who rekindled interest in premodern illustrated editions of Chinese fiction. See Craig Clunas, Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 29, 42–3, 89–90. Ibid., pp. 96–9. On photographs hung on walls, see Frank Dikötter, Things Modern: Material Culture and Everyday Life in China (London: Hurst and Company, 2007), pp. 128–29, 242, 244, 248. Letter 132 (30 May 1929), in Lu Xun and Xu Guangping, trans. Bonnie S. McDougall, Letters between Two: Correspondence between Lu Xun and Xu Guangping (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2000), p. 375, and “In Memory of Wei Suyuan”, in Lu Xun, Selected Works, vol. 4: “On the wall hung a large portrait of Dostoevsky. I respect and admire this master, but I hate the callousness of his writing [. . .] Now his gloomy eyes were fixed on Suyuan and his couch, as if to tell me: Here is another poor wretch for me to write about” (p. 71; translation slightly modified). Cf. “Yi Wei Suyuan jun” (1934), collected in Qiejieting zawen (Essays from Demi-Concession Studio, 1937); in LXQ J, vol. 6, pp. 65–72, at p. 69. Jiang Deming, “Ting Cao lao tan Wei Suyuan” (Listening to Old Cao Speak of Wei Suyuan; 1988), in Zhang Demei and Leng Ke, eds., Cao Jinghua jinian wenji (Zhengzhou: Henan jiaoyu chubanshe, 1992), here p. 130. Letter to Tai Jingnong and Li Jiye (December 1927), in Wei Suyuan, ed. Xu Zifang, Wei Suyuan xuanji (Hefei: Anhui wenyi chubanshe, 1985), pp. 105–6. The writer Tai Jingnong (1902–90) was also a member of the Unnamed Society; another society member, Suyuan’s brother Wei Congwu (1905–78), became the main translator of Dostoevsky into Chinese. We cannot today identify the sculptor, to whom Wei referred in gratitude by her name and patronymic, Lydia Nikolaevna. “Yi Fei Ming” (Recollections of Fei Ming), in He Xi, ed. Jiang Zhinong, He Xi wenji (Kunming: Yunnan meishu chubanshe, 2003), p. 155. The book was

154

60.

61.

62.

63.

64. 65.

66. 67.

68.

69. 70.

NOTES Fei Ming’s (1901–67) short novel, Moxuyou xiansheng zhuan (The Biography of Mr Neverwas, 1932). “Wenxue geming lun”, as trans. in Denton, Modern Chinese Literary Thought, at p. 145. On the enlistment of Wilde by Chen Duxiu “in the cause of a national, realistic, and social literature”, see C. T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, p. 4. Wang Tongzhao, “Eluosi wenxue de pianmian” (The Emphasis of Russian Literature), in Wang Tongzhao wenji (Jinan: Shandong renmin chubanshe, 1980–84), vol. 6, pp. 349–59. These five salient qualities of Russian literature were all given by Wang in English, along with their Chinese translations. Cf., on this text: Chen Jianhua, 20 shiji Zhong-E wenxue guanxi, pp. 71–2. Contrary to his method when writing on Andreev with the help of Thomas Seltzer in Xuesheng zazhi in 1920 (see n. 13 above), Shen Zemin provided the full reference to William Phelps’s popular Essays on Russian Novelists (1911) in Xiaoshuo yuebao of April 1921. In an introduction to his translation of a play by Andreev in 1923, Zhang Wentian silently passed off a number of Phelps’s quotations from Russian literature as his own findings, but he did not appropriate the main text of the American critic’s book: see Zhang Wentian zaoqi wenji, pp. 263–67. See Jon E. von Kowallis, The Lyrical Lu Xun: A Study of His Classical-Style Verse (Honolulu: Hawaii University Press, 1996), pp. 210, 214, commenting on a satirical poem on Zhang Yiping by Lu Xun (1932/33). Li Jiye, for one, could never forgive Zhang for borrowing and then neglecting to return his copy of Edward Carpenter, Angel’s Wings: A Series of Essays on Art and Its Relation to Life (1898): see Lu Xun xiansheng yu Weiming she, in Li Jiye wenji, vol. 2, p. 192. Wang Tiran, “Qianyan” (Foreword), in idem, trans., Xinling dianbao (The Human Telegraph) (Shanghai: Xiandai shuju, 1933), p. 2. Quoted from introductions of 1920 in Ge Baoquan, “Geng Jizhi xiansheng yu Eguo wenxue” (Geng Jizhi and Russian Literature), Wenyi fuxing, vol. 3, no. 3 (1 May 1947), p. 271. Zheng Zhenduo, “Azhibasuifu yu Shaning: Shaning de yi xu”, Xiaoshuo yuebao, vol. 15, no. 5 (May 1924), at pp. 9–10. Lung-kee Sun, “The Presence of the Fin-de-Siècle in the May Fourth Era”, in Gail Hershatter et al., eds., Remapping China: Fissures in Historical Terrain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 201–5. Lu Xun, “A Reading List for the Youth” (1925), as trans. in T. A. Hsia, The Gate of Darkness, p. 148. See “Qingnian bidu shu”, collected in Huagai ji (Splendid Cover Collection, 1926), in LXQ J, vol. 3, pp. 12–3. See Kelupaotejin, “Eguo de piping wenxue” (literally, “Russian Critical Literature”), in Eguo wenxue yanjiu, special issue of Xiaoshuo yuebao in 1921. Zheng Zhenduo, Eguo wenxue shilüe (Concise History of Russian Literature, 1924), in Zheng Zhenduo quanji, vol. 15, p. 494. Cf. Chen Jianhua, 20 shiji Zhong-E wenxue guanxi, p. 86.

NOTES

155

71. Lu Xun’s introduction to The Harp, an anthology of ten short stories by Soviet writers published in early 1933, opened with the words: “The literature of Russia has been ‘for life’ (wei rensheng) since the time of Nicholas II”. See “Shuqin qianji”, collected in Nanqiang beidiao ji, in LXQ J, vol. 4, pp. 443–49. 72. See the recent study of the tensions between “literature” and “life”, in Chinese and Western literary discourse, Zhu Shoutong, Wenxue yu rensheng shiwu jiang (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 2006), here pp. 67–76. Much of the discussion in it is relevant for the issues raised here and below. 73. Further examples of the application of “rensheng de wenxue” and “rendao zhuyi” to Turgenev, by writers and translators in the early 1920s, can be found in Sun Naixiu, Tugeniefu yu Zhongguo, pp. 31, 101, 105. 74. Chen Jianhua, 20 shiji Zhong-E wenxue guanxi, pp. 78–9. See Geng Jizhi, “Eguo si da wenxuejia hezhuan” (A Collective Biography of Four Great Russian Writers), in Eguo wenxue yanjiu. 75. Hu Yuzhi, “Tugeniefu”, collected in Hu Yuzhi wenji, vol. 1, pp. 61–8 (here pp. 61–2). Cf. on this article: Sun Naixiu, Tugeniefu yu Zhongguo, pp. 102–4. 76. A much cited article by Wing-tsit Chan, “Chinese and Western Interpretations of jen (Humanity)”, Journal of Chinese Philosophy, vol. 2, no. 2 (March 1975), pp. 107–29, began by suggesting the translations of the term as “humanity, love, humaneness”. 77. Criticism of “Confucian humanism”, for the linking of a Western term to ancient Chinese thought, the vagueness of its definition and the ambition of proponents to offer it as an Eastern panacea for the ills of Western society, was expressed in two papers, delivered at the conference “East Asian Culture in Western Perceptions”, University of Latvia in Riga, on 24 October 2008: Vytis Silius, “What Is Confucian Humanism?”, and Kaspars Eihmanis, “Unlikely Advocates of Chinese Philosophy: François Jullien and Contemporary New Confucianism”. Huang, The Meaning of Freedom, p. 37, attaches the term “modern Confucian humanism” to a group of philosophers active in Hong Kong after 1949. 78. The main treatment of “humanism” in China, through the twentieth century, must now be Hao Minggong, Rendao zhuyi yu Ershi shiji de Zhongguo wenlun (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 2005). 79. On the positions of Critical Review, see Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900–1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 246–56, and (by Mei Guangdi’s daughter) Yi-tsi Mei Feuerwerker, “Reconsidering Xueheng: NeoConservatism in Early Republican China”, in Kirk A. Denton and Michel Hockx, eds., Literary Societies of Republican China (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008). 80. These examples are cited in Leo Ou-fan Lee, “Some Notes on ‘Culture’, ‘Humanism’, and ‘the Humanities’ in Modern Chinese Cultural Discourses”, Surfaces, vol. 5 (1995). See also Mei Guangdi, “A Critique of the New

156

81.

82. 83.

84.

85.

86. 87.

NOTES Culturists” (Ping tichang xin wenhua zhe, 1922), trans. in Denton, Modern Chinese Literary Thought, pp. 218–27. Liang Shiqiu, “Baibide ji qi renwen zhuyi” (Babbitt and His Humanism), reprinted in Jia Zhifang and Chen Sihe, eds., Zhong-wai wenxue guanxi shiziliao huibian (1898–1937) (Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue chubanshe, 2004), vol. 2, pp. 697–705, here p. 701. In a cluster of four articles on Babbitt in China, published in the journal Humanitas, vol. 17, nos. 1–2 (2004), cf. Bai Liping, “Babbitt’s Impact in China: The Case of Liang Shiqiu”. The recent flurry of publications includes Tze-ki Hon, “From Babbitt to ‘Bai Bide’: Interpretations of New Humanism in Xueheng”, in Kai-Wing Chow et al., eds., Beyond the May Fourth Paradigm: In Search of Chinese Modernity (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008). Focusing on the chief editor of Xueheng, Babbitt’s student and disciple Wu Mi (1894–1978), Hon also surveys the state of this rapidly developing field of research. Zhou Zuoren, “Ren de wenxue”, trans. as “Humane Literature” in Denton, Modern Chinese Literary Thought, pp. 151–61. Zhou Zuoren, “Wenxue shang de Eguo yu Zhongguo”, printed as the first article in the appendixes part of Eguo wenxue yanjiu; modern reprint in Beijing daxue bijiao wenxue yanjiusuo, ed., Zhongguo bijiao wenxue yanjiu ziliao (1919–1949), pp. 5–12. Although Zhou used his quotation from Andreev, “We are all equally unhappy”, as a statement on the character of Russian literature, these words came from a very different context, fragment 9 of the novella The Red Laugh. My thanks to Richard D. Davies for locating this source. Cf. Gamsa, The Chinese Translation of Russian Literature, p. 240. Gan Zhexian, “Zhongguo zhi Tuo’ersitai” (The Chinese Tolstoy; serialized in the Chenbao fujuan, August 1922) was a long systematic comparison between Tolstoy and Tao Yuanming (traditional dates 365–427), the poet most famous for his Notes on the Land of Peach Blossoms. See summaries in Chen Jianhua, 20 shiji Zhong-E wenxue guanxi, pp. 99–101; Lin Jinghua, Wudu Eluosi, pp. 120–21. Zhou Zuoren, “Wenxue shang de Eguo yu Zhongguo”, in Eguo wenxue yanjiu, pp. 4, 6. The respective terms in Russian are gumanizm and gumannost’. The former word entered the Russian vocabulary already in the beginning of the nineteenth century and relates to humanism as the cultural tradition identified with the Renaissance and harking back to ancient Greece. The latter word was a creation of the 1840s, a derivation either from the French humain or the German human, which became notable for its use by Belinskii: see P. Ia. Chernykh, Istoriko-etimologicheskii slovar’ sovremennogo russkogo iazyka (Historical-Etymological Dictionary of Contemporary Russian) (Moscow: Russkii iazyk, 1993), vol. 1, pp. 226–27. With Belinskii’s encouragement, gumannost’ (as carrier of the “benevolence”, “pity” and “compassion” that may

NOTES

88.

89. 90.

91.

92.

93.

94.

95.

157

all be subsumed under the English “humanitarianism”) became the quality in which Russian literature excelled, but which it would be misleading to identify with “humanist” values. Closely akin to this interpretation was the May Fourth understanding of “rendao” as the equivalent of the French humanité, evocative of the Enlightenment and of the French Revolution. A single issue of the journal Rendao, its Chinese title accompanied by Humanité, was published in Peking on 5 August 1920 by a group of students (including Zheng Zhenduo, Qu Qiubai and Geng Jizhi), whose previous journal, Xin shehui (New Society), had been banned shortly before. See Qu Qiubai, Exiang jicheng (A Journey to the Land of Hunger), in Qu Qiubai wenji (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1985), vol. 1, pp. 27–8; T. A. Hsia, The Gate of Darkness, p. 17. The students may have been acquainted with L’Humanité, the newspaper of the French socialists since 1904 (and organ of the French Communist Party after its foundation in 1920). Zheng Zhenduo, “Yi ge buxing de chefu” (1921), in Zheng Zhenduo quanji, vol. 1, pp. 379–81. Hu Shi, “Dong-xi wenhua de jiexian”, in Hu Shi wencun (Taipei: Yuandong tushu, 1953), vol. 3. Cf. his English-language essay, “The Civilizations of the East and the West”, in Charles A. Beard, ed., Whither Mankind: A Panorama of Modern Civilization (New York: Longmans, 1928), pp. 25–41. More mundane reasons for Hu Shi’s objection to rickshaws are suggested in Hanchao Lu, Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 67. Cheng Fangwu, “Shizhi fangyuzhan” (Defensive War for Poetry, 1923), in Cheng Fangwu wenji (Jinan: Shandong daxue chubanshe, 1985), pp. 75–88, at pp. 76–7. This quotes Hu Shi’s poem, “Renli chefu” (The Rickshaw Driver), from his collection Changshi ji. See original text “Renli che yu zhanjue”, and its translation under the above title, in Zhou Zuoren: Selected Essays, trans. David E. Pollard (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2006), pp. 88–93. “Xiandai Zhongguo wenxue zhi langmande qushi” (The Romantic Trend in Modern Chinese Literature, 1926), in Liang Shiqiu wenji (Xiamen: Lujiang chubanshe, 2002), vol. 1, pp. 34–54, at pp. 44–5. See Geremie R. Barmé, An Artistic Exile: A Life of Feng Zikai (1898–1975) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 364–68, and the reference to comments by C. T. Hsia, ibid., p. 372. Zheng Zhenduo, Eguo wenxue shilüe, in Zheng Zhenduo quanji, vol. 15, p. 495. Zheng would have read very similar words on Chernyshevskii in one of the most widely used sources of reference in the 1920s, Moissaye J. Olgin’s A Guide to Russian Literature (1820–1917) (originally published in 1920): “His numerous essays and articles had the aim of showing young Russia how to live . . .” (p. 57).

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NOTES

Two

Writers and Readers

1. Hu Yuzhi, “Tugeniefu”, in Hu Yuzhi wenji, vol. 1, p. 64, said that Turgenev’s Hunter’s Notes (1847–51) led to the liberation of the serfs in the same way that Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) by H. E. Beecher Stowe brought about the end of slavery (1862). Such hyperbolic praise of Hunter’s Notes, which met with no scepticism in China, was common in Russian and Western criticism. As Oxford University awarded an honorary doctorate of Civil Law to Ivan Turgenev, the first novelist ever to be honoured in this fashion, on 18 June 1879, the Regius Professor James Bryce read out a presentation in Latin, in which he claimed that “as soon as the Russian emperor had learnt from the works of this writer how miserable the situation of the peasant serfs was, he immediately took the decision to liberate them from the power of their lords”—thus, Bryce said, “the creation of a great talent may rise above reality itself ”. See J. S. G. Simmons, “Turgenev i Oksford”, in P. N. Berkov et al., eds., Russko-evropeiskie literaturnye sviazi. Sbornik statei k 70-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia akademika M. P. Alekseeva (Russian-European Literary Contacts: Essays for the 70th Birthday of Academician M. P. Alekseev) (Moscow and Leningrad: Nauka, 1966), pp. 392–98 (at p. 398). 2. On Russia, see the guide by Manfred Schruba, Literaturnye ob’edineniia Moskvy i Peterburga 1890–1917 godov (Literary Associations in Moscow and Petersburg; Moscow: NLO, 2004) and the introduction to it. On republicanperiod China, see Michel Hockx, Questions of Style: Literary Societies and Literary Journals in Modern China, 1911–1937 (Leiden: Brill, 2003); Denton and Hockx, Literary Societies of Republican China. 3. On “thick journals” in Russia, from the beginnings to the 1880s, see overview in William Mills Todd III, “The Ruse of the Russian Novel”, in Franco Moretti, ed., The Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), vol. 1, esp. pp. 411–13. His “ruse”, rather than the expected “rise”, refers to writers’ strategies in a social and political setting little favourable to the emergence of literature as a profession. See also Abram Reitblat and Christine Thomas, “From Literary Almanacs to ‘Thick Journals’: The Emergence of a Readership for Russian Literature, 1820s–1840s”, in Simon Eliot et al., eds., Literary Cultures and the Material Book (London: The British Library, 2007), pp. 191–205. 4. The perceived lack of an equivalent for Russian “repentance consciousness” in modern Chinese culture has preoccupied the critic Liu Zaifu (in emigration in the United States since 1989): see Link, The Uses of Literature, p. 45, n. 109 and p. 54, n. 137; on traditional culture, cf. comparative remarks in Wolfram Eberhard, Guilt and Sin in Traditional China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), pp. 20–21. Wang Jiezhi, Xuanze yu shiluo: Zhong-E wenxue guanxi de wenhua guanzhao (Nanjing: Jiangsu wenyi chubanshe, 1995), pp. 165–72, regards the critical introspection of Lu Xun and

NOTES

5.

6. 7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

159

Ba Jin as being closest to the Russian example, but sees their tendency for social and moral self-criticism as an exception in Chinese discourse, rejecting possible analogy between “repentance consciousness” and the Confucian imperative for “self-examination”. Consider, however, the case of writer Zhu Ziqing (1898–1948), described in Vera Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 184–94, 205–6. Guo Moruo found the legitimation he needed to expose his “moral sins” in print in the confessional writing of St Augustine, Rousseau and Tolstoy: Chen, From the May Fourth Movement to Communist Revolution, pp. 26, 45. David M. Bethea, “Literature”, in Nicholas Rzhevsky, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Modern Russian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), here pp. 165–66. Cf. comments on Russian “belatedness” in comparison to the West, ibid., pp. 169–70. This point is made by Benjamin Schwartz, “The Intelligentsia in Communist China: A Tentative Comparison”, in Richard Pipes, ed., The Russian Intelligentsia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), here pp. 176–77. “Avtobiografiia” (1913), in Shmelev, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 1, pp. 16, 18–9. Cf. a statement by Leonid Andreev, a writer who also only read Russian, in an “Autobiographical Sketch” of 1910: “By the age of twenty [i.e. 1891] I was well-acquainted with all the Russian and foreign (translated) literature; there were authors, such as Dickens for example, whom I had reread scores of times”. L. N. Andreev, Sobranie sochinenii, in 6 vols. (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1990–96), vol. 1, at p. 576. See Zheng Zhenduo, “Wenxue de tongyi guan” (A Unified View of Literature), Xiaoshuo yuebao, vol. 13, no. 8 (August 1922), pp. 1–10. Chen, From the May Fourth Movement to Communist Revolution, pp. 97–101. Chap. 4 in Lin Jinghua, Wudu Eluosi, does list (pp. 407–8) republicanperiod writers of Christian background (such as Lin Yutang), others who converted to Christianity (Xu Dishan, Bing Xin, Wen Yiduo) and many more with interest in Christian, or biblical, subjects. Lin stresses the limited knowledge in China of confessional differences within Christianity and poor understanding of the influence exerted on Russian literature by the Russian Orthodox worldview. Frederic Wakeman, Jr., “The Price of Autonomy: Intellectuals in Ming and Ch’ing Politics”, in S. N. Eisenstadt and S. R. Graubard, eds., Intellectuals and Tradition (New York: Humanities Press, 1973), pp. 35, 60–7. On the history and use of the word, see S. O. Shmidt, “K istorii slova ‘intelligentsiia’ ”, in D. S. Likhachev et al., eds., Rossiia, Zapad, Vostok: Vstrechnye techeniia. K 100-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia akademika M. P. Alekseeva (St Petersburg: Nauka, 1996), and Galina N. Skliarevskaia, “Russkie poniatiia ‘intelligentsiia’, ‘intelligent’: Razmyshleniia o semanticheskikh

160

14. 15.

16.

17.

