The Search for an Internationalist Aesthetics: Soviet Images of China, 1920–1935
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The Search for an Internationalist Aesthetics: Soviet Images of China, 1920–1935. Edward Tyerman Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2014 © 2014 Edward Tyerman All rights reserved ABSTRACT The Search for an Internationalist Aesthetics: Soviet Images of China, 1920–1935. Edward Tyerman This dissertation examines images of China produced in early Soviet culture, focusing in particular on the mid-to-late 1920s, a period of heightened Soviet involvement in Chinese politics. It argues that China became in this period the primary testing ground for the creation of an “internationalist aesthetics”: a mode of representation that might express horizontal solidarity over vertical dominance, and inscribe China into the global map envisioned by Marist-Leninist theories of revolution. Seeking to produce a new China to replace the exotic Orient, Soviet artists and writers experimented with multiple genres and media—reportage, film, theatre, biography—in their search for the correct mode for internationalist aesthetics. The struggle over how to represent the world for a revolutionary society thus coalesces, in this period, around the question of how to represent China. Such an aesthetics is inevitably interconnected with politics, and internationalist aesthetics encountered and expressed the same ambiguities as the political project of Soviet internationalism: a liberatory, anti-imperial ideology that simultaneously sought to control political and historical narratives from the world revolution’s proclaimed centre in Moscow. Consequently, these disparate images are united by an insistence on the privileged position and perspective of the Soviet observer, who looks at Chinese reality with a combination of advanced modern knowledge, sympathy with oppression, and revolutionary experience that is purportedly inaccessible to other Europeans, or indeed to the Chinese themselves. This privileged perspective on China undergirds the claims of internationalist aesthetics to present a true image of the world. The search for an authoritative mode for internationalist aesthetics is hampered, however, by recurrent issues of access, mediation and translatability, and by lingering parallels between this avowedly anti-imperialist discourse and the imperial systems of knowledge production it supposedly replaces. Table of Contents List of Illustrations…………………………………………………………………...ii Note on Translations and Transliterations...............................................................iii Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………..iv Introduction..................................................................................................................1 Chapter One Violent Strangers and Foreigner Talk: The Image of the Chinese Migrant in Revolutionary Russia...................................................................................................48 Chapter Two Unmasking the Exotic: Reporting the Chinese Revolution.......................................115 Chapter Three The Internationalist Gaze: China in Early Soviet Cinema.........................................197 Chapter Four Authenticity and Sacrifice: China Onstage................................................................284 Chapter Five Chinese Confessions: Den Shi-khua and Biographical Allegory...............................355 Epilogue Abandoning Internationalist Aesthetics?...................................................................414 Sources and Bibliography........................................................................................433 i List of Illustrations Figure 1: Vladimir Mayakovsky, "Muscovite China," 1927…………………….….60 Figure 2: "Help!! Sound the Alarm!" Pravda, June 5, 1925……………………….203 Figure 3: The Great Flight. Newspaper advertisement, November 1925………….214 Figure 4: China on Fire. The Ruler of the World catches sight of China……….…216 Figure 5: China on Fire. Seeing China's resources………………...………………217 Figure 6: China on Fire. The spider of Capital wrapped around China…………...217 Figure 7: China on Fire. Carving up the map of China……………………………218 Figure 8: China on Fire. Dismembering China……………………………………218 Figure 9: China on Fire. Imperialist encirclement of the USSR…………………..219 Figure 10: “They are watching…” Vecherniaia Moskva, June 15, 1925…………..222 ii Note on Transliterations and Translations All translations are my own unless otherwise specified. The original language is given alongside the translation at times when attention needs to be drawn to specific elements of the original text. Otherwise, the original is given in a footnote. For transliteration from Russian, I follow the Library of Congress system. Exceptions are made for proper names that have a widely accepted standard rendering in English: so Leon Trotsky not Lev Trotskii, Vladimir Mayakovsky not Vladimir Maiakovskii, etc. Transliterations from Chinese are given in pinyin. When Romanizing Chinese proper names, I largely follow standard contemporary pinyin usage, even though this sometimes conflicts with Russian usages of the 1920s. So, for example, I render the current Chinese capital 北京 as “Beijing,” not “Peking,” though the Soviet writers discussed below call it Пекин (Peking). Likewise “Guangzhou,” not “Canton” (Кантон), for 广州. An exception to this rule is made for Chinese proper names with established English versions that depart from pinyin: e.g. Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai- shek. When Chinese names are taken from Russian texts where they are given in Cyrillic transliteration, I give the names transliterated from Cyrillic, with the pinyin in brackets if it can be clearly discerned. (For a fuller discussion of this issue, see Chapter Five, on “Den Shi-khua/Deng Shihua.”) iii Acknowledgements This project has incurred many debts, intellectual, practical and emotional. Boris Gasparov has been a generous and thoughtful advisor as well as an enduring intellectual inspiration. Cathy Nepomnyashchy supported my work from its earliest stages, and offered an invaluably thorough set of editing suggestions at a crucial stage in the writing process. Lydia Liu encouraged me to pursue Sino-Russian connections from my first arrival at Columbia, and provided impetus for this study with her seminar on Lu Xun and Modern China; her comments on the final outcome have been rich and conceptually challenging. Katerina Clark graciously shared details of her own research at various stages in my work, and offered thoughtful, nuanced challenges at the defense; as did Tarik Amar, overcoming the inconsistencies of Skype and an eight-hour time difference. I can only hope to do full justice to my committee’s thoughts and suggestions in the future; the shortcomings of the current text remain entirely my own. Columbia’s Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, besides providing an environment that encouraged me to pursue intercultural, interdisciplinary work, granted me a four-year Summer Fellowship, which enabled me to spend my summers learning Chinese and completing preliminary research. A crucial year of research in Moscow and New York was supported by a Moseley- Backer Fellowship from the Harriman Institute, Columbia University, with additional help from the Mogilat Fund. My final year of writing was made possible by a Dissertation Fellowship from the Mrs Giles Whiting Foundation. In Moscow, I am most grateful to the staff at RGALI, RGASPI, RGAKFD and the Russian State Library (especially the Newspaper and Dissertation Division in Khimki), for granting me access to their materials and helping me to find my way around. iv The Columbia Slavic department has been a wonderful home within which to work and play; among its members, I am especially grateful to Riley Ossorgin for carrel companionship and musical relief, Greta Matzner-Gore for sharing my introduction to socialist realism and indeed America, Liza Knapp, John Lacqua and Elsie Martinez for their help and support, and Katie Holt for reading and commenting on my work, explaining how the Lenin Library catalogue works, and offering an ever sympathetic ear. I am indebted to the wonderful Chinese language teachers of Columbia’s East Asian department, especially Wang Zhirong and Liu Lening, for teaching me Chinese. Among the graduate students in the East Asian department, Anatoly Detwyler, Gal Gvili and Yurou Zhong all helped this project in various ways. Sarah-Louise Raillard offered sanity and sympathy in the laborious early stages. My family have patiently borne my absences and frustrations, and remain my first and best source of inspiration and encouragement. Last but not least, without the love and support of Robyn Jensen, this project would never have been completed. v Introduction I. China and the Soviet Union in the 1920s: Politics, Aesthetics, Education Here, in this immense land that has for century upon century been for Asia what Greece and Rome were for Europe, here, in the struggle between two irreconcilable worlds for mastery of an immeasurable human ocean, the fates of our planet are being decided. Will we enter the kingdom of socialism, or will we transition to a new, higher phase of capitalism—the answer to this fateful question will be given by Asia, and above all by China, by China’s evolution over the coming decade. (A. A. Ivin, China and the Soviet Union, 1924)1 In the mid-1920s, after the failure of proletarian revolutions in Europe and the rise of Ataturk in Turkey, China became the focal point of Soviet efforts