Eurasia without Borders: The Dream of a Leftist Literary Commons, 1919–1943 9780674270213

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Eurasia without Borders

Eurasia without Borders the dream of a leftist literary commons, 1919–1943

Katerina Clark

the belknap press of harvard university press Cambridge, Mas­sa­chu­setts & London, ­England 

• 

2021

 Copyright © 2021 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca First printing Jacket design: Annamarie McMahon Why 9780674270220 (EPUB) 9780674270213 (PDF) The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Names: Clark, Katerina, author. Title: Eurasia without borders : the dream of a leftist literary commons, 1919–1943 / Katerina Clark. Description: Cambridge, Mas­sa­chu­setts : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2021. | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021010384 | ISBN 9780674261105 (cloth) Subjects: LCSH: Class consciousness in lit­er­a­ture. | Communism and culture—­Eurasia—­ History—20th ­century. | Communist aesthetics in lit­er­a­ture. | Revolutionary lit­er­a­ture. | Anti-­imperialist movements—­Eurasia—­History—20th ­century. | Lit­er­a­ture and transnationalism—­Eurasia—­History—20th ­century. | Eurasia—­Lit­er­a­tures— ­History—20th ­century. Classification: LCC HX523 .C53 2021 | DDC 809/.933552—­dc23 LC rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2021010384

To Hana Claire, Isaiah David, Meghan Jean, Marley Manning Brian, and Julian Paul Hope Holquist

Contents



Introduction: Eurasia without Borders?

1

I. FIRST STEPS, 1919–1930

1. Nâzim Hikmet, Turkish Poet of the New Millennium

43

2. Revolutionary Poetry and the Persianate Tradition

83

3. Across the ­Great Divide to Af­ghan­i­stan

123

4. India’s Place in Eurasian Cultural Geographies

161

5. The “Roar” of Revolution in the Far East

194

II. THE COMMONS WITHIN SIGHT, 1930–1943

6. From Shanghai to Berlin and Beyond

237

7. Mulk Raj Anand and the London Literary Left

277

8. The Sino-­Japanese War, Mao’s Talks, and the Ecumene Unraveled 312 Epilogue

355

Contents

viii

Abbreviations 367 Notes 369 Acknowl­edgments

437

Index 439

Eurasia without Borders

Introduction Eurasia without Borders?

O

n September 1, 1920, a “Congress of the Toilers of the East” gathered in the Azerbaijani capital of Baku. Dedicated to the cause of communist revolution in Asia, the weeklong conference assembled delegates from all over the “East,” including Turks, Persians, Koreans, Chinese, and many Soviet ethnic minorities. They gathered at the behest of a singular organ­ization: the Comintern, or Communist ­International. Founded only the previous year, in the name of fomenting communist revolutions throughout the world, the Comintern enjoyed an ambiguous status: a transnational body with a membership that spanned the globe, it was also an arm of the new Soviet state. Though its Executive Committee included a large number of foreign communist leaders, it was chaired by two members of the Bolshevik leadership, Grigory Zinoviev as head and Karl Radek as his deputy. The Comintern had already held two congresses in Moscow and Petrograd: the inaugural congress in 1919, when the body was founded, and the Second Congress of July  16–­August  7, 1920, shortly before Baku. This congress, though primarily concerned with revolution in the West and relations with Western trade u ­ nions, also for the first time paid serious attention to the national liberation movements of the colonies of Asia, Africa, and the Amer­i­cas. However, the delegate lists for the two initial congresses, though they included a sprinkling of Asians, overwhelmingly comprised Rus­sians, Eu­ro­pe­ans, and North Americans. To make up this deficit the leadership planned the Baku

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gathering to give impetus to revolutionary movements in Asia that might help bring its vast territory into the communist orbit. The Baku Congress came at a fraught time for the cause of international revolution. In the fall of 1920 the fledgling Soviet state was still contending with the vestiges of the Civil War, which had erupted a­ fter the Bolshevik Party came to power in 1917. Since 1918, the Red Army had battled the Whites and other counterrevolutionary forces. Foreign powers, meanwhile, had also landed troops at vari­ous points on Soviet territory in an effort to topple the regime (the Intervention). Baku had seen action of both kinds: the British occupied the city in 1918, and the following year, ­after the British left, anti-­ Bolshevik forces founded the in­de­pen­dent country of Azerbaijan with Baku as its capital. The Bolsheviks had retaken the city on April 28, 1920, ­after a legendary ­battle. But though the Intervention and Civil War ­were by the time of the Baku Congress winding down, Bolshevik control remained tenuous. Central Asia was not fully secured u ­ ntil 1922, another reason why the congress was not held in that other major Muslim area. Baku, already secured, was a natu­ral site for this unpre­ce­dented congress of “Easterners.” The fact that it was a cosmopolitan city with a predominantly Muslim population made it particularly appealing. The speechmakers at Baku did not address the tenuous hold of the Revolution in the Asian areas of the former Rus­sian Empire. Rather, they exuded a millenarian confidence and charted a way forward for revolutionary triumph in Asia. They had some reason for this confidence. In this chaotic time, the Comintern had managed to assem­ble for the Baku Congress, in a city so recently wrested from counterrevolutionary forces, 1,891 delegates from across the ­Middle, South, and Far Easts and the Soviet ethnic minorities of Transcaucasia and Central Asia. Though the Baku Congress’s primary function was to promote po­liti­cal revolution in the East, the cause of revolutionary culture also assumed a prominent place in the keynote speeches, which w ­ ere fired by the dream of creating a leftist Eurasian cultural space. In the ensuing years the quest for such a culture became a standard item on the Comintern agenda, and most (though far from all) Soviet-­originated initiatives for an international culture ­were connected directly or indirectly with its institutions. It is no accident that the temporal bound­aries of this book, 1919–1943, coincide with the period of the Comintern’s existence—­t hough occasionally the demands of

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my subject ­matter take me forward or back in time. One might consequently be tempted to see the Comintern, or more specifically Comintern-­affiliated cultural bodies, as playing the leading role in prosecuting a Eurasian leftist culture, or even as its center. But, as the book ­w ill show, though the aim of realizing this “Eurasia without borders” was central to the Comintern’s cultural platform throughout its existence, the movement for this end extended beyond that body’s reach. During the interwar years, the dream of a single, Eurasian cultural space that fired speaker a­ fter speaker at Baku also captivated the imagination of a broad spectrum of leftists in Eu­rope and Asia. From Calcutta to London, from Beijing to Berlin, intellectuals w ­ ere drawn to some version of this dream. The Baku platform represents neither the genesis of the movement for its esta­ blishment nor a canonical source for Soviet policy on international culture (which changed over time). As we ­w ill see, in the heady postrevolutionary years many in the Rus­sian avant-­garde, and some non-­Comintern Bolshevik intellectuals, appealed to leftists in other lands to join them in establishing their vari­ous versions of an “international” culture. But I am using the official speeches delivered in Baku as a frame, a point of orientation for the book, ­because they proj­ect an idealized and maximalist version of cultural amalgamation. The vision presented at Baku was maximalist in the sense that while many of ­t hose who sought to establish a “new,” revolutionary culture had an essentially Eurocentric conception of its formation, the speakers at Baku called for melding the cultures of Eu­rope and Asia, effectively for a “red” Eurasian culture. And so my story begins in Baku.

An International “Ocean” In addressing the opening session of the Baku Congress, Zinoviev declared that its aim was to “unite ­under it p ­ eople speaking all languages . . . ​not just the Eu­ro­pean proletariat, but also the hard core of our reserves, our foot soldiers—­hundreds of millions of peasants who live in Asia, and the Near and Far Easts.” As many of the subsequent speakers stressed, t­ here w ­ ere to be no national or ethnic divisions. In Zinoviev’s words, “[The masses] s­ hall forget every­thing that divided us at one time.”1 ­After all, a central premise of Marxism-­Leninism was that the proletariat is in essence international and had only been split into national groups by its class enemies. Béla Kun, the

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Hungarian communist leader, spoke next and further clarified this position with his opening remark: “Though I speak Rus­sian very badly, let me pre­ sent in the language of world revolution, Rus­sian.”2 Rus­sian was, then, the language of world revolution.3 Delegates ­were urged to declare their fealty to Soviet power, that is to say, to a Rus­sian party and Rus­sian ideological models. But the majority of the delegates did not know the a­ ctual language of Soviet power even as well as Kun did. The congress, while declaring this internationality of language, was faced with the impossible situation of making the speeches, delivered in several languages, accessible to all the delegates, who represented a wide range of languages and ­educational levels. Initially, ­after its delivery, each speech was laboriously translated orally and generally in summary form into some of the major languages of ­t hose represented, and into Turkish and Farsi (Persian) in par­tic­ u­lar, but also into Chechen, Kalmyk, and other languages of Soviet minority ­peoples. Nevertheless, angry delegates complained from the floor about not being provided with a translation into their par­tic­u­lar language or about the translations being too reduced.4 By September 4, it was clear that at the consequently slow rate of pro­gress in getting the scheduled speeches delivered it would be impossible to finish the congress on schedule, and so Zinoviev ­declared that from then on they would provide translations in only three languages—­Russian, Turkic-­Azerbaijani, and Farsi. ­Those who did not understand them could huddle with a delegate who would translate for them and w ­ ere often relegated to the corridor for this purpose.5 Some languages ­were more equal than the ­others, and most w ­ ere being marginalized. So, too, ­were some speakers more equal; the Eu­ro­pean delegates and the American activist journalist John Reed w ­ ere given the lion’s share of the platform for the remaining time of the congress. The ideal of a common “language” could not be taken literally. In effect, most of the Bolshevik speakers expressed more interest in creating a “new culture,” one that would supplant that of the bourgeois world. This putative new, transnational culture envisioned at Baku would function both as an agent and as an attestation of the pro­cess of internationalizing the Revolution. Radek, deputy head of the Comintern, declared to “stormy applause”: “Cap­i­ tal­ist culture amounts to the death of any culture. . . . ​And when we, comrades, hand you the banner of common strug­gle against a common e­ nemy, we know very well, that together with you we ­shall create a culture that is one hun-

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dred times better than the slave o ­ wners of the West have created. . . . ​L ong live the Red East [Krasnyi Vostok], which together with the workers of Eu­rope ­w ill create a second culture ­u nder the banner of communism.”6 Mikhail Pavlovich, a lapsed Menshevik but now a leading Bolshevik authority on Eastern affairs, presented a rosy picture of the emergence of this “new culture” that would be developed by “hundreds of millions” of Asians.7 “­There ­w ill appear new and ­g reat works by genial poets, writers of belles lettres, e­ tc., who have come from worker and peasant backgrounds,” he predicted. “­There w ­ ill be a brilliant flowering of what has only in recent times been awakening to life.” In his utopian scenario, “All the individual streams ­w ill in a most marvelous way and harmoniously intermingle [perepletat’sia] with the waves of a single common international ocean of poetry and knowledge of the toiling humanity who have been freed from national and class oppression for the first time and who ­w ill shine with such hitherto unseen beauty, the likes of which neither classical Greece [achieved], with all its divine works of art, nor the civilizations of the medieval and cap­i­tal­ist epochs, with all their pleiad of immortal poets, artists, thinkers, and scholars.”8 As Pavlovich envisioned it, then, all the vari­ous Asian lit­er­a­tures would “harmoniously intermingle” with Eu­ro­pean proletarian lit­er­a­ture in “a single common international ocean of poetry and knowledge.” At the time, Asian cultural life was largely conducted in separate national spheres, though at precisely this time ­there ­were periodic attempts among Asian intellectuals, most of them noncommunists, to establish a pan-­Asian culture. But their platforms did not encompass all of Asia. Some incorporated in their purview East Asia, or East and South Asia, o ­ thers the Muslim world. At Baku, Pavlovich envisioned not only a postimperial culture but also a posthistorical one. Carl Schmitt and ­others have characterized the ocean as a place without borders that functions in an eternal pre­sent.9 An ocean is an almost abstract, featureless space with no interior borders. The cultures of Eurasia ­were to amalgamate and in a Lethe-­like expanse of ­water, an “ocean,” where differences would be dissipated in the ephemeral waves. Though this issue was not raised in Pavlovich’s speech, an implicit question is, Would this ocean have currents that would draw the “waves” to “Moscow” as a gravitational center? Pavlovich, Zinoviev, Radek, and other speakers at Baku ­were urging ­t hose pre­sent to realize this vision of a new, pan-­Eurasian culture in actuality. This

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book is about that attempt. That aim was prosecuted not by t­ hese speakers themselves, but over the ensuing years by myriad individual actors and organ­ izations. In the interwar period, the international left and Soviet officialdom shared a faith in the power of lit­er­a­ture, which became the main medium in the drive to create an internationalist culture. As I have argued in Moscow, the Fourth Rome, lit­er­a­ture was impor­tant to the Soviet leadership ­because it could articulate its new belief system in less abstract terms than in Marxist tracts. A faith in the power of lit­er­a­ture underwrote a lot of Soviet policy in the interwar years, especially ­under Joseph Stalin. The Soviet state, down to its very bureaucracy, believed in the capacity of lit­er­a­ture to transform society and invested heavi­ly in international literary engagements, even with socie­ties very dif­fer­ent from its own. For the broader international left, as well, lit­er­a­ture would come to play a critical role in organ­izing a transnational socialist confederation, ­whether as its spearhead or as its mouthpiece, and so literary culture is the main focus of this book. Pavlovich’s invocation of the “­great international ocean” was not a standard feature of Bolshevik discourse in the interwar years, and so one should be wary of overinvesting in it as encapsulating the Comintern proj­ect in culture. But the “ocean” could be seen as a troped translation for the cultural sphere of Vladimir Lenin’s famous account in “The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-­Determination” (“Sotsialisticheskaia revoliutsiia i pravo natsii na samoopredelenie,” 1916) of how oppressed nations and ­peoples come to realize themselves in a postnational po­liti­cal order. In this article Lenin states: “The aim of socialism is not only to abolish the pre­sent division of mankind into small states with all manner of in­de­pen­dent identities [obosoblennost’], not only to bring the nations closer to each other [sblizhenie], but also to merge [sliiat’] them. And in order to achieve this aim, we must . . . ​explain to the masses the reactionary nature of the ideas of . . . ​ so-­called ‘cultural national autonomy.’ ” Yet, he continued, “just as humankind can achieve the abolition of classes only by passing through the transition period of the dictatorship of the oppressed class, so mankind can achieve the inevitable merging [sliianie] of nations only by passing through the transition period of complete liberation of all the oppressed nations, i.e., [ensuring] their freedom to secede.”10 Lenin, then, foresaw the socialist revolution as a two-­stage progression. First, the oppressed nations and ­peoples, such as colonial entities, would

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achieve “self-­determination” (samoopredelenie), and this would enable greater rapprochement (sblizhenie) between them. Particularly crucial was developing a sense of solidarity between the proletariat of “oppressor” nations and the ­peoples of oppressed nations (such as colonial subjects). Once this was achieved, the second phase, the merging of all nations and ­peoples, could proceed. He was explic­itly not a federalist, centralization being a cardinal princi­ple for him. Versions of the notion of “merging” (sliiat’, sliianie) occur twice in this paragraph. The corresponding term in Pavlovich’s formulation, “perepletat’sia,” which I have rendered as “intermingling,” actually means “interweaving” ­ hether the Asian lit­er­at­ ures and is potentially ambivalent on the question of w ­were to “merge,” or “intermingle,” with Eu­ro­pean proletarian lit­er­a­ture. That ambiguity reflects a fundamental prob­lem or paradox that plagued all attempts at realizing an internationalist, transnational lit­er­a­ture such as Pavlovich envisioned: the competing demands of the national and the international, that is, how to retain the distinctiveness of each national or ethnic cultural tradition in a “single common international ocean of poetry and knowledge.” As it enfolded over time the movement for an internationalist lit­er­a­ture was dogged by the prob­lem of how the many would become the one, how the par­ tic­u ­lar would become the general, and the degree of homogenization that would entail. Pavlovich’s evocation of an “ocean” represents one of many articulations of a dream of boundlessness and borderlessness, which infused a ­great deal of postrevolutionary rhe­toric (and also the rhe­toric of the avant-­garde). His par­tic­u­lar vision was of a Eurasia without Borders, of a single and unified cultural space, although the space was not to be without its exclusions (such as class enemies). Allegedly, and this was another aspect of the utopian nature of the proj­ect, the “ocean” would comprise the culture of the Asian toiling masses, then largely illiterate, fused with that of the Eu­ro­pean proletariat, who came from a completely dif­fer­ent culture system and spoke ­radically dif­fer­ent languages. A tall order. Then t­ here was the issue of uneven development. Lenin acknowledged the prob­lem in his 1919 speech to the Second All-­Russian Congress of Communist Organ­izations of the ­Peoples of the East, where he noted, “You are confronted with a task which has not previously confronted the Communists of the world,” of applying communist theory and practice when “the bulk of the population are peasants” and

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so “the task is to wage a strug­gle against medieval survivals and not against capitalism.”11 The role in this pro­cess of leftist intellectuals, Eu­ro­pean and Asian, was not mentioned in the Baku speeches. In practice, and inevitably, they would be key players in the pro­cess of “intermingling,” especially t­ hose with knowledge of other languages and cultures. Such cultural ­adepts ­were to play a crucial role as intermediaries working ­toward cultural rapprochement and generating what was aimed to be a Marxist post-­, or anti-­, imperialist lit­er­a­ture. This book charts the contributions and fates of t­ hese Eu­ro­pean and Asian intermediaries, who functioned as “translators” between cultures and ­were intended to be facilitators of rapprochement. Some of them, as we ­shall see, ­were recruited by Comintern-­affiliated or Soviet bodies, ­others took it upon themselves. But most of the intermediaries sought to provide what they saw as a more accurate depiction of Asia for Eu­ro­pe­ans and Asians alike, overcoming imperialist exoticism and inflecting their narratives with class analy­sis and a Marxist perspective, which was often indebted to Lenin’s classic Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Capitalism (Imperializm, kak noveishii etap kapitalizma, 1917). Given the prominence of this Leninist text in the discourse of the intermediaries and the like-­minded, and given the difficulty, when looking at the postrevolutionary years, of disaggregating the anticolonialist movement from the anti-­imperialist, I w ­ ill largely be using the term “anti-­imperialist” ­here, but it ­w ill encompass in its frame of reference anticolonialism as well. This book also attempts to tease out the extent to which the efforts of the intermediaries ­were guided or controlled by the Comintern or other Moscow-­centered agencies and to what extent they w ­ ere acting in­ de­pen­dently or linked together in laterally articulated groupings. Another pattern we ­w ill see, one akin to what Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic outlines for the case of transatlantic black culture, is one where the circulation of texts and ideas is not one-­way but bi-­or multidirectional and involves multiple centers.12

World Lit­er­a­ture from the Left Nothing like a “single international ocean” was ever achieved by the efforts of the vari­ous agencies and leftist intermediaries dedicated to this ideal. In

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practice, the proj­ect was tenuous and pro­gress faltering. Still, what emerged, progressively, in the wake of Baku and subsequent Comintern-­sponsored literary congresses was the beginnings of a world lit­er­a­ture, “world” in that it encompassed such a broad expanse both geo­graph­i­cally and culturally. It was not the Paris-­centered world lit­er­a­ture of Pascale Casanova in her book The World Republic of Letters (though from 1935 the Comintern-­funded international literary effort was formally centered in Paris, its purse strings w ­ ere in Moscow). Casanova’s book outlines an “international literary space” occupied by “a sort of intellectual international.”13 This book describes a Moscow-­centered such “international” that was likewise formed around lit­ er­a­ture and had a significant presence in the cultural history of the interwar years. This version of world lit­er­a­ture, a putative Eurasian “red” culture, was intended to rival the established, Eurocentric literary “worlds” that Casanova and o ­ thers describe and which are centered in places like Paris, London, and Berlin and dependent on the “bourgeois cap­i­tal­ist” order. We are looking ­here at a version of world lit­er­a­ture in a Euro-­Asian configuration that would not yet embrace the “world” in its entirety. Eu­ro­pean, Soviet, and Asian leftist writers and their texts would “intermingle,” but the “international ocean” would in practice not yet include African writers, and only sporadically Latin American (though they ­were impor­tant in other anti-­ imperialist movements of ­these de­cades). The incorporation in the “­great ocean” of ­t hese vast geo­g raph­i­cal entities came l­ater, a­ fter World War II, when, during the Soviet Union’s big push for dominance in the Third World, the geo­graph­i­cal purview of Moscow-­oriented “world lit­er­a­ture” expanded to include ­those other continents, as Rossen Djagalov has outlined in his book From Internationalism to Postcolonialism.14 Moscow-­centered literary organ­ izations that emerged in the 1920s and 1930s ­were overwhelmingly Eu­ro­pean, or more precisely Euro-­American. When we look at Comintern cultural efforts in Asia, we are dealing with a comparative backwater. Nevertheless, the inclusion of con­temporary Asian lit­er­a­ture in the “international ocean,” however reduced, marks a significant step in the evolution of “world lit­er­a­ture” as we know it ­today. This book, then, makes a contribution to the prehistory of world lit­er­a­ture. It explores a missing link between world lit­er­a­ture as it emerged in the late eigh­teenth and early nineteenth centuries and world lit­er­a­ture as it has preoccupied theorists and cultural historians in recent de­cades. In the late

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eigh­teenth and early nineteenth centuries, several intellectuals ­were taken by a number of Asian classics and sought to incorporate them in Eu­ro­pean lit­er­a­ture to create a “world lit­er­a­ture.” Goethe, for example, proposed including the Chinese novel, the verse of Hafez and other Persian poets, and the play Sakuntala, derived from the ­great Sanskrit epic the Mahabharata.15 But the Asian texts promoted then came from the classical heritage of their respective cultures, or the past at any rate, and ­were tastefully remote in time from then con­temporary Eu­ro­pean lit­er­a­ture. Moreover, ­there ­were major lacunae in Goethe’s acquaintance with the main classics of Asian lit­er­ a­ture.16 As David Damrosch has argued, “Goethe is no multiculturalist . . . ​ Western Eu­rope remains the privileged modern world of reference for him, and Greece and Rome provide the crucial antiquity to which he always returns.”17 As Damrosch also points out, world lit­er­a­ture as it was understood in ­those days was “often closely associated with imperial values.”18 Many of the works by Asians promoted by Eu­ro­pean writers in the late eigh­teenth and the nineteenth centuries had been translated into Eu­ro­pean languages by agents of imperial bodies, especially of the East India Com­pany. Also, conversely, colonial powers played a major role in the Eu­ro­pe­anization of non-­European lit­er­a­tures (the case of Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay, who imposed En­g lish lit­er­a­ture on his Indian subjects, being the most infamous).19 In the early twentieth ­century, some prominent Eu­ro­pean literary intellectuals made gestures t­oward a Euro-­Asian lit­er­a­ture. But they essentially built on the example of Goethe and o ­ thers from this e­ arlier period, largely experimenting with adaptations of classical verse and drama from Asian lit­ er­a­tures: well-­known examples include Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa’s appropriation of Chinese and Japa­nese poetry and the continuing vogue for Persian poetry (Hafez et al.) and for ancient Sanskrit texts and Indian spirituality. Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali writer who became a cult figure in the 1910s among Eu­ro­pe­ans, might seem to be an exception in that he was one of the few con­temporary Asian writers that Eu­ro­pean pundits promoted. But while the Soviet Union would honor Tagore as an anti-­imperialist and foreground his novels, which proselytized for modern ideas and ­women’s liberation, in the West enthusiasts focused on his poetry, which they incorporated in narratives about ancient Indian-­Sanskrit spirituality (see Chapter 4).

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The kind of Euro-­Asian leftist lit­er­a­ture envisaged in Baku and on subsequent, analogous platforms was to be opposed to all forms of religion. In ­consequence, one might compare its informing vision with the eighteenth-­ century idea of Voltaire and o ­ thers of a Republic of Letters, a transnational but also secular fraternity of a highly educated and sophisticated élite. One objection to such a comparison would be that spokespersons at Baku and beyond proposed a mass lit­er­a­ture by “proletarians” or the victims of colonialist oppression, and they ­were generally uneducated. But, in practice, leftist anti-­imperialist lit­er­a­ture was (as has already been mentioned) in Asia, in the Soviet Union, and in the West, largely written by highly educated intellectuals. One might be tempted to call writers of the interwar left cosmopolitans, a modish term in literary theory ­today. But, actually, they did not ­favor cosmopolitan ideals, which they associated with aristocrats and the bourgeois. Karl Marx in his writings had linked cosmopolitanism with cap­i­tal­ist expansionism and identified a cosmopolitan-­cum-­capitalist phase as a necessary stage en route to the postnationalist “proletarian world community!”20 In the Soviet Union the very term “cosmopolitanism” was anathema and rarely seen in published sources ­until the late 1940s when many intellectuals, and Jews especially, ­were persecuted as “rootless cosmopolitans.” The international left, and the Soviet and Comintern platforms a fortiori, promoted “internationalism” as an antidote and successor to cosmopolitanism. It is, however, useful to consider the internationalist literary movement in terms of cosmopolitanism ­because the contradictory understandings of the term illustrate a fundamental paradox in the internationalist literary movement, especially as regards Asia. Historically, the term “cosmopolitan,” though it originates in ancient Greece with Diogenes, has been particularly associated with the Enlightenment, and especially with Kant’s essay Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784), but he was dismissed in Soviet sources as an “idealist” phi­los­o­pher. T ­ oday, when that capacious term has become modish, a wealth of dif­fer­ent interpretations of it has emerged. But ­there are two, general understandings, which can be seen as counterposed. Both involve transcending national borders in some way, ­whether mentally, physically, po­liti­cally, or culturally, and so both potentially informed the dream of the “­great international ocean.” On the one hand, and as it has been put by Amanda Anderson, “cosmopolitanism” is “a term that

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throughout its long philosophical, aesthetic, and po­liti­cal history has been used to denote cultivated detachment from restrictive forms of identity.”21 In the Enlightenment, it was defined against the allegiances of religion, class, and the state. In the twentieth ­century, its use was associated with a reaction against extreme attachment to nation, race, or ethnic group. Most cosmopolitans so defined are secular, not firmly wedded to their country’s belief system, but at the same time ­t here are in practice always some limits to their purview, which does not embrace the “world” in its entirety. A second understanding of cosmopolitan, on the other hand, and one potentially more applicable to the kind of internationalism envisaged in Baku, concerns g­ reat geopo­liti­cal agglomerations known as empires. ­These formations also transcended national borders, but not by ignoring them mentally as in theory the members of the Eu­ro­pean Enlightenment’s Republic of Letters did, but by conquest and amalgamation. Disparate principalities, states, and cultures ­were combined in the one geopo­liti­cal unit, held together in part by a lingua franca and common culture promoted by a centralized power. One version of this imperial, transnational cosmopolitanism can be found in Sheldon Pollock’s The Language of the Gods in the World of Men, where he argues that the Sanskrit world in ancient times represented a cosmopolis. Pollock contends that in this “world,” which at its height covered an area stretching from Af­ghan­i­stan to Java, Sanskrit language and Sanskrit texts functioned as a “communicative medium” enabling a universal, or at any rate supraregional, culture that dominated throughout this vast area, “despite the internal divisions, both the po­liti­cal, and the linguistic divisions into vernaculars.” In this transregional formation Sanskrit culture, which meant primarily a highly conventionalized verse, became the core of what Pollock calls “culture-­power practices and their associated theories—­legitimation, ideology, nationalism, civilizationalism, and the like.” The work Sanskrit did was “directed above all ­toward articulating a form of po­liti­cal consciousness and culture, politics not as transaction of material power . . . ​but as cele­ bration of aesthetic power” that provided a “literary expression of po­liti­cal selfhood.”22 Soviet socialist realism could be seen as a “cele­bration of aesthetic power” that provided a “literary expression of po­liti­cal selfhood.” But the term itself had not yet been in­ven­ted in 1920 when the Baku Congress took place, let alone had its conventions been set as they ­were to be in the early 1930s.

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Something like socialist realism as a single literary system with its own set of conventions that “articulat[ed] a form of po­liti­cal consciousness and culture” was in a sense implicit in Pavlovich’s call for an “international ocean.” But, as we ­shall see, though by the 1930s socialist realism had come to dominate lit­er­a­ture in the Soviet Union, it was somewhat thinly represented in the interwar years in both Western and Asian leftist lit­er­a­ture. As a cosmopolis the Sanskrit world was, however, not unique. Another and roughly comparable supranational culture based in a single literary language can be seen in the Persianate world, which at its height extended to Northern India (thanks to the Mughals), Af­ghan­i­stan, Central Asia, and to some extent Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Armenia as well. The two literary cultures w ­ ere not entirely separate in that u ­ nder the Mughals Sanskrit texts w ­ ere widely translated into Farsi and became impor­tant at the Mughal court;23 conversely, texts in Farsi played a major role in Indian culture well into the twentieth c­ entury. Eu­ro­pean empires, such as the Roman or the British, could also be seen as potential models for the “international ocean.” The British Empire, unlike the versions of empire Pollock discusses, was a modern empire, one not maintained ideologically by a thin stratum of literati and their patrons but in which education was more evenly distributed. Within the empire, culture was more variegated, its ­adepts less consistently dedicated to generating paeans to potentates, and its patterns of publication and distribution more complex. It was, as Antoinette Burton and Isabel Hofmeyr have put it in Ten Books That ­Shaped the British Empire: Creating an Imperial Commons, “not a coherent ­whole but an assemblage.”24 Even in classic examples of empires, then, we have two dif­fer­ent versions when it comes to patterns of cultural diffusion, one more hegemonic, the other more federalist. ­These two possibilities hung over Comintern policies for the East in the initial years. Radek declared in Baku, “Long live the Red East, which together with the workers of Eu­rope w ­ ill create a second culture ­under the banner of communism.”25 Was he suggesting a “red imperium?”26 Pavlovich, though sometimes nicknamed a “red imperialist,” actually presented a variety of models for the ­f uture po­liti­cal organ­ization of Eurasia, and largely of some federation with Moscow as intellectual or inspirational center.27 In lectures he delivered to the Acad­emy of the General Staff, published in 1921 as The Foundations of Imperialist Policy (Osnovy imperialisticheskoi politiki), he

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asserted: “Just as the planets revolve around the sun, so all the Eu­ro­pean and even the Asiatic countries, in so far as they are taking the path ­towards the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the fundamental constitution of socialism, are beginning to be more and more attracted to Rus­sia as to the sun, as to the natu­ral center in the system of Eu­ro­pean and Asiatic socialist states.”28 Did the Bolsheviks who wrote about a “Red East” ­really envision territorial expansion and with it po­liti­cal and economic control, or did they envision rather some kind of “intellectual international” of the sort Casanova claims to be or­ga­nized around Paris, functionally an equivalent of Pavlovich’s “sun”?29 A ”natu­ral center” implies an autochthonous formation, and some have argued recently that, in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution, many in both Eu­rope and Asia hoped for what Ali Raza, Franziska Roy, and ­Benjamin Zachariah have called in their edited volume of this title an “internationalist moment” such that “cooperation and movements across geo­ graph­i­cal and po­liti­cal bound­aries” would enable “humanity” to create a new world for itself “disregarding the sanctity of states, empires, and governments,” in this case a federation of socialist states.30 But Bolsheviks often insisted that such transnational formations be or­ga­nized and controlled from Moscow. As Stalin put it in Prob­lems of Leninism (1926): “While shaking imperialism, the October revolution has at the same time created . . . ​a power­f ul and open center of the world revolutionary movement, around which it now can rally and or­ga­nize a united revolutionary front of the proletarians and of the oppressed p­ eoples of all countries against capitalism.”31 The Comintern had been founded in 1919 to further this. ­There are several noted historical pre­ce­dents for an “intellectual international” that have attracted the attention of scholars who write about “world lit­er­at­ ure” and other transnational cultural formations, and not all of ­t hese pre­ce­dents entail dependence on the institution of a single, hegemonic transnational government. One that comes to mind is the Arabic cultural sphere in medieval Central Asia. S. Frederick Starr in his book Lost Enlightenment (note he is invoking a Eu­ro­pean periodization of intellectual history) enthuses about a long list of brilliant thinkers and scientists from t­ here who wrote in Arabic (the language of much ­earlier conquest) and, though they often ­enjoyed local patronage, participated in the greater intellectual world of interchange offered by that lingua franca.32 Another example, about which Benedict Anderson wrote in ­Imagined Communities, is the use of Latin as

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15

“the language of a pan-­European high intelligent­sia.” As he points out, “The universality of Latin in medieval Western Eu­rope never corresponded to a universal po­liti­cal system.”33 Anderson further observes that the dominance of Latin throughout Eu­rope, though it originated in the Roman Empire, continued as Roman Catholicism and lingered on u ­ ntil print capitalism in the late sixteenth c­ entury brought a “demotion” of Latin in ­favor of vernacular languages. “The fall of Latin,” he argues, “exemplified a larger pro­cess in which the sacred communities integrated by old sacred languages ­were gradually fragmented, pluralized, and territorialized.”34 Alexander Beecroft in An Ecol­ogy of World Lit­er­a­ture: From Antiquity to the Pre­sent Day has in effect further modified Anderson’s revision, pointing out that though Latin was for broad areas of Eu­rope “the language of po­liti­cal power,” it also held sway in other areas that ­were never conquered by Romans. In ­these areas it served as “the language of cultural prestige.” The Latin cosmopolis, then, “can be understood neither as simply a vehicle of imperialist hegemony nor as a space innocently f­ ree of h ­ uman domination.”35 One might use a similar formulation for the cosmopolis as conceived by many of the Soviet internationalists, who sought less to establish po­liti­cal hegemony in Eurasia than to establish symbolic hegemony as a “soft” route to ideological hegemony. A big question not addressed in the speeches delivered at Baku was how mandatory was the “sacred language” of Marxism-­Leninism to be and how far w ­ ere writers to go ­toward adopting or generating a uniform literary culture. A pos­si­ble model for a socialist internationalist lit­er­a­ture that was not regimented is suggested in one of Franco Moretti’s formulations for world lit­er­a­ture, where he describes a “spectrum of outcomes,” which “showed that world lit­er­a­ture was indeed a system—­but a system of variations. The system was one, not uniform.”36 The “new culture” proposed at Baku and subsequently would nevertheless, like Latin and Arabic, be grounded in a dominant belief system, in this case Marxism-­Leninism, and as such would require a radical re­orientation of the cultural traditions of its adherents. To found a “second culture,” a postimperialist culture, as Radek demanded at Baku, would necessitate re­orienting the axis of world lit­er­a­ture away from ancient Greece and Rome, the point of orientation for Goethe and other proponents of “world lit­er­a­ture,” and from its implication in imperialist culture. To many Eu­ro­pe­ans of the time, the imperial magnificence of the classical era underwrote the stature of their own