18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

NOTES transformatsiiakh”, in Peter Thiergen, ed., Russische Begriffsgeschichte der Neuzeit: Beiträge zu einem Forschungsdesiderat (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2006). The literature on the intelligentsia as a cultural phenomenon is very large: see, e.g., the essays in T. B. Kniazevskaia, ed., Russkaia intelligentsiia. Istoriia i sud’ ba (Moscow: Nauka, 1999), and Boris Uspenskii, “Russkaia intelligentsiia kak spetsificheskii fenomen russkoi kul’tury”, in his Etiudy o russkoi istorii (St Petersburg: Azbuka, 2002). See Igal Halfin, From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000). Zhishi fenzi replaced zhishi jieji (“the knowledgeable class”), the term initially appropriated from the Japanese in the 1910s as an alternative to the old Chinese “literati” and “scholars”. Eddy U, “Reification of the Chinese Intellectual: On the Origins of the CCP Concept of Zhishifenzi”, Modern China, vol. 35, no. 6 (November 2009), pp. 604–31, here pp. 608–12. Attitudes towards religious sectarians also differed widely: many writers in Russia expressed admiration for Old Believers as the representatives of an authentically Russian way of life, and showed an interest in other sects. Educated Chinese, however, shared the state’s fear and suspicion of heterodox believers. A social group to be set apart here are republican-period scientists. Tracing their mobilization for work under the Kuomintang’s National Defence Planning Commission and its successor organizations, William C. Kirby, “Technocratic Organization and Technological Development in China: The Nationalist Experience and Legacy, 1928–1953”, in Denis Fred Simon and Merle Goldman, eds., Science and Technology in Post-Mao China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 23–43, suggests that this “scientific and technological elite” (which, he points out, may be compared to Soviet-period “technical intelligentsia”) was drawn into state service because of wartime patriotic sentiment. Cf. Schwartz, “The Intelligentsia in Communist China: A Tentative Comparison”, p. 177. See Charles W. Hayford, To the People: James Yen and Village China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). Cf. Hung Chang-tai, Going to the People: Chinese Intellectuals and Folk Literature, 1918–1937 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 173–75. Alexander Etkind, “Orientalism Reversed: Russian Literature in the Times of Empire”, Modern Intellectual History, vol. 4, no. 3 (2007), p. 626. “Moral and political pressure” on writers to represent “communal instincts” intensified by the mid-1930s, according to Anderson, The Limits of Realism, p. 189 (ibid., p. 182, calls this “the true drama of 1930s’ fiction”). Ibid., p. 201, concludes (without mentioning the Russian example) that by the end of the decade “humanistic pity” in fiction had been superseded by descriptions of politically unified masses.

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23. For a survey of these origins, see W. Gareth Jones, “Politics”, in Malcolm V. Jones and Robin Feuer Miller, eds., The Cambridge Companion to the Classic Russian Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 24. The last point is argued in Zhao Ming, “Tuo’ersitai, Tugeniefu, Qiehefu: 20 shiji Zhongguo wenxue jieshou Eguo wenxue de san zhong moshi”, Waiguo wenxue pinglun, no. 1 (1997), a provocative essay disputing many received notions (such as Mao Dun’s claim of being a student of Tolstoy). Zhao regards republican-period statements about “learning” from the Russian classics as wishful thinking at best. Tolstoy’s most perceptible effect in China was to have served as a model of personal integrity for a writer such as Ba Jin (whom Zhao calls a “character out of Russian literature”); Turgenev was read mainly for the love stories, to which May Fourth readers were susceptible no less than the readers of entertainment fiction, while genuine appreciation of Chekhov, impossible within a literary discourse demanding hero figures and “answers to the questions of life”, still needs to await the maturation of the Chinese reader. This article understandably created a stir, but in a later issue of the journal Waiguo wenxue pinglun it received the support of Zha Mingjian: see his comments in no. 4 (1997), pp. 131–34. 25. Quoted in the entry by V. N. Baskakov in P. A. Nikolaev, Russkie pisateli 1800–1917: biograficheskii slovar’ (Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 1989), vol. 1, p. 411. Another useful perspective is provided in S. B. Dzhimbinov, “Velikii knigochei i ego trudy” (The Great Book Lover and His Works), an introduction to vol. 1 of Vengerov, Russkaia literatura XX veka 1890–1910 (Moscow: “XXI vek–soglasie”, 2000). 26. Vengerov, “V chem ocharovanie russkoi literatury XIX veka?”, Russkaia slovesnost’, no. 2 (1993). Excerpts of this lecture are also reprinted in S. Konovalov and D. J. Richards, eds., Russian Critical Essays: XXth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), pp. 226–32. 27. Vorovskii’s article, “Bazarov and Sanin: Two Kinds of Nihilism” (1909), was translated in China by Feng Xuefeng: see Xiaoshuo yuebao, vol. 19, no. 10 (October 1928). 28. The didacticism in Sanin was noticed in 1913 by D. H. Lawrence, whom one could have imagined as Artsybashev’s ideal reader. Lawrence found Sanin “very interesting” (though not “very good”) and “a bit too much of an illustrated idea of how one should behave—exactly like the novels to promulgate virtue”. He had borrowed the book (in either the French or the German translation) from the son of Constance Garnett. See The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, eds. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), vol. 2, pp. 33, 70. 29. “Smert’ Bashkina”, in Mikhail P. Artsybashev, Sobranie sochinenii (Collected Works), in 3 vols. (Moscow: Terra, 1994), vol. 3, p. 683. Artsybashev expressed strong criticism of “the writer’s” authority as teacher and prophet in his essays of the 1910s, “Uchiteli zhizni” (The Teachers of Life) and “Propoved’ i zhizn’ ” (Preaching and Life); see ibid., pp. 718–60.

162

NOTES

30. Andrew Wachtel, “Psychology and Society”, in Jones and Miller, The Cambridge Companion to the Classic Russian Novel, p. 136. 31. “A celebrated scholar in England once remarked that fiction is the soul of the people. How true! How true!” Liang Qichao, “Foreword to the Publication of Political Novels in Translation” (1898), in Denton, Modern Chinese Literary Thought, at p. 73. 32. See, e.g., Ernest Barker, National Character and the Factors in Its Formation (London: Methuen, 1927). These are large questions, studied in recent years by historians such as Julia Stapleton and Peter Mandler. Closer to our subject, consider the opening sentence of Olgin, A Guide to Russian Literature (1820–1917): “A national literature may be viewed as a manifestation of a purely creative genius, or as a reflection of the spiritual life of a people, or as a picture of its national character and socio-political conditions”. Another guide, widely cited in Chinese even before its translation in 1933, Maurice Baring’s Landmarks in Russian Literature (1910; reissued London: Methuen, 1960), pp. 72–3, 78, explained why a “truly great” writer must be representative of his nation. An identical conviction is expressed by Zhi Liang, “Lun wenxue de minzu jieshou” (On the National Reception of Literature), in idem, ed., Eguo wenxue yu Zhongguo (1991); by Wang Jiezhi, Xuanze yu shiluo (1995), p. 100, and a host of other contemporary authors in the PRC. 33. See chap. 2, “China in Britain, and in the British Imagination”, in Robert Bickers, Britain in China: Community, Culture and Colonialism 1900– 1949 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1999), at pp. 26–31. 34. This is the subject of Lung-kee Sun, “Chinese Intellectuals’ Notion of ‘Epoch’ (Shidai) in the Post-May Fourth Era”, Chinese Studies in History, vol. 20, no. 2 (winter 1986–87). 35. Arguments along these lines may be found in Guo Moruo, “Revolution and Literature” (1926), trans. in John Berninghausen and Ted Huters, eds., Revolutionary Literature in China: An Anthology (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1976), pp. 28–32. At the time they could still be answered by voices such as that of Liang Shiqiu, “Literature and Revolution” (1928), trans. in Denton, Modern Chinese Literary Thought, pp. 307–315 (Sun, “Chinese Intellectuals’ Notion of ‘Epoch’ ”, p. 64, called this article “a last-ditch battle in defense of May Fourth individualism”). Cf. a doggerel by the Communist critic Ah Ying (pen-name of Qian Xingcun), urging “leisured” and “petty bourgeois” Chinese writers to follow the example of Sergei Esenin, the poet who committed suicide declaring that he did not fit “the age”: “Yesaining de shi” (Esenin’s Poem, 1928), in Ah Ying quanji, in 12 vols. (Hefei: Anhui jiaoyu chubanshe, 2003), vol. 1, pp. 197–200. Speaking in the name of the new “age”, Ah Ying’s essay “The Bygone Age of Ah Q” (see Denton, Modern Chinese Literary Thought, pp. 276–88), aimed earlier in the same year to hasten the departure of Lu Xun.

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163

36. “And, so it seems to me, the Revolution has justified all my main tenets. The most important one of these [. . .]—the view of new Russian literature as a century-long preparation for the Revolution—can hardly today be called a personal ‘view’ and interpretation. This, methinks, is today for everybody a clear, and for all an indubitable, fact”. As pointed out by Dzhimbinov, “Velikii knigochei i ego trudy”, in Vengerov, Russkaia literatura XX veka 1890–1910, p. 13, Russia’s pre-eminent bibliographer died as the result of malnutrition in revolutionary Petrograd within but a year of uttering these words in an introduction to a reprint of his Collected Works in 1919. The inner cover of Sobranie sochinenii S. A. Vengerova, 2nd ed., vol. 1, Geroicheskii kharakter russkoi literatury (Petrograd: Svetoch, 1919), which I have used at the library of the Slavisches Seminar at the University of Zurich, was bound with a questionnaire for entering the Bolshevik Party. For a restatement of this thesis, shortly before the collapse of the Soviet system, see K. N. Lomunov, “Russkaia literaturnaia klassika i revoliutsionno-osvoboditel’noe dvizhenie”, in V. R. Shcherbina, ed., Mirovoe znachenie russkoi literatury XIX veka (Moscow: Nauka, 1987). 37. N. Ia. Berkovskii, ed. by V. G. Bazanov and G. M. Fridlender, O mirovom znachenii russkoi literatury (On the World Importance of Russian Literature) (Leningrad: Nauka, 1975), only mentioned Asia, negatively, to rebut the claims of European commentators who traced Russian literature to its supposedly “Oriental” roots; see pp. 31–7, 126, 133–34, esp. p. 169 (on the error of comparing the plays of Alexander Ostrovskii with “primitive theatre such as the Japanese or the Chinese”). This study of the effects of Russian literature on French, German and British literary cultures posited its superiority to them all. 38. See, e.g., Timothy Brook, “Capitalism and the Writing of Modern History in China”, in Brook and Gregory Blue, eds., China and Historical Capitalism: Genealogies of Sinological Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 110–57, at p. 139. 39. Cf. T. A. Hsia, “Demons in Paradise: The Chinese Images of Russia”, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 349 (September 1963), p. 36. 40. Chen Jianhua, 20 shiji Zhong-E wenxue guanxi, p. 165. An identical argument is developed, e.g., in the foreword to Sun Naixiu, Tugeniefu yu Zhongguo, pp. 5–7, 13–4, 22–3. 41. Vitalii A. Shentalinskii, Donos na Sokrata (Moscow: Formika-S, 2001), esp. pp. 72–3. These writings were first made public in Russia in 2002: Vladimir Korolenko, Byla by zhiva Rossiia! Neizvestnaia publitsistika 1917–1921 gg. (As Long as Russia Lives! Unknown Essays, 1917–21) (Moscow: Agraf, 2002). 42. Tolstoy’s letter to Gu Hongming (1857–1928) was well-known, though rarely discussed in the PRC prior to the appearance of Wu Zelin, Tuo’ersitai he Zhongguo gudian wenhua sixiang (Tolstoy and the Thought of Classical Chinese Culture) (Beijing: Beijing shifan daxue chubanshe, 2000). Ah Ying,

164

43.

44.

45.

46. 47.

NOTES who quoted it in 1929 to accuse Tolstoy of “foul preaching” (Ah Ying quanji, vol. 1, p. 44), switched to the diametrically opposite position by 1938 (ibid., vol. 5, pp. 788–89). The Taiwan scholar Li Sher-shiueh has drawn attention to the discrepancy between Tolstoy’s cultural conservatism and his enlistment by the Chinese Left; his Christian faith and the anti-religious zeal of both the Bolshevik and New Culture reformers. See Li Shixue, Zhong-Xi wenxue yinyuan, p. 141 ff. See, e.g., Olgin, A Guide to Russian Literature (1820–1917), p. 14: “Russia instantly recognized in Pushkin her own and loved him as people love their soil, their nature, the house of their parents. Pushkin’s influence on the following generations is incalculable. Not one Russian possessing the knowledge of reading has failed to learn from Pushkin beautiful and inspiring things”. The “things” learned were meant to extend beyond the realm of literature: they are described as “love [for] Russian nature and the best elements in the past and present of Russia” (pp. 17–8). On Russia’s nineteenth-century writers as teachers, see more ibid., p. 65 (on Pisarev), p. 67 (on the poet Nekrasov) and pp. 76–7 (on Turgenev). A powerful argument for the potential of classical and canonical literature to reach readers at all levels of society and against the patronizing association of the lower classes with a set of “alternative values” was mounted in Jonathan Rose, “Rereading the English Common Reader: A Preface to a History of Audiences” (1992), now in David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery, eds., The Book History Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 324–39 and was developed in Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). Gary Saul Morson, “Philosophy in the Nineteenth-Century Novel”, in Jones and Miller, The Cambridge Companion to the Classic Russian Novel, p. 152, adds that these writers considered the millenarian tendency of the intelligentsia, their readers, as “at best misguided and at worst extremely dangerous”. This essay underestimates the belief of Russian writers in abstractions and their propensity for espousing total solutions for the problems of society. Pamela Davidson, “The Moral Dimension of the Prophetic Ideal: Pushkin and His Readers”, Slavic Review, vol. 61, no. 3 (autumn 2002), takes a leap in the opposite direction by connecting “the exaggerated adulation of writers as a source of moral and spiritual authority” to the “messianic ideals that determined the course of Russian history” (pp. 517–18). Irina Gutkin, The Cultural Origins of the Socialist Realist Aesthetic 1890–1934 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999), pp. 32–7. In the end, as Shentalinskii, Donos na Sokrata, p. 167, observes about Boris Savinkov’s voracious reading in Lubianka prison in 1925 (his diary reflections on rhythm and style in Russian and French literature and his hectic literary work in anticipation of near death), the revolutionary who had lived so as to “make the word into deed” is left alone with the Word, as his last companion. Savinkov killed himself (or was murdered by his jailers) in May that year. The

NOTES

48.

49.

50. 51.

52.

53. 54.

55. 56.

165

return to literature and poetry of the imprisoned Qu Qiubai in 1935 has been described, most recently, in Jamie Greenbaum’s commented translation of Qu Qiubai, Superfluous Words (Canberra: Pandanus Books, 2006). As A. James Gregor puts it, “the evidence reveals that the ‘revolutionary’ leftwing regimes of Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot have left us a history of human bestiality and homocidal [sic] violence that easily matches that of National Socialist Germany”. See his The Search for Neofascism: The Use and Abuse of Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 51. Cf. on this last point comments in S. A. Smith, Revolution and the People in Russia and China: A Comparative History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 193–95, 203–5. See chap. 2, “Leonard Schapiro’s Russia”, in Kelly, Toward Another Shore. See, e.g., the beginning of his Ocherki prestupnogo mira (Sketches of the Criminal World, written in 1959), part One of Kolyma Tales, in Varlam Shalamov, Sobranie sochinenii v 4-kh tomakh (Collected Works in 4 vols.) (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1998), vol. 2. The idea that classical Russian literature was to be blamed for “ruining Russia” (a mirror image of the Communist celebration of “critical realism” as inspirer and forerunner of the Revolution) was expressed in the 1910s by the critic Vasilii Rozanov (1856–1919): see entry on him by V. G. Sukach, in Nikolaev, Russkie pisateli 20 veka, p. 597. See chap. 4, “Do Books Make Revolutions?” in Roger Chartier, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1991), which, discussing the relations between “reading” and “belief”, asks whether contemporary philosophical books “should be taken as the torches that set the Revolution ablaze” (p. 81). Chartier disagrees here with Robert Darnton, who would answer that question with a resolute “yes”; Darnton’s response to Chartier may be found in his The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York: Norton, 1996). A Russianist’s statement of belief in the decisive contribution of (dissident) books to the “revolution” of 1989 is Karl Schlögel, “Lob des Schweignes. Über Sprachlosigkeit in geschichtlichen Umbruchzeiten”, speech on receiving the Prix Européen de l’Essai Charles Veillon (1990); published as Fondation Charles Veillon, Karl Schlögel (Bussigny, 1991), pp. 21–30. Halfin, From Darkness to Light, p. 260. See Michael Schoenhals, “Demonising Discourse in Mao Zedong’s China: People vs Non-People”, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, vol. 8, nos. 3–4 (2007). Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 242. “Humanist” is meant here as the opposite of “mediaeval”. See Qian Gurong, “Lun ‘Wenxue shi renxue’ ”, in “Lun ‘Wenxue shi renxue’ ” pipan ji (Shanghai: Xin wenyi chubanshe, 1958), pp. 138–84; partially translated in Hualing Nieh, ed., Literature of the Hundred Flowers, in 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), vol. 1, pp. 181–98. In both

166

57.

58.

59.

60.

61.

62. 63. 64.

65.

NOTES publications, the essay is accompanied by articles criticizing it. Cf. the discussion of “Wenxue shi renxue” in Hao Minggong, Rendao zhuyi yu Ershi shiji de Zhongguo wenlun, pp. 139–52. D. W. Fokkema, “Chinese Criticism of Humanism: Campaigns against the Intellectuals 1964–1965”, The China Quarterly, no. 26 (April–June 1966). On the fierce criticism of humanism as “capitalist” and “revisionist” up to the late 1970s, cf. Chen Jianhua, 20 shiji Zhong-E wenxue guanxi, pp. 242, 249–51. Cf. Axel Schneider, “Bridging the Gap: Attempts at Constructing a ‘New’ Historical-Cultural Identity in the People’s Republic of China”, East Asian History, vol. 22 (December 2001), pp. 129–44. Hu Feng, “Gaoerji zai shijie wenxueshi shang jiashangle shenme?” (What did Gorky Add to World Literary History?), in Hu Feng quanji, in 10 vols. (Wuhan: Hubei renmin chubanshe, 1999), vol. 2, pp. 581–85; commented in Chen Jianhua, 20 shiji Zhong-E wenxue guanxi, pp. 161–62, and in Lin Jinghua, Wudu Eluosi, pp. 377–78. Hu Feng’s translations are collected in vol. 8 of Hu Feng quanji. Liu Yan, Xiehefu yu Zhongguo xiandai wenxue (Shanghai: Shanghai shehui kexueyuan chubanshe, 2005), pp. 78–9, highlights the connection between an article on Chekhov, which Hu Feng published in February 1945, and his opposition to the demands of “revolutionary literature”. On Hu Feng’s article in commemoration of Pushkin in 1947 and his translations of Gorky’s essays on Russian writers, see Lin Jinghua, Wudu Eluosi, pp. 208–11. See Ba Jin’s account of his recent meeting with Herzen’s great-grandson in Paris, “Monsieur Noël Rist”, in his Random Thoughts, trans. Geremie Barmé (Hong Kong: Joint Publishing, 1984), pp. 110–13. The original text is in Ba Jin, Suixiang lu (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1987), pp. 89–92. While living in Paris in 1927–28, Ba Jin had paid homage to the tombs and monuments of Rousseau, Voltaire, Hugo and Zola, all of whom he also called his “teachers”: see Random Thoughts, pp. 70–1. Quoted by Sun Naixiu, Tugeniefu yu Zhongguo, p. 54. See the chapters on Herzen in Kelly, Toward Another Shore, pp. 307–52, and introductory remarks ibid., pp. 10–13. A recent mention of Eichenwald, along with other émigré critics of the time, is made by Wang Jiezhi in an introductory article setting out to correct the established image of twentieth-century Russian literary criticism as the preserve of the Marxist school. See his “Zhongguo wenxue jieshou 20 shiji Eguo wenlun de huiwang yu sikao”, Eluosi wenyi, no. 2 (2004). This expulsion is the subject of Stuart Finkel, On the Ideological Front: The Russian Intelligentsia and the Making of the Soviet Public Sphere (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); cf. V. G. Makarov, ed., Vysylka vmesto rasstrela: deportatsiia intelligentsii v dokumentakh VChK–GPU, 1921–1923 (Expulsion Instead of Execution: The Deportation of the Intelligentsia in the Documents of VChK–GPU) (Moscow: Russkii put’, 2005). Eichenwald’s

NOTES

66. 67. 68.

69.

70. 71.

72.

73.

74.

167

best-known series of critical essays, Siluety russkikh pisatelei (Silhouettes of Russian Writers; begun in 1906), included the attack on Belinskii that enraged the socialist literary camp in 1914: see, in the first Russian re-edition since 1917 (Moscow: Terra, Respublika, 1998; in 2 vols.), vol. 2, pp. 199–207, 252–86 (the latter—a “reply to critics” on the Belinskii affair). Osip Mandelstam, Sobranie sochinenii v 4-kh tomakh (Collected Works in 4 vols.) (Moscow, 1993–97), vol. 2, p. 358. Boris Pasternak, Safe Conduct: An Autobiography and Other Writings (New York: New Directions, 1958), p. 119. One would not want to “explain” this suicide only by biographical circumstances and political oppression. Bethea, “Literature”, pp. 167–68, 178, 192–96, connects the self-inflicted deaths of Tsvetaeva and Mayakovsky to the demanding Russian view of the poet as “secular saint”. Marina Mogil’ner, Mifologiia “podpol’nogo cheloveka”: radikal’nyi mikrokosm v Rossii nachala XX veka kak predmet semioticheskogo analiza (Moscow: NLO, 1999), pp. 205–6, suggests that older readers, who had been exposed to the critical deconstruction of the revolutionary Hero in pre-war (“Silver age”) Russian literature, would have been largely immune to the resuscitation of the same figure after 1917. Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol, corrected ed. (New York: New Directions, 1961), pp. 38–9. Awareness of the role that writers of entertainment fiction played in the introduction of foreign literature is still new in China, promoted by the research of Guo Yanli: see his Zhongguo jindai fanyi wenxue gailun, 2nd revised ed. (Wuhan: Hubei jiaoyu chubanshe, 2005). Cf. Gamsa, The Chinese Translation of Russian Literature, pp. 289–304. Zhao also translated works by Turgenev, including the seminal novel Rudin (serialized in Xiaoshuo yuebao from January to April 1928 and published by the Commercial Press in September the same year). See, e.g., Qu Qiubai, “Kuli de fanyi” (The Translation of Coolies, 1931), in Qu Qiubai wenji, vol. 1, pp. 379–80 (with Zhao’s statement on “fluency”, dating to the same year, quoted in editors’ commentary). The title of this piece referred to a recent translation of the book Chinese Coolies by the Polish writer and traveller in the Orient, Wacław Sieroszewski (1858–1945), but the double entendre must have been intended. Cf. Leo Tak-hung Chan, TwentiethCentury Chinese Translation Theory: Modes, Issues, Debates (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2004), pp. 22–4, and disparaging references to Zhao’s “fluency” in the Qu Qiubai–Lu Xun correspondence on translation in 1931–32, as made available ibid. On Lu Xun’s criticism, see ibid., p. 159. Cf. Kowallis, The Lyrical Lu Xun, p. 213. Zhao himself dared not argue with a writer he greatly admired. A section of his extensive book collection (donated to Fudan University in Shanghai after his death) consisted of publications by and about Lu Xun. See Jiang Jurong, “Zhao Jingshen xiansheng de cangshu”, in Li Ping and

168

75.

