How the Steel Was Tempered: the Rebirth of Pawel Korchagin in Contemporary Chinese Media

Front. Lit. Stud. China 2012, 6(1): 95–111 DOI 10.3868/s010-001-012-0007-6 RESEARCH ARTICLE Mingwei Song How the Steel Was Tempered: The Rebirth of Pawel Korchagin in Contemporary Chinese Media Abstract Russian writer Nicholas Ostrovski’s novel How the Steel Was Tempered (1934) provided generations of Chinese youth with a widely admired role model: a young devoted communist soldier, Pawel Korchagin, whose image occupied a prominent place in the orthodoxy revolutionary education and literary imagination during Mao’s era. Over the past decade, Pawel Korchagin has regained his popularity in Chinese media, his name and image have been appropriated by numerous artists and filmmakers to help in portrayals of the new generation’s self-fashioning. The various (unorthodox) interpretations recently attached to Pawel’s heroic story reveal a huge gap between Maoist ideology and the post-Mao ideas. This paper looks into the intricate relationships between Pawel Korchagin’s revolutionary past and his varied contemporary representations. By doing so, I hope to gain a better understanding of the cultural politics of appropriating Mao’s legacy to create new meanings for a changing Chinese society. One example on which this paper focuses is the sixth-generation director Lu Xuechang’s film Becoming a Man (1997), which rewrites the revolutionary Bildungsroman of Pawel in a startling different context. Keywords youth, revolutionary Bildungsroman, contemporary Chinese culture, the sixth-generation filmmakers, self-fashioning Introduction Russian writer Nicholai Ostrovski’s 1934 novel Kak Zakalialas Stal (How the 1 steel was tempered; translated in Chinese as Gangtie shi zenyang liancheng de) 1 Kak Zakalialas Stal was published in 1934 in Russia. An English translation (by Alec Brown) was published in 1937 as The Making of a Hero (New York: International Publishers). Mingwei Song ( ) Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA 02481-8203, USA E-mail: [email protected] Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 02:42:46AM via free access 96 Mingwei Song is today probably better known in China than in its home country. While it has disappeared from Russia’s recently published “Literary Canon Series,” more than thirty new translations of this novel are currently available on China’s book market. 2 Ostrovski’s protagonist Pawel Korchagin (“Bao’er Kechajin” in Chinese translation) is a household name in the PRC, and very likely the best-known foreign literary character for people living through Mao’s era. In the story, Pawel Korchagin is a Ukrainian youth who devotes his life to the cause of the Russian revolution, subjects himself to the disciplines of the Party, and goes through all kinds of imaginable (and unimaginable) difficulties to develop himself into a qualified communist soldier. During Mao’s era, this glorified and familiar image of the youthful Korchagin occupied a prominent place in the orthodox revolutionary education and literary imagination. The way he overcomes “weakness” and strengthens his revolutionary will helped to establish the correct route of personal development for several generations of socialist youth during the Mao era. Since the past decade has seen renewed interest in Mao’s legacy, Pawel Korchagin has also regained popularity in Chinese media, and his name and image have been appropriated in portrayals of the new generation’s self- fashioning. The various (unorthodox) interpretations recently attached to Pawel’s heroic story reveal a huge gap between Maoist ideology and the post-Mao ideas. Pawel Korchagin: A Revolutionary Bildungsroman Nicholai Ostrovski (1904–1936) based the story of How the Steel Was Tempered on his personal life experience. Both the author and his protagonist Pawel Korchagin were born in czarist Ukraine, joined the communist underground as teenager soldiers, defended Bolshevism against the White Army in the civil war, became communist party workers, and during this process were blinded, crippled and tortured by several diseases caused by extreme exhaustion during the work. Ostrovski completed this autobiographical novel by dictating it to his wife on his death bed, and after its publication in 1934 it soon assumed a place in the socialist literary canon, despite the fact that some editors, who rejected the manuscript, considered it very poorly written and over-simplified in its characterizations.3 One might say that the title of How the Steel Was Tempered itself caused the book to be tempered into an appropriate weapon for claiming a piece of the literary canon, especially because of its intense contribution to the communist 2 Zha Mingjian and Xie Tianzhen, 2007, 849–50. 3 See Mei Yi, 1983, X. Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 02:42:46AM via free access The Rebirth of Pawel Korchagin in Contemporary Chinese Media 97 revolution. In the novel we see a revolutionary soldier being tempered like a piece of steel. The story can be read as a typical revolutionary Bildungsroman, which presents a clearly structured linear process of the self-fashioning of a communist hero. Bildungsroman is a German critical term used to refer to a novelistic genre that finds its mature form in novels like Wilhelm Meister Lehrjahre.4 As the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin claims, this type of novel is generically “modern” because unlike the novels of antiquity that know only the image of the ready-made hero, the Bildungsroman historicizes time by picturing “the image of man in the process of becoming.” What Bakhtin emphasizes as the central attribute of the Bildungsroman is the revolutionary quality of the protagonist’s Bildung: “He is no longer within an epoch, but on the border between two epochs, at the transition point from one to the other.… He is forced to become a new, unprecedented type of human being.” 5 Pawel Korchagin can be viewed as a representative of the “new, unprecedented type of human being” between the epochs that see Russia’s transition from czarism into socialism. By adapting narrative conventions of the classical Bildungsroman, Ostrovski’s How the Steel Was Tempered integrates the personal development of a youth into Russia’s revolutionary history. Into an individual’s growth process, the novel invokes all kinds of disciplines that denote “political correctness,” such as the submission to party authority, never-ending self-criticism, and the abandonment of “all-too-human” weaknesses. Pawel Korchagin’s Bildung consists of a series of tests and challenges that enable him to be constantly aware of his own inadequacies and thus to make every attempt to perfect his personality according to ever-higher political and ethical standards. In order to gain such a “correct” political awareness, he has to sacrifice and relinquish many things associated with individuality and even “humanity,” such as his first love Tonia, a member of the bourgeoisie; his romantic relationship with the Komsomol cadre Rita, which is let go simply because of Pawel’s over-devotion to his work; and his health, both physical and mental. All these losses and perils function as the required method for making a good piece of steel out of Pawel, and his will only grows 4 The most influential definition of the Bildungsroman is found in Wilhelm Dilthey’s analysis of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and other German novels that form the canon of the German Bildungsroman: put more simply, the Bildungsroman depicts the formative experience, especially the spiritual development, of youth. Dilthey’s definitive passage reads: “Beginning with Wilhelm Meister and Hesperus, they all depict the youth of that time, how he enters life in a blissful daze, searches for kindred souls, encounters friendships and love, but then how he comes into conflict with the hard realities of the world and thus matures in the course of manifold life-experience, finds himself, and becomes certain of his task in the world.” See Wilhelm Dilthey, 1993, 29. 5 M. M. Bakhtin, 1986, 23. Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 02:42:46AM via free access 98 Mingwei Song stronger. When Pawel decides to perform a last service to the Party by writing his life story into a novel, he creates a self-image of the strong-willed, emotion-free, super-human hero as a model for youths. Korchagin actually tries to emulate another literary hero, a British revolutionist nicknamed “the Gadfly” in Ethel Voynich’s The Gadfly (1897). Comparing these two works, Rudolf Wagner finds that “Ostrovski’s text, however, retains hardly anything of the complexity of the relationships prevailing in The Gadfly. The Gadfly is reduced in Pawel’s mind to a revolutionary super-hero, complete in his devotion and self-control, while Voynich’s text shows a man deeply hurt, cynical and at the same time overwhelmed by love for his father/priest and for the woman who drove him away.”6 In comparison with the romantic character of “the Gadfly,” Pawel Korchagin is a more simplified character who shows no signs of inner, emotional drama when abandoning his lovers, seeing his health deteriorate, and practicing stoic self-training and self-criticism. He has no complaint or regret. In this sense, Pawel Korchagin is an idealized product of the political education promoted by the Communist Party. His “steel-like” will is tempered by his unconditional submission to Party authority, and his personal development can be summarized as a process of relinquishing individuality while successfully adapting himself to the Party’s institutions. It is no wonder that the novel served as a

Load more