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lit­er­a­ture. In T. S. Eliot’s famous essay “What Is a Classic?” (1944), for example, he argues: “The bloodstream of Eu­ro­pean lit­er­a­ture is Latin and Greek—­not as two systems of circulation but one, for it is through Rome that our parentage in Greece must be traced. What common mea­sure of excellence have we in lit­er­a­ture, among our several languages, which is not the classical mea­sure? What mutual intelligibility can we hope to preserve, ­except in our common heritage of thought and feeling in t­ hose two languages . . . ? No modern language could aspire to the universality of Latin, [which] . . . ​came to be the universal means of communication between ­people of all tongues and cultures.”37 What Pavlovich proposed in Baku would eclipse, but also bypass, “classical Greece, with all its divine works of art.” But the need for such a radical re­orientation, to consider an alternative genealogy from that of ancient Greece and Rome, was a challenge rarely taken up in Soviet Rus­sia or by any West Eu­ro­pean literary internationalist. The Rus­sians had long debated the question as to ­whether their lit­er­a­ture was part of the Eu­ro­pean tradition or had a separate lineage, but generally they regarded it as a distinctive branch. This sense of Rus­sia’s literary identity did not change radically when the country became the Soviet Union (one has only to look at Georg Lukács’s 1930s ­accounts of literary history, canonical in that de­cade, to see that). The old China hand and leftist A. Ivin was one of the few Soviet scholars who suggested that they should jettison the old, imperialist time line for literary evolution with its milestones in Classicism, Romanticism, Realism, and so forth, together with the outdated mode for looking at world culture in terms of the Judeo-­Greco-­Roman Eu ­ro­pean heritage.38 A dif­fer­ent version of a lineage that scorned the Eu­ro­pean classical age can be seen in the work of the Soviet linguist Nikolai Marr, who devised an alternative system to the Indo-­European and downgraded classical Greek and Latin from prime conduits of Indo-­European to minor players in linguistic and cultural evolution (see Chapter 4). The potential for cultural imperialism is always a danger in seeking to establish an international lit­er­a­ture. Periodically, one finds in Soviet fiction or journalism of the 1920s some version floated of a “Red East”; for example, in the early 1920s, Red East (Krasnyi Vostok) was a regular column heading in the periodical Zhizn’ natsional’nostei (Life of nationalities [i.e., of ethnic groups]), where Pavlovich published frequently. And in Vsevolod Ivanov’s

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novel of 1922, The Blue Sands (Golubye peski), the protagonist, Zapus, a communist enthusiast and red commander, proclaims a “Red East” (Krasnyi Vostok) while he fantasizes about successive conquests of Asian lands in the name of the Revolution. He dreams that “the power of the Soviets ­w ill perhaps [spread to] China, Mongolia . . . ​a nd h ­ ere not far away is Turkestan, Bukhara, Manchuria.” “Mongolia [­w ill be] ours. China has 500 million,” he muses. “Oh! . . . ​It’s all ours . . . ​Red Asia!”39 It is not clear in Ivanov’s novel how seriously we are to take Zapus’s vision, but a common obsession of Soviet writers of this period is the ­g reat conquerors of Asia—­A lexander the ­Great, Genghis Khan, Babur, and Tamerlane (the last features in Ivanov’s novel)—­who created ­great civilizations and potentially offered models for establishing a transnational revolutionary culture. Their example attracted Soviet intellectuals b ­ ecause their conquests abolished borders and thereby overcame the narrowness of small principalities by creating vast territories where ideas and culture might circulate. Though this dynamic had to do with commerce, a dubious institution for Marxists, the conquerors w ­ ere con­ve­niently from a precapitalist era. But Soviet intellectuals ­were very conflicted about them. The territorial amalgamations they effected made pos­si­ble greater intellectual intercourse, but this was achieved by extraordinary vio­lence (see Chapter 2). The Soviet intellectuals’ enthusiasm for the conquerors can be seen as yet another example of the megalomaniac tendencies of intellectuals who have totalizing impulses and seek to realize their own agendas, downplaying the costs. Even g­ iants of the Enlightenment in their cele­bration of the f­ ree circulation of ideas and goods teetered on the edge of endorsing despotism.40 But cultural erasure through vio­lence is endemic to revolution and often to avant-­gardism as well. The manifesto of the prerevolutionary Rus­sian avant-­ garde, “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste” (“Poshchëchina obshchestvennomu vkusu,” 1917), in seeking to effect a revolution in culture, called for most of the famous writers of the past and pre­sent to be “throw[n] overboard from the steamship of modernity.” 41 Zinoviev had called for “forget[ting] every­thing,” but how broadly would that injunction be applied? Endemic within it was the danger that cultural distinctiveness would be erased. Kant in one of his classic essays on cosmopolitanism, “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch” (“Zum ewigen Frieden. Ein philosophischer Entwurf,” 1795), in effect warns against stasis from

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cultural homogenization, a form of death. But cultural erasure also appealed to some thinkers of the Enlightenment who saw it as way of overcoming obscurantism and replacing it with Reason. As Alain Touraine has observed: “At the beginning of the seventeenth ­century, Descartes sought to construct rational thought from the standpoint of a tabula rasa, freed from all received ideas and all customary habits of thought.” Touraine goes on to note that “more than two centuries l­ ater, the song which would become the most universal symbol of the workers’ revolutionary movement, The Internationale, proclaims, ‘du passé faisons t­ able rase,’ ” in other words, “let us make a clean slate of the past.” 42 To truly “forget every­t hing,” as Zinoviev enjoined, would be to be left without any language. In an ultimate utopianism the masses would be proceeding not to utopia as to a no place (u-­topia), but to a place where t­ here was no word (log­os). In point of fact, Zinoviev only said to forget every­t hing that has divided us, suggesting a smaller se­lection of culture to jettison. But if “cosmopolitanism” was to be rejected as a “bourgeois” ideology, the leftist thinkers would be confronted with the prob­lem of how to reconcile that rejection with the need to avoid both devolving into a narrow or nostalgic nationalist culture and annihilating a national tradition by subordinating it to a Soviet-­generated culture. This was a prob­lem Antonio Gramsci wrestled with in his Prison Notebooks of 1929–1937, where he counterposes to the “cosmopolitan” the activist intellectual, one who helps forward the development of national culture through the vigorous and direct expression not of some nostalgically unified national mythos, but of the complex intercultural engagements that define the national history.43 ­Whether the term “cosmopolitanism” is actually used or not, however, the concept lies at the heart of one of the most problematical aspects of Marxism-­ Leninism: the clash between its universalist aims and accommodating the call of the national, or of the ethnically or locally specific. Inter alia, where does communist doctrine’s proclivity for foregrounding and essentializing class fit into ­either its universalist aims or any appeal to a national group? ­Were t­ hose gathered in Baku and the like-­minded in the West and East to create a new, postimperialist culture, they w ­ ere faced with the issue of how it could incorporate, or allow for, the distinctive cultures of each ethnic or linguistic group. A clear impediment to any common culture was preexisting belief systems and their attendant cultures—in terms of the East, the Muslim,

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especially as became amply evident in Baku, where the delegates, apart from a few Western leftists, w ­ ere overwhelmingly from the Muslim world. By far the largest groups ­were the Turks (235) and the Persians (192). Then ­t here ­were representatives of f­ uture Soviet republics, which had predominantly Muslim populations. Even many of the fourteen Indian and eight Chinese delegates ­were Muslim.44 The rhe­toric at Baku encouraged the notion of a “holy war” against bourgeois hegemony and imperialist oppression. Some of the speakers even used the Muslim term for a holy war, ghazat. It was Narbutabekov, from Turkestan, who was most out­spoken in insisting that any transnational leftist culture re­spect cultural differences. “One’s beliefs and customs [by which he implicitly meant principally the Muslim], one’s national and cultural institutions should be f­ ree and inviolate,” he declared, adding that it should be pos­si­ble to “or­ga­nize one’s national life [i.e., ethnic culture] freely and without hindrance.” Moreover, he contended, “every­one knows that the East is completely other, its interests are dif­fer­ent from t­ hose in the West—­and so a rigid implementation of the ideas of communism w ­ ill meet re­sis­tance ­t here.”  45 Judging from the transcript, Narbutabekov got the greatest ovation of any speaker at Baku, though he was ostensibly countered in a subsequent speech by Comrade Karkmasov, who was to become chair of the Council of ­People’s Commissars of the Daghestan Soviet Socialist ­Republic and, it is to be noted, spoke in Rus­sian. Karkmasov pronounced Narbutabekov’s words “alien to our underclass [bednota]” and denounced “pan-­Islamists and pan-­Turkists” of all stripes.46 The ideal expressed recurrently at Baku of a “common language” palpably could not be taken literally given that even t­ here the speeches w ­ ere not accessible to many of ­t hose pre­sent, who spoke a veritably post-­Babelian variety of languages. Casanova gave language, or rather language dominance, a central role in her account of the world republic of letters.47 But the Soviet Union had no acceptable lingua franca of the order of Sanskrit or ancient Persian or Latin—or French for Casanova, or En­glish for Moretti. Most educated Eu­ro­pe­ans of the first half of the twentieth ­century knew French, En­ glish, and German, but not Rus­sian. German, the language of Marxism, was initially intended to serve as what Benedict Anderson calls the “administrative vernacular” of the Comintern.48 But given the Soviet appetite for a global reach, they needed experts in a large number of Asian languages, and for many of them ­there ­were few or no specialists. Educated Asians often knew

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En­glish or, failing that, French or German, but few knew Rus­sian ­unless they had studied in Moscow. As for the Soviet Union, Pavlovich lamented in a report of 1921 to Stalin that the country was sadly lacking in po­liti­cally reliable experts on the East.49 The Comintern and Soviet literary officialdom strug­gled to find intermediaries who could assist in their Asian efforts and again and again had to use the same ­people, sometimes ignoring their problematical ideological positions (see Chapter 5). In the interwar period this language handicap (among ­others) frustrated efforts to establish a socialist, anti-­imperialist world lit­er­a­ture that could compete with Western cultural models. Consequently, translation became a crucial aspect of the Soviets’ campaign for establishing their own world lit­ er­a­ture. But translations of Soviet texts into Asian languages w ­ ere hampered by the Asians’ lack of knowledge of Rus­sian; when Chinese leftists translated Soviet texts, for example, they generally used Japa­nese or En­glish translations of them, a further remove from the original. And in the Soviet Union, where knowledge of Asian languages was analogously ­limited, texts by Asian writers ­were commonly translated into Rus­sian from En­glish, or another Eu­ro­pean imperialist source. Though Marxism and communism potentially provided a common global language, as its tenets w ­ ere translated into dif­fer­ent languages they acquired vernacular inflections. It was the task of socialist intermediaries within lit­er­a­ture to find ways to bridge the gap between “socialist content” and vernacular traditions. This task was especially formidable for ­those working with lit­er­a­ture written by Asians, ­because many of their genres and formal features have over time, even more than in the Western tradition, acquired a penumbra of associations. As Damrosch points out, “Literary language is particularly hard to translate since so much of the meaning depends on culture-­specific patterns of connotation and nuance.”50 Context plays a critical role in determining meaning, which is in consequence not stable. Socialist realism, if it was to be portable, would presuppose the possibility of common literary patterns that obtain across countries. But in order to have such invariants, the texts themselves would have to be very bare bones, somewhat abstract, stripped of vernacular particularity, and also simplified, more geared to apprehension by the masses, a group that “world lit­er­a­ture” tends to ignore. ­There can be no irony, no subtlety, no complexity. This is why, for example, though Lu Xun had been enshrined as the f­ather of Chinese leftist lit­er­a­ture, Mao Zedong in his

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canonical “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Lit­er­a­ture and Art” of 1942, while praising Lu Xun, warned against using his writings as models for a new Chinese lit­er­at­ ure (see Chapter 8). A related prob­lem was the translatability of concepts and tropes from one culture system to another, especially of Eu­ro­pean concepts to the dif­fer­ent Asian languages. Also, how portable ­were genres? Occidental genre categories do not apply universally.51 But even between Asian cultures ­t here is ­little synchrony in conceptions of genre or periodization. What might be common literary models for both Western and Asian writers? Pavlovich had said at Baku that examples that might guide the “intermingl[ing] . . . ​in a single common international ocean of poetry and knowledge” can be found in “Tatar, Bashkir, Kirghiz, e­ tc., poetry and lit­er­a­ ture.”52 But the Bashkir, and Kirghiz traditions, and indeed most Asian traditions, w ­ ere built on drama and poetry, much of the verse religious or epic, drawn from a my­t hol­ogy that depicts heroes prevailing in strug­gles against demonic forces. Eu­ro­pean lit­er­a­ture had for several centuries centered around the novel, a more portable literary form as Moretti claims, but one whose modern form had in many Asian countries been imported along with other colonialist culture and ­adopted widely by local Eu­ro­pe­anized intellectuals, a minority. Should each writer follow their own lit­er­a­ture’s national traditions and write communist rhe­toric into it? Stalin in a speech of 1925 produced the ­authoritative pronouncement on this: “Proletarian in content, national in form—­such is the universal culture ­toward which socialism is proceeding” (modified in 1930 to “Socialist in content . . .”).53 But, as I argue in Chapter 2, it is difficult to disaggregate “form” and “content,” and both categories are in any case context dependent. Rather than a patchwork solution, should ­t here be a radically new approach, should the line of literary evolution be severed and a new line generated? The Turkish poet Nâzim Hikmet attempted this radical course by jettisoning Turkish literary traditions in ­favor of Russian-­ cum-­European avant-­gardist vogues (see Chapter 1). Was it, then, inevitable that Eu­ro­pean genres and literary modes would prevail over the Asian in the “international ocean”? Some writers from Asian countries, such as the Persian poet Abulqasem Lahuti (see Chapter 2), resisted such deference, but typically, if often unself-­consciously, most Eu­ro­pean and Soviet intellectuals involved in the internationalist proj­ect assumed or openly advocated the

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dominance of Euro-­Russian traditions. Pavlovich at one point in his Baku speech, ­here typical of the cultured Bolshevik, proposed as models for the “new” culture major Rus­sian writers of the nineteenth c­ entury (Pushkin, ­Lermontov, Tolstoy, Gogol, plus one Ukrainian, Shevchenko).54 Another question implicit in the pronouncements at Baku was would the new culture be instituted from above (vertically) though directives emanating from Moscow, or more spontaneously, horizontally, through networks of encounter and cross-­fertilization involving leftists intellectuals? And who ­were to be its institutional agents? In such pre-­capitalist formations as Pollock’s cosmopolis, the transnational culture had been generated by an alliance of intellectuals and highly cultivated rulers. As conceived at Baku, however, the ­Great Unwashed w ­ ere to be the main players, though how that would work out in actuality was unclear, given the low level of literacy, not to say the widespread illiteracy, among the Asian masses (and the Soviet). The consensus of Western historiography is that Comintern-­sponsored international lit­er­a­ture was largely driven vertically (top-­down), the directives and models for it radiating out from Moscow as metropole. But some recent commentators have sought to complicate this narrative and to focus rather on a lateral dimension. A good example would be Kris Manjapra’s essay of 2010, “Communist Internationalism and Transcolonial Recognition.” ­Here Manjapra discusses an international community of like-­minded leftists he sees as not defined by the programs of the Comintern, and broader in scope than any communist literary movement, what he calls the “socialist global ecumene,” which incorporated a “transcolonial ecumene.”55 Manjapra means by this term not an ecumene in the sense of a hierarchical and doctrine-­bound formation such as the Catholic Church, where all members are subordinated to “Rome.” Rather, he has in mind an “ecumene” in the modern sense of a far-­flung or worldwide community of ­people committed to a single cause and engaged in discussions, lobbying and writing aimed at working ­toward a common program, and generating a common discourse. Manjapra’s somewhat idealized ecumene involves not relations between power­ful centers and their dependencies, but rather lateral connections of the like-­minded, and more particularly of the anti-­imperialists. David Featherstone has written of the way solidarities are created from below rather than or­ga­nized from above, though to what extent they can be seen as self-­generated is unclear.56 As Friedrich A. Kittler (and ­others) have

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argued, no discourse, even the freest pos­si­ble transmission, can manage without authorized controls.57 In the sphere of internationalist lit­er­a­ture, though t­ here was certainly a lot of lateral exchange, during the interwar ­period the metropole—­Moscow, that is, both Soviet and Comintern institutions based ­t here—­played a major role in fostering an internationalist lit­er­ a­ture and mustering writers to this cause. But was this anti-­imperialist leftist culture to be the “handmaiden” of Soviet power, or was it to be the variegated product of a transnational fraternalistic formation, as Manjapra suggests? Arguably, center and periphery make a false dichotomy. As Mike Featherstone points out, “The binary logic which seeks to comprehend ­culture via the mutually exclusive terms of homogeneity / heterogeneity, ­integration / ­disintegration, unity / diversity, must be discarded.” For culture is a “complex prism.”58 In practice, the “new culture” of the literary internationalists was generated both “vertically,” though directives, ideology, exempla, and standard rhetorical tropes emanating from Moscow, and horizontally, through networks of encounter and cross-­fertilization involving leftist intellectuals, not all of whom w ­ ere affiliated with Moscow-­based institutions, or communist (and even the communist writers w ­ ere not always inclined to follow directives). But ­there was considerable overlap between both dynamics. In the interests of greater clarity, however, I am drawing a distinction between two categories of formation in the literary movement(s) that worked ­toward establishing a “Eurasian,” leftist, anti-­imperialist culture. The first of ­t hese I am calling the literary international, a formation comprising organ­izations and individuals who ­were linked ­because they sought to establish a Eurasian cultural space of the left and / or subscribed to the anti-­imperialist or antifascist ­causes. Members of the literary international ­were committed communists or hard-­ core leftists who ­were integrated into, and identified with, Comintern or other Soviet-­linked literary bodies and aesthetic regimes. Also, the literary international was anchored in a network of publishing ­houses, journals, organ­ izations, and conferences, most of which w ­ ere sponsored by the Comintern or another Soviet bureaucracy. But though a “hard core,” the literary international was not monolithic. Its members w ­ ere not corralled in silos. Most of them had multiple connections and affiliations (often including the nonleftist). A good example of this is the Indian writer Mulk Raj Anand, who played a leading role in both British

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and Indian Comintern-­linked literary bodies but at the same time hobnobbed with leading modernists such as the Woolfs, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, and the conservative T. S. Eliot (see Chapter 7). The second category I am using is the ecumene (Manjapra’s term). I use it to characterize a more amorphous and never formally constituted body of roughly like-­minded writers, who ­were not necessarily members of any leftist party or implicated in any of the institutions of the literary international, but who to a significant degree shared their anti-­imperialist or antifascist sentiments, though in many instances not the orientation around Moscow or even Marxism. ­These writers exemplified a broad category of intellectuals that I am calling leftist cosmopolitans, as distinct from the hegemonic cosmopolitans who identified with the literary international. They ­were leftists who sought some transnational identity or linkages and ­were opposed to imperialism or fascism, but w ­ ere not committed to communism.59 Writers of this category formed the bulk of the ecumene. In many instances, the leftist cosmopolitans w ­ ere also patriots. More precisely, they w ­ ere cosmopolitan patriots, a category I have discussed elsewhere.60 Their example throws into relief the fact that “nationalist” and ­“ internationalist” are not mutually exclusive terms. Only extreme nationalism is clearly opposed to all forms of internationalism. Among the leftist cosmopolitans ­were writers whose anti-­imperialist stance was not initially associated with Moscow bodies or with authoritative Soviet texts. Rather, it came from personal experience of imperialist oppression. ­Later, many of them gravitated ­toward bodies of the literary international (see André Malraux and André Gide in Chapter 5).61 But I must stress that the ecumene did not exist as any definable organ­ ization or group. The term refers to a ­mental orientation and identification with the anti-­imperialist cause rather than to any institutionally constituted body. I am identifying its “members” ex post facto. “Ecumene” is a term they would prob­ably not have used to characterize themselves. ­These two categories—­literary international and ecumene—­cannot be seen as distinct. Th ­ ere was a complex pattern of activist cir­cuits, and “membership” of the two categories of formation was fluid and also overlapped to a large degree, especially during the 1930s when the antifascist cause was a ­g reat unifier. But not completely. In that de­cade some members of the ­ecumene w ­ ere accommodated in one of the organ­izations of the literary

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25

international, but only marginally or temporarily. Most hovered on the edges of its formally constituted organ­izations (prime examples would be Christopher Isherwood and W. H. Auden; see Chapter 8). ­There are also paradoxical examples of leftist cosmopolitans who, despite their own convictions, w ­ ere engaged as agents of the literary international (see Boris Pilniak in Chapter 5). ­There w ­ ere, then, countervailing tendencies to any effort at creating a single culture. Each writer, even if they w ­ ere affiliated with Moscow-­oriented bodies, had their own agenda. Even in examples where individual writers w ­ ere committed to Moscow-­oriented internationalism, their literary beliefs did not always conform to the current Soviet or Comintern platform. The Communist Party’s and the Comintern’s official platforms, including in lit­er­a­ture, changed several times during the two interwar de­cades, and at each point some writers resisted the latest shift, or manipulated the new rhe­toric for their own ends (Ėmi Xiao, in Chapter 8, provides an example). It should not, furthermore, be assumed that the Comintern or the Soviet Communist Party ­were monolithic bodies and that their leaders w ­ ere of one mind on all issues. Consider the very dif­fer­ent interpretations of the Marxist theory of revolution by Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, which divided German communists (see Chapter 6), and also other versions of Marxism and leftism popu­lar in Asia, such as ­t hose of Leon Trotsky, M. N. Roy, or the anarchist Petr Kropotkin. The ecumene, then, refers not to a specific body but rather to the self-­ identity of individual writers and bodies that in some way participated in the international literary movement of the left and ­were generally affiliated at some point with a body that was linked to Soviet-­established organ­izations. One should not see the two—­literary international and ecumene—as poles of a binary (hegemonic direction / lateral interactions). Both played impor­ tant roles in the development of an internationalist culture directed against imperialism. Burton and Hofmeyr, in their introduction to their edited volume Ten Books That ­Shaped the British Empire: Creating an Imperial Commons, provide an account of that commons that is pertinent ­here. They point to “the chaotically plural worlds of empire, where vertical grids certainly operated but where connections w ­ ere as typically horizontal: ‘a crazy patchwork’ that crosscut core and periphery and radiated difference rather than modeling an event chain of influence or consequence.”62 This book ­w ill discuss several prominent players in the Moscow-­centered networks who ­were both among ­these networks’ functionaries and actors in their own right.

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It would be an oversimplification to counterpose Moscow as the center of the literary international with the non-­Soviet world as its “periphery.” In the early twentieth ­century ­t here w ­ ere alternative centers that drew the international left, especially the Asians, in a pattern of what some call “significant geographies,” in other words points in the world where foreign writers traditionally congregated or with which they had links, ­whether for publishing their texts or for other forms of literary and ideological exchange. One example would be Istanbul, an intellectual center for many Central Asians before the First World War and also for Persians, Afghans, and other writers from the Muslim world. Another would be Tokyo, which ­until the early thirties functioned as an intellectual hub for East Asians and for some South Asians. Th ­ ese Asian centers to an extent counteracted the Eurocentrism of the movement, if only to an extent. Th ­ ere w ­ ere also fraternities of anti-­ imperialists in Paris (Ho Chi Minh recalled a dif­fer­ent Paris from that of Casanova) and in London and Berlin. Moreover, the attraction of Asians to revolutionary Rus­sia was not necessarily to its ideological positions but sometimes simply to a place that offered an education or royalties or was a supporter of the anti-­imperialist movement. A further complication is that even t­ hose writers and associations ostensibly subordinated to Moscow-­centered bodies and policies ­were not always compliant, not always happy to follow directives. The vari­ous leftist national organ­izations, though technically linked with the central Comintern literary body in a federation, had their own in­de­pen­dent existence and their policies did not always mesh. A case in point would be the way Eu­ro­pean leftist writers—­and even some Soviet literary bureaucrats—­ignored Karl Radek’s insistence in his official speech on foreign lit­er­a­ture at the First Congress of the Writers’ Union (1934) that they had to make a choice, “James Joyce or socialist realism?”63 This book, then, w ­ ill chart a complex series of interactions between writers negotiating a range of forces, both literary and institutional. It ­will show how, in seeking to implement the sort of idealist vision projected in Baku, such banal ­factors as bud­getary and language limitations, lack of specialists, and difficulties in making inroads through local intermediaries and emissaries all made its implementation a hard slog. Yet it was in the aftermath of the Baku Congress that some kind of international leftist cultural fraternity began to emerge more visibly among Asian and Eu­ro­pean writers and intellectuals.64

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27

It was defined not by a single language understood by a “cosmos” of p ­ eople who speak dif­fer­ent vernaculars, as in the Sanskrit or Persian cosmopoleis, but by shared ideas and aims. Its adherents, though not forming a coherent group, ­were linked by networks of contacts and a relatively common body of texts around which they oriented. How could you institute a “world lit­er­a­ture” that was to emerge from a political-­cum-­economic system that denies a role to the market? If all the disparate cultures of “oppressed” Asia and “proletarian” Eu­rope ­were to “intermingle,” what would be the mechanism of this merger? Would it be pos­si­ble without the formation of a world, or pan-­Eurasian, state, or at least a federation? And how could Soviet symbolic forms compete in the international cultural marketplace given the paucity of material and workforce resources that this movement commanded? Th ­ ose who sought to promote the vision of the single “ocean” had to contend with a commercially driven Western bourgeois culture that was already established and better funded. And yet over the course of the 1920s and 1930s, an anti-­imperialist and internationalist literary movement grew in Asia, Eu­rope, and Soviet Rus­sia. In part, this was due to a plethora of institutions established for the purpose.

Networks and Organ­izations Central to the literary international w ­ ere a number of institutions and networks set up and funded by the Soviet state or the Comintern. Comintern cultural bodies w ­ ere critical as vehicles for the dissemination of hegemonic ideas and also for facilitating informal networks, but not exclusively so. Another impor­tant body was VOKS, the All-­Union Society for Cultural Ties with Abroad (Vsesoiuznoe obshchestvo kul’turnykh sviazei s zagranitsei), a Soviet state—as distinct from Party—­body. VOKS promoted visits of foreign and Soviet culture producers to and from the Soviet Union, attempted to found variously titled friendship socie­ties in as many countries as pos­si­ble, and sent care packages of Soviet published material to countries where it had representatives, often in translation. The Baku conference was not the first occasion when, within the Comintern, t­ here was a call to or­ga­nize a socialist international literary movement. The earliest Soviet attempts at that came from the avant-­garde (in 1919), followed by the Proletcult (in 1920), but both initiatives proved unproductive.65

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Then, at successive Comintern congresses of the 1920s, starting with the Second Congress of July–­August 1920, moves ­were made to set up an international body of writers. At the Third Congress of June 22–­August 21, 1921, the idea of setting up what was called a Litintern (Literary International) was floated, though in practice, at this point, Moscow-­oriented revolutionary lit­ er­a­ture was too weakly represented outside the Soviet Union, except in Germany, to ­really establish an international organ­ization.66 In time, however, the movement grew, though Litintern, a body whose name underwent several revisions, ­really came into its own only in the 1930s. The evolution of the literary international can be traced over the 1920s and 1930s in a series of meetings and institutional formations, in many of which the Comintern was involved overtly or covertly. They include successive international literary conferences (1927 in Moscow, 1930 in Kharkov, the 1935 Paris Congress for the Defense of Culture, an antifascist talk fest, and its successor of 1937 held in Madrid, Valencia, and Paris). Another milestone was the First Congress of the Soviet Writers’ Union in 1934, attended by some foreign writers, where the theory of socialist realism received its official formulation. In terms of the expansion of the movement, the most critical of t­ hese conferences was the one held in 1930 in Kharkov, which I am taking as an approximate dividing line between the two major phases in the interwar evolution of the literary international. In conjunction with that meeting, a new international writers organ­ization, MORP, the International Organ­ization of Revolutionary Writers (Mezhdunarodnoe ob”edinenie revoliutsionnykh pisatelei), was formed, and over the next few years internationalist literary bodies all over the world, such as the League of Leftist Writers in China, ­became affiliated with it (see Chapter 6). At this time, also, a stable of semiparallel journals was established, with versions in Rus­sian, French, En­g lish, German, and for a time Spanish and Chinese. They all bore as their titles ­ versions of International Lit­e r­a­ture (the Rus­sian ­mother ship was called Internatsional’naia literatura).67 In addition to t­ hese periodicals, semiaffiliated journals appeared in other countries, such as New Masses in Amer­i­ca and Left Review and New Writing in ­England. Also, publishing ­houses w ­ ere set up in the Soviet Union and in major cities abroad to familiarize readers with selected Soviet and foreign leftist texts (e.g., Lawrence and Wishart in London). The appearance of literary texts by con­temporary writers in trans-

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lation in ­these journals and of publishing ­houses potentially provided models for writers that would be prime movers in the bid to establish an alternative world lit­er­a­ture, alternative to the Western “bourgeois.” The journals and publishing ventures not only expanded the horizons of their readers but also ensured that works by members of the ecumene became available to ­others. Translation was clearly critical in this pro­cess, a subject that is engaged in most of my chapters. Asia was thinly represented in t­hese bodies, but that lack was partially ­redressed by another institution, Moscow’s KUTV, the Communist University of the Toilers of the East (Kommunisticheskii universitet trudiashchikhsia Vostoka, 1921–1938), which had a division u ­ nder Comintern supervision that was for foreign students from what we would call the Third World. At KUTV, friendships and other links ­were formed with fellow students from other countries. Four of the foreign writers featured in this book spent time ­there in the 1920s: Qu Qiubai and Ėmi Xiao from China, Nâzim Hikmet from Turkey, and Abolqasem Lahuti from Persia (see Chapters 1, 2, 5, 6, and 8). All four assumed po­liti­cal roles on graduation, three of them in their home countries, but by the 1930s their po­liti­cal ­careers had largely ended and all four had become impor­tant players in lit­er­a­ture and culture. They, then, provide examples of what Fredric Jameson has called “the cultural intellectual who is also a po­liti­cal militant,” one who “produces both poetry and praxis.” His main example is Ho Chi Minh.68 But unlike Ho (who some claim studied at KUTV), the figures I w ­ ill be discussing ­were, while impor­ tant in their respective national communist bureaucracies during the 1920s, more engaged during the 1930s in the institutionalization of an internationalist lit­er­a­ture. Though, then, in the aftermath of Kharkov the Comintern had managed to found a large, international literary body, what about the quest to esta­ blish a common culture? It is one t­ hing for writers to converge for a few days (in Kharkov, Paris, or Madrid), quite another to converge around a single aesthetic, or a single store of rhetorical tropes and plot functions. Would the emerging Soviet aesthetic (socialist realism) become a model for the literary international? This was not just a ­matter of thematics, of revolutionary or proletarian subject m ­ atter. At stake was the possibility of a Comintern aesthetic. The broad adoption of socialist realism did not occur, in part due to an extraliterary event: the Nazis coming to power in Germany in 1933 and the

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subsequent repression ­there of leftists. Since the Soviet Union was perceived by many to be the only country absolutely committed to the antifascist cause, the ranks of MORP-­a ffiliated bodies swelled. The Comintern believed it needed a broader-­based movement to combat fascism and in the early 1930s abandoned its militantly “proletarian” stance in ­favor of a more ecumenical movement and an expanded tent. This had its impact in lit­er­a­ture. Th ­ ere was in effect no requirement that non-­Soviet writers in the literary international adopt socialist realism as their “method,” and foreign authors largely opted for so-­called critical realism—­critique of existing society—­rather than full-­ blown socialist realism, which celebrated the triumph of a communist order and hierarchy. During the 1920s the main unifying f­ actor that brought Western leftist ­lit­er­a­ture and Soviet lit­er­a­ture together with the Asian had been the anti-­ imperialist cause. But in the face of Nazi aggression the strug­gle against fascism became the principal cause of the literary international throughout the world. De facto the strug­gle against colonialism-­cum-­imperialism was subsumed u ­ nder it. This tempering of the anti-­imperialist thrust in the literary international created a more catholic internationalist lit­er­at­ ure, that incorporated more authors from both Eu­rope and Asia, and was in that sense closer to realizing a “world” lit­er­at­ ure. The strug­gle against imperialism was ostensibly not the main cause of the literary international. That was, rather, the spread of revolution and the crusade against capitalism. Many of its Eu­ro­pean and Rus­sian members had no interest in Asia and w ­ ere more concerned with revolution in Eu­rope. Throughout its history in the interwar years, the successive governing bodies and congresses that ­were at its heart w ­ ere overwhelmingly Eurocentric in their composition and in the focus of their platform. This marked Eurocentrism was reflected in the status of Asian lit­er­a­ture and Asian writers within Comintern literary organ­izations. They had few representatives from Asia, so that Asia was in effect a poor relative in the one “­family” of internationalists. This book nevertheless explores the literary international’s Eurasian dimension. This is not only ­because it is understudied or ­because this book fills in a glaring lacuna in standard accounts of world lit­er­a­ture. The call for a Eurasia without borders represents a much more radical gesture than the call to form a revolutionary Eu­ro­pean culture given that Eurasia’s two com-

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ponents, Eu­rope and Asia, have for centuries been regarded as absolutely, and irrevocably, separate.

Eurasia without Borders? ­ ehind the idea of a “Eurasia without borders” is the very real question as to B ­whether t­ here are two continents, Eu­rope and Asia, or just one, Eurasia—­and more particularly w ­ hether among internationalists the two could be considered as one. Historically, since at least the ancient Greeks, the Eurasian landmass has generally been seen as comprising two continents, Eu­rope and Asia, but the alleged line of demarcation between them has been contested and also changed over time. This has been in part ­because t­ here is no self-­ evident boundary sufficient to justify a geo­graph­i­cal division (the Ural Mountains are too low and discontinuous, and anyway they split Rus­sia in two). It was also ­because the division was essentially cultural and ideological, having to do with the Eu­ro­pe­ans’ sense that they and their culture w ­ ere quite other than the Asian.69 It has commonly been argued that the defining core of Eu­rope is Christendom.70 When in the nineteenth c­ entury Ottoman (Muslim) rule in the Balkans was challenged, Eu­ro­pean intellectuals began to place the eastern border of Eu­rope ever further away from areas occupied by the Turks. A dramatic revision of the border was the Austrian statesman Klemens von Metternich’s famous pronouncement “Asia begins at the Landstrasse,” that is, in Vienna’s third district. In another, slightly ­later variant, to be found in Friedrich Naumann’s best-­selling travelogue, titled “Asia” (1900), the border begins in Athens, wanders around the eastern Mediterranean, and ends in ­Naples. Other places frequently named as marking a dividing line between Eu­rope and Asia include Belgrade, Sofia, Trieste, Lvov, or even Prague.71 Such radically westward placings of the border, ever farther from the Urals, raised a question particularly germane to this book, one that obsessed Rus­sian intellectuals during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Does Rus­sia belong in Eu­rope? Soviet ideology, inasmuch as it purported to supersede all the belief systems that divided Asians from Europeans—­and Chris­tian­ity above all—­ offered the possibility of a culturally unified Eurasia.