76.

77.

78. 79. 80. 81.

82.

NOTES Hu Ji, eds., Zhao Jingshen yinxiang (Shanghai: Xuelin chubanshe, 2002), here p. 83; on “the Milky Way”, see Jia Zhifang, “Zhao Jingshen xiansheng meiyou yicuo” (Zhao Jingshen Did Not Mistranslate), followed by Xu Shuofang, “Qieshuo ‘niunai lu’ ” (Another Word on “The Cow Milk Road”), ibid., pp. 119–22. Xu Shuofang, it may be noted, would still prefer Zhao to have kept out his “cow”. These sketches were brought together posthumously in Zhao Jingshen, ed. Ni Fan, Wo yu wentan (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1999), here pp. 77, 96. Cf. his little-known translation from the English of Na Vostoke (In the East, 1936), by the arch-Communist author Petr A. Pavlenko (1899–1951): a novel predicting war between the Soviet Union and Japan as well as socialist revolutions in China, India and Indochina. The translator’s Introduction, signed by “Lingfeng” in Hong Kong, November 1939, tied the plot to China’s current war of resistance. See Paifulangke, Hongyi dongfei (accompanying English title: Red Wings Fly East) (Chongqing: Da shidai chubanshe, 1940). My thanks to Konstantin Tertitskii for sending me his copy of this translation. See “Xin E duanpian xiaoshuo ji” (1957), in Ye Lingfeng, Dushu suibi (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1992), vol. 2, pp. 11–4; the journal, combining articles of an “aesthetic” bent with a leftist political line, is described as “a perfect reflection of Ye’s own intellectual profile” in Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 256. Ye believed his anthology to have been the second after Yandai (The Pipe), translated by Cao Jinghua. V. V. Petrov, “Sovetskaia literatura v Kitae v 1928–1930 gg.”, in A. I. Borshchukov et al., eds., Literatura stran zarubezhnogo Vostoka i sovetskaia literatura (Moscow: Nauka, 1977), p. 223, correctly indicates that Cao’s book only appeared some months after Ye’s, in December 1928. Ibid., p. 248. Ibid., pp. 239–43. Cf. Jones, “Politics”, p. 73. Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol, pp. 115–16, 120. The civic school of criticism (Belinskii, Chernyshevskii, Pisarev, Dobroliubov and Nikolai Mikhailovskii) is dealt with ibid., p. 128. Cf. ibid., p. 85: “It is inconceivable what type of mind one must have to see in Gogol a forerunner of the ‘naturalistic school’ and a ‘realistic painter of life in Russia’ ”. With reference to the reception of Gogol abroad, cf. George Hyde, “Russian Nineteenth-Century Fiction”, in Peter France, ed., The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 588: “[Gogol] was dragged screaming by his translators into the realist fold, and made to yield up ‘descriptions’ of Russian life which surely (if taken literally) warped people’s imaginings of Russia and Russians for generations”. See Ba Jin, Suixiang lu (no. 69), pp. 377–85.

NOTES

169

83. Evgeny Dobrenko, The Making of the State Reader: Social and Aesthetic Contexts of the Reception of Soviet Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 12–4, 77. Link, The Uses of Literature, pp. 210–11, points out that “preferences” as indicated in such surveys were necessarily limited by the availability of titles in the book market. A form of reader response common to China and Russia were readers’ letters to writers; cf. ibid., pp. 217–18. 84. On early Soviet Russia, see A. K. Sokolov, “Predislovie” (Introduction), in his, ed., Golos naroda. Pis’ma i otkliki riadovykh sovetskikh grazhdan o sobytiiakh 1918–1932 gg. (The People’s Voice: Letters and Responses by Ordinary Soviet Citizens on the Events of 1918–32) (Moscow: Rosspen, 1997), pp. 5, 9. The letters were not always intended for publication; as newspapers and journals were organs of the state, writing to them was a way of communicating with the authorities. As Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–1962 (forthcoming; New York: Walker & Company, 2010), shows with regard to the PRC, citizens wrote in profusion to China Daily, to the provincial authorities and directly to Chairman Mao. Few letters to the press were published (and that after being rewritten); many of their authors sought redress against local-level abuse and some obtained it, but the more critical letter writers would be traced (as the police routinely opened the mail) and punished. 85. See Dobrenko, The Making of the State Reader, beginning of chap. 8.

Three

The Agents of Soviet Literature

1. Rachel May, “Russian: Literary Translation into English”, in Olive Classe, ed., Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English, in 2 vols. (London and Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2000), vol. 2, at p. 1207. 2. Zheng Zhenduo, “Azhibasuifu yu Shaning: Shaning de yi xu”, p. 10, n. 6. 3. See “Xuyan” (Foreword), in Exiang jicheng, in Qu Qiubai wenji, vol. 1, p. 3. A recent non-academic edition of this travelogue is recommended: Qu Qiubai zuopin jingbian (The Best of Qu Qiubai) (Guilin: Lijiang chubanshe, 2004), pp. 231–306. A study of Qu Qiubai that devotes much space to his two years in Russia is chap. 1 of T. A. Hsia, The Gate of Darkness; see also Li Yu-ning and Michael Gasster, “Ch’ü Ch’iu-pai’s Journey to Russia, 1920–1922”, Monumenta Serica, vol. 29 (1970–71). 4. See esp. the beginning of section 4 in Exiang jicheng, in Qu Qiubai wenji, vol. 1, p. 23. 5. Ibid, p. 31. Here Qu also reveals the classical origins of the “land of hunger”: the difficult journey to Soviet Russia is for him an act of sacrifice, comparable to the decision of the righteous brothers of antiquity, Bo Yi and Shu Qi, who had starved themselves to death on a remote mountain so as “not to eat the grain” of the Zhou dynasty.

170 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

NOTES Ibid., pp. 33–4. Ibid., pp. 90–93. Ibid., pp. 96–7, 99. Ibid., pp. 104, 109. See now an illustrated edition, Qu Qiubai, Chidu xinshi (Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue chubanshe, 2004). As Jiang Guangci explained in the introduction, his own part of the book was placed first because revolutionary literature was more important and interesting for the readers. He was, though, deeply grateful to his friend “Qu Weita” (pseudonym of Qu Qiubai) for his contribution on Russian literature before 1917. See Eguo wenxue shi (A History of Russian Literature), in Qu Qiubai wenji, vol. 2, p. 134, and the recent edition: Qu Qiubai, Eguo wenxue shi ji qita (Shanghai: Fudan daxue chubanshe, 2004). Zheng Zhenduo, Eguo wenxue shilüe, in Zheng Zhenduo quanji, vol. 15, pp. 450–53. See the many errors in Zheng’s writings on Russian literature, identified in Lin Jinghua, Wudu Eluosi, pp. 170–71. Zheng’s Concise History, for one, was certainly no mere retelling in Chinese of Maurice Baring’s An Outline of Russian Literature (first ed. 1915), as argued by Mau-sang Ng, The Russian Hero in Modern Chinese Fiction (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1988), pp. 26–7. In his extensive bibliography, Zheng made no secret of his debt to Baring, but his use of the Outline comes close to standard academic practice in becoming only one of the many sources that he weaves into his chronicle (it will suffice to compare the treatment of Pushkin and Lermontov by Baring and Zheng: the two poets, occupying more than a third of the English book, receive less than five pages altogether in the Chinese, which is far more interested in Russian prose). Chen Jianhua, 20 shiji Zhong-E wenxue guanxi, pp. 94–5; Lin Jinghua, Wudu Eluosi, p. 501. The poet and early Bolshevik agitator Dem’ian Bednyi (1883– 1945), a favourite of Lenin but not (contrary to Lin’s claim, ibid.) of Stalin, would be excluded from the Party in 1938. Ellen Widmer, “Qu Qiubai and Russian Literature”, in Merle Goldman, ed., Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977). This translation, begun by Qu in 1933–34 and left incomplete at his death, was first published in 1940: see Xie Tianzhen and Zha Mingjian, eds., Zhongguo xiandai fanyi wenxue shi (1898–1949) (Shanghai: Shanghai waiyu jiaoyu chubanshe, 2003), pp. 146–47. As a pointer to the aesthetic sensibilities of a Party ideologue, who demanded politicized literature from Chinese writers, Qu’s Gypsies may be compared with Zhou Yang’s involvement in a collaborative translation of Anna Karenina (first volume published 1936, second in 1956; ibid., p. 97). Both works belonged to a classical canon sanctioned by the Soviet Union. Qu Qiubai, trans. Greenbaum, Superfluous Words, p. 172. See also the translation and commentary by Alain Roux and Wang Xiaoling, Qu Qiubai

NOTES

18. 19.

20. 21.

22.

23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

171

(1899–1935), “Des Mots de trop” (Duoyu de hua): L’autobiographie d’un intellectuel engagé chinois (Paris and Louvain: Éditions Peeters, 2005). The Chinese original, included in an annex to the French edition, is by now allowed into print in the PRC: see Qu Qiubai, Chidu xinshi, pp. 165–92. The blind admiration of the worldly and well-informed Mao Dun for the USSR is addressed in Lin Jinghua, Wudu Eluosi, p. 202. See post-script to the first PRC reprint, ed. by Ge Baoquan in 1984, as appended to Hu Yuzhi, Mosike yinxiang ji, in Hu Yuzhi wenji, vol. 2, pp. 354– 442. The entry on Hu Yuzhi in Zhongguo fanyijia cidian (Beijing: Zhongguo duiwai fanyi chubanshe, 1988), p. 279, calls this book “the first to systematically introduce the Soviet Union in China”. Mosike yinxiang ji, in Hu Yuzhi wenji, vol. 2, pp. 410–13. A. V. Golubev, “. . . Vzgliad na zemliu obetovannuiu”: Iz istorii sovetskoi kul’turnoi diplomatii 1920–1930-kh godov (Moscow: Institut rossiiskoi istorii RAN, 2004), pp. 140–42. Dreiser’s Russian Diary, eds. Thomas P. Riggio and James L. W. West III (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), includes critical remarks on the cult of Lenin (the portraits and statues of the Leader filling every available public space along with the images of Marx and Stalin), and “the kow-towing of the intelligentsia to the workingman & peasent [sic] with the gun” (p. 172). Despite its generally favourable image of the USSR, Dreiser Looks at Russia was only excerpted there and remained untranslated in China; see Michael David-Fox, “The Fellow Travelers Revisited: The ‘Cultured West’ through Soviet Eyes”, Journal of Modern History, vol. 75 (June 2003), pp. 300–35, at p. 320, and Wolfgang Bauer, Western Literature and Translation Work in Communist China (Frankfurt am Main and Berlin: Alfred Metzner Verlag, 1964), p. 26. See David E. Apter, “Bearing Witness: Maoism as Religion”, Copenhagen Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 22 (2005). For more Western parallels to the Chinese voyages to Moscow, cf. Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981) and Ludmila Stern, Western Intellectuals and the Soviet Union, 1920–40: From Red Square to the Left Bank (London: Routledge, 2006). “Preface to First Volume of American Edition”, included in Emma Goldman, My Disillusionment in Russia (London: C. W. Daniel, 1925), p. xi. Mosike yinxiang ji, in Hu Yuzhi wenji, vol. 2, pp. 421–25. Ibid., pp. 425–30. Hu Yuzhi, “Bali guoji xiju jie de liang wan: Eguo de xin yanju yishu”, Dongfang zazhi, vol. 25, no. 15 (10 August 1928), described his impressions of Turandot (this independent adaptation of Carlo Gozzi’s eighteenth-century play, set in an imagined Peking, was staged by Evgenii Vakhtangov in Moscow shortly before his death in 1922, four years prior to the posthumous release of Puccini’s opera by the same name) and, in lesser detail, 200,000 (first

172

28.

29.

30.

31.

32. 33.

NOTES staged, with Solomon Mikhoels in the leading role, in 1923, and included in the Yiddish Theatre’s programme when it performed in Paris in 1928). For more on Vakhtangov’s Turandot, see Nick Worrall, Modernism to Realism on the Soviet Stage: Tairov—Vakhtangov—Okhlopkov (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 127–39; on the Yiddish Theatre’s tour of Western Europe, Alla Zuskina-Perel’man, Puteshestvie Veniamina: Razmyshleniia o zhizni, tvorchestve i sud’ be evreiskogo aktera Veniamina Zuskina (The Voyage of Veniamin: Reflections on the Life, Creative Work and Destiny of the Jewish Actor Veniamin Zuskin) (Jerusalem: Gesharim, 2002), pp. 101–14. The Red Poppy was first performed in Moscow in June 1927; for the name change, see G. V. Keldysh, ed., Entsiklopedicheskii muzykal’nyi slovar’ (An Encyclopaedic Musical Dictionary) (Moscow: Bol’shaia Sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1959), pp. 56, 119. Cf. Bei Wenli, “E-Su yishu zhong de Zhongguo qingdiao”, Eluosi wenyi, no. 4 (1999), pp. 57–8, for a somewhat different description of the ballet (which does not refer to Hu Yuzhi) and for a mention of the “Red Poppy incident” in late 1949. See also Bickers, Britain in China, pp. 45–7, on offensive stereotyping of Chinese in British plays staged by London theatres and Chinese protests against them in the late 1920s. Puccini’s Turandot, performed worldwide since its premiere in 1926, was banned from Chinese stages until the 1990s because of its allegedly offensive portrayal of Chinese cruelty. The story of the opera’s later admission into China, its “sinification” and adaptation, was told by Marco Ceresa in “From Music Box to Chinese Box: The Fable of Turandot between East and West”, a paper presented at the conference “East Asian Culture in Western Perceptions”, University of Latvia in Riga, on 23 October 2008. Chapter on Reinhold Gliere in Stanley D. Krebs, Soviet Composers and the Development of Soviet Music (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1970), at p. 75. The set designer of Red Poppy was Boris M. Erbstein (1901–63). His sometime teacher V. E. Meierhold was arrested in 1939 and executed in February 1940. The director and former star actor of the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre, Solomon M. Mikhoels, was murdered in an orchestrated car accident on 13 January 1948; his colleague and successor (who had played the first supporting role in 200,000), Veniamin L. Zuskin, was arrested on 24 December 1948 and shot together with other Jewish artists and writers on 12 August 1952. In memoirs published in the emigration, Boris Bazhanov, a former secretary of Stalin who escaped the Soviet Union in 1928, did describe VOKS (The AllSoviet Association for Cultural Contact with Foreign Countries) as a “theatre production”. Golubev, “. . . Vzgliad na zemliu obetovannuiu”, p. 104. Stanislav Rassadin, Samoubiitsy. Povest’ o tom, kak my zhili i chto chitali (Moscow: Tekst, 2002). Basic sources are the entries on Cao Jinghua and his daughter Cao Suling in Zhongguo fanyijia cidian and the autobiographical sketch by Cao Jinghua in Wang Shoulan, Dangdai wenxue fanyi baijia tan (Beijing: Beijing daxue

NOTES

34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

39. 40.

173

chubanshe, 1989), pp. 746–48. Zhang Demei and Leng Ke, Cao Jinghua jinian wenji, opens with a biographical outline by Zhang Demei, “Cao Jinghua zhuanlüe”. Cf. S. A. Smith, A Road Is Made: Communism in Shanghai, 1920–1927 (Richmond: Curzon, 2000), p. 19. The Socialist Youth League (SY) formed in Shanghai in August 1920 and was disbanded, for failing to conform to Communist ideological discipline, in May 1921 (ibid., pp. 14, 26). It was “refounded” (as CY) in November, this time according to the model of the Communist Youth International (ibid., p. 45). Jiang Deming, “Ting Cao lao tan Wei Suyuan”, in Zhang Demei and Leng Ke, Cao Jinghua jinian wenji, here pp. 128–29. Cao Jinghua described the adventures of the voyage in a lively play, Kongbu zhi ye (A Night of Terror, 1923): see Jiang Deming, “Cao Jinghua yu Kongbu zhi ye” (1978), ibid., pp. 105–8, and the text in Cao Jinghua yizhu wenji (Beijing: Beijing daxue and Hebei jiaoyu chubanshe, 1989), vol. 9, pp. 31–47. A number of modern Chinese writers, translators and political figures had a strong personal connection with the Soviet Union. Cao’s daughter has the “Su” of “Sulian” (Soviet Union) in her given name. Other examples are a son of Lao She, who studied forestry in Leningrad, and the wife of translator Ge Baoquan who, while Ge served in the PRC embassy, graduated from the Moscow Conservatory. See Oleg B. Rakhmanin, Iz kitaiskikh bloknotov (Moscow: Nauka, 1982), pp. 24, 31. When Mao Dun and his wife visited Moscow in the 1940s, they met with their niece Maya, daughter of Mao Dun’s younger brother Shen Zemin; born while her parents studied at Sun Yat-sen University in 1926, she was left in a Moscow institution when they returned to China in 1930 and would only arrive in the PRC in 1950. See Zhong Guisong, Shen Zemin zhuan (A Biography of Shen Zemin) (Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 2003), pp. 142, 312. Much on these human connections, the personal dimension of early Chinese-Soviet relations, can be found in Du Weihua and Wang Yiqiu, eds., Zai Sulian zhangda de hongse houdai (The Red Offspring Raised in the Soviet Union) (Beijing: Shijie zhishi chubanshe, 2000) and still more will become available in English when Elizabeth McGuire publishes her dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley, “The Sino-Soviet Romance, 1920–2008”. Sergei L. Tikhvinskii, Diplomatiia: issledovaniia i vospominaniia (Diplomacy: Studies and Memoirs) (Moscow: Institut rossiiskoi istorii RAN, 2001), pp. 305–7. On this period in Cao’s translation work, and on the relationship with Lu Xun, cf. the chapter in Li Jin, Sansishi niandai Su-E Hanyi wenxue lun (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 2006), pp. 96–127. Roman S. Belousov, “Za stranitsami dnevnikov Lu Sinia”, Problemy Dal’nego Vostoka, no. 5 (1987), here pp. 114–21. Lu Xun’s diary records 292 letters to Cao, the first a reply to Cao’s letter from Kaifeng in May 1925 and the last written only two days before Lu Xun’s

174

41. 42.

43. 44.

45. 46.

47. 48.

49.

50.

NOTES death. See “Wuxian cangsang hua yijian” (Lost Letters of Reversals Without End), in Cao Jinghua, Cao Jinghua sanwen xuan (Xi’an: Shanxi renmin chubanshe, 1983), p. 133, where Cao says that the actual number of letters he received from Lu Xun was even higher. See, on this translation, Petrov, “Sovetskaia literatura v Kitae”, pp. 227–29. Joshua A. Fogel, “Japanese Literary Travelers in Prewar China”, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, vol. 49, no. 2 (1989), pp. 588–90; Christopher T. Keaveney, “Uchiyama Kanzô’s Shanghai Bookstore and Its Impact on May Fourth Writers”, E-ASPAC, 2002. Cf. David E. Pollard, The True Story of Lu Xun (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2002), p. 179. Uchiyama’s foreign nationality must have made him immune to KMT sanction for enabling the appearance in Chinese of The Iron Flood as well as of the already mentioned The Rout. The claim is also made, and may be true, that both books were published at Lu Xun’s personal expense. Pollard, The True Story of Lu Xun, p. 166. Wang Yougui, Fanyijia Lu Xun, pp. 288–89, estimates that the reason was Lu Xun’s realization that accepting the invitation would force him to part with his illusions. Belousov, “Za stranitsami dnevnikov Lu Sinia”, p. 116. E.g., in a letter from Switzerland (signed 17 July 1924) to his translator Jing Yinyu, Romain Rolland expressed joy at Jing’s intention to translate JeanChristophe, granting him full permission to do so and asking to be sent two copies of the translated book. We know this because Jing (although he would not manage the entire length of the novel itself) translated and published Rolland’s letter in Xiaoshuo yuebao, vol. 16, no. 1 (January 1925). “The Forty-First” and “The Story of a Simple Thing”. Petrov, “Sovetskaia literatura v Kitae”, pp. 224–25. A copy of this rare edition is at the Sinological Institute Library, Leiden University. See, on the circumstances of its publication, A. G. Shprintsin, “O literature na kitaiskom iazyke, izdannoi v Sovetskom Soiuze (20–30-e gody)”, in L. Z. Eidlin et al., eds., Izuchenie kitaiskoi literatury v SSSR. Sbornik statei k shestidesiatiletiiu chlena-korrespondenta AN SSSR N.T. Fedorenko (Moscow: Nauka, 1973), pp. 254–55. Belousov, “Za stranitsami dnevnikov Lu Sinia”, p. 118. Signed copies of Aleksei Tolstoy’s Bread, Serafimovich’s Iron Flood and Konstantin Fedin’s Towns and Years (all of which Cao Jinghua had translated into Chinese), along with letters to the translator from the last two writers, were admired in Cao’s Beijing apartment by Nikolai T. Fedorenko: see his Kitaiskie zapisi (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1955), pp. 516–17. Some of Cao’s correspondence with these and other Soviet writers is included in translation in Zhang Demei and Leng Ke, Cao Jinghua jinian wenji. R. Belousov, V tysiachiakh ieroglifov: o knigakh i liudiakh (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo vostochnoi literatury, 1963), pp. 123, 167–68.

