Introduction
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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 Here and below, the spellings Peking and Nanking will be used in historical reference to Beijing and Nanjing before the foundation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). 3.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 chuban- she, 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 144 NOTES the functioning of the parallel system in the USSR and the literature of the thaw that followed the death of Stalin. 5. 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). 6. 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. 7. 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 immedi- ately evaluated as an absolute, which is true or false, an inspiration or a devil- ish 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. 8. 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”. 9. 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 145 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. 10. “Zhu Zhong-E wenzi zhi jiao”, collected in Nanqiang beidiao ji (Mixed Dialects, 1934), in Lu Xun quanji, in 18 vols. (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chu- banshe, 2005) (hereafter: LXQJ), 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. 11. 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. 12. “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. 13. 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. 14. 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 con- servative 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. 15. 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. 16. 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 146 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. 17. Anderson, The Limits of Realism, p. 134. 18. The young translator and critic Xie Liuyi rejected symbolism for this same rea- son, in the conclusion to his “Wenxue shang de biaoxiang zhuyi shi shenma?”, Xiaoshuo yuebao vol. 11, no. 6 (June 1920). 19. 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 “dis- patch 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). 20. “ ‘Ah Q zhengzhuan’ de chengyin”, in Huagaiji xubian de xubian (Sequel to the Sequel to Splendid Cover Collection; 1927), in LXQJ, 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.