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But what is “Eurasia”? In this book I am not using the term in the narrow sense used by the Eurasianists (a group of Rus­sian émigré intellectuals from the 1920s and 1930s), and lingering ­today in much of the scholarship and rhe­ toric in Rus­sian nationalist tracts.72 Eurasianism was a conservative ideology that sought to retain the borders of the former Rus­sian Empire, keeping out what, to its adherents, w ­ ere alien, Eu­ro­pean influences and drawing closer the Asian and Rus­sian ethnicities within the territory, if u ­ nder Rus­sian spiritual guidance. H ­ ere I am using the term “Eurasian” to refer to the vast landmass that encompasses all of Eu­rope, Rus­sia, and Asia, though in discussing Asia I ­w ill be looking primarily at countries of outer Asia: Turkey, Persia (Iran), Af­ghan­i­stan, India, China, Mongolia, French Indochina, and Japan, not at inner Asia (Central Asia e­ tc.), except in Chapter 2, where my Persian poet ends up in Tajikistan. Furthermore, though many scholars use the term “Orient” for Asia, making a distinction between “the Orient,” which is defined in cultural terms, and “Asia,” which has a basis in geography, ­here I ­will largely avoid the term “Orient” and primarily use the term “Asia” ­because of its inclusion in the term “Eurasia.” The congress in Baku was held in a place and at a time when national bor­ reat War throughout the ders appeared less secure. In the aftermath of the G Eurasian landmass, and in Africa and the Pacific as well, borders w ­ ere changing or being contested. During the early Soviet years, in Rus­sia, with all the confusion of the Civil War, when the Reds and Whites fought each other and ­t here ­were incursions of American, Chinese, Japa­nese, and Czech forces, the populace could in many instances not be sure in which country they would be residing once the fighting ­stopped. Given the indeterminacy of national borders at that time, the possibility of rethinking borders fired the imagination of the delegates at Baku and elsewhere. Bolshevik spokespersons in Baku and elsewhere tended to essentialize Asia and discuss it as if it was a single entity. They downplayed the many internal borders in Asia, its manifold countries, languages, writing systems, po­liti­cal organ­izations, and confessions. Within the Comintern, the one division (otdel), called Vostok (the East), h ­ oused all the Asian countries and even included Africans and African-­Americans.73 In other words, this bureaucratic category (Vostok) effectively meant not just the Asian but all non-­European countries and ­peoples. Soviet reliance on this broad category in both bureaucratic and scholarly institutions, incidentally, did not come from Marxist

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33

texts but was one of many carryovers from prerevolutionary conceptions and practice. It also bespeaks an insouciance to the distinctions within Asia and Africa, in that it reinforced the sense that Eu­ro­pe­a ns ­were separate from non-­Europeans, making it more likely that the vision of Baku would prove phantasmal. Asian intellectuals, for their part, ­were already formulating vari­ous versions of a pan-­Asian entity (see Chapter 5), among them some Asian communists. In the early to mid-1920s, vari­ous East Asian communists sought to establish a specifically communist organ­ization that would span all of Asia. For example, on May 20, 1924, Ho Chi Minh, who had been in Moscow since 1923 attached to the Comintern, sent a three-­page proposal to its Eastern Section, outlining the rationale for a Federation of Asian Communists.74 But Comintern and Bolshevik officials w ­ ere not interested in an Asia-­based, pan-­ Asian ­union. Rather, they wanted to establish Moscow as a center from which pathways of interaction would radiate out, drawing Asian intellectuals to it as their center, the capital of world revolution. As is clear from most statements on this subject, Asian writers ­were expected to absorb Euro-­Russian culture, but ­there was ­little effort made for the reverse. 75 This asymmetry that marked the history of the literary international can be seen in the dramatic imbalance in the volume of lit­er­a­ture translated into Asian languages by leftist enthusiasts and its e­ ager readership as compared with an egregiously smaller quantity of translated material by Asian writers and the even smaller interest in it among Rus­sian and Eu­ro­pean internationalists. The Eu­ro­pean and Soviet writers who joined the literary international rarely shed their Eurocentric self-­identities. A basic and now infamous premise of colonialist ideology, one that justified the occupation by Eu­ro­pe­ans of non-­European territories, was that the newly subject ­peoples w ­ ere “sleepy” and that the Eu­ro­pean occupiers had a “civilizing mission” to “awaken” them, to bring them out of their centuries-­ long torpor into the modern era. But in the early phases, Bolshevik and Comintern spokespersons often used a similar vocabulary. Zinoviev, for example, in a speech at the Baku Congress, invoked Mikhail Lermontov’s poem “Kazbek,” in which the East is depicted as having been sleeping for many centuries.76 Such strains of what some might call a neo­co­lo­nial­ist mentality about a slumbering Asia have some pre­ce­dents in Marxist theory, which might be said to have inherited the German philosophical tradition’s

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take on Asia, but more particularly on China, which in writings of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries so often stood for the East. Notably, Johann Gottfried Herder proclaimed China a highly patriarchal and “despotic realm” cut off from the rest of the world—­“a nation thrust into a corner”—­ which consequently “has remained for thousands of years at the same point” and made no advances in the sciences. In sum, and this is Herder’s famous and oft-­repeated verdict, “the empire is an embalmed ­mummy, wrapped in silk, and painted with hieroglyphics: its internal circulation is that of a dormouse in its winter’s sleep.”77 Hegel was more blunt, declaring that with its spirit stultified by the “despotism of the Sovereign,” China has no history— in other words, t­ here has been no linear progression.78 One might have assumed that Marxist theoreticians would have dif­fer­ent attitudes, but the notion that China (or Asia generally) was in a sleep of centuries typifies their repre­sen­ta­tions. Marx in an article of July 7, 1862, claims that “Oriental empires continually exhibit an immutability in social ­sub-­structure” and pronounces China a “living fossil.”79 And in early Soviet texts one often finds expressed some sense of Asian backwardness and condescending attitudes that w ­ ere typical of the colonialist mentality, which sees orientals as “sleepy” or “barbaric,” or most likely both. Soviet authors often expressed a revulsion at the smells and culinary practices of Asians that is also typical of Eu­ro­pean colonialist texts. Even at Baku Zinoviev was to remark that “the working masses of the East do not understand the most elementary princi­ples of hygiene.”80 But ­there w ­ ere also other, less pessimistic accounts of Asians to be found in Soviet texts. ­After all, Marx also maintained that the Asians, and the Chinese in par­tic­u­lar, w ­ ere already emerging from their torpor, that they ­were being “rouse[d] out of their hereditary stupidity.”81 Lenin in his pronouncements was even more positive about the revolutionary promise of moribund China. He used in his speeches not the terminology of the “­mummy” or “fossil,” but rather, and repeatedly, versions of “awakening,” a key notion in the “Internationale.” In one article, “China Renewed,” he declares that “four hundred million backward Asians [i.e., the Chinese] have awakened to po­liti­cal life. A fourth of the population of the globe has gone, so to say, from sleeping to the light, to movement, to strug­gle.”82 The question then is: W ­ ere Asians to be “awakened” by the efforts of the Soviet and Eu­ro­pean internationalists, or would they come to “awaken” themselves? Largely, though not always, the answer was that the Soviet Union, or

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the example of the Bolshevik Revolution, led or inspired Asia’s “awakening.” Lenin, in his article “The Awakening of Asia” of 1913, declares that “world capitalism and the Rus­sian movement of 1905 have awakened Asia,” continuing: “Hundreds of millions of the population which is downtrodden, and has gone to seed in a medieval stagnation, has woken up to a new life and to a strug­gle for the fundamental rights of man, for democracy.”83 We ­w ill note that he identifies 1905 as a critical moment for Asia not b ­ ecause of the Rus­sian defeat that year at the hands of the Japa­nese but in terms of the Revolution of 1905, which in Soviet lore was the second in the g­ reat triad (the Decembrist revolt of 1825, 1905, and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917). ­There was also ­little doubt in Lenin’s pronouncements that the awakening of Asia was to be guided from Moscow. In 1919, in a speech to the Second All-­ Russian Congress of Communist Organ­izations of the P ­ eoples of the East, he declared: “Now it remains for our Soviet republic to gather around itself the ­peoples of Asia who are awakening, in order to conduct the strug­g le against international imperialism together with them.”84 This issue of how Asians would be “awakened” was most explic­itly clarified in an unsigned lead article of December 1918 for the journal Zhizn’ natsional’nostei, where Stalin, head of the Commissariat for Nationalities, frequently published at the time. The anonymous author declares: “The task of communists is to intervene in the growing spontaneous [stikhiinogo] movement in the East and develop it further into a conscious [soznatel’noi] strug­gle with imperialism.”85 In this last sentence the author implicitly invokes Lenin’s doctrine of the Party’s function as a “conscious” vanguard that w ­ ill lead the masses to revolution. Such statements, however, have caused many scholars to accuse the Soviet leadership of a “Red Orientalism.” One of them, Michael Kemper, contends that Bolshevik and Comintern leaders like Pavlovich “portrayed the East as in need of a Marxist developmental model.” “Soviet Orientalism,” he concludes, “therefore translated more directly into a ‘civilizing mission’ than western orientalism did.”86 Such glib statements disregard the dif­fer­ent modalities of empire. At the time, Bolshevik intellectuals believed they ­were bringing the Asians and other subject ­peoples not “civilization” but “scientific socialism,” which was the ultimate in science and knowledge, superseding “bourgeois” epistemology. They saw themselves as anti-­imperialists in that they ­were adherents of a totally dif­fer­ent belief system and also not bent on the economic exploitation of other p ­ eoples. Though they did not

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always in practice adhere to t­ hese princi­ples, t­ hese distinctions should not be glossed over. Another unsigned editorial in Zhizn’ natsional’nostei (of May 28, 1921) asserts in a Spenglerian vein that bourgeois, Western culture has exhausted itself and its “spiritual energy” and creativity have “dried up.” “Tomorrow they w ­ ill fi­nally die and across their bodies ­w ill step the new Prometheus, who has dared to grasp in his hands the torch of knowledge” and ­w ill bring about a “new Re­nais­sance,” which “­w ill conquer international imperialism.”87 “Knowledge,” then, the torch of Prometheus, was central to the internationalist writers’ proj­ect in Asia. They w ­ ere to bring knowledge about Asia both to Rus­sians and Eu­ro­pe­ans and to the Asians themselves. We might note in this connection that Pavlovich, in Baku, described his g­ reat international ocean as one of “poetry,” the central medium of most Asian lit­er­a­tures, “and knowledge” (emphasis mine). Knowledge, likely conveyed through “poetry” (lit­er­a­ture), would be the kiss of the prince that would awaken the sleeping princess that was Asia. And knowledge of an Asia u ­ nder the imperialist yoke would impel Westerners to join the anti-­imperialist cause. But it would be true, Marxist-­inflected knowledge, contrasted as such with the bourgeois imperialist account of Asia. Although, then, this book pre­sents a chronicle of the internationalist literary movement between the wars as applies to Asia, interwoven with this chronicle are discussions of an array of texts that aspire to conveying “true” knowledge of Asia. During the 1920s, especially, Soviet and Asian writers of the ecumene took upon themselves the task of countering the account of the East to be found in imperialist, exoticist texts that commanded a huge readership. The most common generic variants of this lit­er­a­ture are the adventure romances set in exotic locales, as in Rudyard Kipling and especially H. Rider Haggard (see Chapter 3), or love romances involving encounters between Eu­ro­pe­ans and languid, alluring orientals, a genre of which the master was the wildly popu­lar French writer Pierre Loti (see Chapters 1 and 5). Leftist writers attempted to provide a postexoticist account of the East and to supersede the standard plots and tropes of imperialist lit­er­a­ture. But many of ­t hese writers continued unself-­consciously to use the tropes of that lit­er­a­ture even as they sought to transcend it (see Chapters  3 and 5). This lingering of imperialist rhe­toric ­particularly marked works of the transition phase, in the early postrevolu-

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tionary years. Inevitably, the temporal border of 1917 proved to be not as absolute as it was vaunted to be. The anti-­imperialist movement did not begin ­after the Revolution or with the formation of the Comintern, nor was it only Soviet-­inspired. The movement was dispersed and t­ here w ­ ere e­ arlier intellectual centers, such as Berlin in par­tic­u­lar, to which disaffected or exiled Persian, Turkish, Chinese, and Indian anti-­imperialist intellectuals and groups flocked. ­Later in the 1920s, the League against Imperialism, which attracted both communist and noncommunist activists, was to establish its headquarters in Berlin, a natu­ral base, though for reasons of police repression it had to hold its first conference (of February 10, 1927) in Brussels. In other words, the movement was not purely Moscow-­centric and centripetal.

The Organ­ization of the Book In treating my primary texts and their authors, I am ignoring Pavlovich’s injunction to “intermingle” the national cultures in the one g­ reat international ocean, to pre­sent a transnational account. I am largely looking at the countries and their cultures individually, as they themselves did and as the Soviet Union did, too. In other words, I am not following this introduction’s title in presenting a Eurasia without Borders. Despite many well-­intentioned efforts by leftist enthusiasts, the question mark in my title was never removed. The book is or­ga­nized in two parts. The first part (“First Steps”) charts how writers responded to the call for a unified Eurasian cultural space in terms of interactions between Euro-­Russian and Asian writers. The chapters in this part are or­ga­nized in a geo­graph­i­cal sweep of Asia g­ oing from its west to the Far East: Turkey, Persia, Af­g han­i­stan, India, Mongolia, Indochina, China, and Japan. The chapter divisions into national lit­er­a­tures are partly necessitated by the fact that, though the movement was meant to be transnational, in Comintern and Soviet bureaucratic practice all lit­er­a­tures w ­ ere pigeonholed in bodies determined by nation-­states. Each chapter treats not only a dif­fer­ent country or region within Asia but also a dif­fer­ent aspect of the quest for a transnational, leftist Eurasian culture. And each chapter discusses works by Soviet or Eu­ro­pean leftists about the country in question as well as ­t hose of indigenous leftists. An exception is the chapter on Af­ghan­i­stan (Chapter 3), where I could not find an Afghan leftist writer of the period as an example.

38

I n t ro d u c t i o n

The chapters are also or­ga­nized in an approximate chronological sequence. They begin around 1919, when the Comintern was founded, but this was a year marked by several other momentous events in the international arena, such as the first Pan-­African Congress in Paris, not to mention the abortive revolutions in Germany and Hungary. Inevitably, the lion’s share of the coverage in t­ hese chapters is devoted to the early Soviet years, a high point of revolutionary internationalism before Stalin and ­others promulgated the policy of “socialism in one country” in 1924. Several of the writers discussed, such as Nâzim Hikmet from Turkey and the Bolshevik Fedor Raskolnikov (see Chapters 1 and 3), ­were in ­t hese years personally close to Trotsky or shared his commitment to internationalism. ­After reviewing developments in Euro-­Asian leftist interactions in lit­er­a­ ture of the early to mid-1920s, the book takes its coverage to 1927, when, in ­ ere the Shanghai debacle of April, Soviet revolutionary ambitions in China w crushed, bringing about a crisis in the communist movement and the Stalin-­ Trotsky split. Paradoxically, however, it was in the wake of this split, around 1930, that the literary international came to enjoy a major presence on the world’s intellectual horizon. The book’s second part (“The Commons within Sight”) deals with the 1930s, when the movement expanded radically, in part in response to the rise of fascism, to which the Soviet Union was the most actively opposed of the major powers. The ensuing chapters chronicle the progressive broadening of the ecumene thereafter, both in numbers and in geo­graph­i­cal reach, but also engages the increasingly urgent question of the extent to which a single Comintern aesthetic would be established that could become the basis for a leftist “world lit­er­a­ture.” The more fundamental question of the extent to which cultural rapprochement was pos­si­ble became particularly acute during the period of the Sino-­Japanese War (1937–1945), the subject of my culminating chapter, Chapter 8, which shows a reverse trend from amalgamation as the ecumene began to unravel in the late 1930s. The En­glish writers Christopher Isherwood and W. H. Auden, both then on the fringes of the literary international, arrived in China full of enthusiasm for its anti-­Japanese cause but, once ­t here, came to recognize that they cared more about the crisis in Eu­ rope, where the Nazis had begun their rampage of conquest. They also recognized the real­ity that their Eu­ro­pean mind-­sets did not map well onto the Chinese. Chapter 8 looks at a range of examples that illustrate the prob­lem

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39

of translation in both the literal and figurative senses of the word. Successful translation would be critical for any “intermingling” of the Euro-­Russian and Asian leftist cultures. In China, the prob­lem of how to effect an “intermingling” was exacerbated as Mao in his speeches of the late 1930s increasingly stressed the communist movement’s national identity and vernacular cultural traditions. His “Yan’an Talks on Lit­er­a­ture and Art” that w ­ ere delivered in 1942, though highly ambiguous, indicate a pulling back from Soviet literary and ideological models. The Talks also provide object lessons in the difficulties of rendering concepts in translation and pre­sent examples of how what are ostensibly equivalent terms in Soviet and Chinese communist discourse do not match completely. Mao’s Yan’an Talks w ­ ere first published in 1943, which was also the year the Comintern was abolished. Although that year does not mark the end of the Second World War (and with it of the Sino-­Japanese conflict), it marks the end of what might be called the “Comintern episode” in the history of literary internationalism and consequently the end of the period covered by this book, though I have added an epilogue in which I speculate on the degree of continuity between this interwar movement and postwar postcolonialist and “world” lit­er­a­ture. Mao’s Talks and the Baku Congress bookend my narrative in that the Talks bring out many prob­lems ignored in the upbeat speeches delivered in Baku, among them how to accommodate the conflicting pulls of the national and the international, of vernacular traditions and Marxist ideology, and how to get beyond elite culture to generate an effective, mass culture. My narrative starts at the other end of this trajectory, a time of optimism that a postimperialist, Eurasian culture was pos­si­ble, a time of millenarian expectation, reflected in the speeches made at Baku. It begins with the Turkish poet Nâzim Hikmet, an exuberant internationalist, who sought to rid his verse of vernacular formal features in the interests of attaining a truly transnational culture and became a darling of le tout Moscow for his impassioned public readings and his unshakable commitment to international revolution.

1 Nâzim Hikmet, Turkish Poet of the New Millennium

G

eorg Lukács, in his 1967 preface to History and Class Consciousness (1923), recalls the “messianic, utopian aspirations” of the leftists from all over Central Eu­rope gathered in Vienna in 1918–1920 and their “belief in the immanence of world revolution and the total transformation of the civilized world.”1 In neighboring Ger­ ere caught up in a similar many, leftists, many of them writers and artists, w internationalist revolutionary euphoria. In 1918–1919 they attempted to pull off an a­ ctual revolution and then tried it again in 1923, the same year that this book by Lukács first appeared. Both German revolutions ­were linked to Soviet Rus­sia, and for both the Soviet Union sent a Comintern leader, Karl Radek, to oversee the conduct of the revolution and urge the insurgents to join forces with Soviet power.2 Transnational communion seemed a feasible goal for the German, Austrian, and Hungarian leftists gathered in Vienna and Berlin of the early years, ­because for them German could serve as a lingua franca. But how achievable was such communion in a broader geographical-­cum-­cultural purview where ­t here was no such common language? Lukács, in the above quotation, sees the awaited revolution as bringing about “the total transformation of the civilized world,” which one would prob­ably take to mean Eu­rope and Amer­ i­ca. But in the Soviet and Comintern platforms of the early years the awaited revolution was, as we saw at the Baku Congress, meant not just to be in ­Eu­rope but to break out in countries throughout the globe, including what we would call the Third World, and within it particularly in Asia. Liberation

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from oppressors was to be not just from the bourgeoisie but also from colonialist-­imperialists. This chapter picks up the story of millennial expectations for the broader purview of Eurasia. It w ­ ill focus on the literary c­ areer of Nâzim Hikmet (1902–1963) during the 1920s and 1930s, which he spent at times in Turkey, at times in Moscow. Hikmet’s ­career provides the central example through which to follow the interactions between the emerging Soviet culture, Eu­ro­ pean leftist and especially avant-­gardist culture, and the new culture of republican Turkey. It also problematizes the idea that internationalist culture developed in a vertical hierarchy presided over by a hegemonic Moscow and Comintern cultural bureaucracy (while not dismissing the idea that such Soviet institutions played a major role). The activities of Hikmet in the interwar years also provide a case study in the prob­lem of how to calibrate the roles of vernacular culture from Asian countries with cultural models emanating from Moscow and the Western Eu­rope left. How might the distinct Asian cultures “interweave” (or “intermingle”), as Mikhail Pavlovich had put it, with the Western and Rus­sian in the one ­great international ocean. Hikmet, as we s­ hall see, initially tackled the prob­lem by jettisoning his national literary conventions. This represents the most radical, but far from the only, resolution of that dilemma to be covered in this book. Hikmet was a highly sui generis poet and thinker, but his ideological and aesthetic positions w ­ ere heavi­ly influenced by two milieux in which he was immersed during his two stints in Moscow of the 1920s (1922–1925 and 1925–1927): the internationalist avant-­garde and Moscow’s Communist Uni­ ese milieux ­were interconnected, versity of the Toilers of the East, KUTV. Th not overlapping, but leading spokespersons in both w ­ ere intent on creating an internationalist culture, overcoming attachments to the national. And so my account of Hikmet’s c­ areer also illustrates the paradoxes, ambiguities, and unacknowledged contradictions that have over time attended that central dilemma of international communism: how to calibrate the competing demands of the national and the international. KUTV, as we ­shall see ­later, played a critical role in the history of the literary international as a cauldron of anti-­imperialist, internationalist activism and a major center for drawing Asian writers into the literary international. But ­there the faculty and the students alike ­were confronted by a related prob­lem that was glaringly apparent at the Baku conference—­how to create a Eurasian commons in the absence

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of any common language among would-be participants, which meant that even any attempt at basic communication was fraught. Hikmet gave public poetry readings where, a topos of memoirs by internationalist enthusiasts, the literal content of his poems was not accessible to his audience but the power of his voice, rendering words as sound and rhythm, became the ve­ ere godfathered by members of the hicle of solidarity.3 ­These per­for­mances w internationalist Soviet avant-­garde, who ­adopted him as one of their own and ­were at the time linked with counter­parts in Germany and Austria. The Soviet artistic avant-­garde in the early postrevolutionary years had ambitions for the internationalization of their own art. On January 1, 1919, almost two years before the Baku conference, and before Litintern was mooted, they or­ga­nized ­under the auspices of the Department of the Fine Arts an International Bureau, whose main tasks w ­ ere to establish links with representatives of left revolutionary art in vari­ous countries, so that they might “unite in the name of constructing a new, universal artistic culture,” which would serve as a “mighty weapon for realizing world socialism.” Though the bureau ­ ntil was not originally a venture of the Comintern, which was not founded u March 2 of that year, afterward it voted to link itself with that body. In other words, this is an example not of cultural internationalism originating in the Comintern, but of ex post facto affiliation (the Department of Fine Arts was a government, as distinct from Party or Comintern, body). The leadership of the bureau included some of the most aesthetically radical members of the avant-­garde: Wassily Kandinsky, Kasimir Malevich, Velemir Khlebnikov, Vladimir Tatlin, and the leading Formalist theoretician, Osip Brik.4 The proj­ect for an international of the arts captures the spirit of the revolutionary moment, which, as Lukács recalled, had fired the left in much of Central Eu­rope. But the initiative was Eurocentric, and even narrowly so. When the bureau’s leaders put out feelers for avant-­gardists in other countries to join their bureau, they focused on Eu­ro­pe­a ns, but though the Germans responded enthusiastically t­ here was l­ittle interest elsewhere in Eu­rope. In Eu­rope and Soviet Rus­sia, nevertheless, many intellectuals dreamed of overcoming divisive language differences throughout the world, not just in Eu­rope. Walter Benjamin, for example, even before he became a Marxist, in his essay of 1923, “The Task of the Translator,” argues that essentially only the most reduced texts are amenable to translation and “fidelity in the translation

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First Steps, 1919–1930

of individual words can almost never fully reproduce the meaning they have in the original” b ­ ecause the noncoincidence between words and expressions in dif­fer­ent language systems is a bar to translatability. Nevertheless, he insists, t­here exists the possibility of higher-­order translation into a “pure language,” a universal language that is not hindered by any need to convey literal meanings but operates rather in the realm of the symbolic.5 A shared mission of the initial postrevolutionary years among both ­Bolshevik officials and the Soviet avant-­garde was to establish a common language that would enable intercourse between all the dif­f er­ent linguistic, ethnic, and cultural groups. The avant-­garde’s International Bureau was committed to this, most particularly one of its leading members, the visionary poet Velemir Khlebnikov, who was more invested in the East than the o ­ thers. Already in the prerevolutionary period Khlebnikov had worked up several highly eccentric schemes for attaching meanings to letters or sounds, thus bypassing conventional semantic systems, which w ­ ere a bar to mutual com6 prehension. He wrote about issues of language again in 1919, particularly in articles he submitted for the group’s projected journal, Internatsional iskusstva (International of Art), where he made two proposals for an international language to serve the revolution. The first was to devise a “common written language” for the entire world, his model being how all the dif­fer­ent languages and dialects of China, and also Japa­nese, w ­ ere mutually intelligible thanks to a “hieroglyphic” system of writing, something that around this time attracted a number of Eu­ro­pean modernists, including most famously Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa, whose ideas on the Chinese written language ­were published in that resonant year, 1919.7 In the meantime, as a stopgap mea­sure Internatsional iskusstva was to come out in seven languages: besides Rus­sian, in En­glish, French, German, Spanish, Japa­nese, and Chinese. This would be an expanded version of a common practice of the 1920s for Eu­ro­ pean avant-­garde journals to come out in—or at any rate make partial gestures ­toward coming out in—­multiple languages, generally just three, such as French and German plus Rus­sian or the language of the journal’s national origin. It would be easier to devise internationally comprehensible forms of visual culture rather than the verbal. Suprematism, for example, a movement headed by another member of the International Bureau, Kasimir Malevich, was against any form of repre­sen­ta­tion in art, making it more readily transna-

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tional. Also, Nikolai Punin’s projected article for Internatsional iskusstva was called “Art as Esperanto,”8 but for the verbal arts a single, mutually comprehensible language might seem a utopian proj­ect. In the early 1920s, however, some Soviet officials ­were also exploring the possibility of an international language. In January 1919, the very month the International Bureau was announced, a movement for Esperanto (in Soviet Rus­sia often called the “International Language”) was growing in Moscow with a series of public lectures and courses on it. That month P. M. Kerzhentsev, deputy editor of Izvestiia, the main theoretician of the mass spectacles, and from spring of that year the head of the Rus­sian Telegraph Agency, ROSTA, famous for its po­liti­cal posters, called in Izvestiia for an “international language” to be taught in all the schools of the world, together with the relevant vernacular languages. He proposed that in ­every country all the major po­liti­cal, so­cio­log­i­cal, and literary texts would be published in it. While rejecting Esperanto as the medium, Kerzhentsev recommended setting up a commission to establish an international language that would in effect be a modified form of it.9 In the years 1918–1921 the Esperanto movement gained momentum all over the Soviet Union, but with the introduction in 1921 of NEP (the New Economic Policy, which permitted a partial return to private enterprise) the government s­ topped subsidizing Esperanto organ­izations, and they dwindled down to just a few cells, though ­there was another flurry of interest around 1926, when an international conference on Esperanto was held in Leningrad on August  5–10.10 Actually, Esperanto, in­ven­ted by Dr. Ludwig L. Zamenhof in 1887 in the Pale city of Bialystok, is largely based on the main Eu­ro­pean languages and would scarcely qualify as a world language. Khlebnikov’s other, and more radical, proposal was for the entire world to adopt something like his own “trans-­sense” language (zaum), that is, a language that was not tied by the conventional meanings of words or even by words themselves—­but in consequence the sound or visual qualities of a text became critical. The Board of the ­People’s Commissariat for State Control, a governmental body then overseeing the work of state bureaucracies, did not approve of publishing in Internatsional iskusstva material in a “Russo-­trans-­ sense language” (russko-­zaumnyi iazyk), nor did they think it feasible at the time to print contributions in Japa­nese and Chinese as Khlebnikov proposed, and the journal was never authorized.

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Aural Millenarianism: Nâzim Hikmet and Vladimir Mayakovsky The initiative for an International of the Arts petered out, then, and in any case Kandinsky emigrated to Germany in 1920 and began his long association with the Bauhaus, and Khlebnikov died in 1922. But it had an afterlife and was revived somewhat in 1923, another year of attempted revolution in Germany, and by some of the same cast of characters. In late 1922, the preceding year, as part of the international revolutionary effort two landmark world congresses ­were held in Moscow. The first of them was the Fourth Congress of the Comintern (November 5–­December 5, 1922), followed in November by the Second Congress of the Profintern (the Comintern-­affiliated international trade ­union organ­ization). Many delegates to the two congresses from abroad ­were still in Moscow in early 1923, and leaders of the Soviet avant-­garde, e­ ager to demonstrate and strengthen the links between revolutionary art and revolutionary internationalism, or­ga­nized events on successive January nights that w ­ ere aimed at bringing closer leftist culture of the Rus­sian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR), the West and the East. Both events ­were attended by leaders of the Soviet avant-­garde and by Comintern delegates to the recent Comintern and Profintern congresses, among them foreign revolutionary writers.11 The first of ­t hese eve­nings, h ­ oused in the studio of the theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold, featured a demonstration of his system of biomechanical exercises for actors. At the second, held on January 15 in the Meyerhold Theater u ­ nder the rubric “International of the Arts,” leading representatives ­ ere of the Soviet literary avant-­garde dominated the proceedings, which w presided over by Nikolai Chuzhak. Sergei Tretiakov gave an introductory speech, followed by contributions from I. A. Aksenov, Nikolai Aseev, Osip Brik, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Meyerhold. Th ­ ere ­were also pre­sen­ta­tions by Comintern delegates and foreign writers, such as the Jamaican / American “negro” poet Claude McKay, who also read some of his poems.12 Another “Eastern” writer who read his verse at the second eve­ning (though he was not a delegate) was the highly sui generis Turk Nâzim Hikmet. Hikmet, a poet, dramatist, novelist, and memoirist, is commonly cited as Turkey’s greatest poet of the twentieth c­ entury. The son of an Ottoman official in Thessaloníki and from a cultivated f­amily, he, a fervent nationalist with pan-­Turkist inclinations, had joined the in­de­pen­dence movement of

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Kemal Atatürk, whose patriotic forces drove out occupying Eu­ro­pean powers and secured complete in­de­pen­dence for Turkey in 1923. But ­earlier, in January 1921, Hikmet’s life had taken a new direction when he met some Turkish students who ­were deported from Germany back to Turkey for their involvement in a Spartacist (communist) organ­ization in Berlin that had led the revolutionary effort of 1918–1919. He was inspired by them to read Marxist texts and was advised to go to the Soviet Union to further his leftist education.13 On September 30, 1921, he together with some like-­minded friends reached Tiflis (Tbilisi) and went on to Batumi (on Georgia’s Black Sea coast), which had only recently been freed from the Mensheviks. A ­ fter six months he moved on to Moscow, where he arrived in late spring 1922. In Moscow, Hikmet was initially put up in the Lux ­Hotel, where the Comintern ­housed leading international communists, and ­t here he joined first the Soviet Communist Party and l­ ater the Turkish. Hikmet was a committed communist and anti-­imperialist but also a somewhat maverick figure, and his c­ areer in both Turkish and Soviet bodies had its spectacular ups and downs. He had a problematical relationship with Soviet authority, though he lived in the Soviet Union twice during the 1920s and ended up ­there at the end of his c­ areer (from 1951 ­until his death in 1963). For most of the second half of the 1920s, Hikmet was a leading figure in the Turkish Communist Party, and even served as its head for a while, but was expelled from the Comintern in 1930 and from the Turkish Communist Party ­ ill see in the cases shortly thereafter.14 His c­ areer then followed a pattern we w of most of the Asian writers in this book who in the 1920s enjoyed prominent c­ areers in communist organ­izations but whose communist activities by the 1930s w ­ ere largely confined to the literary sphere. When Hikmet recited his poems at the Meyerhold Theater he had been in Moscow less than a year, but he had already begun to be integrated into its avant-­garde, if as a ju­nior member.15 Pravda billed him as “the Turkish Futurist poet Nazim,” and he was seen by them as an exotic, a spokesman for the Asian oppressed, and as one of their own. He was one of the guests, together with two Turkish delegates, to the first eve­ning in the Meyerhold Studio, but at the second he read his poem “New Art” (“Novoe iskusstvo”), his first appearance before the Moscow general public. ­L ater in 1923, on March 8, Hikmet took part in another “International Meeting,” which in this case was to mark International W ­ omen’s Day.”