NOTES

175

51. Numerous such trips are mentioned in A. S. Tsvetko, Sovetsko-kitaiskie kul’turnye sviazi (Moscow: Mysl’, 1974). 52. “The residents in those places and I harbor different feelings and live in different worlds”. See Lu Xun’s preface as included in Xiao Hong, trans. Howard Goldblatt, The Field of Life and Death and Tales of Hulan River (Boston: Cheng & Tsui, 2002), p. 4; “Xiao Hong zuo Shengsi chang xu”, in LXQ J, vol. 6, p. 423. 53. Qu Qiubai, Exiang jicheng, in Qu Qiubai wenji, vol. 1, p. 40. The Pass between the Mountains and the Sea, in present-day Hebei province, was the only gate in the Great Wall allowing access to Manchuria. The railway line from Shenyang (also known as Fengtian or Mukden) to Changchun was the northern stretch of the South Manchuria Railway, owned and operated by Japan; Qu went on to say that the “other world” to which he felt transported was Japanese. But his later account of Harbin makes plain that the “otherness” of Manchuria was for him more essential than could be ascribed to the effects of colonialism. 54. Chen Jiying, Sanshi niandai zuojia ji (Taipei: Chengwen chubanshe, 1979), p. 139. Cf. ibid., pp. 178, 195, where Chen explains that much of Asia’s export to Europe also had to pass via Harbin, to be carried further by the CER and the Trans-Siberian. 55. Olga Bakich, Harbin Russian Imprints: Bibliography as History, 1898–1961. Materials for a Definitive Bibliography (New York: Norman Ross, 2002), p. 47, gives the total number of Russian books published in Harbin as 3,447 and the total number of “imprints” (including 338 journals and 182 newspapers) as 4,261. 56. Qu Qiubai, Exiang jicheng, in Qu Qiubai wenji, vol. 1, p. 47. 57. Chen Jiying, Sanshi niandai zuojia ji, p. 194 (Chen gives the year of foundation as 1927 on p. 139). His assertion that the Beilei she was the first literary society in Harbin receives corroboration from Fan Quan, Zhongguo xiandai wenxue shetuan liupai cidian (Shanghai: Shanghai shudian, 1993), where all other entries for Harbin literary societies are dated 1932 or later: on the “Beilei she”, see pp. 533–34. 58. Chen Jiying, Sanshi niandai zuojia ji, pp. 133, 138. The “International Gazette” was the main vehicle for the group’s publications, just as it would provide the venue for Xiao Hong’s first story in January 1933. 59. Ibid., pp. 200–203. 60. Andreev’s play To the Stars, forbidden by censorship in Russia, was staged in Harbin in summer 1907: see James B. Woodward, Leonid Andreyev: A Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), p. 135. A production of He Who Gets Slapped was announced in the Harbin newspaper Russkoe slovo on 4 January 1927. Additional Harbin performances of Andreev’s plays from 1920 to 1932 are listed by V. N. Chuvakov, in V. A. Keldysh and M. V. Koz’menko, Leonid Andreev: materialy i issledovaniia (Materials and Studies; Moscow: Nasledie,

176

61.

62.

63.

64.

65.

NOTES 2000), pp. 355–96: while the revolutionary To the Stars was not repeated, there were four more productions of He Who Gets Slapped and of The Days of Our Life; three of Waltz of the Dogs; one production each of Thou Shalt Not Kill, Anathema, Professor Storitsyn and Ekaterina Ivanovna. The only known Russian performance of an Andreev play in Shanghai is Days of Our Life, in May 1925 (ibid., p. 376). Anathema and Waltz of the Dogs were retranslated into Chinese from English in 1923, and To the Stars in 1926; He Who Gets Slapped was adapted for the stage in 1940 and Professor Storitsyn retranslated in 1944. See the Annex in Gamsa, The Chinese Translation of Russian Literature. According to Chen Jiying, Sanshi niandai zuojia ji, p. 199, one society member, a poet from Jilin who attended the Harbin Polytechnic (today’s Harbin Institute of Technology), later became a translator of Soviet fiction. Zhou Zuoren, “Guanyu Lu Xun zhi er” (On Lu Xun, part 2; 1937), in Liu Xuyuan, Kuyuzhai zhu: Mingren bixia de Zhou Zuoren, Zhou Zuoren bixia de mingren (Shanghai: Dongfang chuban zhongxin, 1998), p. 222, mentioned Lu Xun’s brief study of Russian in Tokyo in 1907. In a letter to Cao Jinghua, of 13 June 1931, Lu Xun asked to be sent missing volumes of Sholokhov’s Quiet Flows the Don; yet, he explained that he would only need them to look at the illustrations. LXQ J, vol. 12, pp. 265–67. Lu Xun also bought books in other languages which he knew very little or not at all, respectively English and French. Evidence on this is equivocal; the Austrian-born socialist Ruth F. Weiss, who in a book about Lu Xun mentioned her conversations with the writer in German shortly before his death, would have been too polite to comment on his fluency in the language. See her Lu Xun: A Chinese Writer for All Times (Beijing: New World Press, 1985), pp. 11–2. Wang Yougui, Fanyijia Lu Xun, pp. 16–7, quotes Xu Guangping, to the effect that Lu Xun sometimes spoke German with the American journalist Agnes Smedley, and another memoirist who witnessed an encounter between Lu Xun and the Russian Esperantist from Harbin, Innokentii Seryshev: apparently, when Seryshev addressed him in German, Lu Xun answered in Japanese and the conversation could make no further progress. As quoted in T. A. Hsia, The Gate of Darkness, p. 56. Lisha de aiyuan is reprinted in Jiang Guangci wenji (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 1982–88), vol. 3, but a more enjoyable way to read the novel is offered by an attractive recent edition (Beijing: Xin shijie chubanshe, 2003). On Jiang as a propagator of Soviet literature, best-known for his translation of Iurii Libedinskii’s short novel The Week in 1930, see Petrov, “Sovetskaia literatura v Kitae”, pp. 230–33. Ba Jin, “Jiangjun”, from a 1933 collection by the same name, in Ba Jin xuanji (Chengdu: Renmin chubanshe, 1996), vol. 7, pp. 219–29. The ending is an example of the “alienation” effect which Lee, Shanghai Modern, p. 311, believes to be missing in Shanghai-written fiction (it does appear with even greater force in the representation of Harbin Russians in Market Street by Xiao Hong,

NOTES

66. 67.

68.

69.

70.

71.

177

published in 1936). This story is available in English, as “The General”, in translations by Nathan K. Mao, in Lau et al., Modern Chinese Stories and Novellas 1919–1949, pp. 299–304 and by Don J. Cohn, Chinese Literature, no. 1 (1984), pp. 99–108. There may be an allusion involved: Susan Daruvala, Zhou Zuoren and an Alternative Chinese Response to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 80–81, mentions Zhou Zuoren’s sympathy with a seventeenth-century Chinese émigré from Zhejiang, who before breathing his last in Japanese exile had said words in his native language that none around him could understand. Less attuned to such lore, Ba Jin too could have known this story. Cf. for further evidence of this perception, Ba Jin, Suixiang lu (no. 96), pp. 538–42. See Xiao Jun, “Goats”, trans. Howard Goldblatt, in Lau et al., Modern Chinese Stories and Novellas 1919–1949, quoting p. 356 (translation modified). In the original, “Goats” is signed 11 July 1935. Following the sale of the Chinese Eastern Railway to Japan in March 1935, at least 25,000 employees and their families were repatriated to the USSR from Harbin beginning from late May; most would fall victim to the purge conducted on the orders of Stalin’s henchman Ezhov in 1937. Cf. Steven E. Merritt, “Matushka Rossiia, primi svoikh detei! [Mother Russia, Receive Your Children!]: Archival Materials on the Stalinist Repression of the Soviet Kharbintsy”, Rossiiane v Azii (Toronto), vol. 5 (1998), pp. 205–29. Tolstoy wrote no poetry, and Xiao had confused him with Nekrasov. The following account is from Yuan Muzhi, Yanju mantan (Shanghai: Xiandai shuju, 1933), pp. 119–22. A description of this first performance of Chekhov on a Chinese stage in M. E. Shneider, Russkaia klassika v Kitae: perevody, otsenki, tvorcheskoe osvoenie (Moscow: Nauka, 1977), pp. 124–25, tells only a part of the story. “Benliu bianjiao hou ji” (Notes after Editing and Proof-Reading The Current), in LXQ J, vol. 7, pp. 186–87. Lu Xun was referring to Sologub’s story “Golodnyi blesk” (1908), published in the same issue of Benliu in a retranslation from English by Yao Pengzi. His remarks suggest that he was familiar with the harsh criticism of Sologub by Gorky. Following the entry on Ivanov in Marina Iu. Sorokina, “Snova vostokovedy . . . materialy dlia biobibliograficheskogo slovaria Rossiiskoe nauchnoe zarubezh’e”, Diaspora: novye materialy, vol. 7 (2005). According to Alexander Pantsov, The Bolsheviks and the Chinese Revolution 1919–1927 (Richmond: Curzon, 2000), p. 285, Ivanov/Ivin stayed at Peking University until 1927 and was a Pravda correspondent in China from then to 1930. A. Ivin, Kitai i Sovetskii Soiuz (China and the Soviet Union) (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Iz-vo, 1924), came out with an introduction by the Soviet ambassador in China, Lev Karakhan, who described it as “quite possibly the only [Russian] publication devoted to contemporary China” (p. 7). In the book, Ivin illustrated what he considered the haphazard translation and

178

72.

73.

74.

75.

76.

77.

78.

79.

NOTES misinformed admiration of foreign authorities in China by juxtaposing such names as Tolstoy and Artsybashev; Bernard Shaw and Homer (p. 15). On the play, see Xiaobing Tang, “Echoes of Roar, China! On Vision and Voice in Modern Chinese Art”, Positions, vol. 14, no. 2 (2006). Also, the chapter in Belousov, V tysiachiakh ieroglifov, pp. 133–64 and its revised and footnoted version, “Sergei Tret’iakov o Kitae” (Tret’iakov on China), Vostochnyi al’manakh, no. 10 (1982), pp. 559–80. See, in English, Chinese Testament: The Autobiography of Tan Shih-hua as told to S. Tretiakov (London: Victor Gollancz, 1934; also published by Simon and Schuster in New York). Chapter 21 of the book described Aleksei Ivin’s classes in Peking (in which he criticized the political positions of Chekhov and Tolstoy) and the first attempts of his students, among them Cao Jinghua, at translating Russian literature. Documents related to the arrest and execution of Tret’iakov and the imprisonment of his wife are in V. F. Koliazin, ed., “Vernite mne svobodu!” Deiateli literatury i iskusstva Rossii i Germanii—zhertvy stalinskogo terrora (“Give Me Back My Freedom!” Russian and German Writers and Artists—Victims of Stalinist Terror) (Moscow: Medium, 1997). This collection of KGB documents includes a chilling chapter on the fate of Vsevolod Meierhold, whose last plea from prison serves as the volume’s title. Next to the numerous publications on Alekseev in Russian, see L. N. Men’shikov, “Academician Vasilii Mikhailovich Alekseev (1881–1951) and His School of Russian Sinology”, in Ming Wilson and John Cayley, eds., Europe Studies China (London: Han-Shan Tang Books, 1995), pp. 136–48. See Cao Jinghua, “Haosi chunyan di yi zhi” (Like a First Swallow) and “Wuxian cangsanghua yijian”, in Cao Jinghua sanwen xuan, both indicating Vasil’ev’s year of death as described below. Vasil’ev’s translation was published in Leningrad in 1929 as “Pravdivaia istoriia A-Keia”. Cf. the life dates in the title of a first Soviet commemorative article, published in the same year as Cao’s: Viktor V. Petrov, “Nauchno-pedagogicheskaia deiatel’nost’ B. A. Vasil’eva (1899–1946)” (The Scientific-Pedagogical Activity of B. A. Vasil’ev), in Filologiia i istoriia stran zarubezhnoi Azii i Afriki (Leningrad: Iz-vo Leningradskogo un-ta, 1965), pp. 71–3. These dates could be found in print up to the end of the Soviet era; similarly, until as late as the mid-1990s the year of Sergei Tret’iakov’s execution was believed to have been 1939 rather than 1937 (Tang, “Echoes of Roar, China!”, p. 484, repeats this error). Entry in Iaroslav V. Vasil’kov and Marina Iu. Sorokina, Liudi i sud’ by: biobibliograficheskii slovar’ vostokovedov—zhertv politicheskogo terrora v sovetskii period (1917–1991) (St Petersburg: Peterburgskoe Vostokovedenie, 2003), pp. 91–2. Another name in need of a mention here is that of Nikolai Fedorenko (1912–2000), like Boris Vasil’ev—a student of V. M. Alekseev, a specialist

NOTES

80.

81. 82.

83. 84. 85. 86.

87.

179

in classical Chinese literature and translator of Lu Xun. Spending much time in Chongqing and Shanghai as a diplomat in the 1940s, he later served as ambassador to the PRC, Japan and the United Nations, also becoming one of the prominent intermediaries in Soviet cultural relations with China and Japan. See ibid., pp. 387–88; Fedorenko, Kitaiskie zapisi, and introductory matter in Eidlin et al., Izuchenie kitaiskoi literatury v SSSR. The father of a future Israeli prime minister remembered Fedorenko as a classmate in Qiqihar (Heilongjiang province) in the 1920s, a biographical detail in need of further verification: see Mordechai Olmert, Darki be-derech ha-rabim (supplied English title: My Way) (Tel Aviv: Or-Am, 1981), p. 19. Li Sui’an, Zhong-Su wenhua jiaoliu shi 1937–1949 (Harbin: Haerbin chubanshe, 2003), pp. 136–58, 262–66, gives the Association’s bylaws and list of members and has much on its executive director, the professor of Russian Zhang Ximan (1895–1949), who held senior positions in the KMT. “Pamiati V. N. Rogova” (In Memory of V. N. Rogov), Problemy Dal’nego Vostoka, no. 2 (1989), p. 240. A. N. Zhelokhovtsev, “Iz istorii oznakomleniia kitaiskoi obshchestvennosti s sovetskoi literaturoi (20–40-e gody)”, in V. F. Sorokin, ed., Kitaiskaia kul’tura 20–40-kh godov i sovremennost’ (Moscow: Nauka, 1993), pp. 255–59; in Chinese, see Meng Zhaoyi and Li Zaidao, eds., Zhongguo fanyi wenxue shi (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 2005), pp. 260–64, and Li Sui’an, Zhong-Su wenhua jiaoliu shi, pp. 159–77. See also the catalogue of the books published by Shidai up to 1951, as included ibid., pp. 270–303. Ibid., pp. 166–67. Tensions leading to the closing down of Epoch Press have to be read between the lines of Li Sui’an’s celebratory account, ibid., pp. 176–77. Li Ding, “Eguo wenxue fanyi zai Zhongguo”, pp. 373–74. On Cao Ying, as the translator of Sholokhov and the complete works of Tolstoy, see Meng Zhaoyi and Li Zaidao, Zhongguo fanyi wenxue shi, pp. 429–31. Epoch Press was also active in translating modern Chinese literature into Russian and so attracted the brief collaboration of Valerii Pereleshin (1913–92): by common consent the greatest of Harbin’s Russian poets, he was the only one to have studied Chinese and to translate classical Chinese poetry from the original. Pereleshin began publishing his translations in Russian émigré journals in 1935 and would resume this activity after settling in Brazil in 1953. Living in Shanghai from 1943 to 1952, he translated Lu Xun’s story “Medicine” and some of his essays. See Russian Poetry and Literary Life in Harbin and Shanghai, 1930–1950: The Memoirs of Valerij Perelešin, ed. in Russian by Jan Paul Hinrichs (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1987), pp. 110–13. A biography of Pereleshin in English is forthcoming from Olga Bakich. See Li Jin, Sansishi niandai Su-E Hanyi wenxue lun, pp. 140–41. The first to translate volume three of Quiet Flows the Don from the Russian in 1936

180

88. 89.

90.

91.

92.

NOTES (after volumes one and two had appeared in retranslation from the German in 1931), the 1917-born Zhao Xun also came from Harbin, where he returned to teach after 1945. Meng Zhaoyi and Li Zaidao, Zhongguo fanyi wenxue shi, p. 250. See ibid., pp. 265–67. Information on book-related activities of the Soviet Plenipotentiary Representative Office in Shanghai is drawn from Tat’iana V. Kuznetsova, Russkaia kniga v Kitae (1917–1949) (Khabarovsk: DVGNB, 2003), pp. 163–64. Ol’ga Bakich, “Pushkinskie dni v Kharbine—1937 god”, Zapiski russkoi akademicheskoi gruppy v SShA, vol. 30 (1999–2000). On the manipulated celebrations in the Soviet Union, see Stephanie Sandler, “The 1937 Pushkin Jubilee as Epic Trauma”, in Kevin M. F. Platt and David Brandenberger, eds., Epic Revisionism: Russian History and Literature as Stalinist Propaganda (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), pp. 193–213. An exhibition of these paintings resulted in an impressive commemorative album: Kirill I. Zaitsev (ed.), Pushkin i ego vremia (Pushkin and His Time) (Harbin: Tsentral’nyi Pushkinskii komitet pri Biuro po delam rossiiskikh emigrantov v Man’chzhurskoi imperii, 1938). A re-edition of this album, S. G. Blinov and M. D. Filin, eds., 1799–1837: Pushkin i ego vremia (Moscow: Terra, 1997), includes K. I. Zaitsev, “Bor’ba za Pushkina” (The Fight for Pushkin, 1937), which attests to the competition between Soviet and émigré interpretations of the poet’s heritage. In only half the number of pages of the Harbin album, the commemorative book published in Shanghai in 1937 nevertheless included texts in Russian, French, English and Chinese—this last, an indication of the closer contact between the Shanghai Russian community and its surroundings. See Pushkinskii komitet v Shankhae, Pushkinskie dni v Shankhae, 1837–1937 (supplied English title: Pushkin Centenary), copy Hamilton Library, University of Hawaii. One among several recent reportages on Gao is Si Xiaojian, “Gao Mang: yongyuan de Eluosi qinghuai” (An Eternal Feeling for Russia), Beijing ribao, 26 January 2007. Among Gao Mang’s many books, the following titles speak richly of his perspective on Russia: Linghun de guisu: Eluosi muyuan wenhua (The Soul’s Last Abode: Russian Cemetery Culture; Beijing, 2000), describing the tombs of great Russian writers and historical figures; Shengshan xing: Xunzhao shiren Puxijin de zuji (A Voyage to the Sacred Mountain: In Search for Traces of the Poet Pushkin; Beijing, 2004); Eluosi dashi guju (Old Homes of the Russian Masters; Beijing, 2005), a record of his visits to writers’ places of birth. Cf. in this context a study of Chinese writers’ heroworshipping visits to the tombs of Western poets, Raoul David Findeisen, “Thanatographie oder auf der Suche nach literarischen Helden. Chinesische Autoren als Besucher von ausländischen Dichtergräbern”, in Marc Hermann and Christian Schwermann, eds., Zurück zur Freude: Studien zur chinesischen

NOTES

93.

94.

95.

96.

97.

181

Literatur und Lebenswelt und ihrer Rezeption in Ost und West. Festschrift für Wolfgang Kubin (Sankt Augustin: Institut Monumenta Serica, 2007), pp. 321–51. Another example, deserving of separate treatment, is Wang Meng, Sulian ji (Memorial to the Soviet Union) (Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 2006). Its glossy illustrations resurrecting all the defunct symbols of Soviet statehood, this unabashedly nostalgic tribute by the former PRC minister of culture is dedicated to the ninetieth anniversary of the October revolution and describes a pilgrimage to Lenin’s mausoleum. Other translators of Russian fiction to come out of Harbin include Diao Shaohua (1934–2001), also known as a scholar of the Harbin Russian emigration, and Gan Yuze (born 1942; graduate of Harbin University in 1964). An original autobiographical essay by Gan, expressing a perfectionist approach to the art of translation, is in Wang Shoulan, Dangdai wenxue fanyi baijia tan, pp. 104–11. Larisa P. Chernikova and Bei Wenli, “Istoriia pamiatnika A. S. Pushkinu v Shankhae”, Problemy Dal’nego Vostoka, no. 5 (2000), traces the symbolic history of “the only Pushkin monument in Asia”. Erected by the Shanghai Russian community in 1937, it was removed by the Japanese in 1944, rebuilt through the efforts of the Soviet Consulate (for the 110th anniversary of Pushkin’s death) in 1947, demolished by Red Guards in 1966 and restored by a team of Chinese sculptors in 1987. Cf. Amir A. Khisamutdinov, Rossiiskaia emigratsiia v Kitae: opyt entsiklopedii (Vladivostok: DVGU, 2002), p. 179. An émigré participant in the Shanghai celebrations of 1937, Vladimir A. Slobodchikov describes these in his memoir, O sud’ be izgnannikov pechal’noi . . . Kharbin, Shankhai (On Exiles’ Plangent Fate: Harbin, Shanghai) (Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf, 2005), pp. 210–12. See the participant’s report by Vl. Rogov, “Pushkin v Kitae (Iz istorii kul’turnykh sviazei)”, Vostochnyi al’manakh, no. 3 (1960), pp. 189–90. This article also described the Soviet activities in 1947: restoration of the Pushkin monument, publication of a new collection of Pushkin’s poetry and the festive evening, featuring a speech by Communist poet Guo Moruo, organized in Guanghua theatre on 10 February. Cf. Khisamutdinov, Rossiiskaia emigratsiia v Kitae, p. 209. On the eight books, see Vladimir Rudman, “Pushkin v Kitae”, Novyi mir, no. 6 (1949); cf. Xie Tianzhen and Zha Mingjian, Zhongguo xiandai fanyi wenxue shi (1898–1949), pp. 144–45. Revived after six months of inactivity in September 1936, Yiwen folded in the following year: see ibid., pp. 105–7. A journal by this name was launched again in 1953, as a main forum for the translation of Soviet and other socialist literature; it assumed the name Shijie wenxue (World Literature) in 1959. Gao Mang joined this journal in 1962, returned to it after the Cultural Revolution and retired as chief editor in 1989.

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Four Soviet Socialist Realism as a Manual of Practice 1. See Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), pp. 168–69. 2. Anthony C. Yu, “History, Fiction and the Reading of Chinese Narrative”, Chinese Literature Essays, Articles, Reviews, vol. 10, nos. 1–2 (1988), p. 8. 3. Quoting Yu, ibid., p. 19, who calls this “an immense irony”. 4. Cf. On-cho Ng, “The Epochal Concept of ‘Early Modernity’ and the Intellectual History of Late Imperial China”, Journal of World History, vol. 14, no. 1 (March 2003), p. 48: “Even in the heyday of evidential learning [. . .] there was no clear discrimination between facts (factual descriptions) and values (moral and value judgments), a distinction that is the fundamental tenet of modern science”. 5. D. H. Green, The Beginnings of Medieval Romance: Fact and Fiction, 1150– 1220 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), quoting pp. 13, 11. 6. The reader is referred, however, to the opening section (“ ‘Real Life’ and Fiction”) of the introduction to Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Don Quixote (San Diego, CA: Harvest / HBJ, 1983), at which point, it is hoped, no reader would want to stop before finishing the book. 7. Olgin, A Guide to Russian Literature (1820–1917), p. 19. 8. At the Sherlock Holmes museum in Meiringen, Switzerland (near the Reichenbach Falls, where the detective plummeted to his apparent death on a 4 May of an unspecified year), his Baker Street room is recreated in wonderful detail. Pilgrimages to this pleasant locality by Sherlock fans from all over the world take place on every May Fourth. On the detective, see in particular Nick Rennison, Sherlock Holmes: The Unauthorized Biography (London: Atlantic Books, 2005). 9. This is the novel argument of Ming Dong Gu, Chinese Theories of Fiction: A Non-Western Narrative System (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), p. 194. 10. See, on this last, Adzhimamudova, Iui Da-fu i literaturnoe obshchestvo “Tvorchestvo”, p. 166. 11. Kai Vogelsang, “Some Notions of Historical Judgment in China and the West”, in Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer et al., eds., Historical Truth, Historical Criticism, and Ideology: Chinese Historiography and Historical Culture from a New Comparative Perspective (Leiden: Brill, 2005), does not argue that all genres of writing were perceived as “true”, but that factual “truth” was of no concern to writers—whether of history or fiction—whose aim was to teach by moral example: “there was neither a clear-cut distinction between history and fiction nor, by the same token, between history and myth” (p. 160). Cf. David Der-wei Wang, “Fictional History / Historical Fiction”, Studies in Language

NOTES

12.

13. 14.

15.

16.

183

and Literature, no. 1 (1985), p. 70: “We can hardly find a literary tradition other than the Chinese one that has so constantly adopted the narrative modes and assumptions of historical writing in all kinds of fiction generation after generation up to the late Ch’ing period”. Leo Ou-fan Lee, “Lin Shu and His Translations: Western Fiction in Chinese Perspective”, Papers on China, vol. 19 (1965), p. 163; for Lin’s tears over Dickens’s Dombey and Son, cf. ibid., p. 174. Lee reminds us that Marguerite Gautier of the Dumas novel was modelled on a real-life courtesan, Marie Duplessis. Cf., for examples of this, articles in Pollard, ed., Translation and Creation, pp. 18, 196, 230, 247. A reader of Rider Haggard’s novel in Lin’s translation complained, in 1907, that Lin had mistreated Joan (Jiayin): “If Jiayin could speak out”, he added, “she would not appreciate such a biographer”. Quoted in Hu Ying, Tales of Translation: Composing the New Woman in China, 1899–1918 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 87. See also Eva Hung, “Sherlock Holmes in Early Twentieth Century China (1896–1916): Popular Fiction as an Educational Tool”, in Ann Beylard-Ozeroff et al., eds., Translators’ Strategies and Creativity (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1998), pp. 73–4. The principal text is Liang Qichao, “On the Relationship between Fiction and the Government of the People” (1902), in Denton, Modern Chinese Literary Thought, pp. 74–81. “It was more than obvious that those Reformists saw in the novel, which had more popular appeal than historiography, a new weapon most suitable for their political agenda . . .”: Henry Y. H. Zhao, “Historiography and Fiction in Chinese Culture”, in Moretti, ed., The Novel, vol. 1, p. 82. Cf. Pollard, Translation and Creation, pp. 106, 118. E. Perry Link, Jr., Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies: Popular Fiction in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Cities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 13, 31–2, 37; on “the pretense of truth”, see esp. ibid., p. 186, and on the persistence of similar expectations among audiences in Communist China, idem, The Uses of Literature, pp. 212, 225–26. Timothy C. Wong, Stories for Saturday: Twentieth-Century Chinese Popular Fiction (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003), pp. 238–40, also shows the insistence of entertainment fiction on factuality: the successful popular writer was as a rule also a journalist, who would not give up his claim of telling “a true story” even when “reporting” on events in the realm of the supernatural. Wong is in obvious disagreement with Denise Gimpel, Lost Voices of Modernity: A Chinese Popular Fiction Magazine in Context (Honolulu: Hawaii University Press, 2001), pp. 166–75, where a discussion of the “desire for authentication” starts out from a refusal to regard writers’ “preoccupation with history and verifiable fact” as “a sign of backwardness . . . or as an adherence to traditional forms” (p. 169). Gimpel’s suggestion that writers of the 1910s emphasized verisimilitude so as to distance themselves from the heritage of “preposterous

184

17.

18. 19.

20.

21.

22.

23. 24.

25.

NOTES plots [of] fairies and demons, gods and spirits” (p. 172) and the comparison she draws with the attempts of some writers of popular fiction in early twentieth-century Britain to convince readers of the “authenticity” of their stories, ignore—while seeking to defend Chinese writers presented as “voices of modernity”—their distinctive penchant for the fantastic, which linked them with native tradition. Adzhimamudova, Iui Da-fu i literaturnoe obshchestvo “Tvorchestvo”, p. 128. On Yu’s deliberate blurring of “the distinction between life and fiction”, e.g., by publishing to rich commercial and practical rewards the diaries documenting his (until then, unsuccessful) courtship of the beauty Wang Yingxia in 1927, see Yunzhong Shu, “The Cost of Living Up to the Demand of Autobiographical Fiction: An Analysis of the Interaction between Yu Dafu’s Fiction and His Life”, Tamkang Review, vol. 33, no. 1 (autumn 2002), here pp. 67–9. Consider the strategy of Ye Lingfeng, as described in Lee, Shanghai Modern, pp. 263–64. “Zenma xie” (How to Write, 1927), collected in Sanxian ji; LXQ J, vol. 4, pp. 18–28, at p. 23. On Lu Xun’s role in relieving Chinese fiction from “the unbearable pressure of historiography”, see Zhao, “Historiography and Fiction in Chinese Culture”, pp. 91–3. On these matters, cf. an acclaimed study of demarcation lines between levels of “truth” in ancient Greece: Paul Veyne, Les Grecs ont-ils cru à leurs mythes? Essay sur l’ imagination constituante (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1983). See Renditions, special issue 53 & 54, Chinese Impressions of the West, pp. 134 (Ambassador Xue Fucheng in the early 1890s), 142, 144 (Ambassador Wang Zhichun in 1894). Expressing the disdain for traditional fiction that was common among the literati, both diplomats judged the Christian canon ridiculous enough to be compared with The Enfeoffment of the Gods—a novel of the late Ming, set in the remote antiquity of the rising Zhou dynasty and rich in its display of magical military tactics. Esherick, The Origins of the Boxer Uprising (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 62–5, 294. The Taiping rebels, between 1851 and 1864, had also “borrowed military stratagems from [popular novels]”: see ibid., pp. 218–19, and Colin P. Mackerras, “Theatre and the Taipings”, Modern China, vol. 2, no. 4 (October 1976), pp. 473–501, at p. 476. Esherick, The Origins of the Boxer Uprising, pp. 329–30. A partisan overview, to be treated with some caution, is Jean Chesneaux, “The Modern Relevance of Shui-hu chuan: Its Influence on Rebel Movements in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century China”, Papers on Far Eastern History, no. 3 (March 1971), pp. 1–25. As cited in Sun Naixiu, Tugeniefu yu Zhongguo, p. 105. While his admiration for Turgenev could get out of hand, here as well as in his essay on Hunter’s Notes in Xiaoshuo yuebao in 1922 (partly quoted ibid., pp. 106–7) Geng stressed that Turgenev had always used “purely artistic” means to convey his “message”. He

NOTES

26. 27.

28. 29.

30. 31.

32.

33. 34.

185

thereby expressed his own resistance to the subjugation of Chinese literature to political ends. Zi Yi, “Wenxue he rensheng” (Literature and Life), Wenxue xunkan, no. 75 (2 June 1923), p. 1. Mao Zedong, “On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship” (30 June 1949), available in Pei-kai Cheng and Michael Lestz, eds., The Search for Modern China: A Documentary Collection (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1999), here p. 355. The same novel would be withdrawn from bookstores with the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution and become the target of an ideological campaign as late as 1975. See, e.g., Harrison E. Salisbury, The Long March: The Untold Story (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), pp. 73, 220. C. T. Hsia, “Yen Fu and Liang Ch’i-ch’ao as Advocates of New Fiction”, in C. T. Hsia on Chinese Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), p. 226. Cf. ibid., p. 237, on the two subjects of his article: “They both exaggerate the power of fiction and presuppose a naïve reader utterly docile to persuasion”. See also remarks on Liang Qichao in Link, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies, pp. 131–32. Adzhimamudova, Iui Da-fu i literaturnoe obshchestvo “Tvorchestvo”, pp. 168–69. The “educative” prestige of history in Chinese civilization is compared to the function of religion in Western cultures in Yu, “History, Fiction and the Reading of Chinese Narrative”, p. 13. The phrase was probably first used by writer Iurii Olesha, rather than by Stalin or Gorky, as has often been claimed. See Valentina Antipina, Povsednevnaia zhizn’ sovetskikh pisatelei. 1930–1950-e gody (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 2005), pp. 46–7. Gutkin, The Cultural Origins of the Socialist Realist Aesthetic, pp. 51–6, emphasizes (in line with the central thesis of her study) the close connection between this slogan of socialist realism and the earlier aspirations of Russian futurists, notably Mayakovsky and Tret’iakov. The émigré Czech writer Joseph Škvorecky satirized the slogan in his novel The Engineer of Human Souls (1977). Link, The Uses of Literature, p. 286. The four Chinese authors rewarded in 1951 included the poet He Jingzhi (b. 1924) and his collaborator in creating the propagandistic opera The WhiteHaired Girl, Ding Yi (b. 1920). See V. F. Svin’in and K. A. Oseev, Stalinskie premii: dve storony odnoi medali (Novosibirsk: Svin’in i synov’ia, 2007), pp. 426–28; Yang Lan, “ ‘Socialist Realism’ versus ‘Revolutionary Realism plus Revolutionary Romanticism’ ”, in Hilary Chung, ed., In the Party Spirit: Socialist Realism and Literary Practice in the Soviet Union, East Germany and China (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1996), p. 99. A survey of the prizes, awarded from 1941 to 1952, Alla Latynina, “The Stalin Prizes for Literature as the Quintessence of Socialist Realism”, ibid., notes that the winning novels were meant to be emulated. Thus every national minority in the Soviet Union

186

35.

36.

37.

38.

39. 40.

41.

42. 43. 44.

45.

NOTES “had its own Virgin Soil Upturned describing collectivization in terms appropriate to local conditions, as well as its own Quiet Flows the Don” (p. 120). Lorenz Bichler, “Coming to Terms with a Term: Notes on the History of the Use of Socialist Realism in China”, ibid., pp. 30–43. The following discussion also draws on Nicholas Luker’s introduction to his (trans. and ed.) From Furmanov to Sholokhov: An Anthology of the Classics of Socialist Realism (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1988). This anthology, gathering translations of The Iron Flood, Cement, The Rout and How the Steel Was Tempered, may be recommended for closer acquaintance with these works. Yang Lan, “ ‘Socialist Realism’ versus ‘Revolutionary Realism plus Revolutionary Romanticism’ ”, in Chung, In the Party Spirit, pp. 88–105. The second slogan had replaced the first by 1960. It was glorifed in the Cultural Revolution, but allowed to peter out in the early 1980s. Cyril Birch, “The Institution of a Socialist Literature, 1949–1956”, in Denis Twitchett and John K. Fairbank, eds., The Cambridge History of China, vol. 15 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 744. See T. A. Hsia, Metaphor, Myth, Ritual and the People’s Commune. Studies of Chinese Communist Terminology, No. 7 (Berkeley: Center for Chinese Studies, 1961), chap. 1, and quotation from p. 40. Ibid., pp. 43–4. See, e.g., Mark T. Hooker, The Military Uses of Literature: Fiction and the Armed Forces in the Soviet Union (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996), pp. 1–6. It was Lenin who called the press “one of the most powerful weapons, which in a critical moment in the battle, can be more mighty and dangerous than bombs or machine guns”. In the 1930s “the sharp pens of Soviet writers” were likened to “bayonets” in their indispensability to the Red Army (ibid., pp. 2–3). The second United Front was enabled after the kidnapping of Chiang Kaishek by Northeastern warlord Zhang Xueliang in the “Xi’an incident” of December 1936, and was followed by massive Soviet assistance to the KMT in its war effort against Japan. Such assistance stemmed from the Soviet fear of Japan, who did attack the USSR in July 1938 and August 1939; the signing of a Soviet-Japanese neutrality pact in April 1941 brought it to an end. Kuznetsova, Russkaia kniga v Kitae, pp. 165–66. Ibid., pp. 167–69. “Eluosi he Sulian wenxue zai Zhongguo” (Russian and Soviet Literature in China), in Ah Ying quanji, vol. 2, pp. 823–29, at pp. 827–28. Comments in square brackets are mine, M. G. The play, serialized in Pravda in summer 1942 and awarded the Stalin prize for drama in 1943, blamed initial Soviet defeats in the war on the smugness of backward generals of the older generation. See Evgenii Dobrenko, Metafora vlasti. Literatura stalinskoi epokhi v istoricheskom osveshchenii (Munich: Otto Sagner, 1993), p. 234, and excerpts translated in James von Geldern and Richard Stites, eds., Mass Culture in Soviet Russia: Tales, Poems, Songs, Movies, Plays, and Folklore, 1917–1953 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana

NOTES

46.

47.

48.

49.

50.

51.

52. 53.

187

University Press, 1995), pp. 345–71. The only work on Ah Ying’s list not to have won the Stalin prize was Sholokhov’s They Fought for the Motherland (mistakenly attributed by Ah Ying to Aleksei Tolstoy); the author had already obtained it for his Quiet Flows the Don in 1941. The translator and poet Xiao San attended in 1922–24 the Communist University of the Toilers of the East in Moscow. Like Cao Jinghua, he returned to the USSR after the break-up of the United Front in 1927, remaining there until as late as 1939. Meng Zhaoyi and Li Zaidao, Zhongguo fanyi wenxue shi, p. 253. Information drawn from Su Zhenlan and Wu Xiaoyan, “Sulian zhanshi wenxue dui Zhongguo geming de junshi yingxiang”, Dangshi zongheng, no. 11 (2008) and Li Sui’an, Zhong-Su wenhua jiaoliu shi, pp. 85–8. Belousov, V tysiachakh ieroglifov (numbers in brackets in this paragraph refer to page numbers in the book). Born in 1927 and recently deceased, R. S. Belousov did not write on China after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. A productive author, since the 1970s, of popular books about writers and protagonists of Russian and world literature, from the 1990s he published also in the domains of fantasy and the occult. Simonov’s novel (awarded the Stalin prize for literature in 1946), and the first two parts of Bek’s, first appeared serially in Russian in 1943–44. Volokolamsk Highway was renamed Fear and Fearlessness (Kongju yu wuwei) in the Chinese translation, first published in June 1945. Mao Dun, “S pozhelaniem uspekhov” (With Wishes of Success), Pravda, no. 331 (27 November 1954), p. 2; cited also in Rakhmanin, Iz kitaiskikh bloknotov, p. 20. I found no corresponding Chinese version in Mao Dun’s Complete Works, which do gather his greetings to and speech at the Third Congress of Soviet Writers in 1959. Notable for the condemnation of Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago (p. 679), these texts, in Mao Dun quanji, vol. 33, pp. 678–85, no longer referred to the practical effects of Soviet literature in China. Cao Jinghua, “Sovetskaia literatura v Kitae” (Soviet Literature in China), Pravda, no. 326 (22 November 1951). There are differences between this text and the revised Chinese version, “Sulian wenxue zai Zhongguo”, published in Renmin ribao of 14 February 1952 (now collected in Cao Jinghua yizhu wenji, vol. 10, pp. 379–84). Miin-ling Yu, “A Soviet Hero, Pavel Korchagin, Comes to China”, Russian History / Histoire Russe, vol. 29, nos. 2–4 (2002), p. 335, cites the Renmin ribao text in an article overloaded with detail and conceptually confused; here she misses the point by merely dismissing Cao’s claims as “somewhat exaggerated” (cf. ibid., p. 330). Cao Jinghua, “Sovetskaia literatura vospityvaet nashu molodezh’ ” (Soviet Literature Educates our Youth), Narodnyi Kitai, no. 21 (1952), pp. 30–32. For the general problem raised here, cf. the discussion of “actual” and “prescribed” reader preferences in Link, The Uses of Literature, pp. 66–7: “In the Communist base areas of the 1940s there was great convergence of actual and

188

54.

55. 56.

57. 58.

59. 60. 61.

62. 63.

NOTES prescribed preferences for resist-Japan stories, especially when the anti-Japan message was delivered through oral or performing arts that circumvented the problem of illiteracy. [. . .] On the other hand, during the same war years in China, Mao Zedong’s pronouncements that the proletarian masses love the difficult language and subtle art of Lu Xun is a good example of wide divergence between actual and prescribed preferences”. On the appeal of Russian poetry and literature to audiences at wartime, see Richard Stites, “Frontline Entertainment”, in idem, ed., Culture and Entertainment in Wartime Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), pp. 129–30, 135 (translated poetry by Heinrich Heine was used too, with the express aim of contrasting it with the present degradation of German culture). Mao Tun, trans. Hsu Meng-hsiung and A. C. Barnes, Midnight (repr. Amsterdam: Fredonia Books, 2001), p. 79. “(T)he PLA was an army of peasants with low educational levels even at the time of the Korean War, let alone before. This meant that a command system based on the written word or class-room instruction with written materials were not possible”. Hans Van de Ven, “The Military in the Republic”, in Frederic Wakeman Jr. and Richard L. Edmonds, eds., Reappraising Republican China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 120. The level of literacy in the first country to spread the image of the book-inspired Communist fighter was, while generally better, far from satisfying: according to a survey published in Pravda in January 1923, and cited by Pantsov, The Bolsheviks and the Chinese Revolution 1919–1927, p. 75, over 92 per cent of the members of the Russian Communist Party at that time were “only semiliterate”. See Salisbury, The Long March, p. 153. This comes across in the chapter on Sassoon in Jon Stallworthy, Anthem for Doomed Youth: Twelve Soldier Poets of the First World War (London: Constable, 2002), here pp. 63–7. Birch, “The Institution of a Socialist Literature, 1949–1956”, p. 754. Dobrenko, Metafora vlasti, pp. 186–89, 198. “Say we have never been to a battlefield, but reading the novels of Tolstoy and others enables us to experience the misery of war and provokes in us antiwar thoughts”. Zhou Zuoren, “Women and Literature”, as translated in Denton, Modern Chinese Literary Thought, here p. 231. Cf. remark in Zhou Zuoren, “Wenxue shang de Eguo yu Zhongguo”, in Eguo wenxue yanjiu, p. 5. Xie Tianzhen and Zha Mingjian, Zhongguo xiandai fanyi wenxue shi (1898– 1949), pp. 467, 507–9. Stites, “Frontline Entertainment”, pp. 132–33, 138, notes that troops did not want to hear military songs, asking for love songs instead; they preferred comical performances to enacted battle scenes (ibid., p. 137, does mention “spontaneous readings out loud” from what must have been anti-fascist poetry by Soviet authors). The distribution of paperback books (the “Armed Service Editions”) to U.S. troops in the same years presents a contrast in

NOTES

64.