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First Steps, 1919–1930

Modeled on the January eve­nings in the Meyerhold Theater, this one was held in the auditorium of Moscow’s Polytechnical Museum and was or­ga­ nized by students of the Second Moscow State University, but presided over by Osip Brik (a leader of the e­ arlier International Bureau). Members of the Comintern from ­England, Hungary, and Turkey spoke, “Comrade Malacca” from Java presented several Malay poems, and the Futurist poets Vasily Kamensky and Aleksei Kruchënykh read some of their recent verse.16 A highlight of the international eve­ning at the Polytechnical Museum was the first joint participation at a public reading by Hikmet and Vladimir Mayakovsky. The two had actually met the previous year when Mayakovsky recited for Hikmet his poem “Left March” (“Levyi marsh,” 1918), but their joint appearances became legendary.17 “Left March” had become Mayakovsky’s staple at public readings, and he presented it again on this occasion, together with his anti-­i mperialist poem “The Third International” and his recently published “Paris. ­Little Chats with the Eiffel Tower” (“Parizh. Razgovorchiki s Ėifelevoi bashnei”). Hikmet read his poem “New Art,” once again, and then marked the occasion with a reading of a poem about w ­ omen’s equality in rev18 olution, “Pants and Skirts” (“Briuki i iubki”). Clearly, the coupling of him with the g­ reat “bard” of the Revolution, Mayakovsky, and / or seeing him as critics often have, as Mayakovsky’s disciple, had its Realpolitik dimensions. The promotion of Hikmet on Moscow’s literary platforms could be ascribed to the fact that Turkey was at the time in the pro­cess of throwing off both the “imperialist” occupiers and the caliphate, an action of par­tic­u­lar appeal in a land of militant atheism. But for t­ hese two poets, a greater f­ actor in their coming together was a common aesthetic-­cum-­political outlook. Hikmet’s “New Art,” a poem he composed in late 1922 (possibly during the Comintern congress) and read to many Moscow auditoria in t­hese months, is suffused with Futurist enthusiasm for the new, machine age but is in essence a manifesto calling for a total re­orientation of art to serve the revolution.19 Like the Rus­sian Futurists with the demand in their 1912 manifesto to throw a list of famous writers off the steamship of modernity, he calls for a radical break, for a “throwing off,” but in this case he recommends ­jettisoning not a list of writers but the saz, the three-­stringed lute-­like instrument that was an emblem of classical Turkish verse and was featured in its refrains. The saz, traditionally used to convey sadness or despair, has he says “numbed [okochenel] its audience, and it does not rouse the masses”; what is

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required instead is a poetry that would “make the ­people be moved as one.”20 In another poem of the same year (1922), “The Poet,” he proposes that for the “new art” poets should replace the saz with such texts as Karl Marx’s Capital and Friedrich Engels’s Anti-­Dühring.21 We are reminded of Plato’s strictures in his Republic about banning from verse all rhythms that lull their audience, preferring the more martial, that which “rouses” as Hikmet put it. ­Running through the assorted imagery in his “New Art” is the emphasis on which sounds are appropriate for revolutionary poetry. The saz’s notes are “mournful,” while by contrast the orchestra-­ cum-­ocean “thunders” and as such is in sync with the thundering sound of steel on the anvil and the roar of the agricultural machines in the fields that are transforming nature. Sound, then, is both the register and the agent of revolutionary change. Hikmet’s call to jettison the saz is not just about changing the tone of poetry. In his new verse he generally eschewed deeply ingrained Turkish verse conventions (largely derived from Persian and Arabic, but now increasingly superseded in Turkish poetry) in ­favor of Russo-­European experimental verse, and often ­free verse. In fact, in metrical terms Hikmet’s poems are more radical than Mayakovsky’s Soviet-­era verse, in that he abandoned stress-­based meter for completely meterless lines. It was not just a new prosody that now marked Hikmet’s verse. The orchestration and delivery of sound became a hallmark, as it was in Mayakovsky’s readings, too. In fact, Mayakovsky wrote ­later in his booklet How to Make Verse (Kak delat’ stikhi, 1927)—­note that to him verses are “made,” not written—­ about how he composes poems in his head, “almost without words,” waving his arms as he seeks to establish a rhythm for the poem while walking along a crowded Moscow street with its j­umble of traffic sounds, and “progressively from this rumble . . . ​begins to tease out individual words.”22 “Left March,” the poem Mayakovsky read during their first joint appearance, written in December 1918 and first delivered to sailors in Petrograd, had with its insistent drumlike beat become the marching song of leftist internationalism.23 With its twenty-­t hree exclamation marks in forty-­eight lines, the poem addresses its audience directly with imperatives. Kornelii ­Zelinski, who attended that original reading, reckoned that what was critical for the poem’s immediate impact and the “thundering applause” it elicited was its “sound patterns and repetitions”—­“Left! Left! Left!” the poet kept

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demanding as if in a musical motif. Even more impor­tant was the “aggressive delivery,” with Mayakovsky “sometimes lightly stamping his foot” in time to the poem’s rhythm, “the gesture of his hand cutting the air,” and “the all-­pervading voice of the poet.”24 Reports on Hikmet’s reading in the Polytechnical Museum are similar to the accounts of Mayakovsky’s public recitations of revolutionary poems. Aleksandr Fevral’skii in a memoir ascribes its g­ reat success to the way Hikmet “caught the revolutionary pathos” with his “­g reat rhythm and sound patterns.”25 Pravda claimed that the reading “had an extraordinarily strong impression on the audience ­because of its sound aspect [zvukovaia storona].” The energy of Hikmet’s poetry was infectious, and the audience responded to his ­great expressiveness of rhythm and phonetics with “rapture” (vostorg).26 But a clear ­factor in Hikmet’s ecstatic reception was his compelling, booming delivery (often accompanied by a wind orchestra), a feature that has been seen as an imitation of Mayakovsky’s style of recitation.27 I am not ­going to engage h ­ ere the fraught question of influence, and of Mayakovsky’s influence in par­tic­u­lar. ­There are ­earlier pos­si­ble pre­ce­dents. Consider, for example, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s love of loud noise in his masterpiece, the sound-­poem Zang Tumb Tumb (1912–1914), in which “words” (largely neologisms) convey through onomatopoeia the sounds of rocket and machine-­gun fire. Quite possibly such e­ arlier, Eu­ro­pean poets as Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé provided pre­ce­dents, too; they ­were sometimes cited by Rus­sian Futurists in their lists of cultural idols, and Hikmet had grown up with them thanks to his m ­ other, a connoisseur of French verse. Also, sound repetition for effect rather than content was a feature of a lot of Soviet avant-­garde verse in ­these years, including Kamensky’s signature poem “Sten’ka Razin,” which he read at the Polytechnical Museum, and the verse of Sergei Tretiakov, who presented Hikmet to the audience at the Meyerhold Theater; he taught a course at its studio called “Word Movement.”28 The privileging of sound in Hikmet’s verse is actually more marked in other poems of ­t hese years, such as “Strike” (“Grev, Zabastovka,” 1923) and “Mechanize” (“Makinalashmak,” 1923). A section of the latter poem runs “trrrum, / trrrrum, / trrrum,” repeated twice, while in the intervening lines the poet declares, “I w ­ ill be happy, / the day when I have a turbine in my belly.”29 But in 1923 Moscow, the sound qualities of the poems read ­were less impor­tant than the delivery and the audience’s reception of the poems

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as rousing sound. So an obvious question is what the relationship of Hikmet’s poems as delivered in t­hese early Moscow years is to Khlebnikov’s and Kruchënykh’s zaum. Mayakovsky’s prerevolutionary verse on occasion hovered on the verge, but neither his nor Hikmet’s postrevolutionary poems ­approached trans-­sense. However, when Hikmet much ­later, in 1932, published a collection of his verse in Rus­sian (a language he knew by then, though the poems w ­ ere in translation), he inserted as a prologue the lines “Bána-­bak . . . ​ / Gei avanak” (Look at me, stupid) and at the end ­“Daglarla / dalgalarla / Dag gibi . . . ​[his]” (With the mountains, with waves like a mountain with the waves). Th ­ ese words are all Turkish and come from Hikmet’s poem “Orkestra” of 1921, published in Turkey; “New Art” represents an expansion and reworking of this ­earlier text. Possibly Hikmet added ­t hese lines from it to give the poem an incantatory quality that also defines much of Khlebnikov’s trans-­sense verse.30 But their incorporation in ­later versions draws attention to the fact that ostensibly, with its reference to the saz, Hikmet’s poem “New Art” is directed at a Turkish audience, though he was, for the time being, addressing a largely Rus­sian, and to an extent international, audience. U ­ nder the sign of revolution, the one, the national, blended into the many (literary traditions) of the “­great ocean.” Unlike Marinetti, who was close to the fascists, both Mayakovsky and Hikmet had a deep commitment to the Revolution (if somewhat idiosyncratically conceived) and to serving it with agitational verse. Mayakovsky had from 1919 to 1922 worked for the Soviet telegraph agency ROSTA, turning out propaganda posters and ditties in response to Civil War events and new government policies. In writing about Mayakovsky’s verse during the years of his most intense acquaintance with Hikmet, 1922–1923, most Western scholars have focused on his love poetry and attacks on an insidious creeping bureaucratism, but in fact, though he no longer worked for ROSTA. he wrote many occasional, agitational poems that w ­ ere often published in the official daily newspaper of the Soviet government, Izvestiia, and other national organs. It was largely due to this presence in the national press that he was catapulted to celebrity status in 1923, the very year Hikmet also emerged on the Moscow stage. Hikmet’s emphasis on sound as the critical ele­ment for agitational poetry could be seen as a strategy to compensate for the fact that at the Moscow readings he was addressing audiences where very few listeners, if any, might have

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any command of Turkish, while as yet Hikmet himself knew very ­little Rus­ sian; most of his communication with Moscow intellectuals was conducted in French.31 At ­t hese public readings the yawning language gap was minimized in that generally a translation into Rus­sian was read or, in the case of “Pants and Skirts,” Hikmet himself provided the audience with a brief summary in French. Yet, newspaper reports insist, though the overwhelming ma­ ere ecstatic at his readings, jority of the audience knew no Turkish, they w and in the cultural world of Moscow he rapidly became a celebrity, like Mayakovsky.32 In his early Soviet years, Hikmet had responded largely to the sound patterns of Mayakovsky’s verse (also to their layout in a “stepped” pattern); the meanings of Mayakovsky’s verse w ­ ere inaccessible to him.33 Several de­cades ­later, he confessed in an interview, “At first I did not understand him at all, since I still had a poor command of Rus­sian, and even now I do not understand all [his verse].” And in a letter of 1941 to a friend when commenting on a new edition of Mayakovsky’s works, he admitted that he was ­really able to read Mayakovsky for the first time but discovered they had much in common. At a Mayakovsky memorial eve­ning of 1955 he reported that ­because Mayakovsky declaimed in such a songlike manner (pevuche), he ­understood him, but it was harder to grasp the meaning of Mayakovsky’s texts.34 What­ever the common provenances or comparisons to be pointed to in the work of ­t hese two poets, their per­for­mances in t­ hese early postrevolutionary years throw into stark relief impor­tant aspects of poetry itself. One of them is its expressive nature that is sometimes likened to ­music (pevuche). Sound can act powerfully on a listener in a subrational way without regard to the referential meanings that the sound combinations (words) ostensibly convey. In the late 1910s and early 1920s, Friedrich Nietz­sche was all the rage in Rus­sia, and his promotion of “­music” and the Dionysian in texts like The ­ usic (Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of M Geiste der Musik, 1872) influenced both conceptions of poetry and the downplaying of the verbal aspect of plays (seen especially in the theatrical work of Meyerhold and his disciples).35 Often under­lying the most radical experiments in Soviet culture at this time was the impulse to get away from language, which always carried with it the possibility of difference and hierarchy—­two taboos of truly demo­cratic

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revolution—­and to plunge into a prelinguistic world of what Nietz­sche had called “­music,” holding out the promise of a universal language. Enthusiasts sought to re­orient culture from the dominance of the literary text to such nonverbal forms as gesture, sound, pantomime, and dance, and in lit­er­a­ture to downplay literal meanings in ­favor of the allusive or purely audial. For a poem’s sound patterns to have maximum impact, however, it had to be performed. Per­for­mance by the poets themselves (as in t­ hese Moscow readings) accorded their poems authenticity and expressivity, sundering the barrier between poet and audience. The year 1923, when Hikmet gave his first public readings in Moscow, was, perhaps not coincidentally, also the year Sergei Eisenstein published his essay “Montage of Attractions,” in which he argued that a film’s maximum impact on the audience would be achieved not by direct thematic pre­sen­ta­tion of revolutionary content as much as by using par­tic­u­lar formal strategies. Agitation in Hikmet’s readings was conducted not by words but by rousing sound. In fact, when on another occasion Hikmet presented “New Art” to a poetry eve­ning to honor delegates to the Sixth Congress of the Comintern in December 1926, his reading in Turkish got a standing ovation, while the Rus­sian translation by Eduard Bagritsky, which conveyed the literal meanings of the poem, seemed pallid by comparison, to Bagritsky’s consternation.36 Both Mayakovsky and Hikmet in their verse, as Talat S. Halman has said of Hikmet, “dealt less with the intellectual substance of Marxism than its mythic aura or the romantic spirit of rebellion,” and sound helped convey this.37 When meanings fell away, sound became the substance, the language of revolution, the language of the ineffable. In the interaction between audience and poet at t­ hese eve­nings, sound imparted the frenzy of the revolutionary experience. Mayakovsky in his poem “The Fourth International” of 1922 declares: “Ecstatic to the point of screaming / Alarmed to the point of pain / I too / In the frenzied tempo of a gallop / rang out [kolokolil] words over the tongue like copper [of church bells] / Triumphantly clapping the rhythm.”38 The key second last line, which is hard to render literally, suggests the replacement of the old faith with the new. “Copper” in its adjectival form “mednyi” has in Rus­sian a secondary meaning as “brazen.” Th ­ ere is a cele­bration ­here of the secular powers of poetry; the new “faith” and the new brash aesthetic (“clapping”) overpower the religious acoustic. Also, though h ­ ere I have translated the neologism “kolokolil,” a verb based on the noun for a bell, kolokol,

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as “rang out,” potentially its inclusion identifies Mayakovsky’s mission in his verse with the nineteenth-­century radical Alexander Herzen’s journal The ­ ngland as a clarion call for the Bell (Kolokol), which he issued from exile in E liberation of Rus­sia’s serfs; as it ­were, Mayakovsky has appropriated that reference from the ­great tradition of the Rus­sian intelligent­sia as a pre­ce­dent for the liberation of the masses through avant-­garde art. Hikmet could not be comprehended by his Moscow audiences at the level of the linguistic referential for circumstantial reasons: he did not know Rus­ sian, nor did they Turkish. But arguably the reception of his verse by both Mayakovsky and his Moscow audiences was symptomatic of a widespread trend in t­ hese revolutionary years, what I am calling aural millenarianism. Elsewhere, in my book Petersburg, Crucible of Cultural Revolution, I wrote about perceptual millenarianism among avant-­garde artists in the 1920s.39 Aural millenarianism, likewise born of the millenarian expectations of this time, was its twin. In Hikmet’s and Mayakovsky’s per­for­mances the style of recitation, sound patterns, and imagery reinforce each other, as do poet and audience. “Listen to us,” Hikmet opens “New Art,” and they do with rapt attention. Poet and audience are together swept up in an access of Dionysian frenzy. The individually played three-­stringed saz has been replaced by the collective “orchestra” of the “commune,” he declares in the poem. The voice had become a vehicle for solidarity, and poems became more power­ful in the per­for­mance than when read. The audience was, for the space of a reading at least, swept into “the g­ reat international ocean.” Hikmet elides the distinction between the machine and the garden as in the poem images of machines and metal are conflated with aquatic imagery. The mere “stream” is to be redirected into a g­ reat flow, and the thundering waves of the text complement the thundering delivery of the poet. But this image presupposes a radical collectivity, a 180-­degree turn from individualism, and so pre­sents a stark contrast with the hypersubjectivity in the ­earlier poetry of Mayakovsky—­and of Marinetti. Hikmet was caught up in the “messianic, utopian aspirations” and sense of the “immanence of world revolution” that Lukács found among the leftists gathered in early 1920s Vienna. But his vision was broader. It was not of a red Eu­rope but of a Eurasia without borders, of a world without borders, even. His former secretary A. A. Babaev, reports that Hikmet dreamed of a time

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when ­t here ­w ill be neither borders on earth, nor states, nor armies, when “mankind ­w ill be one nation and [any individual] w ­ ill be a citizen of all countries together.” 40 Hikmet himself recalled that when the fifth anniversary of the Revolution came in 1922 he could not contain his agitation ­because he expected that at any moment he would hear p ­ eople on the streets shouting, “Socialist revolutions in Eu­rope! The imperialists of Asia and ­Africa have been thrown into the sea!” 41 In his poem “While Waiting for the German Revolution of 1923” (“V ozhidanii nemetskoi revoliutsii 1923 goda”), he enjoined: “Faster! / Faster! / Faster! / The cause should advance farther, faster / If / Oh / ­t here would be a soviet of workers and peasants—­t he Reichstag.” 42 In such cryptic, allusive declarations we see the appropriation of prewar Futurist rhe­toric for the communist cause. Hikmet’s internationalist fervor shares the fascination with speed and radical change that had been a hallmark of the prewar Eu­ro­pean avant-­garde, especially in Marinetti’s writings, a journey at breakneck speed to radical otherness.43 When Hikmet urges the world on, he also invokes the millenarian sense of imminence and a “revolutionary eschatology” of a collectivist vision of “salvation”—­millenarianism as Norman Cohn defines it in his classic account, The Pursuit of the Millennium.44 The poetry readings involved a kind of aural millenarianism based on collectivity—­a ll can utter, all can hear. In fact, collective readings ­were a popu­lar genre in t­ hese years, notably in agitprop theater, and the practice became a hallmark of leftist per­for­mance art throughout the world. A ­ fter Hikmet presented on International ­Women’s Day, his fellow students gave a collective reading of his poem “The Twenty-­Eighth of January” (“Dvadtsat’ vos’moe ianvaria”), a heartfelt account of the 1921 assassination of the communist leader Mustapha Suphi and his comrades, a subject to which he returned throughout his life.45 While Hikmet was caught up with Soviet avant-­gardists who shared his “messianic, utopian aspirations,” as Lukács put it, the Soviet state and the Turkish government had more pragmatic attitudes to getting closer. The ­Soviet Union supported Kemal Atatürk in his campaign against Eu­ro­pean occupiers, and when Turkey became a republic in 1923 the two countries collaborated in several areas, including in introducing a latinized alphabet (in the Soviet case not for Rus­sian but for the languages of many minority ­peoples). ­There ­were reasons for collaboration, such as the fact that both had

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recently had a revolution, both ­were primarily agricultural countries, and both w ­ ere at the time somewhat pariah nations internationally. As Atatürk sought to modernize and secularize Turkey, he drew on Soviet models for several of his proj­ects, including in agriculture and in introducing a planned economy. But one of the broader contexts of Hikmet’s c­ areer is the complicated on-­again, off-­again relationship between Turkey and the Soviet Union during the interwar years.46 Though Turkey was dependent on the Soviet Union for aid, and shared a sense of what was often called the “the oppression of the West over the East,” Atatürk was wary of communists, and at times he maintained a distance or was outright hostile.47 He appreciated the anti-­ imperialist emphasis of communist dogma but did not accept class conflict as the basis for po­liti­c al pro­g ress and was concerned to make sure that Bolshevism did not undercut his national movement.48 In Turkey, both Soviet journals and Turkish journals that printed material favorable to the Soviet Union w ­ ere recurrently censored,49 and Atatürk persecuted and banned the Communist Party intermittently, starting as early as 1925.50 This contributed to Hikmet’s frequent arrests and incarcerations in Turkey during the 1920s and 1930s (though Atatürk personally had an ambivalent attitude ­toward him). The Soviet Union valued links with Turkey, however, and VOKS was particularly active in promoting Soviet material in Turkey; it had more provincial branches ­t here than anywhere ­else. Principally, it sent texts of practical use to a country bent on modernization—­publications about economics, law, agriculture, health, the Soviet five-­year plans, the literacy campaign, and latinization. As elsewhere, in its dealings with Asian countries, the locals’ lack of knowledge of Rus­sian was an impediment. VOKS did not have the resources to provide translations into Turkish of the materials it sent. Some of them consequently came from Azerbaijan, where Azeri was spoken, a Turkic language that was especially close to the dialect of Turkey’s province of ­Erzurum. VOKS also sometimes managed to send materials in French translation, a language known by the educated classes in Turkey.51 But pro­g ress ­toward rapprochement was slow.52 In 1930, VOKS admitted in a report that neither in Persia nor in Turkey was t­ here evidence that in the near f­ uture a society for closer ties with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) (obshchestvo sblizheniia) could be formed, despite protestations of “friendship” from both sides.53

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One pos­si­ble ave­nue for cultural influence might have been film, especially since in the s­ ilent era language differences w ­ ere less of a barrier b ­ ecause intertitles could be translated readily. But the Soviet film industry found itself unable to compete with the Eu­ro­pean, which catered to the Turks with popu­lar films. The American share of the Turkish market grew from 30 ­percent to 80 ­percent, leaving only 20 ­percent for German and French imports. The Turks themselves, largely u ­ nder French directorship, made some films of their own about Muslim life, lowbrow comedies and Turkish dramas. The miniscule percentage of Rus­sian films screened was ­until 1926 confined to prerevolutionary and émigré titles.54 And so in February 1928 the Soviet Union established a new film studio in Baku, Azgoskino, and in March Vostokkino, which was specifically to make films for Eastern audiences.55 Though neither VOKS nor the Soviet film industry was particularly successful in making inroads in Turkey, the cause of cultural rapprochement was served by links forged on a more individual basis. Hikmet, who loomed large on the intellectual horizon of Turkey, played a major role in purveying Soviet ideas and culture to the Turks, despite being repeatedly sidelined by prison (fourteen years) or exile (twelve years). He inspired other Turkish writers to jettison traditional literary forms but also had a strong ideological influence, agitating not only for communism but also against imperialism. Though he had been a staunch anti-­imperialist in his pre-­Moscow days, his experiences while a student at KUTV provided him with an anti-­imperialist vocabulary and stock of tropes, which lingered in his writings and statements rather longer than for most Soviet and internationalist intellectuals.56

Revolutionary Internationalism, KUTV, and the Anti-­imperialist Cause In May 1922, the Comintern assigned the newly arrived Hikmet to study at KUTV in Moscow, where he started classes in the fall (in addition, Hikmet worked in the early 1920s in the Foreign Department of the Party in Moscow).57 KUTV had been set up in 1921, and it operated u ­ ntil 1938 as an institution for training communists or the communist-­inclined of the Soviet national minorities and was ­u nder the Commissariat for Nationalities. It also had a section for foreign students, which was run by the Comintern, and non-­ European candidates from many countries ­were selected for admission. When

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t­ hese students graduated they ­were generally assigned by the Comintern for po­liti­cal work in the home country or to work on translations or conduct research in the Soviet Union. Although this university contributed greatly to the development of a transnational leftist ecumene, Western and Rus­sian leftists ­were not included in its student body. At an institutional level ­there was a marked apartheid among the many institutions the Soviet Union set up for inculcation of Marxist internationalist ideology as well as for research. The “Vostok” (non-­European) did not “interweave” with the Eu­ro­pean, though ­there was some intermingling of a more informal nature. And both the instructors at KUTV and the specialists in the vari­ous Soviet research institutions for the study of the East ­were Rus­sians. This relative sidelining of the East notwithstanding, KUTV was a priority proj­ect for the Comintern, and KUTV students enjoyed a privileged status in Moscow of the 1920s. Their university was ­housed in a former Dutch bank, next door to a monastery, right in the center of Moscow on t­ oday’s Pushkin Square (by contrast, a l­ ater but analogous institution, the Lumumba Friendship University, founded ­under Nikita Khrushchev, was located in what was then Moscow’s periphery). Selected KUTV students w ­ ere invited to Party and Comintern congresses and to plenary sessions of the Executive Committee of the Communist Party.58 Hikmet, for example, was during his second stint in Moscow elected to the International Bureau of Proletarian Lit­er­a­ture, one of a select group of Asian writers that also included the prominent Comintern officials Sen Katayama from Japan and M. N. Roy from India.59 Many KUTV alumni from ­t hese early years became impor­tant po­liti­cal leaders, such as Liu Shaoqui, who served as president of the P ­ eople’s Republic of China (PRC) from 1959 to 1968, and possibly Ho Chi Minh while he was in Moscow in 1924.60 Several other gradu­ates served as po­liti­cal leaders in the 1920s but would become impor­tant in the world of letters in their home countries, including the Chinese writer Qu Qiubai (a name previously rendered Ch’ü Ch’iu-­pai; see Chapter 5), who was, like Hikmet, introduced to Mayakovsky.61 KUTV played a crucial role in the evolution of a transnational ecumene inasmuch as many of its foreign students formed friendships ­t here with students from other countries. Thanks to that body t­ here was more intra-­Asian interaction among leftists. This fact complicates the issue of the extent to which the ecumene was formed in a top-­down pattern or, as Kris Manjapra

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has argued (as discussed in the Introduction), by lateral connections; on the one hand, KUTV students ­were thrown together by a Soviet institution established at the highest levels and subjected to a Moscow-­devised curriculum, but, on the other, the informal contacts they made on the campus and through its extracurricular cultural life also had a major impact on their ­careers and thinking. Potentially, KUTV could have established a nonhegemonic network of non-­European leftists, an intra-­Asian confederation of the like-­minded. But this was never authorized or­gan­i­za­tion­ally, and so lateral links continued to operate on an informal level. Hikmet’s years at KUTV w ­ ere arguably crucial for the formation of his literary persona and profile, as his association with Mayakovsky has shown ­ ere that he (they often made joint appearances at the KUTV club).62 It was h particularly developed his anti-­imperialist position, a hallmark of a KUTV education. In fact, the university came into being as part of a complex of in­ eoples of the East stitutions set up in the wake of the Baku Congress of the P that w ­ ere intended to promote its values and both further the study of imperialism and re­orient the dominant conceptions of the East in the Soviet Union and in the communist movement generally. The university had originally been Pavlovich’s idea. He had wanted it to be set up in Baku, but, in the event, it was founded in Moscow. Grigory Broido, recently returned from Party work in Central Asia, became its first director, while Pavlovich ran two other institutions that played a major role in the reconceptualization of the East and in making up for the deficit of Marxist scholars on the East, the All-­ Russian Scholarly Association of Oriental Studies (Vserossiiskaia nauchnaia assotsiatsiia vostokovedeniia), which was founded by a decree of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR on December  13, 1921, and its journal Novyi Vostok (New East, 1921 / 1922–1930); Pavlovich also played a leading role in the early years of the journal Zhizn’ natsional’nostei (Life of nationalities). Though Pavlovich was not KUTV’s director (he sometimes lectured t­ here, however), most of its faculty ­were inspired by the dream he championed of a world without borders. One finds versions of it in Broido’s book Natsional’nyi i kolonial’nyi vopros (The National and the Colonial Question, 1924), and one could assume that the ideas ­t here ­were similar to t­ hose conveyed in the core course he taught at KUTV, which had the same title.63 Though in this text Broido to some degree follows Lenin’s analy­sis of imperialism in his canonical

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book Imperialism, as the Highest Stage of Capitalism (Imperializm, kak vysshaia stadiia kapitalizma, 1917), he gives greater emphasis to the role of internationalism in combatting imperialism, foregrounding the need to ­counter national allegiances. He repeatedly insists that “nationalism is . . . ​a direct reflection of class interests.” The nation is only “a historical phenomenon” that was born of the rise of capitalism, he contends, and would die with it (an analog to the “withering away of the state”), while “the proletariat is conducting a strug­gle with the bourgeoisie to eliminate the barriers between the proletariat of all countries, for the destruction of constraints [ramki, i.e., “limits” or, literally, “frames”], which hinder the development of the produc­ ill tive forces of the world.” When this is accomplished, “a single humanity w arise on the basis of a single, or­ga­nized communist world economy” and “the remnants of nationalist ideologies w ­ ill gradually die out.” The resulting political-­cum-­economic unit, however, is not to be homogeneous; Broido claims it is the bourgeoisie that “generally fights for the elimination of the distinctive national features of minor ethnic groups.”64 It might be assumed that Hikmet’s anti-­imperialist, universalist position was a product of his KUTV education. But this is to assume the maverick Hikmet’s susceptibility to what he was taught. Broido and other lecturers ­there inculcated a general line on imperialism, which was not of course original, and the students largely took a similar position. But for Hikmet, his extracurricular activities while at KUTV may have been more impor­tant than the formal part of his education. As already indicated, this included associating with the leftist avant-­garde of Moscow. Hikmet’s aggressive adoption of the anti-­imperialist position did not in any case originate during his time at KUTV. He had experienced imperialism firsthand when Eu­ro­pean powers took over parts of Turkey a­ fter World War I. Together with the group of his friends who had come from revolutionary Germany he published an anti-­ imperialist journal, Asia, which was dedicated to showing the strug­g le of Asian ­peoples against Western colonialists, and Hikmet contributed an anti-­ British poem he wrote in that context (actually, the journal appeared for only one issue).65 To see the students at KUTV as having been brought to an anti-­imperialist position by their studies at KUTV is also to assume that the classes imparted what the syllabi and curriculum outlines intended. KUTV had an admirable program for its students, and as reported for 1922–1923, Hikmet’s first year

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t­ here, it included both general education (primarily in basic science and in Marxist-­oriented social sciences), which was essential since so many of them had had l­ ittle education, and courses of a more purely ideological nature, such as “Historical Materialism.”66 But this was all in theory. In ­t hese early postrevolutionary years, KUTV’s administrators strug­g led to mount ­these courses. Language was a prob­lem, both in the more figurative sense of the need to create an ideological commons and in the more practical sense of coping with a polyglot student body.67 The administration could not find enough competent ­people to lecture in the relevant tongues, and they lacked appropriate textbooks and scholars who could write books that might be accessible to the students in their many languages.68 To add to the headaches, ­ ere only marginally literate. Courses in Rus­sian ­were some of the students w compulsory, but the language of instruction in other courses was to be the students’ own as much as pos­si­ble. Often lectures w ­ ere delivered in Rus­sian with an oral translator provided.69 But some courses existed only on paper, and many students had a hard time following the content of t­ hose that ­were given. We know, for example, that Broido’s course on nationalism and colonialism was “poorly mastered” by the students.70 A truly international language would have come in handy! Ironically, the lack of expertise in the many languages of KUTV’s foreign students facilitated greater cross-­national intercourse. Since the instructors ­were unable to conduct classes in ­every language, they often resorted to grouping students from several countries in the one class where the language of instruction was not the students’ own but some kind of lingua franca that they more or less knew—­and, more often than not, the language of a Eu­ro­ pean colonialist country. In 1922, when Hikmet started studying at KUTV, ­there ­were sections conducted in Rus­sian, French, En­glish, Chinese, and Korean, though by 1925, Turkish, Greek, Japa­nese, and Farsi had been added.71 Hikmet, as an educated Turk, knew French and was thrown into a class where that was the language of instruction.72 It was partly t­ here that he came into contact with several students from other countries who would come to form his personal, transnational network. His circle included at vari­ous times Ėmi Xiao (see Chapters 6 and 8), a Chinese and in fact an old school friend of Mao who had recently spent time in France, where he had joined the French Communist Party (his real name was Xiao San, but he had added Ėmi as a tribute to Émile Zola).73 If one is to take at face value Hikmet’s

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semiautobiographical novel Life’s Good, ­Brother (Yaşamak Güzel şey be kardeşim) of 1967, he and Xiao ­were not only very close but also embroiled in a dramatic love triangle.74 Another friend of Hikmet at KUTV, and another student who already knew French—­though they may have communicated in Turkish—­was the Kurdish-­Persian writer Abolqasem Lahuti (see Chapter 2). A sign of the importance for Hikmet of the friendships he made at KUTV would be that he wrote two of his major works about par­tic­u­lar friends he had made ­t here, “Why Did Banerjee Try to Kill Himself” and the poem The Gioconda and Si Ya-­u (discussed ­later this chapter). Hikmet was gregarious and had a wide circle of foreign acquaintances, not all of whom necessarily knew French. This was especially so in his second period at KUTV (starting in late 1925), when his knowledge of Rus­sian was greater. One of the new friends he made then was the Palestinian communist Najati Sidqi.75 He also had several Indian friends, including the dramatist Es Habib; Zafar Hassan, a po­liti­cal activist who had worked in Af­ghan­i­ stan; and Banerjee, apparently a supporter of both Marx and Gandhi.76 Other internationalist friends he met while t­ here include the Azerbaijani poets ­Mikael Rafili and Suleiman Rustam and the Rus­sian Constructivist poets Eduard Bagritsky and Ilya Selvinsky. For Hikmet and his friends from KUTV, the commitment to revolutionary internationalism they shared colored all their subsequent activities, though in each case they ­were not always well integrated in the organ­izations of the Communist Party and Comintern, especially not Hikmet. In 1923 a fellow Turkish student sent a denunciation to Broido demanding that Hikmet be expelled on the grounds that he was from a bourgeois background and that his extracurricular activities meant he was putting in minimum effort at the university.77 Broido does not seem to have been moved, and Hikmet was kept on. Quite possibly he was retained ­because he had already become a star of leftist internationalism. ­After graduation, most of Hikmet’s friends from KUTV became po­liti­cal leaders and administrators and w ­ ere only writers secondarily, but by the 1930s several of them, including Hikmet, who was expelled from the Party in 1932, and two of his closest KUTV friends—­X iao and Lahuti—­had begun to work more exclusively in lit­er­a­ture. This was, however, despite the fact that lit­er­a­ ture had a marginal presence in the university’s formal program. Though Broido in his book, and presumably in his lectures ­t here as well, mentions

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lit­er­a­ture as an agent of colonialism, ­there was very ­little lit­er­a­ture in the ­curriculum. Moreover, ­those in authority showed a Eurocentric and even Russo-­centric bias in their sense of what lit­er­a­ture the students should read. Broido in his policy statements for KUTV saw as an impor­tant aspect of its club’s activities the “introduction of the audience to Eu­ro­pean culture.”78 But within Eu­ro­pean culture, Rus­sian lit­er­a­ture was favored; students in the literary-­journalism section of the club ­were to be introduced to Rus­sian lit­ er­a­ture presented “with a Marxist twist.” And in a discussion among KUTV officials of 1925, Broido complained that many of the students wanted to study the ancient history of the Eastern nations, a “Menshevik deviation.” Modern history and lit­er­a­ture ­were to be prioritized, and especially Rus­sian. He reported that some students objected to the compulsory classes in Rus­sian, which this self-­proclaimed internationalist condemned as “nationalism”—­​ how can you study Lenin without knowing Russian?—an unself-­conscious expression of his own national biases.79 Aspirationally, Rus­sian was to be the lingua franca of the left international. Though Hikmet’s brand of anti-­imperialism might be said to have been derived from the lectures and extracurricular activities he attended at KUTV, ­there is an impor­tant difference. Broido and other prominent Bolsheviks who lectured to the students ­there envisioned Moscow’s “group[ing] around itself” the benighted masses of Asia.80 In Hikmet’s verse, Moscow does not function as the mecca. Rather, Asia is the privileged site of revolutions. In his poem “The Arrow Let Fly from the Bow. From the History of the International Workers Movement” (“Strela, vypushchennaia iz luka. Iz istorii mezhdunarodnogo rabochego dvizheniia,” 1925), he proposes that the “arrow” of revolution, fired in the nineteenth c­ entury, w ­ ill reach its ultimate target in the “red heart” of the East.81 Rather than Paris or Moscow, standard putative Asian revolutionary flash points—­India, China, Af­ghan­i­stan, and so on—­are recurrently invoked in his verse as charismatic names (as they are in Mayakovsky’s poetry).