65. 66.

67. 68. 69. 70.

71.

189

its concern to provide “relief from the constant sense of subjection to arbitrary authority and from the bewildering lack of privacy”, a “release of tension” for “the boys overseas”: see Trysh Travis, “Books as Weapons and ‘The Smart Man’s Peace’: The Work of the Council on Books in Wartime”, Princeton University Library Chronicle, vol. 60, no. 3 (spring 1999), quoting pp. 386–87. Encouraging reading as a pastime, rather than fostering it to promote an ideology, represented a compromise with another image the Council on Books in Wartime wished to spread: that of books functioning as Thomas Paine’s unsigned pamphlet of January 1776 supposedly did, in contributing to the American Revolution. A play by the Writers’ War Board, A Book That Fought a War, closed with “a dog-eared, dirty copy of [Paine’s] Common Sense in every haversack, good to wipe a razor on, good to start fires with, good for a man’s soul and his body, good to copy into apologetic letters sent home” (quoted ibid., p. 384). The responsibility for propaganda was shifted from the Workers and Peasants Red Army to the CCP in the Gutian conference of 1929, reverting to the army in the early 1960s. Stefan R. Landsberger, “The Deification of Mao: Religious Imagery and Practices during the Cultural Revolution and Beyond”, in Chong, ed., China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, pp. 142, 148. Zou Zhenhuan, 20 shiji Shanghai fanyi chuban yu wenhua bianqian (Nanning: Guangxi jiaoyu chubanshe, 2000), p. 172. Yu, “A Soviet Hero, Pavel Korchagin, Comes to China”, p. 341, refers in passing to “various abridged editions” of How the Steel Was Tempered that were published by the CCP during the civil war. Popular adaptations of Volokolamsk Highway are mentioned, parenthetically, in Su Zhenlan and Wu Xiaoyan, “Sulian zhanshi wenxue dui Zhongguo geming de junshi yingxiang”, p. 58. Li Hsiao-t’i, “Making a Name and a Culture for the Masses in Modern China”, Positions, vol. 9, no. 1 (spring 2001), pp. 35, 54. James E. Sheridan, Chinese Warlord: The Career of Feng Yü-hsiang (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966), pp. 87–9. Cf. Li Sui’an, Zhong-Su wenhua jiaoliu shi 1937–1949, p. 170. Cf. Chang-tai Hung, “The Politics of Songs: Myths and Symbols in the Chinese Communist War Music, 1937–1949”, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 30, no. 4 (1996), pp. 916, 929. Wang Meng, “Banished to Xinjiang, or about Bestial Hatred of Literature” (1981), in Helmut Martin and Jeffrey Kinkley, eds., Modern Chinese Writers: Self-portrayals (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1992), here pp. 55–6. How the Steel Was Tempered was retranslated from the English by Mei Yi on CCP instructions in 1942, when it replaced a previous translation of 1937. Revised with the help of a translator able to consult the Russian, Mei’s became the standard version of the book in the PRC after 1952; when a translation from the original came out in 1976, Mei Yi countered it (in 1979) with a new retranslation

190

72.

73.

74.

75.

76.

77.

78.

NOTES from English. See the chapter on How the Steel Was Tempered in Wang Jiezhi and Chen Jianhua, Youyuan de huixiang: Eluosi zuojia yu Zhongguo wenhua (Yinchuan: Ningxia renmin chubanshe, 2002), at pp. 384–85. The chapter on Liu Bocheng in Liu Sui’an, Zhong-Su wenhua jiaoliu shi 1937– 1949, pp. 178–208, mentions his reading of Simonov’s Russian People in the original in 1950 and his use of the sanctioned examples of good and bad characters from Korneichuk’s The Front (see also ibid., p. 87). Aaron William Moore, The Peril of Self-discipline: Chinese Nationalist, Japanese, and American Servicemen Record the Rise and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1937– 1945, PhD thesis at Princeton University (2006). Another necessary qualification is that these diaries were not spontaneous reflections of their authors’ thoughts: written partly for submission to superiors, they obeyed discursive laws that did not legitimize the expression of personal opinion. Moore points out that the discourse of Nationalist diaries “reveals many influences from Chinese Communist writers such as Mao Dun, but no noticeable influence by Russians” (personal communication, 13 December 2006). Peng Ming, Istoriia kitaisko-sovetskoi druzhby (Moscow: Iz-vo sotsial’noekonomicheskoi literatury, 1959; a translation of Zhong-Su youyi shi, 1957), p. 262. Yao Yuanfang, “Suwei’ai zhanshi wenxue chengle women wuxing de junshi liliang”, Wenyi bao, vol. 1, no. 3 (1950), pp. 15–6, is explicitly mentioned also in V. Ovchinnikov, “Sovetskaia literatura v Kitae”, Novyi mir, no. 5 (1951), p. 220. As Ovchinnikov stated that Chinese soldiers, forced to abandon all their personal effects (“even clothes . . . and the letters of relatives”), would never part from the books of Soviet writers, which they considered “as essential in battle as their weapons”, he referred to Zhou Libo, but this claim, too, appeared already in Yao Yuanfang (p. 15). Another article by the same title, N. Fedorenko, “Sovetskaia literatura v Kitae”, Oktiabr’, no. 5 (May 1953), also cited Yao, on whose report descriptions of the battle use of Volokolamsk Highway in Fedorenko, Kitaiskie zapisi, pp. 251–52, were again based. See Nie Rongzhen, trans. Zhong Renyi, Inside the Red Star: The Memoirs of Marshal Nie Rongzhen (Beijing: New World Press, 1988; Chinese edition first published in 1984), chap. 19. The victorious Taiyuan campaign was led by Xu Xiangqian in March and April 1949. As an anonymous Chinese soldier in the Korean War did with his copy of Volokolamsk Highway, which future lieutenant general Li Jijun, then a young volunteer, respectfully picked up and brought back to China. The book’s cover had been lost and some pages already removed, “probably having been rolled for cigarettes”. Li’s act and subsequent reading impressions are adduced as a case of “the influence of Soviet wartime literature” in Su Zhenlan and Wu Xiaoyan, “Sulian zhanshi wenxue dui Zhongguo geming de junshi yingxiang”, p. 59. Bethea, “Literature”, p. 163, notes the absence of secular writing “until well into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries”, adding that “the category

NOTES

79.

80.

81. 82.

83.

84. 85.

86.

191

of ‘fiction’ (i.e. a self-contained world wholly created through words that is understood by its reader to be artificial, hence ‘untrue’) came late to Russian literature”. On the sacralization of the book in Russia, see also Alexandre Stroev, “Lecture en Russie”, in Roger Chartier, ed., Histoires de la lecture: un bilan des recherches (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 1995), p. 189. Alexander Des Forges, “Burning with Reverence: The Economics and Aesthetics of Words in Qing (1644–1911) China”, PMLA, vol. 121, no. 1 (2006), p. 145. As Des Forges puts it, the aspiration of word-cherishing societies was “to establish a universal recognition of the value of the written word as written word, even among those who were illiterate” (ibid.). Cf. the discussion in Joseph P. McDermott, A Social History of the Chinese Book: Books and Literati Culture in Late Imperial China (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006), pp. 182–85, 189–90. Yan Shoucheng, “Signifying Scriptures in Confucianism”, in Vincent L. Wimbush, ed., Theorizing Scriptures: New Critical Orientations to a Cultural Phenomenon (New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Rutgers University Press, 2008), at p. 78, n. 15. Des Forges, “Burning with Reverence”, pp. 143, 147–49. See E. V. Volchkova, “Amuletnaia magiia v ritual’nykh praktikakh kitaiskikh derevenskikh traditsionalistskikh soiuzov (pervaia polovina XX veka)”, in K. M. Tertitskii, ed., Religioznyi mir Kitaia: al’manakh 2003 (Moscow: Muravei, 2003). This study takes its rich source material mainly from the practices of republican-period popular societies, the Red Spears and Big Swords. David Cressy, “Books as Totems in Seventeenth-Century England and New England”, The Journal of Library History, vol. 21, no. 1 (winter 1986), discusses Bibles being carried on a pole, “like a legionary standard”; “The Bible, held aloft, served as an inspirational emblem and as a weapon, even without the necessity of being opened” (p. 94). See John Keegan, The Face of Battle (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), p. 274, referring to the battle of the Somme in 1916. Cressy, “Books as Totems”, p. 99; cf. the section on “talismanic use of books and texts” in Rowan Watson, “Some Non-textual Uses of Books”, in Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose, eds., A Companion to the History of the Book (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), at pp. 483–84. Soviet-era claims on Ostrovskii’s novel as the inspiration for soldiers and hero workers are too uncritically treated in Katerina Clark, “The Cult of Literature and Nikolai Ostrovskii’s How the Steel Was Tempered ”, in Klaus Heller and Jan Plamper, eds., Personality Cults in Stalinism—Personenkulte im Stalinismus (Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2004), pp. 424–25. The entry on Ostrovskii by I. V. Kondakov in Nikolaev, Russkie pisateli 20 veka, pp. 525–27, attributes the immense popularity of the novel to the unprecedented state campaign that aimed to elevate its author to socialist sainthood.

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NOTES

87. Elena Tolstaia-Segal, “K literaturnomu fonu knigi Kak zakalialas’ stal’ ”, Cahiers du Monde russe et sovietique, vol. 22, no. 4 (October–December 1981), p. 392. 88. Cf. the section “Za rodinu, za Stalina!” (For the Motherland, for Stalin!), in Benedikt Sarnov, Nash sovetskii Novoiaz: Malen’ kaia entsiklopediia real’nogo sotsializma (Moscow: Materik, 2002), pp. 137–53. 89. An example of this perspective can be found in the stories by writer Shen Congwen (1902–88) on the soldiers conscripted into warlord armies in his native Hunan province. 90. Meir Shahar (Xia Weiming), “Jin Yong wuxia xiaoshuo: yi wenhua wei wuqi”, in Wu Xiaodong and Ji Birui, eds., 2000 Beijing Jin Yong xiaoshuo guoji yantaohui lunwen ji (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 2002), at p. 65. Jin Yong’s Shujian enchou lu (A Record of Book and Sword, Gratitude and Revenge) was translated as The Book and the Sword for publication by Oxford University Press in 2004. 91. Werner Meissner, trans. Richard Mann, Philosophy and Politics in China: The Controversy over Dialectical Materialism in the 1930s (London: Hurst and Company, 1990), pp. 102, 105. Cf. Meissner’s comments on the mythical qualities thereby attached to the Marxist texts: “they are like foreign gods, in which one has more confidence than in one’s own” (p. 8); on their “supernatural power”, see further ibid., p. 185. 92. Alan Patten, “The Humanist Roots of Linguistic Nationalism”, History of Political Thought, vol. 27, no. 2 (summer 2006), quoting pp. 228, 238. 93. To describe his struggle to reconstruct the purity of Latin grammar, Valla used the terms of battle: “I shall put together, however small my forces will be, an army which I will lead [. . .] I will go before the soldiers, I will go first, so as to encourage you”. Ibid., p. 246. 94. See Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, “ ‘Studied for Action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read his Livy”, Past and Present, vol. 129 (November 1990), pp. 30–78, on a late sixteenth-century reading, by an English admirer of Valla, of the history of Rome as “a treasury of military devices to be imitated and heroic battles to be savoured” (p. 69); the authors conclude by calling Harvey’s reading an example of “an entirely unfamiliar brand of engagement with experience and intellectual history”. Recourse to history as a guide for political action was, however, standard in imperial China, while the tendency to conflate history with fiction facilitated the application of a similar reading mode to Russian literature. For Western military uses of the written word in the twentieth century, cf. Manela, The Wilsonian Moment, p. 51 (George Creel, the American journalist who chaired the Committee on Public Information in 1917–19, assured President Wilson that, due to their unprecedented circulation worldwide, his declarations “had the force of armies”); on the adoption of the motto “books are weapons in the war of ideas” in the United States in the Second World War, see Travis, “Books as Weapons and ‘The Smart Man’s Peace’ ”.

NOTES

193

95. Cf. cautious remarks in Peter Burke, “Strengths and Weaknesses of the History of Mentalities”, collected in his Varieties of Cultural History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), at pp. 179–81. 96. Chen Duxiu, “On Literary Revolution”, in Denton, Modern Chinese Literary Thought, pp. 141, 145. 97. Li Chuli, “Zenyangde jianshe geming wenxue” (How to Build a Revolutionary Literature), as quoted in Anderson, The Limits of Realism, p. 48. 98. Yang Sao, “Zuichu he waiguo wenxue jiechu shi zai Riben”, in Zheng Zhenduo and Fu Donghua, eds., Wo yu wenxue (Shanghai: Shanghai shudian, 1934), pp. 142–43. 99. Random examples from Qu Qiubai are in his letter on translation to Lu Xun (1931), trans. in Chan, Twentieth-Century Chinese Translation Theory, pp. 152 (writers as “revolutionary fighters on the literary front”), 155 (a more extensive metaphor, involving troops and weapons) and his essay “The Question of Popular Literature and Art” (1932), trans. in Denton, Modern Chinese Literary Thought, esp. p. 425. 100. See, e.g., statements by the editor and playwright Ke Ling (1909–2000) on forging literature into a “bayonet”, or the parallel drawn by another essayist (soon to become a collaborator with the Japanese) “between weapon and pen”. Poshek Fu, Passivity, Resistance, and Collaboration: Intellectual Choices in Occupied Shanghai, 1937–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 37. 101. Charles A. Laughlin, “The Battlefield of Cultural Production: Chinese Literary Mobilization during the War Years”, Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese, vol. 2, no. 1 (July 1998), esp. p. 92. On the rejection of journalistic objectivity by correspondents who saw their newspapers as “paper bullets”, cf. Chang-tai Hung, “Paper Bullets: Fan Changjiang and New Journalism in Wartime China”, Modern China, vol. 17, no. 4 (October 1991), pp. 427–68. 102. McDougall, Mao Zedong’s “Talks at the Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art”, pp. 57–86, includes several statements by Mao in this vein. In the struggle for liberation “there is a cultural as well as an armed front”; May Fourth has formed the new “cultural army” in China (p. 57); the aim of the Yan’an Forum was to unite the cultural with the revolutionary armies (pp. 58–9); writers had so far been “heroes without a battlefield” (pp. 60–61). 103. Ibid., p. 75; cf. commentary on this in Wagner, Inside a Service Trade, pp. 12–3. 104. Erlich, The Double Image, p. 56; cf. pp. 70, 77. The Russian parallel to this process may be illustrated with the help of well-known statements by poets Valerii Briusov and Vladimir Mayakovsky. Briusov’s address “To the Poet” (1907) began: “You must be proud as a banner / You must be sharp as a sword” (translated ibid., p. 72). A poem by Mayakovsky (“Home!”, 1925) included the infamous lines: “I want . . . / the Gosplan [State Economic Planning Commission] / to sweat / in debate / assigning me / goals a year

194

105.

106. 107. 108.

109.

110. 111. 112.

113.

114.

NOTES ahead. / I want the factory committee / to lock / my lips / when the work is done / I want / the pen to be on a par with the bayonet . . .” (ibid., p. 127). “Da Xu Maoyong bing guanyu kang-Ri tongyi zhanxian wenti” (A Reply to Xu Maoyong, With [Statement on] the Problem of a United Front to Resist Japan, August 1936), in LXQ J, vol. 6, at p. 549. An earlier reply by Lu Xun to challenges from the Left in February 1928, his essay “ ‘Zuiyan’ zhong de menglong”, in Sanxian ji, ibid., vol. 4, at pp. 65–6, amounted to an acknowledgement of the same vocabulary even though Lu Xun here countered his critics’ slogan of an “art of weapons” with his own “weapons of art”. See “Befuddled Wooliness”, in Lu Xun, Selected Works, vol. 3, at pp. 19–20. See entry on Pisarev by I. V. Kondakov, in Nikolaev, Russkie pisateli 1800– 1917, vol. 4, esp. p. 620. This summarizes the argument in Mogil’ner, Mifologiia “podpol’nogo cheloveka”, pp. 22–3, 31, and passim. “[P]opular life [is] the sole and inexhaustible source of processes forms of literature and art. [. . .] [O]nly this kind of source can exist; no other exists apart from it”. McDougall, Mao Zedong’s “Talks at the Yan’an Conference,” p. 69. While Mao allowed some inspiration to be derived not from popular life but from other literary works, he made clear that these last could only be counted as the writer’s “secondary” sources. “Our literature and art are [. . .] primarily for workers, peasants, and soldiers, and only secondarily for the petty bourgeoisie [later corrected, to read: ‘for the petty bourgeois intelligentsia’]”. Ibid., pp. 65, 72–3. Rubin, “Writers’ Discontent and Party Response in Yan’an before ‘Wild Lily’ ”, pp. 92, 95. See, e.g., Tang, “Echoes of Roar, China!”, p. 475. The wartime service of Ding Ling, a convert to Communism after the arrest and execution by the KMT of her common-law husband, at the head of “a brigade of writers and composers” (the Northwestern Front Service Corps), is described in terms of “trading the pen for the gun” in Fedorenko, Kitaiskie zapisi, pp. 447–50; cf. Laughlin, “The Battlefield of Cultural Production”, pp. 96–8. On the “exemplary status” of The Rhymes of Li Yucai, see Hilary Chung and Tommy McClellan, “The ‘Command Enjoyment’ of Literature in China: Conferences, Controls and Excesses”, in Chung, In the Party Spirit, here pp. 8–9. Claims on literary influence should be mistrusted where they imply the exclusion of other sources of inspiration, though Wagner, “Life as a Quote from a Foreign Book”, p. 468, believes that the later 1950s represented a still more extreme case: “a cultural scene where practically all the core texts are either translations or domestic imitations of a set of foreign texts”. Xiao Jun’s novel Village in August (1934) was not the only book of the decade to carry a heavy debt to Fadeev’s The Rout, read in Lu Xun’s translation; in addition to titles already mentioned, Wang Angang, “Sulian junshi wenxue dui woguo

NOTES

115.

116.

117. 118. 119.

120.

121.

122.

195

junshi wenxue de yingxiang” (The Influence of Soviet Military Literature on Chinese Military Literature), summarized in Zhi Liang, Bijiao wenxue sanbai pian, pp. 118–20, surveys connections and differences up to the 1980s. A recent treatment is Nicolai Volland, “Translating the Socialist State: Cultural Exchange, Natural Identity, and the Socialist World in the Early PRC”, Twentieth-Century China, vol. 33, no. 2 (April 2008). Statements approvingly collected on the Soviet side, as evidence of “the moral impact of Soviet literature on the young generation of China”, are presented in E. A. Serebriakov, “Nravstvennoe vozdeistvie sovetskoi literatury na molodoe pokolenie Kitaia (1949–1957 gg.)”, in Borshchukov et al., Literatura stran zarubezhnogo Vostoka i sovetskaia literatura. On the appropriation of Nikolaeva’s book by the reform-minded Youth League, and the “learn-from Nastia” campaign, see chaps. 6–7 in Wagner, Inside a Service Trade. See Wagner, “Life as a Quote from a Foreign Book”, esp. pp. 468, 474; idem, Inside a Service Trade, pp. 48–50. Yu, “A Soviet Hero, Pavel Korchagin, Comes to China”, pp. 337, 341–42. “The Chinese Pavel”, devout Communist writer Wu Yunduo (1917–91), was repeatedly wounded in battles against the Nationalists and the Japanese; his book Give Everything to the Party (Ba yiqie xiangei dang) was published to high official acclaim in 1953. More “Chinese Pavels” returned from the Korean front. Cf. ibid. p. 342; Peng Ming, Istoriia kitaisko-sovetskoi druzhby, p. 263. Tina Mai Chen, “Internationalism and Cultural Experience: Soviet Films and Popular Chinese Understandings of the Future in the 1950s”, Cultural Critique, vol. 58 (fall 2004), pp. 90, 93–4. Ibid., p. 105, notes that Chinese film viewers were again required to learn from Matrosov after the Sino-Soviet rift, although by this time he was construed as an example of the upright socialist spirit that Soviet Russia had lost. The reasons for my reservations about Chen’s conviction that the propaganda worked (“Seeing, in this case, was believing”, p. 101), should become even clearer below. The writer Wang Ruowang published Xiang Nasijia xuexi (Learn from Nastia) in February 1956; 400,000 copies of it were issued. In 1957, however, Wang was expelled from the Party as a “Rightist”; rehabilitated by Deng Xiaoping, he was expelled again in 1987, and jailed after Tiananmen. Allowed to emigrate in 1992, he died in 2001 as a political dissident in New York, where he was lamented by Liu Binyan. Jonathan Mirsky, “The Life and Death of Wang Ruowang”, China Brief, vol. 2, no. 2 (January 2002). On Liu Binyan’s first contact with Ovechkin in 1954, see Wagner, Inside a Service Trade, pp. 82–4. During the anti-rightist movement in 1957, the idea of “intervening in life” was denounced, and Liu revived it in 1979: see Nieh, Literature of the Hundred Flowers, vol. 1, pp. 258, xli–xlii. In 1987

196

123. 124.