The Gioconda and Si Ya-­u Hikmet, in his manifesto “New Art,” had enjoined his fellow Turkish poets to jettison the saz, to jettison traditional Turkish poetic conventions, but he was not advocating replacing them with conventions from the Eu­ro­pean or

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Rus­sian literary traditions. He believed that liberated revolutionary Asia could knock the Eu­ro­pean bourgeois aesthetic from its position of dominance. But then, in a pattern akin to that of the revolutionary progression envisioned in Marxism—­feudal to bourgeois to proletarian to classless—­a universal revolutionary aesthetic would ultimately prevail over the Asian as well. His activist aesthetic had one of its fullest articulations in one of his most famous poems, The Gioconda and Si-­Ya-­U (ostensibly about Xiao, rendered as Si Ya-­U). In this poem his argument is made through a romance plot of miscegenation. But this version of the cross-­racial romance pre­sents an inversion of its conventions: the plot revolves not around a Eu­ro­pean male who has as his love interest a languid Asian ­woman, but around an Asian male with whom a Eu­ro­pean female is infatuated. Moreover, in terms of its composition, the poem combines ele­ments of simulated diary and radio broadcasts with fictive narration, a mélange of fact and fiction that became typical of Hikmet’s writings. Hikmet published this poem when back in Turkey in 1929 but conceived it in Moscow before he left.82 One of the events that forms its historical context is the Shanghai debacle of 1927, in other words the brutal suppression by Chiang Kai-­shek of a communist uprising in Shanghai, an event that ushered in an existential crisis among the left and precipitated the Stalin-­ Trotsky split (see Chapter 6). Xiao had led a contingent of insurgents in the uprising, and Hikmet was ­under the misapprehension, then common in Comintern circles—­but erroneous as he learned only in 1951—­that Xiao had been executed in its aftermath. The Gioconda ostensibly follows Xiao’s life, taking him from his time in France in the early 1920s to the Shanghai debacle. It includes snippets from Xiao’s ­actual biography and its historical context, but is largely fanciful. The poem begins in Paris where the young Si (Xiao) is captivated by the portrait of Mona Lisa (Gioconda) in the Louvre, an accurate biographical detail, and ends with the aftermath of his putative execution in Shanghai. But the poem is arguably only marginally about Xiao and does not follow his biography very closely. Rather, Si is rendered as a generic Chinese leftist—­“He works as a weaver days / and studies nights.”83 The poem’s frame of reference is broader and provides a critique of Eu­ro­pean exoticism and its attendant aesthetic. The poem tells a story of liberation, both sexual and po­liti­cal, which is at the same time liberation from the Eu­ro­pean cultural canon and faith in

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Eu­ro­pean cultural superiority. It opens with the Gioconda languishing in her frame in the Louvre, the building that is in a sense France’s, and hence also Eu­rope’s, iconic cultural treasure-­house and where the Mona Lisa is its best-­k nown trea­sure. But her confinement within a frame can be read si­ mul­ta­neously as an attack on the veiling and subjugation that deny Turkish ­women, Muslim ­women in general, and even w ­ omen tout court the opportunity to express their real emotional selves and their sexual desires; the Gioconda feels constrained by the smile that her Re­nais­sance master (Leonardo da Vinci) consigned her to wear in perpetuity. At the same time, in lines reminiscent of Marinetti, she feels bored with this past-­ism (“to be a museum piece is terrible! / in this palace that imprisons the past”). Hikmet also makes digs at the hypocritical class bias in accounts of canonical art: around her frolic Rubens’s beauties, who are “the plump ladies / of milk and sausage merchants,” while she is “this poor farmer’s d ­ aughter / Done up as the Virgin Mary.” The Gioconda is attracted to Si-­Ya-­U when he visits the Louvre. As the narrator reports, he is “not a topknot Chinese,” that is, not an exotic and not from some backward culture. His yellowness and slant eyes attract her—­his very Asian-­ness—­and they fall in love. But Si dis­appears suddenly when he is expelled from France. ­Here Hikmet is not biographically accurate, in that though many of Xiao’s contingent of Chinese students ­were expelled, Xiao himself simply left France in 1921 to go to Moscow. Moreover, the expulsions of Chinese, dated in the text as occurring in 1924, actually came a­ fter they staged demonstrations in Paris during the May 30 movement in 1925, but by then Xiao had long left Paris. A ­ fter Si flees, a lovesick Gioconda is helped by the poet-­narrator to escape the Louvre and fly off to her lover, who is now in Shanghai. His new location has some biographical basis in that Xiao was in Shanghai for the debacle of 1927. ­There is also some historical pre­ce­dent for the Gioconda’s leaving the Louvre in that da Vinci’s Mona Lisa was stolen from t­ here by an Italian on August 21, 1911, and returned only on January 4, 1914, though in the poem it is the poet-­narrator who absconds with her. As he rescues the damsel (Mona Lisa) in distress, he arrives not on a white steed, as is the convention, but on a 550-­horsepower monoplane, a symbol of the new world of futuristic technology that is superseding the old. When the Gioconda follows her heart and journeys to Shanghai, her trip does not take her via Moscow as one might expect. The words “Moscow” and

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“Soviet Union” never appear in the text, and “Turkey” only glancingly; the fact that Xiao spent several years at KUTV in Moscow is also notably omitted. The Gioconda flits past a series of African, Asian, and Australasian locations in the Indian Ocean, but t­ here is no mention of the Eu­ro­pean towns she must have flown over to get ­there. Eventually, she is dropped from the skies and onto a boat that conveys her to Shanghai. In other words, her journey takes her, rather as it took the revolutionary arrow in Hikmet’s ­earlier poem “The Arrow Let Fly from the Bow,” from France, the original capital of revolution but also of the bourgeois nineteenth ­century, to Shanghai, center of the revolutionary East. In Shanghai the Gioconda suddenly finds Si-­Ya-­U, but as he approaches her, just as suddenly an executioner working for Chiang Kai-­shek appears and cuts off Si’s head. As it rolls at her feet, this proves to be the moment that impels her ultimate liberation and self-­realization. The narrator last sees the Gioconda in the final car of a train “standing watch: / a frayed lambskin hat on her head / boots on her feet / a leather jacket on her back”—in other words, she is dressed to recapitulate an amalgam of an iconic resolute Cheka (secret police) operative and a Soviet Civil War fighter such as Vasily Chapaev. Before then, however, the Gioconda had strangled a British officer in an access of fury at Si’s death. She is tried by a French military court in Shanghai, an institution of the imperialist concessions, and sentenced to burn at the stake. But as “the flames painted Gioconda red / She laughed with a smile that came from her heart / Gioconda burned laughing.” This image is suggestive of Joan of Arc’s martyrdom, and of any number of other Eu­ro­pean martyrs, like Jan Hus, who ­were burned at the stake for their beliefs, but also of the maniacal laughter of the false Maria as she is burned at the stake in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), which Hikmet quite possibly saw. But as the Gioconda laughs maniacally, the bonfire is suffused with the color red; as it ­were, the Shanghai debacle was only a temporary setback, for the international revolutionary movement w ­ ill prevail. The overall trajectory of the Gioconda, then, is an allegorical journey that is multiply inflected. It is of course a tale of ­women’s liberation and of sexual liberation, but also of liberation from Eurocentrism. When the Gioconda flees the Louvre she jettisons her constraining (bourgeois) gilded frame in which she has felt confined. Then, in Shanghai, she acquires a bamboo frame, thereby challenging the hegemony of Eu­ro­pean art; she also prefers Chinese brush art to the pinnacles of Eu­ro­pean art. But ultimately, ­after Si’s execution, the

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Gioconda dispenses with the bamboo frame as well in an action symbolizing an end to the distinction between East and West and also her final liberation. She has no more need of frames; the aesthetic, ethnic, and class distinctions that the frames proclaim fall away. The Gioconda sheds her frame when she takes her leap into revolution. Asian-­ness per se (bamboo) is also no longer defining. She attains a transnational identity, but a specifically red one, the color red having been a positive motif throughout. As the Gioconda morphs into the form of the revolutionary activist, she goes from being an aesthetic object to a po­liti­cal activist; art, now liberated, morphs, as in “New Art,” from an object of contemplation to an agent of activism. This poem, then, is about breaching multiple borders: the borders between art and life, between passivity or aestheticism and revolutionary engagement, between East and West. Hikmet’s Gioconda, despite its geo­graph­i­cal trajectory to Shanghai, is not exclusively Asia-­centric but bears some marks of the Euro-­Russian avant-­ garde. It is playful and witty, erotic and irreverent, at times with fanciful, dreamy sections reminiscent of Surrealism, then more or less at its peak in Paris; t­ here are also intimations of Bertolt Brecht and a direct reference to Pablo Picasso. The conceit of the Gioconda rejecting her role as an apex of Western art is reminiscent of Marinetti, who in his founding manifesto of Futurism pronounced the superiority of the new art over another canonical artwork in the Louvre, the Winged Victory of Samothrace. But ­here the trea­ sure in the Louvre is not to be destroyed, but transformed. As with “New Art,” the main thrust is for a new aesthetic, aligned with the po­liti­cal. The poem ends not with an evocation of the international communist cause but rather with Hikmet mocking, in the tradition of Futurism, the ­great reverence for the Mona Lisa (his words rendered in En­g lish as “masterpiece shmasterpiece”). A closer pre­ce­dent in the writings of the avant-­garde would not be something by Marinetti but would be one of the poems Mayakovsky read at their first joint appearance in the Polytechnical Museum in 1923, “Paris. ­Little Chats with the Eiffel Tower,” in which the poet addresses the Eiffel Tower and enjoins it to abandon the de­c adence of Paris with its stock exchange and come to Moscow to join the revolution: “It is not for you / a prime example of machine genius /  [to stay] ­here / and wilt [taiat’] from Apollonian / verses” (this “wilting” could be seen as comparable to the way the Gioconda languishes in the Louvre).84

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Hikmet had returned to Turkey in December 1924, but he stayed ­there only briefly b ­ ecause in 1925 Atatürk’s government began a clampdown on the leftist press in which he was working and the Turkish Communist Party was banned. At first he escaped arrest by ­going under­ground but in the end realized the futility of that and returned to the Soviet Union in August 1925, remaining t­ here u ­ ntil the fall of 1928. By his second visit, Hikmet knew more Rus­sian. He worked at KUTV as a translator and, a­ fter the foreign section of the university set up a research institute, he began to work t­ here as well.85 During this second Moscow stay, Hikmet became most active in theater. This work was, as with his poetry readings, linked both with KUTV and with the Soviet avant-­garde. The drama circle of KUTV’s club was initially directed by Vsevolod Meyerhold and had close links with the Meyerhold theater, located nearby.86 At Meyerhold’s suggestion, Hikmet began to write plays based on Marxist and Leninist texts, using many of Meyerhold’s own strategies for a revolutionary theater, such as pared-­down scripts that featured humor, a fast pace, pantomime, antics on stage, and mass scenes. The results w ­ ere well received.87 Meyerhold was less directly involved in Hikmet’s theater activities during this second period. But Nikolai Ekk, a member of Meyerhold’s theatrical stable and best known t­ oday as the director and scriptwriter of the film Road to Life (Putëvka v zhizn’, 1931), a fiction film about the rehabilitation of street urchins, founded together with Hikmet METLA (an acronym for Moskovskaia Edinaia Teatral’naia Leninskaia Artel’), a theater that, ­ under the 88 a­ uspices of the KUTV club, opened in September  1926. METLA was a “mobile,” propagandistic theater that eschewed professional actors and at times, very much in the Meyerholdian spirit, staged its plays in a circus.89 Hikmet wrote most of the plays they performed, some of which he subsequently staged in Istanbul, where they ­were generally directed by Muhsin Ertuğrul, a former KUTV student who, while in the Soviet Union, had also studied in the theaters of Konstantin Stanislavsky and Yevgeny Vakhtangov.90 The scripts ­were playful, Marxist-­inflected (one of them an illustration of Lenin’s Imperialism) but, above all, distinctly, if somewhat schematically, internationalist.91 METLA only lasted a year, and by 1927 Hikmet was asking to go back to Turkey. In 1928, fed up with fruitless petitioning to go, he returned t­ here illegally. It was in the ensuing period of the late 1920s and early 1930s that

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Hikmet became most vis­i­ble in Turkey both as a po­liti­cal activist and as a writer, especially a­ fter his book 835 satır (835 Lines) was published in 1929. According to Nergis Ertürk, the “novel poetic idiom” he had developed in Moscow and which was demonstrated in the verses Hikmet published ­t here had a major impact on Turkish modernism, though other influences such as Surrealism ­were more impor­tant for some leading poets.92

Nâzim Hikmet, Exoticism, and Pierre Loti Hikmet’s poetry has proved more enduring than his plays. In his verse of the mid-1920s, as in his dramas of that time, imperialism is a par­t ic­u ­lar bête noire, but in the poems frequently his vitriol for imperialists is directed against the fiction of Pierre Loti, the iconic exoticist writer in Eu­rope of that time.93 Loti, a prolific author, set his romances and travelogues in countries all over the world, and they w ­ ere mega–­best sellers in Eu­rope of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His works ­were a hit in imperial Rus­sia too, where at the turn of the ­century many of them appeared in translation, including numerous individual titles, journal publications, and three multivolume editions, the largest, of 1911, of twelve volumes.94 Loti was a naval officer and in the course of duty traveled extensively in Asia and Africa, sometimes performing diplomatic functions. In other words, he was biographically implicated in Eu­ro­pean imperialism.95 Together with his semi-­disciple Claude Farrère, who was also a naval officer, he has become a standard bête noire of postcolonial criticism. In the early Soviet years, the two functioned as emblems for the sort of bourgeois imperialist exoticism that the “clear-­eyed” Soviet writers on the East w ­ ere to ­counter.96 Over the ­ rother, Solomon Vel’tman, pubcourse of the 1920s, Mikhail Pavlovich’s b lished exposés of exoticist lit­er­a­ture and film in a series of articles that appeared in his b ­ rother’s journal Novyi Vostok.97 Vel’tman actually gives Loti surprisingly l­ ittle coverage in ­these articles.98 Farrère and ­others are accorded much more, but in most other Soviet attacks on exoticism Loti was the main butt.99 In fact, even before the Revolution, Loti had been disparaged in Bolshevik commentary and in such non-­leftist highbrow journals as Apollon.100 Hikmet almost certainly encountered the standard criticisms of Loti while he was at KUTV. Broido in his book on colonialism, and presumably in his lecture series on it at KUTV as well, rails against the repre­sen­ta­tion of the

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Easterners in Western lit­er­a­ture, and singles out Loti in par­tic­u­lar.101 It is also quite pos­si­ble that Vel’tman spoke at KUTV, as did several leftist intellectuals, and that in his addresses t­ here he condemned exoticist lit­er­a­ture.102 But Loti was also the bugbear of some Soviet writers to whom Hikmet was close in the early 1920s, including Sergei Tretiakov (see Chapter 5), one of his sponsors in introducing him to the intellectual world of Moscow. Critiques of Loti ­were not a preserve of Soviet letters. They w ­ ere also at the time a rallying point of intellectuals in France, and Hikmet could have read their attacks or heard about this while he was in Istanbul, before leaving for Moscow.103 We know that his ­mother, a ­great Francophile, was so outraged when, in April 1920, French soldiers w ­ ere quartered opposite her h ­ ouse in Istanbul that she attacked them, brandishing a saucepan and cursing Loti, an erstwhile love.104 But when Loti’s Aziyadé appeared in Turkish translation in 1923 it enjoyed widespread popularity, possibly b ­ ecause he was an apologist for the Armenian genocide.105 Moreover, he and Farrère both supported the republican cause in the strug­gle against the Eu­ro­pean invaders. Consequently, no doubt, they both enjoyed official ­favor in Atatürk’s Turkey. ­There is no sign of Loti in Hikmet’s pre-1922 poems, which w ­ ere, rather, inflected with nationalist sentiment.106 The earliest of his translated poems that attacks Loti is “Anatoliia,” of 1922, written in Moscow, where he draws a contrast between the lure of the Orient in Loti’s novels and the real­ity of Asia as exemplified in the starvation he witnessed in Anatolia.107 The poem proposes as a panacea for the misery the Soviet formula for overcoming backwardness: electrification and technological modernization. Loti actually wrote three books on Turkey and numerous po­liti­cal pamphlets in addition to Aziyadé (1879). But the most famous of ­t hese is that novel. It is semiautobiographical in that it is based on a diary Loti kept during a three-­month period as a French naval officer in Greece and Istanbul in the fall and winter of 1876, but the diary entries ­were reworked for the novel into a sort of generic exoticist romance. It tells the story of an illicit love affair of a twenty-­seven-­year-­old British naval officer, “Loti,” with an eighteen-­year-­old Circassian harem girl, the eponymous Aziyadé. Aziyadé, whose green eyes are first glimpsed by Loti through a lattice, is an alluring beauty (Hikmet in Gioconda likewise foregrounds the allure of the eyes in his interracial romance—­“we spoke the language of eyes,” the text reports). Aziyadé’s enchanting eyes are the only part of her vis­i­ble since she

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is totally veiled and shuttered. It becomes the Loti figure’s obsession to find out what lies b ­ ehind the veils, a cliché; it was, for example, an obsession also of Le Corbusier in his comments in Journey to the East on the Turkish ­women he sees on the streets.108 But Loti finds out. The novel fast forwards to the unlikely seeming situation where Aziyadé steals out ­every eve­ning for erotic assignations with an entranced “Loti,” who defies the curfew on his naval vessel to see her. L ­ ater, she oscillates between dalliances with the Loti figure in a barque on the Bosphorus or at his lofty hideaway in Eyup, and her husband’s harem. Aziyadé does not speak the language of her lover, and hence their meetings are carried out largely without words (a fact that tempts one to see the legendary closeness of Mayakovsky and Hikmet as a mutation on the exoticist romance). Incongruously, in this novel their love drama takes place against the backdrop of imperialist interventions, the buildup to the Russo-­Turkish War, and the introduction of a constitution in Turkey in 1876 (which “Loti” deplores). “Loti” conducts his romance disguised as an aristocratic Turk, hiding out in idyllic settings far from the madding crowd, but he recurrently returns to his ship and his naval c­ areer and, in the end, true to the genre of the interracial romance, sails away leaving Aziyadé, who ­w ill die an early death (though he returns ­later to fight for the Turks and perishes).109 Hikmet caricatures Loti most directly in his poem “East and West” (“Şark-­ Garp”), which first appeared as “Pierre Loti” in the Turkish periodical Aydinlik in 1925—­that is, soon ­a fter he returned from his first stay in Moscow—­and was renamed when republished in 1932. The poem opens with a collage of motifs from Loti’s writings, including the alluring lattice win­dow that sets the scene for Aziyadé. But it also features an invocation of the splendors of the Ottoman sultanate that are celebrated in Loti’s reminiscences, Fantôme d’Orient (1892). Actually, such repre­sen­ta­tions of Loti’s exoticism ­were somewhat anachronistic by the 1920s in that Loti in his ­later writings on Turkey had begun to critique his own romances of miscegenation.110 A hallmark of fiction by Loti and Farrère is g­ reat ambivalence about the Western world, or more particularly about the modern world. The sultry plots of interracial romance in their Istanbul texts are suffused with a repugnance for the commercialized and Eu­ro­pe­anized sections of the city. Their protagonists nostalgically cling to an idealized vision of an ­earlier, purer, and more spontaneous world, now no longer to be found in Eu­rope but still pos­si­ble in

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non-­European locales. They ­favor the allegedly quiet and deserted streets of old Istanbul, a sanctuary from modernity. In Farrère, the Eu­ro­pean protagonists see in ­t hese older haunts of Istanbul an antidote to “the monotony of modern existence” and lament what he calls a “pervading vulgar modernity” creeping into its modernized sectors.111 This binarized apprehension of the city inflected the subsequent accounts of many Eu­ro­pean travelers, including Le Corbusier. Their travelogues pre­sent a valorized contrast, perhaps derived from Loti and Farrère, between the city’s westernized, commercial areas around Pera and, what they prefer, a more traditional Istanbul to be found across the Galata Bridge in places like Sultanahmet, with its gigantic mosques, and Eyup (to which the protagonists in Aziyadé repair), with its ancient mosque and Muslim cemeteries.112 Atatürk, however, was committed to modernizing Turkey and creating a new, post-­Ottoman identity for the nation that would restore Turkey to what he saw as a more appropriate status in the concert of nations. His efforts in this cause show some zigzagging as he, like the Soviet Union and also the literary international, tried to negotiate the problematical dichotomy of the national and international. Starting in the late 1920s, he initiated a cultural overhaul in an effort to supersede the religiously inflected Ottoman culture. The first stage in this progressive pro­cess was to jettison Turkey’s Perso-­Arabic script in ­favor of latinization. In this proj­ect t­ here was considerable collaboration between Turkey and the Soviet Union, which also began to latinize the scripts of several of its non-­European languages, principally from Muslim areas. Turkish officials appealed to VOKS for help in acquiring manuals and other materials from the Soviet Union’s own experience in latinization, while Central Asian newspapers often pointed to the Turkish script reform as an inspiration for their own (an example of lateral interaction).113 Before long, Atatürk had moved on from script reform to a more fundamental overhaul of Turkish culture in a series of programs that w ­ ere intended to create a new, post-­Ottoman national identity. They included a language reform designed to purge Turkish of its extensive Arab and Persian vocabulary and also grammatical features from Ottoman, all seen as too infused with Muslim religiosity.114 The newspaper La République dedicated its editorial of September 26, 1932, to this question. ­Under the heading “Return to the National Culture,” it declared that “the national language” “takes first place among other ­factors that raise a nation to the level of an in­de­pen­dent

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state.”115 In other words, and paradoxically, as Atatürk agitated for a more “pure” Turkish, purging it of foreign borrowings, he, like the avant-­garde idealists of the International of the Arts, sought to create a more “universal” Turkish language, one that might take its place in world culture.116 The question of the identity of the Turks and their place in history was also tackled. In 1931 the Turkish Historical Society was established (it was first called the Society for the Study of Turkish History and renamed in 1935), with its main task to prove that this history was not confined to the Ottoman past. In 1932 what has been termed the “Turkish historical thesis” was presented to the First Turkish Historical Congress, which convened in Ankara (the second was held in 1937). According to this thesis, which foregrounds a pre-­Islamic past, the Turks originated from Central Asia, which was the cradle of the world’s original civilization (in effect, the thesis replaced the Indo-­Europeanist genealogy; see Chapter 4).117 From t­ here, civilization spread throughout the world through the migration of Turks to vari­ous parts of Asia and Africa. Also central to the thesis was the claim that ­earlier civilizations in Anatolia, such as the Sumerian and Hittite, ­were of Turkic ­peoples. If proved, this would establish that Anatolia had been a Turkish land since antiquity and hence provide a single, Turko-­centric genealogy for the nation stretching back deep into time.118 In 1936 the claim was also made that all languages originated from Turkish, a reflection of the historical thesis that claimed to prove the continuity of Turkish culture since the inception of h ­ uman civilization.119 According to this thesis, without the influences of race, color, or religion, this common heritage united the ancient ­peoples of the continents. This provided a pre­ce­dent, Atatürk maintained, for the ­people of the world to unite u ­ nder what he saw as common ideals. Atatürk was so committed to ­these ideas (his “sun-­language theory”) that when he died he left a considerable part of his inheritance to the Turkish Linguistic Society and the Turkish Historical Society. It was around the time when ­t hese new campaigns ­were launched that (in 1933) Hikmet began a long poem that effectively challenged not bourgeois Western art, and Western ascendancy, as in Gioconda, but rather the new official account of Turkish history and its allegedly “universally” resonant national culture.120 The poem, “The Epic of Sheik Bedreddin” (Seyh Bedreddin destam), which some consider Hikmet’s finest, appeared in 1936, the last poem he managed to publish in Turkey for thirty years.121 In several re­spects,

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the “epic” belongs to this post-­Ottoman moment, but has Marxist coloring. Ostensibly, it follows Atatürk’s post-­Ottoman, secular historiography in that it questions the version of historical events supplied by Muslim theologians and the major historians of the Ottoman era (whom Hikmet lists in the text). Bedreddin was an unorthodox Islamic thinker of the f­ourteenth and fifteenth centuries who, a­ fter a successful ­career, had been banished in 1413 by the new sultan, Mehmed I, to Iznik, where he began to develop more radical ideas and acquired the reputation of being an antiauthoritarian. He is best known for his role in a 1416 revolt against the Ottoman Empire, in which he and his disciples posed a serious challenge to the authority of Sultan Mehmed I and the Ottoman state. Bedreddin’s followers—­especially one named Mustafa—­organized a revolt in his name. ­After a three-­year strug­gle the revolt was crushed by the sultan’s forces, and in 1420 Bedreddin himself was taken prisoner, tried, and hanged. The remaining four thousand of his followers ­were also killed (in the poem, two thousand). But “Bedreddin,” written by a committed Marxist, is not contained by an anti-­Ottoman stance. One of Hikmet’s aims in writing it was allegedly to ­counter the popu­lar claims in the Turkish press of the mid-1930s that communism was alien to the Turkish p ­ eople.122 The poem, with a l­ ittle poetic license, claims that Bedreddin’s teachings anticipated communist princi­ples of social justice. The basic assumption of Islam that all property belongs to Allah is represented as the basis for Bedreddin’s challenge to the system of feudal landownership and serfdom. The poem is not just an account of the events surrounding Bedreddin and his disciples such as Mustafa. It opens not in the past time of Bedreddin, but in the pre­sent time of Hikmet. The initial verses find the first-­person protagonist in prison (as was Hikmet at the time). During one sleepless night as he reads of Bedreddin in a Muslim theologian’s book, he feels intensely his incarceration and suffers from a headache. Suddenly a follower of Mustafa appears at the barred win­dow and beckons him. The protagonist slips effortlessly through the prison bars and together with his “guide” journeys over the sea, back to the time of Bedreddin. Th ­ ere, he reports, Bedreddin is moved by the poverty and oppression of the p ­ eople, and his followers Mustafa and Kemal r­ ide off to foment revolt in other regions of Anatolia. The poem reaches its climax in the ninth canto, where the sultan’s army is confronted by ten thousand followers of Bedreddin led by Mustafa. Eight thousand of the ten

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thousand are slaughtered, and soon Mustafa and the remaining two thousand followers are captured and subjected to horrible deaths. As in The Gioconda and Si Ya-­U, then, the protagonist escapes a constricting frame (­here the prison bars) with the aid of a helper, as in a fairy story, and journeys over the sea to another real­ity, a place of intense revolutionary engagement. And, as in the Gioconda, the poem ends in a grisly execution (­here a mass execution). But in this instance the journey is more in time than in space. The protagonist travels to dif­fer­ent places within Turkey, or more accurately the Ottoman Empire (including present-­day Bulgaria, for example), but not beyond, as in Hikmet’s more transnational Gioconda. However, though the protagonist is ostensibly transported back to medieval times, with the poem’s many, highly resonant references to well-­k nown moments in lit­er­a­ture, legend, and history, multiple time periods are invoked. For example, a protagonist swims across the sea at the Dardanelles. The Dardanelles had special meaning for the Turks of the 1930s, ­because it was in defending that sea passage in the b ­ attles of Gallipoli (1915) that Atatürk secured a victory for the Turks against the Eu­ro­pean allies and their colonial subjects, a victory that contributed to his extraordinary status for Turks. But the Dardanelles w ­ ere known e­ arlier to Eu­ro­pe­a ns as the Hellespont, and swimming across its straits also calls to mind the moment that has captivated Eu­ro­pe­ans and Rus­sians, when Byron swam across its four-­mile stretch of turbulent ­water in 1810, a feat that symbolized his defiance of conventional constraints and his devotion to the cause of freedom (the legendary Greek hero Leander also supposedly swam across). As in the Gioconda, then, the hero’s release from the confinement of the prison bars / picture frame means not only escaping the confines of time and place but also escaping the m ­ ental constraints of rigid literalism. The poem is historically based, but the protagonist takes off from history, giving rein to the imagination. When, for example, the rebels overthrow the landlords in a violent uprising and distribute land among the peasantry (an act with parallels in postrevolutionary Rus­sia), Hikmet downplays the ensuing societal reor­ga­ni­za­tion, presenting rather an Edenic idyll, where nature has been enhanced, as it w ­ ere, in cele­bration of the victory: “Look, the figs are like huge 123 emeralds.” Such imagery might seem to make it a Kunstmärchen, but Hikmet blurs the distinction between fable and actuality. A case in point would be some of the place-­names. In canto 6, for example, as Hikmet

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switches from prose to poetry he keeps repeating the names “Mad Forest” and “Sea of Trees,” which have the ring of folk legend, but are a­ ctual names for parts of the former Ottoman Empire. “Bedreddin,” as its title proclaims, is an epic, if an epic in a typically, for him, idiosyncratic form. The poem contains several ele­ments from the Turkic folk epic, especially in canto 6, which has clear allusions to The Book of Dede Korkut, with its falcons and a roan ­horse, which in the Turkic epic tradition are closely tied to the hero’s identity. But the poem overall is by no means consistently epic. One can see this, for example, in the prosody, which is hybrid: now prose, now verse, now extensive quotations from classical Persian chronicles, now using Hikmet’s “Mayakovskian” style from the 1920s, now using traditional Turkish meters, and now imitating folk genres. Hikmet also kept switching language levels: now the literary high style, now the vernacular, some version of peasant language or even outright slang.124 Hikmet’s shift to the epic genre coincides with a shift in the Soviet literary platform of the mid-1930s to an emphasis on the folk epic. This was especially encouraged by Maxim Gorky in his speech to the First Congress of the Writers’ Union in 1934, where he enjoined writers to draw on heroes and revolutionaries from the oral tradition, but also urged them to incorporate myth. “Myth is invention [vymysel],” he declared. ­Were writers “to add to the real facts . . . ​the desired, the pos­si­ble,” then “we would get that romanticism that lies at the foundation of myth and is highly useful in that it facilitates the arousal of a revolutionary attitude to real­ity, an attitude that in practice transforms the world in some practical way.”125 At the congress, Gorky singled out Suleiman Stalsky, an ashug (folk bard) from Daghestan, as a model for o ­ thers to emulate, describing him as “illiterate, but full of wisdom” and calling him “a Homer of the twentieth ­century.” He urged writers, “Collect your folklore,” “learn from it, rework it,” and become familiar with the folklore of the major ethnic minorities.126 Did Hikmet know about this shift in Soviet literary policy and Gorky’s recommendations? Quite possibly, since his friend and collaborator in Istanbul, the theater and film director Muhsin Ertuğrul, served ­there as a point man for VOKS and was receiving from it several Soviet publications, including Literaturnaia gazeta, Teatr i dramaturgiia, and SSSR na stroike.127 One could presume Hikmet was familiar with ­these journals’ contents. But folklore and folkish language ­were at the time also popu­lar in Turkish lit­er­a­ture.