125. 126.

127.

128. 129. 130.

NOTES Liu too was expelled from the CCP for his persistent criticism of cadre corruption and other ills of the Communist system (in which he remained a believer). He left China for the United States in the following year. Valentin Ovechkin attempted suicide, and stopped writing his ocherki, after being confronted with the reality of “virgin soil” management in the Omsk region in 1961. See entry by V. A. Bogdanov in Nikolaev, Russkie pisateli 20 veka, pp. 508–10. Landsberger, “The Deification of Mao”, p. 143. Cf., for two very different perspectives on this connection between language and political terror, Cheng-chih Wang, Words Kill: Calling for the Destruction of “Class Enemies” in China, 1949–1953 (New York and London: Routledge, 2002) and Igal Halfin, Intimate Enemies: Demonizing the Bolshevik Opposition, 1918–1928 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), esp. Halfin’s chap. 2, “Killing with Words”. W. J. F. Jenner, The Tyranny of History: The Roots of China’s Crisis, 2nd ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1994), pp. 216–17. See Ji Fengyuan, Linguistic Engineering: Language and Politics in Mao’s China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004); a version of chap. 5 is also available as Ji, “Language and Violence during the Chinese Cultural Revolution”, American Journal of Chinese Studies, vol. 11, no. 2 (October 2004), pp. 93–117. The weakness of Ji’s argument lies in her insistence that the violent rhetoric of Maoism was imposed on the Chinese people by the regime, and more concretely by some villains at its top echelons; e.g., analyzing the dehumanizing use of “dogs” by the Red Guards, she does not mention how often this tag was attached to ideological opponents in polemics between well-educated persons already in the China of Lu Xun’s time, and indeed by Lu Xun himself. See the chapter on the iconic function of the leader’s portrait (both visual and literary), in Dobrenko, Metafora vlasti, pp. 74–137. See, too, Jan Plamper, “Abolishing Ambiguity: Soviet Censorship Practices in the 1930s”, The Russian Review, vol. 60, no. 4 (October 2001), pp. 526–44. This form of humiliating the accused was not invented in the Cultural Revolution, but it did become most closely associated with this period. Li Zhensheng, Red-color News Soldier (London: Phaidon Press, 2003), p. 179, referring to the Cultural Revolution in Harbin. Landsberger, “The Deification of Mao” (quotation on p. 140); cf. Link, The Uses of Literature, pp. 149, 274, and Ji Fengyuan, Linguistic Engineering, pp. 180–81. On the use of the Quotations from Chairman Mao in the “Campaign to Study and Apply Chairman Mao’s Thought”, begun in 1964, see Ji, ibid., pp. 96–101. The Little Red Book protected its bearers only in so far as such persons were less likely to be tortured by Red Guards when apprehended by them; however, there were also earnest believers in the Book’s potency. See Jiping Zuo, “Political Religion: The Case of the

NOTES

131.

132. 133. 134. 135.

136.

137.

138. 139.

197

Cultural Revolution in China”, Sociological Analysis, vol. 51, no. 1 (1991), pp. 99–110, at pp. 103–4. Joseph Brodsky, “Uncommon Visage. The Nobel Lecture” (trans. Barry Rubin), in idem, On Grief and Reason: Essays (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1997), pp. 46–7. Ibid., p. 51. Ibid., pp. 52–4. “Acceptance Speech”, ibid., pp. 60–61. Gao Xingjian, “The Case for Literature”, Nobel Lecture, now in idem, trans. Mabel Lee, The Case for Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 32–48. Neither “mere” metaphor nor fully explained by the demands of political discourse in the PRC, the tension this statement reveals between the realms of literature and action is the concern of Wei-ming Chen, Pen or Sword: The Wen-Wu Conflict in the Short Stories of Lao She (1899–1966), PhD thesis at Stanford University, 1985. See chap. 13, “The Strange Death of Lao She”, in Jasper Becker, City of Heavenly Tranquillity: Beijing in the History of China (London: Allen Lane, 2008), here pp. 197–98. “Yao Wenyuan, Last Survivor of China’s Gang of Four, Dies at 74”, New York Times (6 January 2006). Gamsa, The Chinese Translation of Russian Literature, p. 329.

Afterword 1. The theatre director Sun Weishi, who had studied in Moscow, translated in the 1950s a Soviet work entitled The Directing Lessons of K. S. Stanislavskii. In the Cultural Revolution, she and her co-translator Zhang Shoushen were persecuted to their death. Li Sui’an, Zhong-Su wenhua jiaoliu shi 1937–1949, p. 89. 2. See Andrew G. Walder, “Cultural Revolution Radicalism: Variations on a Stalinist Theme”, in William A. Joseph et al., eds., New Perspectives on the Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), esp. p. 61. 3. See Liu Xinwu, “Class Counsellor” (Ban zhuren, 1977), in Lu Xinhua et al., trans. Geremie Barmé and Bennett Lee, The Wounded: New Stories of the Cultural Revolution 77–78 (Hong Kong: Joint Publishing, and London: Guanghwa, 1979), pp. 147–78, here pp. 172–73. “Class Counsellor” was indebted to “The Watch” (“Chasy”, 1928) by L. Panteleev (Aleksei I. Eremeev, 1908–89): a book its young heroes read in Lu Xun’s popular translation of 1935. The freshly rehabilitated trio of “Mao Dun, Balzac and

198

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12.

NOTES Tang poetry” (but still not the more politically sensitive Russians) appeared also at the outset of another story of “scar literature”, which then went on to eulogize Hugo’s Les Misérables: see Yang Wenzhi, “Ah, Books!”, ibid., pp. 55–71. See his speeches “The Call of the Times” and “Man Is the Aim, Man Is the Center”, translated in Howard Goldblatt, ed., Chinese Literature for the 1980s: The Fourth Congress of Writers & Artists (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1982), pp. 103–31. Dai Houying’s best-known novel Ren, ah ren! (Man, Oh Man!, also translated as People, Oh People!; 1980) is the subject of Carolyn S. Pruyn, Humanism in Modern Chinese Literature: The Case of Dai Houying (Bochum: Studienverlag Brockmeyer, 1988). Ba Jin, “ ‘Zai renshi Tuo’ersitai’?” (“Getting Once More to Know Tolstoy?”, 1985), in idem, Suixiang lu, pp. 717–23. As he defended Tolstoy from a recent rearguard attack, Ba Jin put the emphasis on the Russian writer’s commitment to the ideal of “matching word with deed”. Six decades earlier, Ba Jin had responded in a similar way to an article by Ah Ying; cf. Ah Ying quanji, vol. 1, pp. 44–5. Barmé, In the Red, pp. 284–85, 299. Cf. Chen Jianhua and Robin Visser, “Humanistic Spirit, ‘Spirit of the Humanities’ ”, in Edward L. Davis, ed., Encyclopedia of Contemporary Chinese Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 273–74. The most recent Luolita by Zhu Wan (a posthumous publication, completed by the translator’s son for the Shanghai Yiwen chubanshe) can justly claim to be the first annotated translation of the novel. It was in its fifth impression by May 2006. Lolita (1955) was translated on Taiwan already in 1964; the first PRC translation in January 1989 was followed by four competing versions in that year alone. See the survey by Zhang Ying, Shi Xisheng and Huang Mei, “50 sui Luolita, 11 zhang Zhongguo lian” (Lolita’s Fifty Years: Eleven Chinese Faces), Nanfang zhoumo (Guangzhou), 16 March 2006. Elena Ivanitskaia, “ ‘Desantnyi nozh v serdtse blizhnemu’: Masslit kak shkola zhizni”, Druzhba narodov, no. 9 (2005), available in an English translation, by Liv Bliss, as “ ‘At Close Quarters, An Assault Knife into the Heart’: Mainstream Literature as a School of Life”, Russian Studies in Literature, vol. 43, no. 2 (spring 2007), pp. 27–55. The most famous of tortured heroes was the wartime partisan Zoia Kosmodem’ianskaia, whose story reached China in both print and film; on her, see Rosalinde Sartorti, “On the Making of Heroes, Heroines, and Saints”, in Stites, ed., Culture and Entertainment in Wartime Russia. This is the thrust of Barmé, In the Red. Cf. Yue Tao, “The New Chineseness: Great Leap Forward or Backward?”, IIAS Newsletter, no. 37 (June 2005). I. V. Kondakov, in Nikolaev, Russkie pisateli 20 veka, p. 527. T. I. Andronova, “Kak zakalialas’ stal’ na frontakh Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny” (How the Steel Was Tempered on the Fronts of the Great Patriotic War)

NOTES

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

199

(Moscow: Gosudarstvennyi muzei–gumanitarnyi tsentr “Preodolenie” imeni N. A. Ostrovskogo, 2001), p. 8. Wang Jiezhi and Chen Jianhua, Youyuan de huixiang, p. 386. The authors go on to describe the revaluation of Ostrovskii’s novel by the PRC literary scene, offering a nuanced analysis of the views expressed by representatives of different generations. The polemic took off in 1998, as the critic Yu Yizhong responded to the argument that the novel possessed a timeless “charm” by saying that it rather demonstrated how “an average person could be turned into a supporter and ‘material’ for the Stalin line” (ibid., p. 390). How the Steel Was Tempered was then excluded from projected entry into a textbook for students of Russian literature, but controversy over the book was resumed (with the opposition still headed by Yu Yizhong) parallel to the screening of the TV series. The series, finally, has attracted some attention abroad: conference papers on it have been presented by U.S. academics He Donghui and Mingwei Song. Cf. Aleksandr S. Martynov, “Rossiia i Kitai: skhodstvo naslediia—obshchnost’ sud’by” (Russia and China: Similarity in Heritage, Commonality in Fate), Zvezda, no. 10 (1995), pp. 167–75, at p. 171. Referring to China as Russia’s “great neighbour”, this author wondered whether post-Soviet Russia was still entitled to call itself “a great nation and a great people”. Martynov was one of the several sinologist advocates of “learning from China”: cf. Christopher Marsh, Unparalleled Reforms: China’s Rise, Russia’s Fall, and the Interdependence of Transition (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005), pp. 144–52. In anticipation of these large-scale cultural undertakings, some conflicting statements on the time spans of “the year of Russia in China” and “the year of China in Russia” were issued. I take this opportunity to correct wrong information on the latter, given in the end of my “Traces of Russian Libraries in China”, Library History, vol. 22, no. 3 (November 2006), pp. 201–12. Concurrently, 2006 was also declared “the year of Italy in China”. The first initiative of this kind, “the year of France in China”, was celebrated from October 2004 to September 2005. In March 2009 “the year of the Russian language in China” was launched, to be followed by “the year of the Chinese language in Russia” in 2010. Chi Li, “Tuo’ersitai weijin”, revised version now in her Kanmainiang (Nanjing: Jiangsu wenyi chubanshe, 2006). The scarf is first mentioned only on p. 208, and its connection to Tolstoy is not revealed until the last five pages of the novella. For the meaning of Kanmainiang, the unusual title of the collection, see the title story, ibid., pp. 13–4. This detail must be the author’s invention. Two major biographies that describe Tolstoy’s clothing on the voyage that ended at Astapovo station (Lev Tolstoi by Viktor Shklovskii and Tolstoy by Henri Troyat), say nothing of a scarf. The writer’s daughter Tat’iana, however, knitted “shawls and scarves”, and then sold them herself on the marketplace to make ends meet in 1919: see Shentalinskii, Donos na Sokrata, p. 33.

200

NOTES

18. Professor He Shaojun of Shenyang Normal University, quoted in Louisa Winkler, “Writers Bring Plight of the Marginalised and Spirituality to Society”, China Daily, 7 July 2005. 19. Howe, “The Authority of Presence”, p. 474. 20. Cf. Des Forges, “Burning with Reverence”; and see Peter Stallybrass, “Marx’s Coat” in Patricia Spyer, ed., Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces (New York and London: Routledge, 1998).

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Zheng Zhenduo, “Azhibasuifu yu Shaning: Shaning de yi xu” (Artsybashev and Sanin: Introduction to the Translation of Sanin), Xiaoshuo yuebao, vol. 15, no. 5 (May 1924), pp. 1–12. Signed Xidi. ———, Zheng Zhenduo quanji (Complete Works), in 20 vols. Shijiazhuang: Huashan wenyi chubanshe, 1998. Zhi Liang, ed., Bijiao wenxue sanbai pian (Three Hundred Pieces on Comparative Literature). Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 1990. Zhi Liang et al., eds., Eguo wenxue yu Zhongguo (Russian Literature and China). Shanghai: Huadong shifan daxue chubanshe, 1991. Zhongguo fanyijia cidian (Dictionary of Chinese Translators). Beijing: Zhongguo duiwai fanyi chubanshe, 1988. Zhou Zuoren, trans. David E. Pollard, Zhou Zuoren: Selected Essays. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2006. Chinese-English bilingual edition. Zhu Shoutong, Wenxue yu rensheng shiwu jiang (Fifteen Lectures on Literature and Life). Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 2006. Zou Zhenhuan, 20 shiji Shanghai fanyi chuban yu wenhua bianqian (Translation Publishing in Twentieth-Century Shanghai and Cultural Change). Nanning: Guangxi jiaoyu chubanshe, 2000.

Glossary of Chinese Terms

Ah Ying 䰓㣅 (Qian Xingcun 䣶 ᴣᴥ)

dao minjian qu ࠄ⇥䭧এ

Ai Siqi 㡒ᗱ༛

Diao Shaohua ߕ㌍㧃

Ba Jin Ꮘ䞥

Ding Ling ϕ⦆

Bao’er ֱ⠒

Ding Yi ϕᯧ

Bei Wenli 䉱᭛࡯

Dong Qiufang 㨷⾟㢇

Biechedu ߹䒞ᴰ

Fan Quan 㣗⊝

Bing Xin ‫ބ‬ᖗ

fengcai 䈤䞛

Bo Yi ԃ་ and Shu Qi ন唞

daoshi ᇢ᏿

Feng Xuefeng 侂䲾ዄ

Cao Jinghua ᳍䴪㧃

Feng Zikai 䈤ᄤᜋ

Cao Suling ᳍㯛⦆

Fu Donghua ٙᵅ㧃

Cao Ying 㤝ᄄ

Fu Lei ٙ䳋

Chen Duxiu 䱇⤼⾔ Chen Jiying 䱇㋔◙ Chen Jianhua 䱇ᓎ㧃 Chen Quan 䱇䡧 Chen Sihe 䱇ᗱ੠ Cheng Fangwu ៤ӓ਒ chiguang 䌸‫ܝ‬ Chi Li ∴㥝

Gan Yuze ⫬䲼╸ Gan Zhexian ⫬㶘ҭ Gao Mang 催㦑 Gao Xingjian 催㸠‫ع‬ Ge Baoquan ៜᇊ⃞ geming䴽ੑ Geng Jizhi 㘓△П Gu Hongming 䕰匏䡬

Dai Houying ᠈८㣅

Guo Moruo 䛁≿㢹

daofu 䘧ヺ

Guo Yanli 䛁ᓊ⾂

218

GLOSSARY OF CHINESE TERMS

Haiyan ⍋➩

Li Dazhao ᴢ໻䞫

Hao Minggong 䚱ᯢᎹ

Li Ding ᴢᅮ

He Jingzhi 䊔ᭀП

LiDu ᴢᴰ

He Shaojun 䊔㌍֞

Li Jijun ᴢ䱯ഛ

He Xi 厈㽓 (Cheng Kansheng ⿟ ՗⫳)

Li Jiye ᴢ䴑䞢

hong bao shu ㋙ᇊ᳌

Li Lanqing ᴢጤ⏙

hongweibing ㋙㸯݉

Li Ping ᴢᑇ

Hu Feng 㚵乼

Li Shixue ᴢཁᅌ

Hu Ji 㚵ᖠ

Li Sui’an ᴢ䱼ᅝ

Hu Qiuyuan 㚵⾟ॳ

Li Yu ᴢ✰

Hu Shi 㚵䘽

Li Zaidao ᴢ䓝䘧

Hu Yuzhi 㚵ᛜП

Li Jin ᴢҞ

Li Zicheng ᴢ㞾៤

Ji Birui 㿜ຕ⨲

Liang Qichao ṕଳ䍙

Jia Zhifang 䊜ỡ㢇

Liang Shiqiu ṕᆺ⾟

Jiang Chunfang ྰἓ㢇

Lin Jinghua ᵫ㊒㧃

Jiang Guangci 㫷‫ܝ‬᜜

Lin Shu ᵫ㋧

Jiang Zhinong 㫷ᖫ䖆

Lin Yutang ᵫ䁲ූ

Jin Ren 䞥Ҏ

Liu Binyan ࡝䊧䲕

Jin Yong 䞥ᒌ

Liu Bocheng ࡝ԃᡓ

Jing Yinyu ᭀ䲅ⓕ

Liu Shaoqi ࡝ᇥ༛

jingshen shiliang ㊒⼲亳㊻

Liu Xinwu ࡝ᖗ℺

Jue Qing ⠉䴦

Liu Xuyuan ࡝㎦⑤ Liu Yan ࡝ⷨ

Kang Youwei ᒋ᳝⚎

Liu Zaifu ࡝‫ݡ‬ᕽ

Ke Ling ᷃䴜

Lu Xun 元䖙

kou maozi ᠷᐑᄤ

Luoguofu 㕙ᵰ໿

lao biandan 㗕᠕᪨

Ma Lie zhuyi Mao Zedong sixiang 侀߫Џ㕽↯╸ᵅᗱᛇ

laoxiao 㗕㙪 Leng Ke ‫ދ‬᷃ Li Chuli ᴢ߱Ṽ

Mao Dun 㣙Ⳓ (Shen Yanbing ≜ 䲕‫)ބ‬

GLOSSARY OF CHINESE TERMS Mei Lanfang ṙ㰁㢇

taoye xunyu 䱊‫❣ފ‬㚆

Mei Yi ṙⲞ

Tao Yuanming 䱊⏉ᯢ

Meng Zhaoyi ᄳᰁ↙

tingche lou 㙑䒞ῧ

Ni Fan ‫޵׾‬

toubi congrong ᡩㄚᕲ២

Nie Rongzhen 㙊ᾂ㟏

Wang Jianzhao ∾ࡡ䞫

niunai lu ⠯ཊ䏃

Wang Jiezhi ∾ҟП

Peng Ming ᕁᯢ Ping Baoxing ᑇֱ㟜

Wang Meng ⥟㩭 Wang Ruowang ⥟㢹ᳯ Wang Shoulan ⥟ᅜ㰁

Qian Gurong 䣶䈋㵡

Wang Shuo ⥟᳨

Qiu Yang ⾟䱑

Wang Tiran ∾‫✊װ‬

Qu Qiubai ⶓ⾟ⱑ

Wang Tongzhao ⥟㍅✻

Qu Shiwei ⶓϪ⨟

Wang Xili ⥟Ꮰ⾂

Qu Shiying ⶓϪ㣅 (Qu Junong ⶓ㦞䖆)

Wang Yingxia ⥟᯴䳲

Qu Weita ሜ㎁ᅗ

Wang Zhichun ⥟П᯹

Qu Yuan ሜॳ

Weiming she ᳾ৡ⼒

Shen Congwen ≜ᕲ᭛ Shen Ying ≜〢 shidai ᰖҷ Shimintu ຿ᬣೳ shizai tai bu cheng dongxi le ᆺ೼໾ ϡ៤ᵅ㽓њ Shi Zhecun ᮑ㳛ᄬ

Wang Yougui ⥟ট䊈

Wei Suyuan 䶟㋴೦ wenyan ᭛㿔 Wen Yiduo 㘲ϔ໮ Wu Mi ਇᅧ Wu Xiaodong ਇᲝᵅ Wu Xiaoyan ਇᇣ➩ Wu Yunduo ਇ䘟䨌

Song Binghui ᅟ⚇䓱

Xidi 㽓䂺

Su Wen 㯛≊ (Du Heng ᴰ㸵)