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Hikmet in “Bedreddin” could not be said to be following current Turkish vogues in that it pre­sents a very dif­fer­ent internationalist vision than the Turkish historical thesis. In the poem, he insistently and repeatedly foregrounds a multicultural, multiethnic Turkey rather than the ethnically pure Turkey of the Kemalist historiography. Since Bedreddin also aims to abolish the laws discriminating against ethnic minorities, Mustafa is able to rally to his cause, in addition to the Turkish peasants, the support of Jewish converts and Greek sailors from the islands, as he emphasizes with a recurring line of the text. This par­tic­u­lar multiethnic mix is a historically accurate detail, but is po­liti­cally marked given that, following Turkish in­de­pen­dence from Eu­ ro­pean occupiers in 1923, in 1924 t­ here was a forced exchange of populations between Turkey and Greece. In the poem, however, the three ethnic groups all sing the same song about how they are working as one, as it ­were, a localized, mini-­version of Baku’s vision of a liberated, transnational proletariat, in which the Asian oppressed join their Eu­ro­pean ­brothers. A topos of leftist internationalist texts is a moment when p ­ eople of dif­fer­ent cultures and ethnicities, often Asians and Eu­ro­pe­ans, join together to sing a song, sometimes each in its rendering in their own language, at other times without comprehending the words (a version of the mythical moment when Hikmet read at the Polytechnical Museum). Most often they sing the hymn of international communism, “The Internationale.”128 The presence of Jews in Bedreddin’s revolutionary fraternity is no innocent detail for that time and could be read as an affirmation of the antifascist position.129 Rather than Turko-­centric, in fact, one might argue that this poem bore the message of the Popu­lar Front, as Hikmet had, for example, in his 1936 brochure German Fascism and Racial Theory.130 One is struck by the absence in “Bedreddin” of anti-­imperialist rhe­toric, so ubiquitous in his verse of the 1920s. But ­after the Nazis took power in Germany in 1933, if not before, the strug­gle with imperialism was in the international communist movement largely subsumed ­under the strug­gle with fascism. Despite its internationalist sentiments, “Bedreddin” was attacked by the Turkish left as too Turco-­centric. In response, Hikmet wrote an epilogue, “National Pride,” as a supplement to the poem, in which he effectively paraphrased Lenin’s arguments in “On the National Pride of the ­Great Rus­sians” (“O natsional’noi gordosti velikorossov,” 1914), replacing some Rus­sian names from Lenin’s text with Turkish ones and introducing examples from the history of Turkey.131

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In time, in a further development, authoritative historians in Turkey started to re­orient their accounts of the national cultural identity away from tracing its lineage from Central Asia to seeing the country as part of the g­ reat civilizations of Eu­rope. Scholars and journalists began to emphasize Turkey’s deep roots in classical civilization and in Hellenism. Turkey’s Ottoman, Persian, and Arabic heritage was not entirely overwritten, but it was now rivaled by the Greco-­Roman; where students might once have studied Ottoman poetry, their syllabi soon included works by Plato, Sophocles, and Homer.”132 In one of the characteristic paradoxes of attempts at reconciling the pull of the international and the national, Atatürk called on Turkish citizens to identify as Eu­ro­pe­ans even while seeking po­liti­cal in­de­pen­dence from Western Eu­ro­pean countries like France. In the late 1930s, as is well known, in Turkey a mammoth national proj­ect was launched of publishing (mostly Eu­ro­pean) books in translation. To that end, a Translation Bureau was established in 1940, dedicated to translating and publishing “a thousand” Western texts into modern Turkish.133 As was somewhat the case in the Soviet Union at this time when Eu­ro­pean lit­er­a­ ture was also translated on a massive scale, the function of the translation proj­ect was in part national aggrandizement, raising Turkey’s stature internationally. As the proj­ect director claimed, “The nation with the richest national library and most vibrant lit­er­a­ture would occupy a higher level of civilization.”134 In choosing texts for translation Turkish officials w ­ ere helped by some of the exiles from Nazi Germany and Austria, who had begun to arrive in Turkey, where they took up se­nior positions in its universities and the arts. Istanbul University alone appointed forty German scholars from vari­ous disciplines to promote the secularization and modernization of higher education. The most famous of them, Erich Auerbach, was able for eleven years to serve t­ here as chair of Turkey’s leading faculty for Western languages and lit­ er­a­tures.135 His magnum opus from this time, Mimesis (1946), hailed in recent years as a landmark in the history of world lit­er­a­ture, rapidly became a classic account of the nature and evolution of the Eu­ro­pean literary tradition.136 It was decidedly Eurocentric, however, and makes almost no mention of Turkey.137 Another contingent of exiles from Nazi Germany and Austria, the refugee architects, could lay a stronger claim to a “world” aesthetic form. Nikolai

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Punin had titled his article for the ill-­fated journal Internatsional iskusstva “Art as Esperanto,” but architecture, another nonverbal art, could also claim to be an international language.138 ­After all, starting from the statement of Museum of Modern Art curators Henry-­Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson for their Modern Architecture International Exhibition of 1932, Euro-­American and Soviet avant-­garde architecture came to be dubbed the “international style.” Proselytizers for this “style” believed that its design princi­ples, which stress that buildings should be stripped of local particularity, ­were universally applicable and would sooner or l­ ater dominate architectural practice throughout the world. In many instances, the very designs of their buildings, with their walls of glass and movable walls, became metonymic instantiations of the new geopo­liti­cal vision of a world without borders, or at any rate with less rigid borders. Hannes Meyer, director of the Bauhaus Dessau from 1928 to 1930, declared in a programmatic article of 1926, which came out in 1928 in the Soviet Union in Rus­sian translation, that in the new age such inventions as the radiogram and the telephoto “are disrespectful of national borders, [­because] they overcome the separation between one p ­ eople and the other,” so that “the fatherland fades away. We learn Esperanto. We become citizens of the world” (Meyer’s emphasis).139 This claim to transcending borders was also typical of Soviet Constructivist rhe­toric from t­ hese years. In 1926 Mosei Ginzburg, who was at this time emerging as its leading theoretician for architecture, in his programmatic “The International Front in the New Architecture” of 1926 framed the claim that the new architecture could transcend borders in terms of a portable international language, proclaiming that the architectural avant-­gardes of all countries share a common cause of counteracting the “rotting” culture of Old Eu­rope and are—­and ­here he uses an image that almost seems to echo Pavlovich’s rhe­toric at Baku—­“closely interwoven with filiations ­running through each other.” They are, he continued, “ forging a new international language that is accessible [blizkii] and comprehensible despite the posts and barriers [that mark] borders” (Ginzburg’s emphasis).140 ­These internationalist architects proclaimed in effect a “Eurasia without borders.” But though ­t here are some quasi exceptions, such as Bruno Taut, who spent a few years in Japan before coming to Turkey, their vision was largely of a Eu­rope without borders. Nevertheless, circumstances, such as the Nazi regime, led several of them to accept invitations to go to Turkey, where

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they mainly designed modernist buildings for the new capital in Ankara. The list of ­t hose involved includes Germans, Austrians, and Swiss, and some of their Turkish students. Among them ­were famous names such as Taut and also Margarete Schütte-­Lihotzky, best known for her design of the Frankfurt kitchen and its maximally rational use of space, an impor­tant precept of the “international style.” But the designs of ­these architects w ­ ere predicated on a conviction about the smooth translatability of Eu­ro­pean modernist norms. The reception in Turkey was not entirely smooth. Though the internationalists enjoyed official patronage, modernist architecture had its detractors who, in an open expression of the competing calls for the national and the international, called for buildings to be modeled instead on the traditional “Turkish ­house” or “Ottoman ­house.”141 While the exiled scholars and modernist architects ­were able to further their intellectual agendas in Turkey, local leftists fared less well. Atatürk died in 1938, and that year Hikmet was arrested and sentenced to twenty-­eight years in prison. In increasingly failing health, he started a hunger strike t­ here in 1950, which attracted the attention of a number of famous Eu­ro­pean intellectuals. Their protests eventually led to his release, but he fled to the Soviet Union in 1951, where he remained in exile u ­ ntil he died in 1963. A ­ fter his death, Hikmet became a cult figure among liberal Soviet intellectuals and unorthodox leftists, but he had long enjoyed that status among leftist internationalists throughout the world. Schütte-­Lihotzky opens her memoir of 1985, Erinnerungen aus dem Widerstand (Memories from re­sis­tance) with a passage from his poem of 1930, “Air as Heavy as Lead,” which had become a favorite of the antifascist movement. And in Turkey he has remained an idol for many intellectuals, too. Istanbul leftists have set up several club-­like establishments named for him that have cafés, bookshops, and rooms for meetings and talks. While foreign and Turkish tourists crowd the Pierre Loti Café, located in his lofty Eyup perch, the leftists congregate in t­ hese venues. Although the dream of a “new world,” of a red Eurasia, was dispelled long ago, still, despite Hikmet’s arrests and exile, his “booming” voice has not been silenced. But in the early 1920s when it rang out at Moscow’s Polytechnical Museum some other internationalist poets chose a dif­fer­ent route from his for establishing a “new art,” in their case not by jettisoning vernacular traditions but by adapting them for the new “content.” Two of them ­w ill be the subject of Chapter 2.

2 Revolutionary Poetry and the Persianate Tradition

A

t the Baku Congress of the ­Peoples of the East, it was painfully apparent that any attempt to found a new, postbourgeois culture that was both transnational and Marxist-­inflected would come up against the intractable prob­lem of the multiple languages, ethnicities, and customs of the East. Would-be internationalist literati carried with them the baggage of their own national traditions. Nevertheless, Pavlovich had blithely proposed that the cultures of the oppressed East might meld with Western proletarian culture in a “single common international ocean of poetry and knowledge.” ­Were they in this cause to jettison their national or ethnic literary traditions rather as Hikmet in his manifesto-­like poem “New Art” urged Turkish writers to jettison the saz, a figure for the Turkish poetic tradition? And then how, in a Marxist-­inflected “new culture,” ­were writers to reconcile the multiplicity of lit­er­a­tures without losing the par­ tic­u­lar tenor of each? Should each writer appropriate their national traditions and write communist rhe­toric into them, or should ­t here be a radically new literary approach to lit­er­a­ture that dispensed with—­“forgot” in Zinoviev’s terms—­all the national cultural heritage? And was that even pos­si­ble? Such questions received, in effect, an official answer five years a­ fter Baku in a speech of 1925 delivered at KUTV by Stalin, “The Po­liti­cal Tasks of the University of the ­Peoples of the East,” which provided the basic framework for Soviet policy with regard to the culture of its non-­Russian minority ­peoples. In it Stalin emphasized that he was not advocating establishing a

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single culture or a “single language,” arguing that culture “assumes dif­fer­ent forms and dif­fer­ent modes of expression among the dif­fer­ent ­peoples who are drawn into the building of socialism.”1 Consequently, he stipulated, the new culture should be “proletarian in content, national in form—­such is the universal culture ­toward which socialism is proceeding. Proletarian culture does not abolish national culture, it gives it content. On the other hand, national culture does not abolish proletarian culture, it gives it form.” By national ­here, Stalin did not mean of the nation, but rather of a par­tic­u­lar ethnic group. ­Earlier in the speech he insisted that t­ here w ­ ere “two sets of totally dif­f er­ent conditions of development,” that of Soviet ethnic minorities who had thrown off the yoke of bourgeois oppression and that of the non-­Soviet East still ­laboring ­under it (he also ­later elaborated distinctions within the second group). In discussing the non-­Soviet East, Stalin did not touch on questions of culture, but since both groups w ­ ere also to work t­ oward the ideal of a “universal” proletarian culture, arguably his formula was to apply to them except that t­ here would be dif­fer­ent “content”; cultural products in the non-­Soviet East would be dedicated to the anti-­imperialist cause rather than to “building socialism” (e.g., in production novels).2 Stalin’s pronouncements w ­ ere actually not yet canonical in 1925, but a­ fter he assumed absolute power in the late 1920s they became so. In 1930, in a speech to the Sixteenth Party Congress in June, he revised the capsule formula to “socialist in content and national in form.”3 This substitution of socialist for proletarian meant a shift from defining the culture as primarily working-­class or Party-­oriented (“proletarian”) to allowing it a broader purview, though the term “socialist” as he used it h ­ ere was also firmly anchored in an orientation to the land of socialism, the Soviet Union. Both Stalin’s original formulation of 1925 and his revised formulation of 1930, then, meant that culture makers should follow vernacular conventions in formal m ­ atters, but not in “content,” that is, not in themes or ideas. One might presuppose that Stalin de facto sought to privilege content over form; as it w ­ ere, let the minority p ­ eoples keep their quaint forms as a mere shell, as long as the content is acceptable. It is not entirely clear to me how, however, you disaggregate form and content. Are a text’s recurrent motifs, for example, part of form or of content? And how might writers meld con­temporary revolutionary “content” with national “forms,” which so often had come down from ancient times and w ­ ere inflected by a feudal mentality and its supersti-

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tions? “Forms” are not inert, empty vessels into which one can pour “content.” Th ­ ere is a dynamic interaction between the two. Moreover, “forms” are not semantically neutral but can be subject to contested interpretation. As Michael Holquist has pointed out in explicating Mikhail Bakhtin, “Features are never purely formal, for each has associated with it a set of distinctive values and presuppositions.” 4 As this chapter ­w ill demonstrate, the historical context plays a critical role in determining ­these “values and presuppositions,” which are not stable in consequence. Since at least the Rus­sian Formalists, whose valorization of a putative form / content binary was the opposite of Stalin’s, theorists have strug­gled to come up with a cogent model for the relationship between the two.5 The prob­ lems have been particularly fraught for ­those, such as Franco Moretti, who in recent years have sought to explicate the dynamic of “world lit­er­a­ture” as genres and exempla travel from a putative “core” to a “periphery.”6 Moretti has based his account of this diffusion on popu­lar novel forms that, with their simplified plots and less nuanced narration, are more “transportable” across cultures and nations.7 But it is easier to “transport” popu­lar formulaic novels than poetry. Most Asian literary traditions are based on poetry (or drama), so that in their case it would be a par­tic­u­lar challenge to bridge the gap between “socialist content” and vernacular traditions. To a greater degree than with prose genres the formal features of par­tic­u ­lar poetic traditions have over time acquired a penumbra of associations that have an impact in their meaning and may not be readily trans-­latable. Consequently, I have chosen to explore how the task of incorporating ­revolutionary ideology and practices (content) within traditions of non-­ European literary “forms” was worked out by looking at examples from poetry. This chapter w ­ ill look more specifically at how the Persian literary tradition was integrated into the new international lit­er­a­ture. This tradition was not entirely separate from the Eu­ro­pean in that, since at least the time of Goethe, much of Persia’s rich poetical culture had been incorporated in some Eu­ro­pean lit­er­a­tures. The Rus­sians had picked up an interest in Persian poetry from Goethe, particularly Aleksandr Pushkin, who had in 1824, even before a Rus­sian version of Goethe’s East-­West Divan first appeared in 1828, published “The Fountain of Bakhchisarai,” which became his most popu­lar work in his lifetime.8 Many Rus­sian poets of the Silver Age (the early twentieth c­ entury) similarly created works that w ­ ere stylizations of classical

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Persian poetry and blurred the distinctions between Eastern and Western traditions. ­Here I ­will be looking at a slightly dif­fer­ent phenomenon, at the appropriation of the Persian classical tradition not as an exoticism or for aesthetic purposes, but for po­liti­cal purposes. This chapter w ­ ill trace, in two specific if somewhat singular examples, the way attempts ­were made to create a transregional revolutionary culture in the wake of the Baku Congress. I ­w ill be looking at poems by the Persian and Kurdish writer Abolqasem Lahuti (1887–1957) and some Persian poems by the Rus­sian avant-­gardist Velemir Khlebnikov (1885–1922). Both poets drew on a previously dominant transregional culture—­the Persianate—­that had entailed, somewhat as Sheldon Pollock has seen as central to the Sanskrit tradition, “primarily a highly conventionalized verse,” which became the core of the “culture-­power practices and their associated theories—­legitimation, ideology, nationalism, civilizationalism, and the like” that provided a “literary expression of po­liti­cal self­ nder the Mughals we saw hood.”9 As Audrey Trushchke has demonstrated, u some mutual influence between the Sanskrit and Persianate cultures.10 In what follows we w ­ ill see attempts at incorporating the Persianate tradition into the “new,” post-­Baku revolutionary culture. Both Khlebnikov and Lahuti fastened on par­tic­u­lar classical Persian poems not to replicate them mutatis mutandis, or to rework them, as had been done by a succession of Eu­ro­ pe­ans and Rus­sians, but rather to radically re­orient the tradition. Both Khlebnikov in his Persian poetry and Lahuti in his Soviet-­era writings in some senses came out of the Baku Congress. The question of ­whether they actually attended it is in both cases moot. Both have been said in vari­ous sources to have been in the audience, though that seems unlikely.11 But it could be argued that they both emerged from Baku in a figurative sense; Khlebnikov is known to have been ecstatic about the speeches delivered t­ here, and Lahuti trained at KUTV, a post-­Baku institution set up to realize its aims. Neither poet was a Bolshevik at the time of the congress in 1920, though ­Lahuti joined the Soviet Communist Party in 1924, but both ­were enthusiasts for revolution in the East. They went on in the year immediately following the congress to participate in the revolutionary effort in Persia, one of the two countries that received the most attention in the speeches made in Baku (the other being Turkey). Khlebnikov was assigned as an agitator to the Soviet expeditionary forces sent in 1921 to aid a revolutionary uprising in the

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Persian province of Gilan, and Lahuti was a leader of another Persian revolutionary uprising, this one in Tabriz.12 In addition, both poets produced propagandistic verse for the revolutionary cause that drew on classics of Persian lit­er­a­ture. In the interests of comparison I ­w ill look at how each poet appropriated the Persianate literary tradition for his Soviet verse as case studies in how the prob­lems that Stalin’s 1925 speech addressed ­were resolved in practice (though in Khlebnikov’s case, since he died in 1922, he wrote his Persian poems ­before Stalin gave his 1925 speech). While Lahuti skillfully encoded key ­Bolshevik narratives with ele­ments from the Persianate tradition, in other words, he melded “form” and “content” roughly as Stalin had envisioned, Khlebnikov’s Persian poems are more radically syncretic and incorporate ele­ments from several of the ­great classical traditions of Asia, including the Persian, with material from the Rus­sian literary tradition and the Bolshevik platform. Moreover, the “national forms” he used for his revolutionary “content” w ­ ere largely not his own (Rus­sian).

Khlebnikov Khlebnikov potentially represents an end case in looking at the applicability of Stalin’s formulation for revolutionary lit­er­a­t ure, an end case in terms of his radical formal and semantic innovations. Before the war, he together with Aleksei Kruchënykh developed a new and somewhat solipsistic kind of writing using “trans-­sense” (zaum) language. They sought thereby to create an art that would be so absolutely in itself that it went beyond self-­valuableness (aestheticism) to another and more radical degree of in-­itselfness. During the 1910s, however, Khlebnikov’s geo­graph­i­cal and generic orientation changed drastically, though he never ceased being a highly sui generis experimentalist. Not all the changes occurred si­mul­ta­neously, but the shifts might be characterized as from an orientation around the absolutely par­tic­ u­lar that underwrote his innovative approach to writing “zaum” poetry to one that was radically general, and in that sense no less utopian. Before the war his intellectual proclivities had been largely Rus­sian or Pan-­Slavic. But in the 1910s he moved progressively from this relatively parochial horizon to the macrohistorical, the transhistorical and transnational—­even transpersonal.13 One could analyze this change as from the nationally or ethnically

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specific to a larger and more generalized geo­g raph­i­cal, confessional, and ethnic orientation. In ­t hese ­later years Khlebnikov became an advocate of a Eurasian Union, challenging the binary of East and West. With his new interest in the macrohistorical, he also developed new theories of time and drew up t­ ables that putatively established that over a vast stretch of ­history cataclysmic military encounters between East and West occurred once ­every 317 years, one of many ways he was ignoring specificity for the ­grand classificatory. Khlebnikov’s writings in this new phase proj­ect a visionary, utopian enthusiasm for a transnational, borderless expanse stretching from northern Rus­sia to the Ganges in India in a political-­cum-­cultural confederation. In his manifesto “An Indo-­Russian Union” (“Indo-­russkii soiuz”), written in Astrakhan in September  1918, Khlebnikov claims that that city unites three worlds, the Aryan, the Indian, and the Caspian, in a triangle of Christ, the Buddha, and Muhammad, a melding that he saw as the basis for a new world where citizens might “pass from the Yellow Sea to the Baltic, from the White Sea to the Indian Ocean, unimpeded by any border.”14 For some years he had placed ­great significance on the fact that he was born near Astrakhan, in the village of Malye Derbety, and he began to claim that the city represented the confluence of Eu­rope and Asia. He even conducted a quixotic expedition to the nearby delta of the Volga to find the lotus, which he believed would confirm the identification. The city of Astrakhan is also associated with two impor­tant incidents from Rus­sian history that have for many played a central role in the account of Rus­sian identity and for Khlebnikov had par­tic­ u­lar resonance: the Tatar invasion (a sarai, a medieval capital of the Golden Horde, had been established t­ here) and the life of the g­ reat peasant rebel Stenka Razin, who had based himself in Astrakhan for a time and from ­there led a force to Resht in Persia. This overall shift in Khlebnikov’s cognitive map left its mark on his generic orientation, which increasingly took him from short, lyric-­like poems to the epic, a mode more appropriate to the macrohistorical and macroterritorial. With a new interest in Asian culture, Khlebnikov began to draw in his verse on some of the g­ reat classical texts of the East, particularly on Sanskrit sources (he had studied the language in 1911, as did T. S. Eliot at a similar time), but also on the Persianate tradition. He periodically invoked some Rus­sians, especially Pushkin. However, his main feeder texts w ­ ere Persian, though

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not the lyr­ics of Hafez or Saadi, then all the rage in Rus­sia, but the ­g reat Persian epics of Ferdowsi and Nizami. He also cited the Sanskrit epic the Mahabharata and, as we saw in Chapter 1, took an interest in East Asian cultures too, but largely in the potential of their writing systems for a universal culture.15 Khlebnikov’s poetry of the postwar 1910s and 1920s—­and in this re­spect his Persian revolutionary poems are no exception—­i llustrates my general point that internationalist writers of the interwar years ­were not operating in a silo, but each of them was si­mul­ta­neously participating in dif­fer­ent movements, networks, and trends. In Khlebnikov’s case, he was drawn to a philosophical and literary orientation that might be described as spiritual cosmopolitanism, or less kindly as spiritual exoticism. Spiritual exoticism was most prominently represented in Rus­sian intellectual life by the theosophical writings of Madame Helena Blavatsky, which ­were extensively published in Rus­ sian translation during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and influenced many intellectuals (see Chapter4). Khlebnikov also in his numerical system for establishing historical recurrence placed his hero Stenka Razin close to Blavatsky.16 Blavatsky’s seminal book Isis Unveiled (1877) disgorges a 628-­page stream of esoteric knowledge and religious beliefs from all over the world, displayed to demonstrate similarities between a host of religious and mythological systems to buttress her philosophical position and her concern to establish what was foregrounded in the subtitle of the Theosophical Society, “the Brotherhood of Humanity”—­a rival version of international solidarity.17 Within this profusion, however, some belief systems and traditions are explic­itly “better than ­others”: in par­tic­u­lar, the ancient Egyptian, the ancient Indian (primarily as available in the old Sanskrit texts), the ancient Persian or Z ­ oroastrian of the Zend-­Avesta, and the Judeo-­Christian.18 We see a similar se­lection in Khlebnikov’s writings of the late 1910s and early 1920s in which he recurrently invokes gods, heroes, and geo­graph­i­cal features of dif­fer­ent cultures, as it w ­ ere, in apposition and largely from the ancient Egyptian, Persian, and Sanskrit texts and mythologies. He moves seamlessly from the one ­ ere exotic name or place to the other as if they are equivalents or linked. Th are differences in Blavatsky’s and Khlebnikov’s positions, however. Khlebnikov gave Muslim culture more prominence in his transnational pantheon than Blavatsky did. Also, rather than privileging the Judeo-­Christian, he

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accorded most-­favored status to the Rus­sian rebel Stenka Razin, who was no religious or mystical figure. Khlebnikov had written “An Indo-­Russian Union” in 1918, but two years ­later an event occurred that inspired him to give more revolutionary inflection to his ­g rand transnational vision—­the Baku Congress, which with ­Pavlovich’s call for a “single common international ocean of poetry and culture” offered an expanded version of the Indo-­Russian Union. Khlebnikov moved to Baku and while t­ here a possibility opened up for him to visit Asia, when he was offered a place in a Soviet expeditionary force to Persia. In an access of enthusiasm for what had been said at Baku, he enlisted as a propagandist and “lecturer” in the Persarmiia (Persian Red Army), which had been formed in Baku at the beginning of 1921 to help the new revolutionary republic in the province of Gilan. This was to be his first encounter with Asia outside Rus­sia, and he saw the assignment as potentially a stepping-­ stone to India, which he had long dreamed of visiting. ­Earlier, on May 18, 1920, a Soviet flotilla had attacked the British base at Enzeli, a port on the Caspian, in a move ostensibly designed to dislodge the British and retrieve the White Fleet boats sheltering ­there, but the Persarmiia was also intended to aid the cause of Mirza Kuchik Khan, a revolutionary who had established a socialist republic in the province of Gilan, a small enclave in a fragmented Persia. Khlebnikov came ­later, in April 1921, with an auxiliary contingent of troops. The unit was transferred to the province’s capital, Resht, with the intention that from ­t here it would join the drive on ­Teheran.19 This was to involve a cosmopolitan guerrilla force of fifteen hundred Jangalis, Armenians, Rus­sians, Azeris, Persians, Armenians, Georgians, Kurds, and ­people from Daghestan and the northern Caucasus. In the event, the campaign fizzled b ­ ecause the alliance with Kuchik Khan could not be 20 sustained. The mission also came up against Realpolitik; the Soviet government was negotiating a trade treaty with Britain and their forces ­were hastily evacuated. And so Khlebnikov found himself unable to pursue the dream of seeing India, and ­after two months, in July 1921, he retreated back to Rus­sia with the evacuating forces. Before his Persian expedition Khlebnikov in Baku had been employed by ROSTA, the Soviet telegraph and propaganda agency, as Mayakovsky had been in Moscow. He continued this kind of work in Persia, though it turned out he had few duties t­ here. Though he was not on its regular staff, he con-

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tributed to the army’s newspaper Krasnyi Iran (Red Iran) and its weekly literary supplement Literaturnyi listok. Khlebnikov was no organ­ization man, more a professional eccentric, or at least accounts of him in Persia always pre­sent him in that role. Allegedly, he frequently wandered away from the army, and with his “monk-­like” hair uncombed and reaching almost to his shoulders, wearing a long jacket and tight trousers of Persian homespun, barefoot and stooped, he would meander along the shoreline as a “Rus­sian dervish,” taken in and fed by respectful locals or sleeping on the bare earth. Or he would hold court in Persian tea­ houses, smoking a power­f ul opiate. And he would attempt, at times successfully, to get his sui generis, Eurasianist poems published in Krasnyi Iran. With a lot of ­f ree time on his hands, Khlebnikov also continued to work on his theory of time and read a lecture in the garrison club on it. He tried to publish his laws of numbers in Krasnyi Iran, but the tract was rejected.21 This is hardly the expected be­hav­ior of an agent of revolution and Bolshevik propagandist. In presenting himself as a dervish, a wandering bard in the Persian tradition, Khlebnikov was claiming the status of the nomad, a favorite self-­image of Rus­sian avant-­garde intellectuals.22 Like Loti, Khlebnikov “went native,” but not to seduce a sultry “Circassian” (as in Aziyadé) and discover what lay ­behind her veil. He was marginally institutionalized and marginally incorporated in the Soviet agitational effort. This anomalous situation was perhaps only pos­si­ble in t­ hese very early postrevolutionary years when the Bolsheviks ­were happy to use for their work any qualified person who was sympathetic to the Revolution. But he was serious about the mission in Persia, though he conceived it in his own terms. The verse he wrote t­ here picks up on the rhe­toric of Baku. However, in his Persian poems he draws his imagery primarily not from Marx or Lenin, or from Comintern tracts, but from classical Persian and Sanskrit poetry. Khlebnikov in his verse of the time often invoked the g­ reat conquerors of Eurasia, Alexander the G ­ reat (who appears in Shahnameh and in Nizami’s Layla and Majnun), Genghis Khan, and Batu, an heir to Genghis who was responsible for the Western campaigns of the Tatars and active in the lower Volga, where Astrakhan is located. Such invocations of the ­great conquerors was typical of the lit­er­at­ ure of the immediately postrevolutionary years. But he sometimes identified with Stenka Razin, an antiauthoritarian rebel, and sometimes represented him as his opposite.23 Khlebnikov fastened on the

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moment in the late seventeenth c­ entury (1670–1671) when Razin’s troops held Astrakhan for seventeen months, during which he led an expeditionary force to Resht in Persia (where Khlebnikov’s unit was quartered). Th ­ ere, popu­lar my­thol­ogy has it, he captured a Persian princess and took her back to Rus­sia, where she tragically drowned in the Volga. This episode in Razin’s somewhat mythicized biography attracted several other writers in the immediately postrevolutionary years, including Khlebnikov’s fellow avant-­gardist Vasily Kamensky, in his long poem “Serdtse narodnoe—­Sten’ka Razin,” sections of which he read l­ ater, on March 8, 1923, at the “International Meeting” to mark International ­Women’s Day, in which Hikmet also read (see Chapter 1).24 I have chosen to analyze two particularly resonant examples of Khlebnikov’s Persian poems. The first, which most bears comparison with the Soviet poetry of Lahuti, illustrates how Khlebnikov seemingly—­and as Lahuti did explic­itly—­appropriated material from the national epic of greater Persia, Shahnameh, written by the poet Ferdowsi between circa 977 and 1010 CE. The title Shahnameh means “book of kings,” and unlike most epics, which center on a par­tic­u­lar hero or cluster of heroes, this one covers a series of fifty kings—­shahs—of Persia. In par­t ic­u ­lar, I ­w ill compare how the two poets drew on one episode of Shahnameh, the story of Kaveh the blacksmith. Kaveh the blacksmith appears in the early sections of Shahnameh, which are regarded as based in myth and oral lore rather than historical actuality. Many stories from t­ here are also in the Zend-­Avesta, but not the story of Kaveh. In Shahnameh, it takes up but a small part of a huge epic, which with its some fifty thousand couplets is the world’s longest epic poem written by a single author and is seven times the length of Homer’s Iliad.25 But the Kaveh episode is disproportionately significant ­because of its role in the Persian national imaginary. In the Shahnameh version of the Kaveh story, a wicked king, Zahhak, of Arab origin (some other versions say Greek) has usurped the Persian throne ­ idow has taken their son Fereydun, and killed the rightful shah.26 The shah’s w the legitimate heir, into the mountains to save him from Zahhak. In the meantime, Zahhak has instituted a despotic and cruel reign. He is further discredited as a ruler by his links with the devil, to be seen in par­tic­u­lar in the two aggressive serpents growing out of his shoulders, who need to be fed ­human brains in order to be pacified. Zahhak has been feeding them the brains of youths. Eleven of the twelve sons of Kaveh have perished in this

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way and the twelfth is now threatened. Zahhak assem­bles notables, demanding that they sign a document endorsing his reign as a just one. They acquiesce, but Kaveh barges into the court and refuses to sign: “A king, then, or a monster? Which are you?” he cries out. He then turns to the assembled notables and declares: “I w ­ ill never sign, or give a thought / to this corrupted tyrant and his court.” When Kaveh leaves the court a crowd gathers around him in the marketplace. He continues to shout his demands for justice and hoists his leather blacksmith’s apron as a rallying point. A new army of men forms around him, and he leads them to Fereydun’s encampment. When Fereydun sees the leather apron he drapes it in Rumi brocade, adorns it with a device of jewels on a ground of gold, and makes fringes for it of crimson, yellow, and purple; at the top of the spear he places a splendid globe, like the moon. Fereydun calls the apron the Kaviani banner, and from this time forward any man who assumes power and places the royal crown on his head would add new jewels to it.27 Ferdeyun proceeds to do ­battle with Zahhak, is victorious, and ascends the throne as the rightful heir. For the rest of the epic Kaveh fades from view, though his sons figure in subsequent episodes as valiant knights and military leaders. In some versions of the story, once Fereydun ascends the throne, he puts Kaveh in charge of his armies and also of his ­whole realm. In Ferdowsi’s version, however, essentially ­after instigating an uprising against foreign domination, Kaveh hands power over to the rightful ruler, so that we have a plot arc about restoring the legitimate heir, which is to be found in so many traditional epics (e.g., the Indian Sakuntala from the Mahabharata, a favorite of Eu­ro­pean intellectuals in the nineteenth ­century; the Iliad; and the African epic Sunjata). The Kaveh story has played a key role in contested accounts of Ira­nian national identity, and the Kaviani banner became Iran’s national flag and remained so u ­ ntil the Arab conquest of the country in the seventh ­century CE (it was also used in Tajikistan). But Kaveh himself became an emblematic figure for a number of disparate po­liti­cal groups in Persia, especially in the twentieth ­century, and so was essentially a multivalent symbol. During the “constitutional revolution” of 1906–1908, enthusiasts took Kaveh as their emblem, and when driven into exile they named their periodical Kāvah (1916–1922), but their orientation had by then become nationalist.28 Another Persian poet of the early twentieth c­ entury, Mohammad Reza Ishqui, drew

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on Shahnameh in the ser­v ice of yet another po­liti­cal position, using it as a vehicle for advocating modernization and liberation from foreign domination.29 And during the 1930s Reza Shah Pahlavi compensated for the questionable legitimacy of his rule (given that he was originally just an army officer) by having statues, murals, and mosaics installed all over Iran celebrating Shahnameh and Ferdowsi. He also sponsored a number of films based on incidents from the epic (Soviet cinema, incidentally, had a significant impact on early Ira­nian film).30 We are, then, looking at a text with dif­fer­ent appropriations and interpretations that resonated over a broad area encompassing Central Asia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, as well as Persia. Both Khlebnikov and Lahuti used this story of Kaveh in their propagandistic writings, Khlebnikov principally in the poem “Kaveh the Blacksmith” (“Kavė-­kuznets”), which he published in Krasnyi Iran on May 15, 1921.31 His choice to emphasize Kaveh’s role as a blacksmith, one of the rare examples of a lower-­class hero in Ferdowsi’s huge epic, provides a happy confluence of the Persianate literary tradition and Bolshevik rhe­toric, enabling a central narrative of the Persianate tradition to be co-­opted in the ser­v ice of a new, Eurasian revolutionary culture. The blacksmith was a major revolutionary symbol of the early Soviet years and a stock figure in posters of the time; in fact, allegedly it was originally commissioned by his friend M. V. Dobrokosky for an agitational placard.32 Moreover, Kaveh’s name was often rendered in Soviet texts as Kova, and the words kovka and kovat’, having to do with forging, ­were central to Soviet rhe­toric about the new man. But the poem follows the traditional story of Kaveh only marginally, as can be seen in the text:

Кавэ-­кузнец

Kaveh the Blacksmith

Был сумрак сер и заспан.

­There was a gray twilight and the air hung heavy. The bellows breathed hastily, Above a heap of gray dust It snorted wheezily in the throat. Like midwives Over a crying baby, The blacksmiths stood by the body of the half naked,

Меха дышали наспех, Над грудой серой пепла Храпели горлом хрипло. Как бабки повивальные Над плачущим младенцем, Стояли кузнецы у тела полуголого,

Revolutionary Poetry and the Persianate Tradition 

Краснея полотенцем. В гнездо их наковальни, Багровое жилище, Клещи носили пищу—­ Расплавленное олово. Свирепые, багряные Клещи, зрачками оловянные, Сквозь сумрак проблистав, Как воль других устав. Они, как полумесяц, блестят на небеси, Змеей из серы вынырнув удушливого чада,

Reddening with a towel. To the nest of their anvil, The crimson abode, The tongs brought food— Molten tin. Ferocious, crimson The tongs, like tin eyes, Shining through the murk, Like the ­will of other laws. They, like a crescent moon, shine in the heavens, Having pulled out the suffocating offspring like a serpent from brimstone, Купают в красном пламени Bathe in a red flame the tear-­stained заплаканное чадо progeny И сквозь чертеж неясной морды And through the sketch of an indistinct face The dev­ils flash with at times Блеснут багровыми порой crimson eyes. очами черта. Гнездо ночных движений, The nest of night movements, Железной кровью мытое, Washed in iron blood, Из черных теней свитое, Woven of black shadows, Склонившись к углям падшим, Leaning down to the fallen coals, Как колокольчик, бьется Like a small bell, writhes железных пений плачем. At the crying of the iron singing. And ­those crazed tongs И те клещи свирепые Труда заре поют, Sing to the dawn of ­labor, И где, верны косым очам, And where, true to the slanted eyes, Проворных теней плети The whips of nimble shadows Ложились по плечам, Are laid on the shoulders, Как тень багровой сети, Like the shadow of the crimson net,

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Где красный стан с рожденья бедных Скрывал малиновый передник Узором пестрого Востока, А перезвоны молотков—­ у детских уст свисток—­ Жестокие клещи, Багровые, как очи, Ночной закал свободы и обжиг—­ Так обнародовали: “Мы, Труд Первый и прочее и прочее . . .”

First Steps, 1919–1930

Where the red host since the birth of the poor Hid the raspberry red apron With a design of the variegated East, And the chimes of the ­little hammers—on the ­children’s lips A whistle— The cruel tongs, Crimson, like the eyes, A nighttime tempering of freedom and kilning— Thus they promulgated: We, ­Labor the First, and so on and so on . . .”