Xia Weiming ໣㎁ᯢ

Su Zhenlan 㯛ᤃ㰁

Xiao Hong 㭁㋙

Sun Ke ᄿ⾥

Xiao Jun 㭁䒡

Sun Naixiu ᄿЗׂ

Xiao San 㭁ϝ

Sun Weishi ᄿ㎁Ϫ

Xie Liuyi 䃱݁䘌

219

220

GLOSSARY OF CHINESE TERMS

Xie Tianzhen 䃱໽ᤃ

Zha Mingjian ᶹᯢᓎ

Xie Zhixi 㾷ᖫ❭

zhanyang ⶏӄ

Xinyou 䕯䜝

Zhang Ailing ᔉᛯ⦆

Xu Dishan 䀅ഄቅ

Zhang Demei ᔉᖋ㕢

Xu Maoyong ᕤសᒌ

Zhang Shoushen ᔉᅜᜢ

Xu Qinwen 䀅ℑ᭛

Zhang Wentian ᔉ㘲໽

Xu Xiangqian ᕤ৥ࠡ

Zhang Ximan ᔉ㽓᳐

Xu Zifang ᕤᄤ㢇

Zhang Xuecheng ゴᅌ䁴

Xue Fucheng 㭯⽣៤

Zhang Yiping ゴ㸷㧡

xuehui ᅌ᳗

Zhao Jingshen 䍭᱃⏅

Yan Fu ಈᕽ yanxing ruoyi 㿔㸠㢹ϔ yanxing yizhi 㿔㸠ϔ㟈

Zhao Ming 䍭ᯢ Zhao Shuli 䍭‍⧚ Zhao Xun 䍭⌉

Yang Sao ἞個

zhengming ℷৡ

Yao Pengzi ྮ㫀ᄤ

Zheng Zhenduo 䜁ᤃ䨌

Yao Wenyuan ྮ᭛‫ܗ‬

Zhi Liang ᱎ䞣

Yao Yuanfang ྮ䘴ᮍ

zhishi fenzi ⶹ䄬ߚᄤ

Ye Lingfeng 㨝䴜勇

zhongyong Ёᒌ

Ye Shengtao 㨝㘪䱊

Zhou Libo ਼ゟ⊶

Ye Zhicheng 㨝㟇䁴

Zhou Shoujuan ਼⯺匥

Ye Zhimei 㨝㟇㕢

Zhou Zuoren ਼԰Ҏ

Ye Zhishan 㨝㟇୘

Zhu Rangcheng ᴅいϲ

Yi E wei shi ҹ֘⚎᏿

Zhu Shoutong ᴅ໑Ḥ

yinhe / yinhan 䡔⊇ˈ䡔⓶

Zhu Wan Џ㨀

yinying 䱄ᕅ

Zhu Ziqing ᴅ㞾⏙

Yu Dafu 䚕䘨໿

zhuanke yishu ㆚ࠏ㮱㸧

Yu Yizhong ԭϔЁ

Zi Yi ᄤ䊑

Yuan Muzhi 㹕⠻П

zizhi ᄫ㋭

Yuefu ῖᑰ

Zou Zhenhuan 䛦ᤃ⪄

Index

Ah Ying (Qian Xingcun), 106–8, 112, 115, 162n35, 163n42, 198n6 Ai Siqi, 117 Akhmatova, Anna, 36, 92 Aldanov, Mark, 58 Aldington, Richard, 111 Alekseev, Vasilii, 88 Andersen, Hans Christian, 25 Andreev, Leonid, 7, 17, 25, 29, 31, 36, 46, 58, 82, 111, 152n48, 154n62, 159n8 Antokol’sky, Pavel, 58 Artsybashev, Mikhail, 7, 28, 31, 45, 58, 67, 72, 97, 178n71 Augustine, St, 159n4 Ba Jin, 14, 16, 36, 56–7, 64, 83–5, 91–2, 133, 136, 159n4, 161n24 Babbitt, Irving, 30, 56 Bal’mont, Konstantin, 58 Balzac, Honoré de, 55, 132 Baltrušaitis, Jurgis, 58 Baring, Maurice, 162n32, 170n13 Barrie, James, 15 Bashkin, Vasilii, 45 Beardsley, Aubrey, 61 Bednyi, Dem’ian, 71 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 139 Bek, Alexander, 108, 112 Belinskii, Vissarion, 29, 33, 44, 46, 57, 156n87, 168n81 Belousov, Roman, 107–8 Belyi, Andrei, 58

Bing Xin, 14, 159n11 Bjørnson, Bjørnstjerne, 152n44 Bo Yi and Shu Qi, 169n5 Brandes, Georg, 22 Brecht, Bertolt, 87 Briusov, Valerii, 193n104 Brodsky, Joseph, 126–8, 133 Brooke, Rupert, 110 Bulgakov, Mikhail, 59, 97 Bunin, Ivan, 54 Burliuk, David, 58 Byron, George Gordon, 21–3, 152n44 Camus, Albert, 54 Cao Jinghua, 26, 67, 76–9, 83, 88–9, 105, 108–9, 112–13, 178n73 Cao Suling, 76 Cao Xueqin, 96 Cao Ying, 90, 121 Carpenter, Edward, 154n63 Cervantes, Miguel de, 96 Chang, Eileen, 136 Chekhov, Anton, 16–17, 24–5, 27, 36, 43, 61, 77, 85–6, 152n44, 161n24, 166n60, 178n73 Chen Duxiu, 27, 118 Chen Jiying, 81–4 Chen Quan, 150n22 Cheng Fangwu, 33 Chernyshevskii, Nikolai, 29, 33, 57–8, 103, 119, 168n81 Chi Li, 139–41

222

INDEX

Chiang Kai-shek, 20, 72, 105, 109, 186n41 Cicero, 117 Coleridge, Samuel T., 96 Communist University of the Toilers of the East (Moscow), 76, 187n46 Confucius, and Confucianism, 19–20, 24, 26, 30, 39–40, 42, 51 Creation Society, 29, 33, 62, 118 Cultural Revolution, The, 7–8, 57, 64, 77, 105, 124–6, 128, 131–3 Dai Houying, 132 Dante Alighieri, 30, 64 Darwin, Charles, 19 Daudet, Alphonse, 96 “decadent” literature, 11, 20, 61–2, 74 Defoe, Daniel, 25 Diao Shaohua, 181n94 Dickens, Charles, 14, 27, 96, 98, 127, 183n12 Ding Ling, 99, 102, 125, 194n112 Ding Yi, 185n34 Dobroliubov, Nikolai, 29, 33, 44, 46, 57, 168n81 Dong Qiufang, 151n36 Dostoevsky, Fedor, 16–17, 26, 29, 35, 40, 45, 53, 70, 123, 134, 152n44, 153n58 Dream of the Red Chamber, 72, 96, 99 Dreiser, Theodore, 73 Du Fu, 29, 139 Dumas fils, Alexandre, 98 Dumas père, Alexandre, 96 Ehrenburg, Il’ia, 58, 106–8 Eichenwald, Iulii, 57–8 Eliot, T.S., 12, 59 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 152n44 émigré literature, 7, 10, 54, 57–9, 64, 81, 83, 89, 135–6 Enfeoffment of the Gods, 100 Engels, Friedrich, 92, 123, 132

English literature, 3–4, 11, 14–15, 18, 23, 25, 60 entertainment fiction, 3, 60, 99, 161n24 Epoch Press, 89–90, 108, 112, 133 Erbstein, Boris, 172n30 Esenin, Sergei, 22, 36, 162n35 Fadeev, Alexander, 22, 77, 80–1, 106, 108–9, 111–12, 123, 137, 194n114 Fedin, Konstantin, 174n49 Fedorenko, Nikolai, 174n49, 178n79, 190n75 Fedorov, Nikolai, 8 Fei Ming, 27 Feng Xuefeng, 151n38, 161n27 Feng Zikai, 33 France, Anatole, 152n44 frontispiece portraits, 19, 25–6, 141 see also writers’ portraits Fu Lei, 133 Furmanov, Dmitrii, 109 Galsworthy, John, 15 Gan Yuze, 181n94 Gan Zhexian, 31 Gandhi, Mahatma, 24, 51 Gao Mang, 91–2, 137, 181n97 Gao Xingjian, 128 Garnett, Constance, 56, 60–1, 161n28 Garshin, Vsevolod, 27, 111 Ge Baoquan, 89, 91, 173n36 Geng Jizhi, 28–9, 32, 61, 69, 77, 157n88 Gissing, George R., 23 Gladkov, Fedor, 104, 112 Gliere, Reinhold, 75 Glinka, Mikhail, 139 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 22, 24, 27, 97–8, 110, 132 Gogol, Nikolai, 16, 21, 24, 35, 60, 63, 74, 139 Goldman, Emma, 73

INDEX Goncharov, Ivan, 16, 44–5 Gorbatov, Boris, 106 Gorky, Maxim, 24, 27, 29, 36, 38, 42, 44, 46, 55–6, 62, 67, 72, 77, 103, 108, 122, 135, 137, 149n11, 177n69 grotesque, the, 10–11, 73, 76, 128 Gu Hongming, 51 Guo Moruo, 24, 39, 78, 107, 136–7, 159n4, 162n35, 181n96 Haggard, H. Rider, 14, 98 Hauptmann, Gerhart, 15, 27, 152n44 He Jingzhi, 185n34 He Xi (Cheng Kansheng), 26 Hegel, G.W.F., 10, 53 Heine, Heinrich, 23, 188n54 Herzen, Alexander, 56–7, 91, 133 Hitler, Adolf, 106, 127 Holmes, Sherlock, 92, 97–8 Homer, 178n71 Hrabal, Bohumil, 140 Hsia, C.T., 20, 101 Hsia, T.A., 104 Hu Feng, 56 Hu Qiuyuan, 20 Hu Shi, 11, 14, 32–3, 143n3 Hu Yuzhi, 29, 68, 72–6, 145n16 Hua Guofeng, 132 Hugo, Victor, 27, 138, 152n44, 166n61, 198n3 “humanist” literature, and humanism, 18, 27–33, 43–5, 47, 50, 53–6, 58, 110, 122, 131–4, 136, 139–41 Ibanez, Vicente Blasco, 111 Ibsen, Henrik, 30 Inber, Vera, 58 “intellectuals”, in Russia and China, 40–2, 52, 119, 132 Ivin, A. (Aleksei Ivanov), 86–7, 89, 93, 178n73

223

Jiang Chunfang, 90 Jiang Guangci, 67, 70–1, 76, 84, 150n30 Jin Ren, 90, 108 Jin Yong, 116 Joan of Arc, 97 Journey to the West, 100 Joyce, James, 12, 59 Jue Qing, 84 Kamenskii, Vasilii, 58 Karakhan, Lev, 177n71 Karamzin, Nikolai, 84, 97 Ke Ling, 193n100 Keats, John, 27, 110 Kharms, Daniil, 59 Khodasevich, Vladislav, 58 Khrushchev, Nikita, 8, 56, 123 Korneichuk, Alexander, 106–7, 111, 138, 190n72 Korolenko, Vladimir, 27, 51 Kosmodem’ianskaia, Zoia, 198n9 Kropotkin, Peter, 29, 56–7 Kupala, Ianka, 108 Lao She, 32, 128, 136, 173n36 Lavrenev, Boris, 78–9, 108 Lawrence, D.H., 161n28 League of Left-Wing Writers, 22, 39, 62, 102, 112 Leavis, F.R., 48 Lei Feng, 124 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 30 Lenin, Vladimir, 18, 77, 103, 118, 123, 127, 132, 171n22, 186n40 Leonov, Leonid, 106 Lermontov, Mikhail, 21, 85, 97, 170n13 Li Bai, 29, 139 Li Chuli, 118 Li Dazhao, 17–18 Li Jijun, 190n77 Li Jiye, 25–6, 154n63 Li Lanqing, 138–9

224 Li Yaolin, 45 Li Yu, 55 Li Zicheng, 107 Liang Qichao, 8, 98, 100, 162n31, 185n29 Liang Shiqiu, 14, 30–1, 33, 143n3, 162n35 Libedinskii, Iurii, 176n64 Lin Shu, 14, 22, 98 Lin Yutang, 33, 159n11 Literary Research Association, 9, 14, 24–5, 29, 61 Liu Binyan, 122–3, 132, 195n121 Liu Bocheng, 109, 112 Liu Shaoqi, 76 Liu Xinwu, 197n3 Liu Zaifu, 158n4 Lu Xun, 3, 7, 9–11, 15–16, 21–2, 25, 28–9, 32, 36, 45, 61, 67, 72, 76–8, 83, 86–8, 92–3, 99, 111, 118–19, 122, 132, 134, 140, 162n35, 179n86, 188n53, 193n99, 194n114 Luzhkov, Iurii, 139 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 74 Mandelstam, Osip, 36, 58–9 Mao Dun, 9, 14–15, 18, 72, 91, 108, 110, 122–4, 132, 136–7, 148n3, 161n24, 171n18, 190n73 Mao Zedong, 7–8, 23, 50, 55, 101, 103, 107, 113, 116, 118, 120, 123–4, 126–8, 132, 136, 173n36, 188n53 Marx, Karl, 10, 23, 39, 50, 53, 92, 123, 132, 137, 171n22 Mary, Queen of Scots, 97 Maupassant, Guy de, 30 May Fourth, 2–4, 14–15, 18, 21, 23, 30–3, 39, 42, 46–7, 49–50, 60, 69, 76, 116, 122, 140 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 52, 58, 185n32, 193n104 Mei Guangdi, 30

INDEX Mei Lanfang, 75, 87, 145n14 Mei Yi, 189n71 Meierhold, Vsevolod, 74–5, 87, 178n74 Mickiewicz, Adam, 21 Mikhailovskii, Nikolai, 168n81 Mikhoels, Solomon, 172n27, 172n30 Mill, J.S., 19, 144n5, 149n22 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 139 Nabokov, Vladimir, 10, 58–60, 63, 133, 182n6 “national character,” 31, 42, 48–51, 53, 120 Nekrasov, Nikolai, 164n43, 177n67 Nie Rongzhen, 109, 113 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 9, 18, 23, 57 Nikolaeva, Galina, 121–3 Nobel Prize for literature, 15, 59 Olesha, Iurii, 185n32 Olgin, Moissaye, 57, 97, 157n95, 162n32 Orwell, George, 110 Ostrovskii, Alexander, 163n37 Ostrovskii, Nikolai, 11, 46, 79, 108, 111–12, 115, 122, 135–7 Ovechkin, Valentin, 123 Paine, Thomas, 189n63 Panteleev, Leonid, 197n3 Pasternak, Boris, 36, 58–9, 92, 187n50 Pavlenko, Peter, 168n76 Peacock, Thomas Love, 21 Pereleshin, Valerii, 179n86 Petőfi, Sándor, 21 Petrarch, 117 Phelps, William L., 154n62 Pisarev, Dmitrii, 45, 119, 164n43, 168n81 Plato, 30 Popper, Karl, 53 Princess Turandot, 74, 171n27, 172n28

INDEX Pushkin, Alexander, 21, 25, 51, 59, 71–2, 85, 91–2, 97, 120, 132, 138–9, 166n60, 170n13 Qian Gurong, 16, 55, 122 Qu Qiubai, 18, 23, 36, 42, 52, 67–72, 75–6, 80–1, 157n88, 167n73, 193n99 Qu Shiying, 69, 76 Qu Yuan, 20–1 realism, 9, 12, 29, 38, 43–5, 47, 53, 60, 63, 74, 98, 101, 118 see also socialist realism Red Flower / Red Poppy, 74–5 Remarque, Erich Maria, 110–11 rickshaws, 32–3 Rogov, Vladimir, 88–9, 181n96 Roland, Madame, 97 Rolland, Romain, 174n46 Rostand, Edmond, 74 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 18, 159n4, 166n61 Rozanov, Vasilii, 165n51 Salutati, Coluccio, 117 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 54 Sassoon, Siegfried, 110 Savinkov, Boris, 31, 52, 99, 164n47 Schnitzler, Arthur, 62 Scholars, The, 87 Seltzer, Thomas, 17, 60 Serafimovich, Alexander, 78–9, 108–9, 111–12, 123 Seryshev, Innokentii, 176n63 Shakespeare, William, 30, 96, 100, 152n44 Shalamov, Varlam, 54 Shaw, George Bernard, 24, 30, 178n71 Shelley, Mary, 23 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 21–3 Shen Congwen, 192n89 Shen Ying, 100

225

Shen Zemin, 17, 29, 173n36 Shi Zhecun, 62 Shidai chubanshe, see Epoch Press Shmelev, Ivan, 26, 38–9, 58 Sholokhov, Mikhail, 90, 102, 106, 108, 133, 138, 176n62, 186n34, 187n45 Sholom Aleichem, 74 Shostakovich, Dmitrii, 139 Sieroszewski, Wacław, 167n73 “Silver-age” Russian literature, 10, 43, 57, 72, 92, 119–20, 123, 135, 167n69 Simonov, Konstantin, 106, 108–9, 113, 133, 190n72 Sino-Soviet Cultural Association, 77, 88, 90, 92 Sino-Soviet Friendship Association, 88, 91, 139 Škvorecky, Joseph, 185n32 Smedley, Agnes, 176n63 Smith, Arthur H., 48 Snow, Edgar, 73 socialist realism, 12, 14, 55, 58, 102–5, 119, 124, 128, 131 Sologub, Fedor, 31, 86–7 Solov’ev, Vladimir, 8 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 133 Spencer, Herbert, 19 Stalin, Joseph, 8, 23, 77, 103, 123, 125, 127, 136, 171n22, 199n13 Stalin Prize for literature, 89, 102, 107–8 Stanislavskii, Konstantin, 197n1 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 21–2, 63, 158n1 Su Wen (Du Heng), 20 Sun Ke, 88 Sun Weishi, 197n1 Sun Yat-sen, 88 Sun Yat-sen University (Moscow), 76, 173n36 Sunzi’s Art of War, 113 symbolism, 9–11, 52, 93

226

INDEX

Tagore, Rabindranath, 14, 152n44 Tai Jingnong, 153n58 Tan Sitong, 30 Tao Yuanming, 31 Tchaikovsky, Peter, 139 Thucydides, 95–6 Tian Han, 78 Tolstoy, Aleksei, 106, 174n49 Tolstoy, Leo, 8, 16–18, 24–5, 29, 31, 33, 36, 40, 43, 45, 51, 53, 55–7, 59, 70, 72, 85, 90, 97, 109, 111, 123, 132–3, 138–41, 152n44, 152n48, 159n4, 161n24, 170n16, 178n71, 178n73 Tret’iakov, Sergei, 87–8, 185n32 Tsvetaeva, Marina, 36, 58–9 Turgenev, Ivan, 16–17, 29–30, 36, 43, 47, 57, 62–3, 72, 91, 100, 123, 158n1, 161n24, 164n43, 167n72 Uchiyama Kanzō, 78 Ulitskaia, Liudmila, 139 Unnamed Society (Weiming she), 26, 76, 79 Vakhtangov, Evgenii, 74 Valla, Lorenzo, 117, 192n94 Vasil’ev, Boris, 88–9 Vengerov, Semen, 44–6, 58, 131, 141 Visconti, Giangaleazzo, 117 VOKS, 90, 105, 172n31 Volkonskaia, Zinaida, 135 Voltaire, 166n61 Vorovskii, Vaclav, 45 Voynich, Ethel, 11, 109–10 Wang Meng, 112, 181n93 Wang Ruowang, 195n121 Wang Shuo, 133 Wang Tiran, 28 Wang Tongzhao, 27, 84 Wang Yingxia, 184n17 Wang Zhichun, 184n21 Water Margin, The, 88, 100–1

Wei Congwu, 153n58 Wei Suyuan, 26, 76–7 Weiss, Ruth, 176n63 Wen Yiduo, 159n11 Wilde, Oscar, 15, 27 Wilson, Woodrow, 10, 192n94 Wordsworth, William, 23 writers’ portraits, 19, 24–7, 91, 123, 137, 141 writers’ tombs, 45–6, 56, 91, 139 Wu Mi, 156n81 Wu Yunduo, 195n119 Xiao Hong, 80, 175n58, 177n65 Xiao Jun, 85, 120, 152n43, 194n114 Xiao San, 106–7 Xie Liuyi, 15, 61, 78, 146n18 Xu Dishan, 159n11 Xu Guangping, 26, 176n63 Xu Maoyong, 119 Xu Qinwen, 152n46 Xu Xiangqian, 109, 190n76 Xu Zhimo, 14 Xue Fucheng, 184n21 Yan Fu, 5, 19 Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art, 23–4, 55, 103, 118, 121 Yang Sao, 118 Yao Pengzi, 128–9, 177n69 Yao Wenyuan, 128–9 Yao Yuanfang, 113 Ye Lingfeng, 61–2, 184n18 Ye Shengtao, 25 Yeats, W.B., 152n44 Yen, James, 42 Yu Dafu, 22–4, 98–9, 101, 148n6 Yu Yizhong, 199n13 Yuan Muzhi, 85–6 Zaitsev, Boris, 58 Zhang Shoushen, 197n1 Zhang Wentian, 22, 52, 110, 154n62 Zhang Ximan, 179n80

INDEX Zhang Xuecheng, 95 Zhang Yiping, 28 Zhao Jingshen, 61 Zhao Shuli, 121 Zhao Xun, 180n87 Zhdanov, Andrei, 103 Zheng Zhenduo, 14, 25, 28–9, 32–3, 39, 52, 60–1, 67, 69–70, 118, 157n88 Zhou Libo, 102, 104, 190n75 Zhou Shoujuan, 26, 60

227

Zhou Yang, 102–4, 120, 152n43, 170n16 Zhou Zuoren, 3, 14, 17, 31–3, 39, 55, 101, 111, 176n62, 177n65 Zhu De, 123 Zhu Rangcheng, 85 Zhu Wan, 198n8 Zhu Ziqing, 159n4 Zhurba, Pavel, 108, 122 Zola, Émile, 27, 166n61 Zuskin, Veniamin, 172n30

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