Clearly, in this poem Khlebnikov has left out a ­great deal of the Kaveh story as it appears in Shahnameh—­two of its central characters, Zahhak and Fereydun, for openers. Every­t hing that happens a­ fter Kaveh hoists the banner has been excised. Of course, the specific detail of the Kaveh story was not essential to the postwar Khlebnikov, who depicted the world with such broad strokes. But ­there is another shift to be seen ­here. He essentially reprogrammed what in the epic was a highly nationalistic story—­one where the ­people unite in an access of patriotic fervor to drive out a foreign usurper and restore the preexisting feudal order and legitimate line of succession— to a story of proletarian revolution, using the blacksmith and his ­labor as a revolutionary emblem, an orientation that is brought out with Khlebnikov’s repeated use of versions of the color red. It might seem that Khlebnikov’s poem has, besides its title, l­ittle to do with Ferdowsi’s epic, especially since the key figures of Zahhak and Fereydun have been omitted. In the Shahnameh original, the blacksmith is less a worker than a member of the privileged classes; his sons, who appear in ­later sections, are knights. The somewhat scant use of the Kaveh story in Khlebnikov’s poem raises the question of ­whether he derived the general plot of “Kaveh the Black-

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smith” from Ferdowsi directly. Though that section of Shahnameh was available in several Rus­sian translations and retellings, it is quite pos­si­ble that Khlebnikov had not read them but based the poem on what colleagues told him of it or that he picked the story up from his newspaper Krasnyi Iran, which published material on Kaveh.33 Members of the indigenous revolutionary movement in Persia had ­adopted Kaveh as their emblematic hero: his image was blazoned on their banner and their flags, and his portrait adorned their offices, their stamps, and their letterhead. And they sang of him in their revolutionary marches. In t­ hese repre­sen­ta­tions, in his right hand, Kaveh held aloft his leather apron as a banner, and, with his left, he was leaning on a blacksmith’s hammer.34 Khlebnikov’s poem was originally written for a Persian poster of Kaveh, but was rejected as too complex and obscure for mass agitation and ­after some arm-­twisting was published in the newspaper instead.35 However much the poem may have been based on a story from Shahnameh, or not, clearly, it is not just about the l­abor of a blacksmith as an emblem of communist revolution. Ostensibly, it anticipates Stalin’s stipulation that lit­ er­a­ture be “proletarian in content [the blacksmith forging revolution in his workplace], national in form [a Persian epic plot is repurposed].” But the blacksmith is not simply a proletarian. Khlebnikov’s text provides a series of figures for him as he forges on the anvil: the midwife bringing forth a child, the bird feeding its fledglings. The poem also makes vague gestures ­toward incorporating the legendary and super­natural aspects of the Shahnameh: “like a serpent from brimstone.” Its meta­phorical imagery about producing (a child, food) essentially stands in apposition to the central gesture of the blacksmith: “Ferocious, crimson / tongs, like tin, eyes / shining through the murk [sumrak] like the w ­ ill of other laws [ustav]” “bring forth the tear-­stained progeny.” The “laws” could be seen as conventional rules of composition, which both Khlebnikov, like Hikmet, Shklovsky, and many ­others in the avant-­garde, sought to confound, but also the laws of the old ruling classes, or of the despot Zahhak in par­tic­u­lar. ­Later in the poem ­t hese same “ferocious tongs” “sing to the dawn of ­labor” and Kaveh’s “crimson apron conceals the red host [stan] of ­t hose who have been poor from birth” with the pattern of a variegated East.” It continues, “The brutal tongs, crimson like the eyes / The nighttime tempering of freedom and kilning.” In other words, the work of the blacksmith is likened to that of the writer who with his

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“ferocious tongs,” identified with the pupils of his eyes, is bringing forth the message for the poor and oppressed. It is hard to see the outlines of revolution in the smoke and heat of the forge, but the poet-­producer is able to wrest a “progeny” from his anvil. With his devil-­like eyes, the creative person is possessed. But it is not the lips of the poet that produce the creation, as is conventional, but rather his fiery eyes. This is a version of the Romantic view of the poet-­visionary married to Bolshevik imagery: forging and producing, commonplaces of Bolshevik rhe­toric, are identified with the act of poetic creation. ­There is also an intimation that the something new being born is the “new culture.” The two crucial words in Khlebnikov’s account of the poet and his product—­chado, or child, for the progeny and oko for the eyes that create it—­are archaic, and even biblical (as is also nebesi, or heavens). This gives the creative pro­cess a semireligious aura that is reinforced when the blacksmith’s work is likened to church chimes (kolokol’chik, perezvony). “Kaveh the Blacksmith,” then, is about the agitational work of the revolutionary poet: the poet-­“ blacksmith” as an afflatus of revolution. He stands for the proletarian revolutionary, who gives voice to the “host” of the poor and oppressed who are literally ­behind his apron, and following the ­g reat banner. For them he guides the “ferocious” tongs; two eyes, two tongs, together create, as it ­were, on the anvil of revolution. At the end the verse proclaims the hegemony of ­labor (Trud Pervyi), in a formulation reminiscent of the way tsars are named in Rus­sian, such as Peter the First (Petr Pervyi), though the casual “so on and so on” at the end somewhat undermines the triumphal tone, suggesting a certain nonchalance, or a weariness following the effort to produce the “offspring,” or a weariness with proclamatory standard Soviet rhe­toric (signs of the fundamental ambiguity?).36 The poem in effect addresses, or perhaps elides by collapsing it, the distinction between blacksmith and impassioned revolutionary poet, thus minimizing the central prob­lem confronting intellectuals in the postrevolutionary years: their role in a culture that privileges workers, who work with their hands. Significantly, the hand, per se, is absent from the poem. Instead, the instruments of creation, the tongs, are directly aligned with the eyes. “Kavė-­kuznets” is not written in the trans-­sense language for which Khlebnikov is most known, but nor is it straight agitational verse. In fact, the poem is not straightforward at all. Several of the words used have two pos­ si­ble meanings: “cherta / chërta” (outline / of the dev­il); “stan,” which can

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mean both the torso and the military host; and “ustav,” which can be both a ­ ese polypast participle of the verb “to tire” and a word for regulations. Th semic words make multiple meanings pos­si­ble and render absolute interpretation elusive. In the blacksmith’s forge, with its suffocating smoke, the ­contours (cherty) are unclear. The poem’s elevated style, the idiosyncratic, dated syntax, and the use of biblical language are reminiscent of the eighteenth-­century solemn ode, which would customarily pay tribute to the monarch—­“Trud Pervyi” (­Labor the First). This use of a capitalized noun (“Trud”) is an example of Khlebnikov’s proclivity in this ­later phase for using impersonal, collective, or transnational categories of ­humans, but at the same time the ­labor of the creative individual is elevated in status by this capitalization. Kaveh is, rather than a version of the specific Kaveh of Shahnameh, an epic worker-­cum-­individual-­ creator, a combination indicative of the contradictory nature of Khlebnikov’s own position. The intensely personal and even solipsistic imagery of the early Khlebnikov has shifted to the transpersonal, but he still privileges its antonym, the idiosyncratic avant-­gardist creator. This theme of the revolutionary poet as both afflatus and supercreator is in effect further developed in a ­later poem by Khlebnikov, “The Ispahan Camel” (“Ispaganskii verbliud”), also known as “With a Copper Womb” (“Sutroboi mednoiu”)—­note once again the meta­phor of giving birth, h ­ ere in potential. This poem is a semi-­sequel to “Kaveh the Blacksmith” and was written on June 5, 1921, but not accepted for publication in Krasnyi Iran. I am calling this a semi-­sequel b ­ ecause in it the purview for broadcasting the revolutionary message has been expanded, to become more internationalist.37 At the center of the poem is an inkwell in the shape of a camel that sits on the desk of Khlebnikov’s propagandist friend in Persia, Rudolf Abich (Rudol’f Abikh). Its “load” is the ink itself, but the greater context is the Silk Route of old, or more generally Eurasia. The Ispahan (Ispagan) in the title is a version of an e­ arlier rendering of Isfahan, in ancient times the capital of Persia. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Shah Abbas I effectively rerouted the Silk Road through Isfahan so that his empire would enjoy a trading mono­ poly. The camel, iconically associated with the Silk Road, is h ­ ere not a nomad-­ like meanderer, but a traverser of this vast Eurasian terrain, a carrier of goods along the Silk Road that made pos­si­ble commerce in both material and cultural goods between the many principalities and dominions on its route.

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As in the speeches at Baku, in this poem ­there are references to ­earlier ­pre­ce­dents for the cause of Eurasian unity, the Mongol leaders (Genghis Khan, Batu) who, though excessively violent, ­were in fact enablers for the Silk Road by conquering and disbanding the many principalities that, with their borders and customs’ barriers, impeded commerce (the Mongol conquest is also hinted at in “Kavė-­kuznets” in the allusions to “whips” and “slanted eyes”).

С утробой медною

With a Copper Womb

Верблюд, Тебя ваял потомок Чингисхана.

The camel, You ­were sculpted by an heir to Genghis Khan. In the white deserts, with a rustling of the dry papers, Of the writing desk You are carry­ing a load of sharp thought— Did the blacksmith by chance forget to give a muzzle?— ­There, where the ringing of ink streams, To the banks of lakes with ink w ­ ater, Beneath the tree from the time of Batu with a stack of its branches, Hanging down onto the eyes, onto the brow of the writer, The hair of the writer like a ­family of fledglings, Who is more ancient than Galile Which established limits to the highroads and corners. You are bearing equality, like a load,

В пустынях белых, с шелестом сухих бумаг, Письменного стола Колючей мысли вьюк несешь—­ Кузнец случайно ли забыл дать удила?—­ Туда, где звон чернильных струй, На берега озер черниловодных, Под деревом времен Батыя, копной его ветвей, Нависших на глаза, на лоб писателя, Семьей птенцов гнезда волос писателя, Кто древней Галиле Дал грани большаков и угол. Проносишь равенство, как вьюк,

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Несешься вскачь, остановивши время Над самой пропастью письменного стола,—­ Где страшно заглянуть, Чтоб звон чернильных струй, Чей водопровод—­ Дыхание песчаных вьюг, Дал равенство костру И умному огню в глазах Холодного отца чернильных рек, Откуда те бежали спешным стадом, И пламени зеркальному чтеца, Ч разум почерк напевал, Как медную пластину—­губ Шаляпина Толпою управлявший голос. Ты, мясо медное с сухою кожей В узорном чучеле веселых жен, По скатерти стола задумчивый прохожий,—­ Ты тенью странной окружен. В переселенье душ ты был, Быть может, раньше—­нож. Теперь неси в сердцах песчаных Из мысли нож! Люди открытий, Люди отплытий, Режьте в Реште

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You are moving at a gallop, having s­ topped time At the very abyss of the writing desk— Where it is terrifying to look, So that the ring of the ink streams, Whose ­water pipe— The breath of sand blizzards, Has given equality to the bonfire And to the wise fire in the eyes Of the cold ­father of the ink streams, From which they fled like a herd in a hurry, And to the mirror flame of the reader, Of whose reason the handwriting sang, Like a copper plate—of Chaliapin’s lips Directing the voice like a host. You, copper flesh with dry skin In a patterned scarecrow of merry wives, A passerby over the table­cloth of the desk, lost in thought,— You, surrounded by a strange shadow. In the transmigration of souls you w ­ ere perhaps previously a knife. Now bear in the sandy hearts A knife [made] of thoughts! ­People of discoveries, ­People of embarkations, Cut in Resht

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Нити событий. Летевший Древний германский орел, Утративший Ха, Ищет его В украинском «разве», В колосе ржи. Шагай Через пустыню Азии, Где блещет призрак Аза, Звоном зовет сухие рассудки.

The threads of events. Flying The ancient German ea­gle, Which has lost its kha, Searches for it In the Ukrainian “­really?” In an ear of rye. Stride forth Over the desert of Asia, Where the specter of I shines, And with a peal summons dry intellects.

II

II

Раньше из Ганга священную воду В шкурах овечьих верблюды носили, Чтоб брызнуть по водам свинцовым на Волге, реке дикарей Этот, из меди верблюд, Чернильные струи от Волги до Ганга Нести обречен.

Before from the Ganges the sacred w ­ ater Was carried by camels in sheepskins, To spray the leaden ­waters on the Volga, river of wild men

Не расплещи же, Путник пустыни стола, Бочонок с чернилами!

This, camel [made of] copper, Is fated to bear Ink streams from the Volga to the Ganges. ­Don’t spill, Traveler of the desert of the desk, The ­little barrel with ink.

In this poem the route of the “camel” is characterized as stretching from Isfahan to the Ganges, and indeed the Ganges Delta was an end point of the southwestern route of the Silk Road. The Road also passes through Galilee, likewise mentioned in the poem, which thereby, with Galilee’s Christian associations and also the mention of the transmigration of souls, creates a poly-

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theistic, cosmopolitan world typical of Khlebnikov’s recent work. In olden times, the poem suggests, sacred ­water was carried from the Ganges to the Volga, an implicit reference perhaps to the way the Sanskrit texts migrated westward ­under the Mughals. Khlebnikov also used this figure in his pre-­ Baku text “Yasir” (“Esir,” 1918–1919), where he wrote of how “­every year the camels bring the sacred ­waters of the Ganges in order for them to blend.” A “marriage of the two rivers” is celebrated and “at the hand of a [cult] priest [zhrets] the ­water of the Ganges is poured from the heavy, long-­necked pitcher into the murky ­waters of the Volga—­the Northern bride!”38 Now, effectively, the sacred words are being carried, thanks to this inkwell, in a reverse direction. In other words, this poem sings the song of Baku. The Silk Road of old with its commerce in goods is an analog to the new networks by which the message of the Revolution is spread to Asia. In “The Ispahan Camel” it comes from Germany, the Abich ­family’s original native land, but also the homeland of Marx and Engels, and proceeds through Ukraine and Rus­sia to Asia. Khlebnikov also invokes Resht, the Persian town where, thanks to the arrival of the Soviet expeditionary forces, it became pos­ si­ble on June 4, 1921, to found the Northern Persian anti-­British revolutionary government headed by Kuchik-­Khan (clearly this poem predates the end of the collaboration with Kuchik).39 “Rezh’te v Reshte” (cut in Resht), the poem declares, effectively meaning sharpen your pens in Resht and spread the word from t­ here throughout the vast Asian terrain (in the early postrevolutionary years, printing was often done not by typesetting but by cutting stencils). But by figuring in an incantatory rhyming pair, Resht, a city with multiple historical referents, loses some of its specificity, becoming a transhistorical place. The central figure of the poem is writing by dipping the pen (rendered sharper, more “koliuchii,” by a knife) into the inkwell, the font. The knife, one of the dominant motifs in the poem, also informs the notion that “the camel” is transporting inflammatory, subversive ideas (koliuchie mysli), literally ideas that are sharp, prickly, or thorny. Cutting suggests preparing a pen so that its sharp point can dig into the page, impressing on it the revolutionary message, but also the slashing of a sabre or other weapon in military or revolutionary combat (such as the short-­lived victory of Stenka Razin in Resht). This figure is replicated in apposition for the other arts: cut into the linoleum to make a poster (as his friend Dobrokosky did in his propagandistic work) / sculpt—­vaiat’—­also using a knife / imprint the ­great Chaliapin’s

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voice on the copper master disk / imprint a text on a page.40 Khlebnikov in his own commentary on this poem wrote: “The handwriting of the author attunes [nastraivaet] the reader to the same number of vibrations. The task of transferring the load [gruz] of the numbers from one soul to the other fell to the lot of one Ispahan camel, when he swapped the sands of the desert for the plane of the desk, living flesh for copper, . . . ​ / And so, being at com[rade] Abich’s, the camel is condemned to carry­ing on his back the equality of the fundamental spiritual sound in the soul of the writer and the soul of the reader.” 41 As in “Kaveh the Blacksmith,” then, Khlebnikov blurs the distinction between sound and writing, referring to the ring (zvon) of the flowing ink; the message carried to the p ­ eople is like the vibrations of a gramophone rec­ord of Chaliapin, associated with the inkwell by the mutual feature copper (mednyi); early master disks ­were often plated with copper, though mednyi figuratively can also mean “brazen,” a meaning used by Mayakovsky in his poem “The Fourth International,” discussed in Chapter 1. A second theme in “Ispaganskii verbliud” is one of rejuvenation, largely represented through the flowing of “ink” into the sterile desert, its lakes and river system, which brings the promise of renewal for the East, a reversal of the ­great Asian decline, when it was reduced from its ancient glory to the vast plains of sand and dust that so often figure in Western accounts of it. By the conventions of poetry, inspiration is often represented by w ­ ater imagery—­ fountains, bubbling brooks, waterfalls; h ­ ere it is updated as the pipelines of an irrigation system. The network conveying the w ­ ater / ink to a parched Asia affords a Silk Road–­like commerce in revivifying ideas. The “transmigration of souls” becomes a “transmigration” of ideas. The Silk Road was in a sense a precursor of the ­great rail routes radiating out from Eu­rope to Asia and Africa that ­were impor­tant ­factors in imperialist design for cap­i­tal­ist expansion—­consider Germany’s proj­ect for a Berlin-­ to-­Baghdad railway. Pavlovich in a book of 1913 condemned the vari­ous imperialist schemes to appropriate vast stretches of territory by building railways (such as from Cairo to Cape Town), thereby opening up large areas for extracting oil and other forms of economic exploitation, a position he reiterated at Baku.42 Though t­ hese schemes had been denounced as imperialist, Khlebnikov was particularly taken by that part of Pavlovich’s speech. An accoutrement of his vision of a transnational ­union was a cult of railways, whose routes cut across territory without regard to terrain or borders. At a

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meeting (­after Baku) in the Communist Club of Kharkov he had shocked his audience by proposing a railway through the Himalayas to India, which would have facilitated a Russo-­Indian Union.43 Khlebnikov, then, saw cultural-­cum-­ideological incorporation of ­people from the vast territory of Asia as analogous to the economic incorporation facilitated by rail routes. But, as this book seeks to show, the analogy at the level of culture was problematical. Language and culture, vehicles of ideology, are less easily “ported” than material goods. In Khlebnikov’s utopistic articulation of the vast cultural network in “The Ispahan Camel” the Persianate and Sanskrit worlds flow together, but the direction of the flow is determined from the new “Ispahan,” figuratively but ­ ill purvey a not literally, the starting point of the post-­Baku network that w “new culture.” Th ­ ese poems, and other writings of this period, foreground networks of impersonal connection—­irrigation systems, railways, rivers—­not ­human networks. Part One of “The Ispahan Camel” ends with an exhortation to the camel to “stride forth” (shagai). In the poem it is to “stride” across the desert of Asia, where the ghost of” I” (­here the biblical az) shines, and “dry intellects” are summoned with a “[bell] peal.” Soviet slogans and propagandistic songs of the time urged the p ­ eople to “stride forward.” That is hardly the gait of a plodding camel, yet ­earlier in the poem Khlebnikov had said it was proceeding “at a gallop” (Nesesh’sia vskach’). This call for an accelerated pace is typical of the rhe­toric both of the Bolsheviks and of the avant-­garde (consider Marinetti’s foundational manifesto of Futurism). ­Toward the end of the poem Khlebnikov invokes “­people [who make] discoveries, / ­People who embark” (Liudi otkrytii,  / Liudi otplytii)—­d iscoverers and seafarers, travelers to the new. This spirit of the “discoverers” is what must be imprinted in Resht, the promise of the avant-­garde, a promise of renewal through daring discovery, and embarking into uncharted territory.44 This is a semi-­reprise of a favorite, quasi-­Marxist contrast that Khlebnikov drew in some prerevolutionary writings between the “inventor / explorers” and the “investor / exploiters.” 45 The pan-­European avant-­garde writers often likened themselves to Columbus, or to a navigator of e­ arlier times; a favorite expression that came from an article by Le Corbusier of 1921 (reproduced in Soviet and German architectural journals) was “rounding the cape,” spelled out as “rounding Cape Horne” in the En­glish translation. This was an image that inspired Hannes Meyer and

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Mosei Ginzburg in their 1920s articles about how the new architecture might transcend national bound­aries.46 In “The Ispahan Camel,” too, the mission of Baku is melded with that of the avant-­garde visionary like Malevich, who in his writings called for a Promethean-­like gesture to “journey” beyond the known, beyond the “horizon.” In Khlebnikov’s poem epistemological adventurism is married to the promise of revolution; the vistas are boundless, like the vast expanses of Eurasia. “Galilee” is a place-­name but also hints at Galileo—­Galilei in Rus­sian. In this poem Galileo, widely acknowledged as the founder of modern science, sets the border (gran’)—­the limit—in the days of the Silk Road. But to the Rus­sian avant-­garde, his scientific findings had been superseded in the theories of Einstein and the Rus­sian mathematician Nikolai Lobachevsky. As if in apposition, the blacksmith, with a very dif­fer­ent role from the one in which he was cast in “Kaveh the Blacksmith,” has perhaps forgotten (the narrator asks) “to provide a bit,” in other words to rein in the camel, to hinder the spread of the subversive, new ideas—­but also to rein in the imagination, which would forestall voyages beyond the known to the radically new. The g­ reat conquerors have not been forgotten by Khlebnikov. As in the speeches at Baku, in this poem ­there are references to ­those ­earlier pre­ce­dents for the cause of Eurasian unity, the Mongols, who though excessively violent ­were enablers for the Silk Road. In fact, the third line of this poem, in addressing the inkwell, proclaims, “You w ­ ere sculpted by an heir to Genghis Khan.”: the camel, and hence the entire route he traverses with his “load,” has been ­shaped by a creative person. Genghis Khan’s revolution, the im­ mense geopo­liti­cal transformation that he and his hordes brought about, is now in a new iteration. Its purview has become ideology and culture, associated in other referents in the poem with avant-­gardism. The new Revolution has appropriated the energy and vitality of a Genghis Khan, or of a Hylaean (the Asiatic name for the Rus­sian Futurist group to which Khlebnikov belonged before the Revolution). Khlebnikov in composing “Kaveh the Blacksmith,” then, took what Moretti would call a “local story” and repurposed it to serve revolutionary propaganda aims. He incorporated Soviet “content” in what Moretti would call local “materials”—or form. But in the “smoke” that ­rose from the blacksmith’s creative anvil, as it ­were, the contours of the two ­were not distinct. With “The Ispagan Camel,” he also sought to recenter the dynamic of Soviet cultural

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diffusion, orienting it away from its dominant route westward, t­oward the East. Lahuti was to take a dif­fer­ent route, and his “camel” would purvey a “load” from his native, Persian tradition north-­eastward, to the land of the Bolsheviks.

Lahuti Khlebnikov did not live long a­ fter his Persian revolutionary adventures. He became seriously ill ­after he returned to Rus­sia, and in 1922 he died. By contrast, Lahuti died thirty-­five years ­later, in 1957. No eccentric and no avant-­ gardist, he had in the interim become incorporated in Soviet lit­er­a­ture as an establishment figure, a role neither Khlebnikov nor Hikmet ever enjoyed. His poetry, unlike Khlebnikov’s, did not pretend to aesthetic avant-­gardism, but was hailed in official criticism of the 1930s as a model for how Stalin’s 1925 dictum could be implemented in practice. Yet the lionization of Lahuti then did not last. The story of his c­ areer illustrates the extent to which “form” is not abstract or neutral (not a shell or vessel), but has its own interpretive frames and imputed history that is subject to contestation. Lahuti, a half Kurd on his ­mother’s side, had been a fervent Persian nationalist and opposed to the Pahlavi regime’s subservience to foreign occupiers, but also a supporter of the downtrodden.47 In 1909 he joined the gendarmerie in Tabriz, a military corps set up in part as a force to ­counter the British incursions into Persia, and ­rose to the rank of major. But he had to flee to Turkey from Persia on several occasions, generally to Istanbul, in order to avoid arrest or a death sentence for his activism. In t­ hose years, Istanbul was a cosmopolitan city and full of refugees from oppressive Muslim regimes. While ­there, ­toward the ­middle of 1921, Lahuti cofounded Pars, a short-­lived bilingual journal in French and Persian, to which André Gide subscribed for a time.48 In 1921 Lahuti was inspired by the revolution in Gilan and crossed the border back into Persia to join the fray. By the time he arrived, the rebel government had been routed in Gilan, but on February 2, 1922, he became head of a short-­lived uprising in Tabriz spearheaded by the gendarmerie, who had revolted when ordered to join Persian Cossack units who favored the anti-­ Soviet Whites. Teheran sent forces to support the Cossacks, and ­after a bloody ­battle the uprising was crushed. Many ­were executed, but Lahuti, a price on

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his head, together with a large contingent of his comrades, both gendarmes and civilian nationalists, managed to escape, fleeing in 1923 on ­horse­back across the frontier into Soviet Azerbaijan, the only ­v iable escape route.49 Other members of his party w ­ ere pardoned by Persia, but he was not, and he continued on to Moscow, where the director of KUTV, Grigory Broido, sponsored his ac­cep­tance into the university, which he attended from 1924 to 1925.50 In that environment Lahuti’s anti-­i mperialist convictions and concern for the poor morphed into a commitment to communism, and he joined the Party in 1924.51 By the 1930s he had been elevated to the Soviet literary elite. Already while at KUTV, Lahuti became incorporated in the effort at establishing a Soviet lit­er­a­ture of the national minorities. He worked in the ­ eoples of the USSR, first as a compositor, Central Publishing House of the P but was soon promoted to literary worker. He also began to publish his own work. In 1923 an article by him on the Kurds appeared in Pavlovich’s new journal Novyi Vostok, in which he cites a good deal of poetry, including by Saadi and some Kurdish poets.52 At KUTV, that ­great generator of transnational networks, Lahuti became a friend of Hikmet. But though friends, they w ­ ere to adopt radically dif­fer­ent approaches to writing revolutionary verse. While Hikmet chose to abandon the Turkish poetic tradition and produced free-­form verse that was both playful and declarative, Lahuti’s poetry from his Soviet years was more traditional. Hikmet advised him to try f­ ree verse for his revolutionary poetry, but he found it alien.53 As he explained in a Literaturnaia gazeta article of 1937, “My Creative Path” (“Moi tvorcheskii put’ ”), from early on, even before he became a communist, he had seen the potential of using traditional Persian forms and poetic motifs for agitational verse, but in his pre-­Soviet verse he had largely used it in the nationalist, anti-­imperialist cause.54 One should not assume, however, that Lahuti’s poetry was derivative or a mere imitation of traditional Persian poetry geared to propagandistic goals. Often in his early Soviet period his appropriation of classical tropes was parodic, and this shift of mode enabled him, in terms of Bakhtin’s formulation cited ­earlier, to challenge the “set of distinctive values and presuppositions” of classical Persian verse’s ideological baggage. In other words, “form,” or more specifically the traditional repertoire of conventions, can become central to a poem’s “content.”55

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Lahuti began his Soviet poetic c­ areer in his KUTV days with his “Ode to the Kremlin” (“Qasidai Kremel,” in Rus­sian “Kreml’,” 1923), one of countless examples where he repurposed examples from the classical Persian tradition for revolutionary agitational poetry.56 “The Kremlin” was written, as he put it, in the meter of an elegy of the twelfth c­ entury.57 More precisely, it was in the meter and rhyme of the famous qasida by the poet Khāqāni of the twelfth c­ entury, “The Ruins at Medain,” dedicated to the Arab conquest of Ctesiphon, the capital city of the Sassanian Empire, and to the consequent tragic destruction of its c­ astle, a symbolic center.58 The Moscow Kremlin, counterpart to the fortress in Lahuti’s reworking, was the symbolic center of the Soviet Union and home of its government, so this poem was a paean to Soviet power. In composing it, he appropriated both the Persian national imaginary and the national poetic form, thereby making its propagandistic message more accessible to t­ hose brought up with the Persianate tradition. But Lahuti transposed into the language of communist internationalism a poem that was fiercely nationalist in tenor. As he explained in an account of 1937, “My aim was to break the nationalist influence of Khāqāni’s poem showing who ­really built ­castles and who ­were their real masters.” He emphasized not only the ele­ment of class in the story of the ­castle’s construction but also the cosmopolitan character of the workforce, pointing out that it was built not by Persians but “by 800 workers and a few hundred engineers from China and other countries.” The elegy, he also stressed, had resonance beyond Persia and was “well known by Turks, Arabs and all the East.”59 ­After graduating from KUTV, however, Lahuti became increasingly immersed in po­liti­cal and bureaucratic work and in the late 1920s wrote less poetry. Students at KUTV, on finishing their studies, w ­ ere assigned by the Comintern or the Party generally for work in their home country, but L ­ ahuti could not return to his, and in 1925 he was sent to Dushanbe (called Stalinabad from 1929 to 1961), the capital of Tajikistan, where the language is a version of his native Farsi.60 ­There he headed a number of Republican Party and government bodies, principally in education and culture.61 When Lahuti arrived in 1925, Tajikistan had only rudimentary provisions for its culture, the traditional centers of Tajik culture such as Bukhara and Samarkand having been apportioned to Uzbekistan when Tajikistan became an autonomous territory within the new republic of Uzbekistan in 1924, and a

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separate republic in 1929. The first printing press for the capital came in 1924, and the first publishing ­house in 1925. Lahuti worked tirelessly to overcome the deficiencies, at one point even transporting a printing press to Dushanbe on his back.62 A dedicated translator of Soviet material, he rendered the Soviet anthem into Tajik and ­later, in the 1930s, composed the Tajik national anthem.63 During the 1930s, Lahuti wrote a g­ reat deal of poetry, and much of it was published by central presses and periodicals in Rus­sian translation, generally by his wife, Cecilia Banu, a Persia specialist. That de­cade saw the height of Lahuti’s poetic ­career, when Soviet literary officialdom began in earnest to work on the creation of a Soviet lit­er­a­ture from the ethnic minorities. Poetry was the dominant medium of the Persianate tradition, and ­those in authority in lit­er­a­ture w ­ ere anxious to raise the literary level of indigenous lit­er­at­ ure for an increasingly literate population.64 Lahuti, who was steeped in the Farsi written tradition, became Tajikistan’s leading poet of the 1930s, while Sadriddin Aini (pen name of Sadriddin Saidmurodzoda, 1878–1954), a friend and the author of the first Tajik novel, became the leading Tajik writer of Soviet prose (he also wrote poetry and sometimes wrote in Uzbek). Lahuti was together with Aini very active in reforming both education and Tajik lit­er­a­ture. Before the Revolution t­ here had been a g­ reat difference between the literary language and spoken Tajik, and Aini took upon himself the task of linguistic reform, abolishing high Tajik from its lit­er­a­ture, with its elaborate phraseology and obsolete vocabulary, and, rather as Atatürk had done, throwing out Arabisms, archaisms, and dialecticisms, and favoring “international” equivalents (largely imported from Rus­sian). The two writers ­were also opposed to the stance of the proletarian writers’ group RAPP (Rus­ sian Association of Proletarian Writers) which by the end of the 1920s had come to dominate all of Soviet lit­er­a­ture. The militant RAPP leaders espoused a somewhat conservative and highly Russo-­centric aesthetic, citing as their literary models the g­ reat realists of the nineteenth c­ entury, and Tolstoy in par­tic­u­lar (as had Pavlovich at Baku). Their Central Asian counter­parts regarded the Persianate tradition as feudal and retrograde. Fortunately for Lahuti, in 1931–1932 t­ here was a general re­orientation of Soviet lit­er­a­ture away from the sectarianism and parochialism of RAPP, and that organ­ization was abolished as part of the Central Committee decree of 1932 that founded the Writers’ Union. Lahuti’s conception of literary inter-

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nationalism presented a rival map that was potentially at odds with the dominant, Russo-­Euro-­centric map of Soviet literary internationalism, but this was not a prob­lem initially. His internationalist orientation favored the transnational Persianate tradition as a source for a new Tajik lit­er­a­ture, effectively rather than the Eu­ro­pean or narrowly Rus­sian (a position he also espoused in his speeches to the First Congress of the Writers’ Union of 1934 and to the Paris Congress of 1935).65 In the early thirties ­there was an officially sponsored effort to minimize the gap between Soviet Rus­sian lit­er­a­ture and that of its ethnic minorities. Th ­ ese two f­ actors cleared the way for the enhanced status the two writers enjoyed during the 1930s. A milestone in this development was the Tadzhikskii sbornik (Tajik anthology, 1933), a collection of Tajik works in Rus­sian translation—­primarily by Lahuti and Aini; Solomon Vel’tman, the noted commentator on colonialist lit­er­a­ture from Novyi Vostok, served as the collection’s editor. Given Lahuti’s public success, one is bound to ask to what extent he functioned in this de­cade as an afflatus of Stalinism. Potentially, a prime example of this would be his 1932 poem “The Gardener” (“Bāḡbān”), which appeared in Tadzhikskii sbornik in Rus­sian translation as “To the Leader. To the Comrade. To Stalin” (“Vozhdu. Tovarishchu. Stalinu”). In this poem Stalin is likened to a “wise” old gardener who lovingly tends his vines, bringing such prosperity to the “happy ­people” that they sing a “triumphant hymn” to him. But then one day a “fervent” young man, to his horror, happens to see the gardener cut out one of the vines that was strong and provided support for other vines. He remonstrates with the gardener, who explains that though this vine had been strong and useful in its time, now it had come to hinder the other vines from growing strong by blocking their access to the sun and sucking up the moisture (light and w ­ ater, two major symbols for enlightenment). One cannot see all the harm the recalcitrant vine is causing b ­ ecause much of that is ­under the ground (in case the reader did not get the point, Lahuti added ­here the term “­under the mask,” a mainstay of purge rhe­toric). ­Little shoots keep coming up from this evil plant, but cutting them off is to no avail, so the rapacious vine has to be cut out at its roots. In the final section of the poem Lahuti addresses (implicitly) the Stalin of his title as the “gardener-­Marxist,” who is following Lenin and is the leader of the Leninists. He then enjoins the young to follow the wise gardener’s example and “cut ­ ere in off the diseased branches / and cut down the trunks ruthlessly,” using h

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the Rus­sian translation “bez poshchady,” another commonplace of purge-­ time rhe­toric.66 Even making allowances for the fact that my source is a translation, clearly the probable context for the poem is the exile of Trotsky in 1929 and the suppression of “Trotskyites.” The garden was a favorite theme of classical Persian poetry, a symbol of divine beauty, and the gardener, though rarely mentioned, stood meta­phor­ ically in poems by Jalāl-­a l-­Dīn Rūmī, Hafez, and o ­ thers for the archetypal gardener, God. Also, the ruler Cyrus the ­Great is referred to as the “Good Gardener” of Persia, as ­were his successors. But, though wine flows throughout classical Persian lyric verse, its gardens mostly featured roses or cypress ­ ere also a feature of Stalin’s natrees.67 Vineyards, found less commonly, w tive Georgia. The meta­phor of Stalin as gardener became a common trope of the cult of personality, very possibly derived from this Lahuti source. This skillfully written parable (if one with an odious message) surely contributed to Lahuti’s becoming one of Stalin’s favorite writers; certainly it did not prevent his elevation to the heights of the Soviet literary hierarchy. When in 1933 the Union of Tajik Writers was formed, Lahuti was made its honorary president (Aini the ­actual president), a position he held u ­ ntil 1946.68 Then, when in the same year a commission was formed to “work on questions of foreign lit­er­a­ture” for the forthcoming writers’ congress, Lahuti was appointed as the representative for “the East” and another gradu­ate of KUTV, Hikmet’s friend Ėmi Xiao, for China (see Chapters 6 and 8).69 A major year for Lahuti was 1934, when the First Writers’ Congress was held.70 As all Soviet writers ­were integrated into the one Writers’ Union, they needed representatives from the Asian republics and fastened on Lahuti in par­tic­u­lar, who came to serve as the representative not just of Tajikistan, but of Central Asia generally. Soon he was assuming a leading role in the administration of lit­er­a­ture in the entire Soviet Union: among other positions he occupied, on September 1, 1934, in the aftermath of its congress (in August), he was appointed to the Writers’ Union Presidium and Secretariat.71 Since 1930 he had been living for substantial periods in Moscow, where he was assigned successively larger apartments in the elite House of Government (completed in 1931), though he nominally headed the Tajik Writers’ Union.72 This residence did not prevent him from assuming the role of bard of the collective and state farm cotton growers of Tajikistan. In their name, when he was at the Paris Congress for the Defence of Culture (1935) he presented a robe

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(khalat) to Gide, the erstwhile subscriber to his journal Pars. On his return, he published a long poem, “In Eu­rope” (“V Evrope”), which included a lament for the failure of his native Iran to follow the path of revolution, but was or­ga­nized overall by the binary of the benighted and repressed in the capitalist-­cum-­fascist world as compared with t­ hose thriving in what he called his “native land” (i.e., the Soviet Union).73 Lahuti changed his account of his literary persona in keeping with the times. Gorky, as mentioned in Chapter 1, in his speech to the First Congress of the Writers’ Union in 1934 had emphasized the importance of incorporating in Soviet lit­er­a­ture works of the minorities and the “folklore of the toiling p ­ eople,” holding up as an example the illiterate Daghestani bard Suleiman Stalsky—­“the Homer of the twentieth ­century.”74 And though Lahuti in his own speech to the congress had emphasized the classical Persian tradition, he subsequently began to “recall” that he had become captivated by Shahnameh when he first heard it from wandering bards (skaziteli), that is, implying an identification with popu­lar oral lore rather than the written tradition.75 In the 1930s Lahuti was constantly advanced as an example of the writer who, in the words of the foreword to a 1937 collection of his poems, “combin[ed] in his creative work Bolshevik content, with a distinctive national form,” that is, met the stipulations of Stalin in his 1925 speech at KUTV and the revised version of 1930.76 His verse of the 1930s adheres to this formula but provides its own understanding of “national in form.” The Soviet “socialist” content was predictable: production heroes; Soviet leaders; the GPU (secret police); border guards; the miners of Donbass; the capital Moscow; and so forth. He also frequently included in his poetry, often as its central theme, material drawn from his revolutionary past in Iran—­Gilan, the Tabriz uprising, and martyred comrades.77 For “national form” Lahuti drew on the Persian classical tradition. He ­contrived to interpolate into his treatment of Soviet themes imagery and symbolic motifs from classical Persian poetry, familiar to many Tajiks b ­ ecause of a common Persianate culture—­nightingales, roses, knights, and Persian warriors. Lahuti was not alone in d ­ oing this, but more accomplished and attuned to the subtleties of the tradition. As he observed in his speech to the First Congress of the Writers’ Union in 1934, authors with only a superficial knowledge of the Persian tradition often produced howlers in “mechanically

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transposing its imagery to their own works.” The example he gave was of a poet who in a recent poem had used the nightingale as a trope for a tractor driver harvesting cotton with the sounds of a nightingale ringing in his ears, not realizing that the nightingale traditionally stands, he claimed, for languor and even laziness.78 A second 1934 event that left its mark on Lahuti’s c­ areer, one that occurred ­earlier than the Writers’ Union Congress, was the Soviet cele­brations of the one thousandth anniversary of the birth of Ferdowsi in May. This anniversary was accorded a lot of attention in the Soviet Union, which claimed to outdo most other countries in their cele­brations and reverence for Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh.79 The promotion of that epic gained extra impetus in the mid-1930s when the national epics of the ethnic minorities ­were elevated to the status of models for the Soviet lit­er­a­ture of each major ethnic group or republic (such as Manas for Kirghizia or Shota Rustaveli’s Knight in the ­Panther’s Skin, of the twelfth ­century, for Georgia). Lahuti began to identify his writing with Shahnameh, and liked to point out that it was a beloved text of all Central Asia.80 The anniversary also brought new translations of the poem. Some sections of Shahnameh by the distinguished translator M. L. Lozinskii ­were published in connection with the anniversary; Lozinskii skillfully rendered part of the poem in metric form, but, unfortunately, completed only 5 ­percent of it.81 ­After the anniversary, Lahuti began drawing on Ferdowsi’s epic in his verse with increasing frequency, counting, as he wrote, on the fact that p ­ eople throughout the Persianate world knew it from childhood, and it was popu­lar despite its being one thousand years old.82 ­There are only infrequent invocations of Shahnameh in his verse written in the 1920s when RAPP was so power­ful, but e­ arlier in his c­ areer, in Persia, he had often drawn material from Shahnameh in his verse. For example, he had written the long poem Iran-­ namė, which he represented as an attempt at disabusing the Persians, who had long taken the events of the early, legend-­based sections of the epic for ­ ere the twin historical fact.83 Prominent among his new poetry of the 1930s w poems, explic­itly based on Shahnameh, “Crown” and “Banner” (“Korona i Znamia”), the text of which Lahuti presented to Stalin at a Kremlin reception of December 4, 1935, a high point in his c­ areer. The reception was to honor collective farm workers from Tajikistan and Turkmenistan who had reached rec­ord levels in their cotton production. The poem, written in the

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meter of Shahnameh, comprises two sections: “Crown,” a translation of a passage from the epic, and “Banner” which extends the basic plot of “Kaveh” into modern-­day, cotton-­producing Tajikistan. At its end Lahuti draws a contrast between the world of Shahnameh, where Ira­ni­ans are pitted against the Turanians, and the pre­sent, where ­under another, crimson banner (an implicit contrast to the role of the Kaviani banner) the vari­ous ethnic groups are at peace and ­t here is prosperity for all.84 This was no innocent claim; the Turkic ­peoples of Central Asia w ­ ere at this time claiming priority in Central Asia for their culture. It is difficult to assess Lahuti’s role during the ­Great Purge ­because, given his high office in the Writers’ Union, he would automatically have been expected to endorse some of the repressions, but like most writers he tried to maneuver within the par­ameters of the times. So, for example, he provided one of the letters approving the sentences of Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev (­after their Show Trial of 1936). It was published in the central press u ­ nder the rubric “The Decision of the Proletarian Court Is Our Decision” (“Reshenie proletarskogo suda est’ nashe reshenie”) and condemned a “rotten liberalism” (gniloi liberalism) in writers’ circles and journals.85 He also, on January 30, 1937, presided over a general meeting of Moscow writers called to denounce Karl Radek and other leading Bolsheviks condemned in the second Show Trial (of the “Parallel Anti-­Soviet Trotskyite Bloc”), held on January 23–30.86 That year, the former RAPP leaders, his erstwhile opponents on aesthetic questions, ­were purged. Lahuti led a brigade of writers to Tajikistan for the purpose of cleaning out local vestiges of RAPP and recruiting replacements for them in the republican Writers’ Union.87 But his rec­ord was not all sinister. Several intellectuals, from a variety of ethnic groups, among them Osip Mandelstam’s wife, Nadezhda, have attested to his support when they ­were persecuted in ­t hese dark times. She praises him in her memoirs as a “kindly Persian,” who at the height of the purges in 1937 made strenuous efforts to help them when they had “nothing to live on” and ­were spurned by other officials.88 Lahuti’s ­career was affected further by the so-­called Friendship Campaign of 1935–1938 instituted by Stalin in highly vis­i­ble Kremlin receptions, at which, and ­here in contrast to the ­earlier “Brotherhood of ­Peoples” campaign of 1929–1931, he emphasized the importance of vernacular distinctiveness, but at the same time insisted that this distinctiveness was to be coordinated

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with the idea of Rus­sia as “leader and exemplar of socialism.”89 “National” lit­er­a­ture became a mantra, especially ­a fter a Georgian reception at the Kremlin in March 1936 where traditional folk epics ­were lauded. Central Committee secretaries of the non-­Russian republics began to devote entire speeches to “national” culture and established research institutes dedicated its “unique characteristics.”90 The doctrine of the “­Great Friendship” often meant in practice promoting Eu­ro­pean cultural forms but incorporating in texts as well the authorized “national culture” of a par­tic­u­lar ethnic group or republic.91 Most egregiously, in the late 1930s a favored cultural form for the republics became the absolutely nonindigenous opera. The rationale was, as musicologist Theodore Levin has put it, that “the cultures of non-­Russians living on Soviet territory could pro­gress—in the Socialist sense—­only by assimilation or adoption of Rus­sian or, more broadly, Eu­ro­pean models.”92 Moscow bureaucrats believed they could give the ethnic minorities of Central Asia a jump start in modernization by creating operas, to Soviet officialdom the highest form of ­music, but new operas that would be based on tales from their own culture. Moreover, in a twist on “national in form,” each republic was to have its own “national forms” and its own specific and unique “­peoples’ ” poet, by analogy with Pushkin as the national poet of Rus­sia, but ­there was to be just one for each.93 In consequence, for example, though before the Revolution tales from Shahnameh had been staged as operas in Azerbaijan (another area of Persianate culture) and t­ here had been plays about Kaveh, in the 1930s the Azerbaijanis w ­ ere prohibited from staging them; “their poet” was Nizami, and so ­t here ­were featured productions of operas based on his Leila and Majnun.94 National republics ­were set the task of building an opera ­house and creating a repertoire for them; each republic was to provide at least one all-­sung, large-­ scale opera by the end of the 1930s.95 For the purpose, monophonic Central Asian folk tunes w ­ ere assiduously collected by composers, as they had been in Eu­rope by Eu­ro­pean Romantics the previous c­ entury, but then given updated, ideologically laden texts and thrust into (nonindigenous) polyphonic arrangements. Lahuti participated in this program, and in the late 1930s he wrote the libretto for the second original opera in Tajik, Kaveh the Blacksmith (Kuznets Kova or Kavi-­i ahangar in Tajik), which was based on the Kaveh story from Shahnameh.96 The opera was broadcast over the radio on December 15, 1940,

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and it had its one-­day Moscow premiere at the Bolshoi on April 15, 1941, as part of a dekada (a ten-­day festival) of Tajik culture. It was published in book form the same year. During the dekada, on April 18, the main Tajik theater (the Lahuti State Academic Drama Theater) gave a per­for­mance of Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello, translated into Tajik by Lahuti and Cecilia Banu, which was attended by no less than Stalin, Vyacheslav Molotov, Kliment ­Voroshilov, and Andrei Zhdanov.97 Kaveh the Blacksmith was only presented on the second stage of the Bolshoi, and more fuss was made of Othello, which suggests that the regime favored the Eu­ro­pean classics for the minority ­peoples—­“world lit­er­a­ture”—­rather than indigenous works from the Tajiks’ own classical tradition, the Persianate. Another new opera staged at the ­Lahuti State Academic Drama Theater was the tragedy Rostam and Sohrab, based on the most beloved episode of Shahnameh, a tragic tale in which a ­great warrior hero inadvertently kills his own son in mortal combat, which was adapted for the opera by ir-­Mukhamed Zoda and M. V. Volkenshtein ­(Lahuti had also incorporated the story of Rostam in “Crown”).98 This episode of Rostam’s tragedy had attracted the attention of Sergei Eisenstein ­earlier, in 1933, as Soviet intellectuals ­were preparing to celebrate Ferdowsi’s one thousandth anniversary the following year. He tried to make a screen adaptation of it, but the proj­ect was rejected out of hand by his nemesis Boris Shumiatsky, who headed the Soviet film industry then. However, Eisenstein incorporated ele­ments of his (now no longer extant) plans for the film in two subsequent, and only slightly less abortive, proj­ects, Bezhin Meadow (Bezhin lug, 1937) and The ­Great Ferghana Canal (Bol’shoi ferganskii kanal, 1939).99 Lahuti’s opera Kaveh the Blacksmith was written not in 1933 but in what was already a dif­fer­ent historical moment, a time when “the folk”-­cum-­ popular (narodnoe) was a mantra of the cultural platform. E. Grosheva, in reviewing the production for Sovetskoe iskusstvo in April 1941, emphasizes that the story of Kaveh was “spread by folk bards [skazitelei].” She calls two central characters a “clown and joker” (balagur i vesel’chak), by analogy with popu­lar entertainers (the clown and joker are also heroes in Bakhtin’s writings about carnival from about the same time).100 While Khlebnikov in “Kaveh the Blacksmith” had cut out some of the major characters from the story in Shahnameh, Lahuti, on the contrary, by his own account followed the conventions of oral epic and “allowed [himself] to improvise freely” in the opera, claiming that this improvisation was

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­ ecause he strove “to produce an opera” on a “level worthy of a Soviet bard.” b In other words, he placed Shahnameh in the vernacular oral tradition rather than the written. Thereby he implicitly laid claim to his own mastery of it, when in fact his ticket to prominence in Soviet lit­er­a­ture had initially been his mastery of the Persian written tradition. Lahuti, in “improvising,” accorded the “folk” greater prominence in the story of Kaveh. He foregrounded several folk characters, and in par­tic­u­lar a “cunning cook,” Qubod; his ­daughter and adviser, Nushofarin; the sons of Kaveh, Bahrom and Farrukh; and their long-­suffering ­mother, Piruz.101 Also, in the opera Kaveh does not go alone to the court to confront the usurper shah, Zahhak. Rather, he tries to barge in at the head of a mob of rebellious commoners but is forced to enter the palace alone b ­ ecause his fellow protesters are not allowed in. Moreover, the rebels are able to thwart the king ­because Qubod, an example of the then modish topos of the crafty man of the folk, wheedles his way into palace employ as a cook. ­There he secretly saves the youths marked as victims, by hiding them in his quarters and surreptitiously substituting sheep’s brains for ­human brains (Kaveh did this in some versions of the story from popu­lar lore, and it should be noted that ­those he saved w ­ ere often represented as forefathers of the Kurds, an ethnic group to which Lahuti belonged in part). Qubod also adds opium to the dish, which sends the serpents to sleep. In the finale t­ here is no sign of Kaveh handing power over to a Fereydun figure, as in Shahnameh. Rather, all the characters break out into dance and song, the lines including “Glory be to the brave warriors, who resolved to rise up and drive out the evil host.”102 In other words, we have a version of a common finale of theatrical and filmic texts from the Stalinist 1930s (such as the finale of Grigorii Alexandrov’s popu­lar musical film Volga-­Volga from about the same time—1938—­where in a song and dance sequence a troupe from the provinces sings a song about the need to use a “broom” to sweep out undesirable ele­ments). Lahuti’s opera is suffused with the distinctive mentality of the second half of the 1930s. Its characters are obsessed with securing the borders, military preparedness, and remaining steadfastly loyal to their native land. Kaveh is presented as a quasi-­mythic figure, but mostly in terms of his extraordinary physical prowess and fa­cil­i­ty for rapid production; he is a version of the Stakhanovite, the (allegedly) titanic worker propelled to fame in the Soviet media of late 1935. Distinctions of both time and space collapsed as commentators

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suggested that young Tajiks should identify with the valiant and self-­ sacrificing heroes of the epic. As Lahuti put it: “­After all for whom are the features of Kova so dear and familiar as they are to his descendants of ­today, who have crushed all manner of Zahhaks, the f­ ree blacksmiths and plowmen of Tajikistan!” The reviewer in Pravda made the same point.103 This is a far cry from the blacksmith-­poet of Khlebnikov’s “Kavė-­kuznets.” Critics viewed the libretto with purge-­time eyes, too. E. Grosheva, for example, finds fault with Lahuti’s depiction of negative characters in the opera as “too meager.”104 The story of the adaptation of Shahnameh for Soviet Tajikistan problematizes the w ­ hole question of “national in form, socialist in content.” For a start, advancing the opera as a genre that could promote modernization suggests that form was the determinant in terms of impact on the consciousness, rather than content, as might have been expected. In the cause of importing Western musical modes, in the mid-1930s—­especially in 1936—­Western composers w ­ ere assigned to Central Asian republics to compose operas, symphonies, and so forth for the populace. Sergei Balasanian, the composer for Kaveh the Blacksmith, of Armenian descent but from Turkmenistan and Rus­ sian trained, moved to Stalinabad in 1936 and became the leading “Tajik” composer.105 This was his second “Tajik” opera where he used Tajik folk and classical melodies in producing “true arias, recitatives, e­ tc.,” thereby, as it was put in the introduction to a libretto, “appropriating [osvaivaia] the experience of world art, and of Rus­sian art in the first instance” (the primus inter pares of “world culture”).106 The case of this opera also throws into relief my point that the binary form / content is problematical. The extratextual framing of both the “form” and the “content” of a par­tic­u­lar work is crucial. This point is illustrated in the b ­ attles over ­whether Shahnameh, as a feeder text for a new Tajik culture, belongs to the Persian tradition, the Tajik, or the Irano-­Tajik. Some commentators from the time even laid claim to some Rus­sian owner­ship of it by pointing to the translation of Vasily Zhukovsky in the early nineteenth ­century, or emphasized a pan-­Soviet context given that versions are to be found in the traditions of Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Armenia.107 Arguments over the provenance of Shahnameh became central to a major debate of the late 1930s and 1940s about Tajik identity, which proved fateful for Lahuti. Though works like his opera went u ­ nder the rubric “Friendship of P ­ eoples,” it was actually not self-­evident who the Tajik p ­ eople w ­ ere and

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what Tajikistan represented. Tajikistan had not, as such, existed as a separate geopo­liti­cal entity before it was created as the Tajik Autonomous Socialist Republic in 1924. Scholars argued about the identity of the Tajiks: ­Were they a separate ethnic group, or the speakers of a par­t ic­u ­lar form of Farsi, or w ­ ere they t­ hose who resided within the new republic’s borders? The orientalist V. V. Barthold, whose distinguished ­career straddled the revolution, argued that their identity was fluid and at successive moments historically conditioned.108 In the late 1930s and especially in the 1940s, Lahuti fell victim to a resurgence of Tajik nationalism that sought to claim priority for Tajikistan in the Persianate literary tradition, and a Tajik provenance for epics, including Shahnameh specifically. During the Tajik dekada of 1941 when Kaveh the Blacksmith was performed, Stalin at a reception called the Tajiks “the oldest ­ eoples of Central Asia” whose intelligent­sia “gave birth to the g­ reat of the p poet Ferdowsi” and added that it was from Ferdowsi that the Tajiks “derive their cultural traditions.”109 Within Tajikistan, the leading proponent of this position was Lahuti’s power­f ul nemesis, Bobodzhan Gafurov, a Tajik, who from 1941 to 1944 served as secretary for propaganda of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Tajikistan, from 1944 to 1946 as second secretary, and from 1946 to 1956 as first secretary (he is now, together with Aini, the most revered cultural icon of postin­de­pen­dence Tajikistan). ­Gafurov, citing Barthold, contended that the Tajik areas of Central Asia ­were the original cradle of the Persianate tradition, and also that the Tajiks ­were the most ancient p ­ eoples of Central Asia, claiming that, for example, the oldest sections of the Avesta ­were written in the language of ancient Sogdiana (located in modern-­day Uzbekistan and Tajikistan), a pre­de­ces­sor of con­ temporary Tajik. He further claimed that “it was the vari­ous p ­ eoples of Iran who had absorbed the creative work of the ­peoples of Central Asia, and not the other way around,” arguing that the writers typically considered Persian, such as Ferdowsi, should be more accurately described as Persian-­Tajik.110 By the late 1930s, commentators ­were categorizing Shahnameh not as Persian or Ira­nian, but as Tajik-­Iranian, or just Tajik. The appropriation of Shahnameh for Tajikistan was evident even in the staging of the opera. The set designer contrived to dress the performers in identifiably traditional Tajik dress and to re-­create on the stage a somewhat

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exoticized landscape from regions of Tajikistan, rather than from areas of ­today’s Western Iran, the home of Ferdowsi.111 Lahuti, who persisted in claiming a Persian identity for Ferdowsi’s epic, was accused of openly identifying as Ira­nian and loving Iran more than ­Tajikistan.112 Gafurov allegedly tried to have him expelled from the Communist Party in 1943, and when t­ hese efforts failed he spread libelous rumors about him. He forbade publication of Lahuti, demanded that the intelligent­sia of Tajikistan not associate with him, and instructed Tajik performers not to stage any of Lahuti’s works. By the late 1940s, Lahuti, with his promotion of Persian lit­er­a­ture, fell afoul of the so-­called anticosmopolitan campaign, and he feared arrest. His situation was not helped by the fact that his wife was Jewish, the ethnic group most in that campaign’s sights.113 Lahuti was not arrested. Realpolitik brought him two partial reprieves. First, ­after Adolf Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, on September 16 the country launched an Anglo-­Soviet invasion of Iran and forced the shah, Reza Pahlavi, to abdicate. In a subsequent cultural offensive the Soviet Union made use of Tajik writers, given the closeness of their language to Farsi. In the 1930s Lahuti had translated Pushkin into Tajik. Now he began translating Pushkin, Mayakovsky, and o ­ thers into Farsi.114 Also, when Pahlavi was out of power in Iran, Lahuti’s works ­were promoted ­there, especially by Abdolhosein Nushin, a theater activist and founding member of the Ira­nian Tudeh Party (leftist, some call it communist, it was founded on September 29, 1941). For the first party meeting Nushin prepared brief po­liti­cal sketches and recitals of Lahuti’s revolutionary poems, and when he subsequently worked on ­t heatrical reform he trained his students in part with recitations of Lahuti’s “Brave Child.”115 The Soviet partial occupation of Iran ended in May 1946 and with it the reprieve in Lahuti’s blacklisting in the Soviet Union. During the ensuing “time of trou­bles,” as Lahuti’s wife put it, the ­couple de­cided to translate Shahnameh themselves as a gesture in support of Persianate culture. This endeavor helped to sustain them morally, and Lahuti told her that though it might well prove impossible to publish their translation, what mattered was that they w ­ ere ­doing it. Their complete, multivolume translation of the epic rendered in verse was, despite the odds, published by the Acad­emy of Sciences between 1957 and 1989, though Lahuti himself had died in 1957,

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before the first volume appeared. As it was, they managed to get the first volume published only as a result of a “miracle”—­t he second reprieve: Jawaharlal Nehru, when visiting in 1955, expressed surprise that the Mahabharata and Shahnameh had no Rus­sian translation.116 In the example of Lahuti, then, we have not just a “court poet” but a writer who remained wedded to his own aesthetic and sense of cultural history, ultimately to the detriment of his own c­ areer. But he, like Khlebnikov and Hikmet, combined in his postrevolutionary c­ areer the roles of active revolutionary and poet-­i ntellectual. Despite such similarities, ­t here is clearly an asymmetry between the example of Khlebnikov, the most marginal and eccentric writer in this book and one whose connection with the Persian literary tradition was slight and in no way defining, and Lahuti, who was (­until sidelined) the figure in this book most implicated and most successful in Soviet literary institutions, and who showed a lifelong devotion to the Persian literary tradition, which was moreover his own. Despite this glaring asymmetry, the two writers could be compared if in Khlebnikov’s case one looked only at his brief Persian phase when he served, if tenuously, in Soviet state institutions. The combination of writer and functionary seen in Khlebnikov’s Persian episode and in Lahuti’s Soviet c­ areer was very common in the early postrevolutionary years among Soviet intellectuals who wrote on Asia. The expeditionary force that initially landed in Enzeli, and which Khlebnikov’s unit was to follow a few months l­ater, had been headed by the colorful c­ ouple Fedor Fedorovich Raskolnikov, as commander, and his wife, Larisa Reisner, as commissar (the pair had already left Persia by the time Khlebnikov or Lahuti arrived). Both Raskolnikov and Reisner w ­ ere dashing military commanders, fiercely loyal to the Revolution, and highly educated actors in the literary world. They, together with some former comrades, w ­ ere to go on a l­ ittle ­later a diplomatic mission to Af­ghan­i­stan, a country located between two g­ reat Asian cultures, the Persianate and the Sanskrit. Some of the party viewed Af­g han­i­stan through the prism of Persian lyric poetry, while Raskolnikov himself translated Tagore. Their writings on their time in Af­ghan­i­stan w ­ ill be the subject of Chapter 3, which w ­ ill tell another version of the porous divide separating revolutionary texts about Asia, one not between Asian and Russo-­ European culture, as much as between pre-­and postrevolutionary culture, between the ideology of imperialism and that of internationalism.

3 Across the G ­ reat Divide to Af­ghan­i­stan

O

n June 3, 1921, a caravan of thirty-­two members of the Soviet mission to Af­ghan­i­stan set out from the Rus­sian border fortress at Kushka, the southernmost point of Rus­sia, and rode on ­horse­back over the mountains to Kabul, a journey that took thirty-­ five days. Their caravan, equipped with one hundred h ­ orses, stretched out for half a kilo­meter. It was headed by Fedor Fedorovich Raskolnikov, the new plenipotentiary in Kabul, and largely comprised new staff for the embassy including Raskolnikov’s wife, Larisa Reisner, and Lev Nikulin, who would initially work in Kabul and ­later serve in the consulate in Herat. ­There ­were also security escorts, a contingent of nineteen sailors and po­liti­cal workers from the Red Navy who had fought ­under Raskolnikov, a heroic commander during the Civil War in both the Baltic and the Volga-­Caspian Fleets.1 The party crossing the Himalayas (or more accurately the mountain chains ­ ere of Af­ghan­i­stan, though Reisner herself liked to use the term Himalayas), w crossing not just into a new terrain but also into a dif­fer­ent sociopo­liti­cal order.2 Though in theory their mission was to prosecute Soviet interests in Af­g han­i­stan, in practice a critical task was to facilitate the revolutionary movement in India and to monitor events t­ here, given that its border had been closed to Soviet citizens. In Kabul the envoys read the Indian newspapers the Bombay Chronicle, Pioneer, Civil and Military Gazette, and In­de­pen­dent, mouthpiece of India’s National Congress, then headed by Gandhi.3 If you look at the many items in Pravda of the 1920s about the po­liti­cal situation in India, you w ­ ill notice that their reported origin is always Kabul, a situation that

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obtained through the 1930s. A second task of the envoys was to aid anti-­ imperialist movements, especially ­t hose directed against the British, a personal cause for Raskolnikov and Reisner, since during the Civil War he had been captured by the British and languished for a time in Brixton prison.4 The envoys w ­ ere arriving in a very propitious moment for Soviet Rus­sia. In 1919 the emir of Af­g han­i­stan had been assassinated and his successor, Amanullah (Ghāzī Amānullāh Khān), sought to become more in­de­pen­dent of the British. In that year, they ­were able to open in Kabul their first foreign embassy in any country. Its first secretary was Reisner’s b ­ rother, Igor M. Reisner, in ­later years a noted Soviet expert on both Af­ghan­i­stan and India. On February 28, 1921, a Soviet-­Afghan treaty was signed in Moscow, and soon thereafter Raskolnikov’s party set out for Kabul. The rapprochement with Kabul and relative sidelining of the British in the early years of Amanullah’s reign afforded Soviet Rus­sia a greater possibility for making incursions into British-­held India. Did this mean, that with the Soviet Drang into Af­ghan­i­stan the ­Great Game was being revived so soon ­after the fall of the Rus­sian Empire (in other words, British / Rus­sian rivalry in seeking to gain a foothold in Central Asia, Northern India, and t­oday’s Pakistan), if revived in a more subdued form?5 But how could one talk of continuing the ­Great Game when it is so much associated with Rus­sian imperialism, that very ism that the Bolsheviks w ­ ere absolutely committed to opposing? Very recently, the manifesto of the Congress of the ­Peoples of the East in Baku had identified Britain as imperialism incarnate.6 The congress organizers looked to “national revolutions” as a means to weaken and disintegrate the British Empire and as a precursor to revolution in E ­ ngland itself.7 Af­ghan­i­stan was not technically u ­ nder imperialist rule, but had been its protectorate from 1879 to 1919, and British India was next door. When the Raskolnikov contingent crossed the border, in June 1921, the Baku Congress had been held less than eight months ­earlier. The declaration of its manifesto that the sleep of centuries was to be broken with a “roar of the world-­wide conflict,” in response to the “thunder of the Rus­sian workers’ revolution,” would have been ringing in their ears.8 For the purposes of this book, a more impor­tant item on the Baku platform was the call to meld Eu­ ro­pean leftist culture with that of the oppressed masses of Asia. But such a rapprochement was not to be readily achieved. Even the found­ers of Marxism, Marx and Engels, with their solidly middle-­class educations, ­were when it

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came to culture trapped in the mind-­set of their backgrounds and ­under the illusion that the ­Great Unwashed would share their attitudes and predilections if only enlightened. The disparity was even greater vis-­à-­v is the Asian oppressed. For the Raskolnikov contingent in Af­ghan­i­stan, the gap between their m ­ ental set and that of the locals proved to be more of a yawning chasm. The story of their efforts to bridge it provides a sort of end case that throws the fundamentally utopian nature of the Baku injunction into stark relief. The members of Raskolnikov’s party had come to this mission from ­careers in Soviet agitation and distinguished ser­vice in the Civil War, but in Af­ghan­ i­stan they had to accustom themselves to a quiet, backwater existence away from the whizz of bullets. It took eight weeks for Pravda and Izvestiia to come via Tashkent, and that city’s paper, Pravda Vostoka, arrived two weeks late, though the delay was only three days for papers from India.9 They found themselves debating Bolshevik policy shifts ­after they had already been superseded. In the eve­nings they passed their time reading and discussing the (dated) news, and reading and rereading to each other letters from home that arrived ­every two weeks with the diplomatic courier. And they wrote, especially Reisner and Nikulin, whose Af­ghan­i­stan texts ­will be my main sources ­here. Reisner wrote a series of essays on her experiences that originally appeared between 1921 and 1925 in a range of Soviet periodicals, including ­ ere put Pravda, an indication of their semiofficial status.10 Most of them w together as Afganistan, which came out in 1925, and a se­lection appeared that year in the popu­lar series of chapbooks published by Ogonëk u ­ nder the ru11 bric Aziatskie povesti (Asian tales). Nikulin published Chetyrnadtsat’ mesiatsev v Afganistane (Fourteen months in Af­ghan­i­stan) in 1923 (and an expanded version in 1933) and, as did Raskolnikov, a series of po­liti­cal articles on Af­ghan­i­stan. The task of Reisner and Nikulin in writing about their experiences was not just to rec­ord what they had seen in Af­ghan­i­stan but also to forge new narratives and discourses for the Soviet Rus­sians’ engagement with the East. The Af­ghan­i­stan texts of the Soviet emissaries would be expected to explode the exoticist myths that plagued popu­lar Eu­ro­pean and Rus­sian writings about Asia. Edward Said in his pathbreaking text Orientalism, this overused and at the same time frequently challenged book, provides a capsule version of the Orient in typical Western texts as “since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences.”12

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In his account, during the modern period ­t hese alluring features have been, as it ­were, a veil that masked the stark power relations and exploitation of the oriental lands by colonialist-­cum-­imperialist Eu­rope. Soviet literary criticism had taken up the anticolonialist / anti-­imperialist cause, anticipating Said in the kinds of critique it made.13 It called for ripping off the exoticist veil as a critical step in forming a postimperialist culture. But, as this chapter ­w ill show, members of the Raskolnikov party, though they undertook a voyage to radical otherness, w ­ ere caught up in their own fictions. The accounts of Af­ghan­i­stan by my three principals—­Raskolnikov, Reisner, and Nikulin—­are heavi­ly indebted to prerevolutionary literary modes. They drew, in what w ­ ere highly syncretic texts, on tropes common to Rus­sian imperialist texts of the prerevolutionary years, but utilized them unself-­consciously in what they believed to be anti-­imperialist tracts. That the tropes of prerevolutionary exoticist writing lingered on beyond 1917 was predictable. As I have argued elsewhere, in most versions of evolutionary theory complete breaks are problematical. The cultural ecosystem is, analogously, not amenable to abrupt and total shifts.14 The Bolshevik Revolution and its aftermath w ­ ere billed as overcoming history. Much of the attendant Bolshevik rhe­toric insisted that t­ here was an absolute break between the pre-­and postrevolutionary culture, but that was overly ambitious. In addition to the baggage on the mules and camels of the Soviet party as it trekked over the g­ reat mountain divides to the Afghan capital, my principals brought with them the intellectual baggage of the cultural elite into which they had been incorporated before the Revolution. The questions raised by the example of my principals, agents of Bolshevism, is this: Do they represent a variant on the “Orientalist,” one not foreseen by Said, or ­were they, rather, post-­or anti-­“orientalists”? ­After all, they ­were in Af­ghan­i­stan as envoys of a country dead set on countering imperialism, to them a scourge that had been exposed as such by Lenin in his tract Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Capitalism of 1917. Yet, at the same time, the ambitions of the Bolsheviks in t­ hese early years to spread world revolution underwrote their mission, and so in their diplomatic work they w ­ ere walking a fine line between anti-­imperialism and neo-­imperialism. Yet ­Reisner’s writings and t­ hose of Nikulin should not be written off as merely neo-­imperial. They deploy the clichés of imperialist writing and exoticism to enhance their narratives and attract readers—­Reisner called the part of her

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book Afganistan that was published initially in the popu­lar journal Krasnaia pa­norama (Red pa­norama) “In an Exotic Country.”15 But though their accounts w ­ ere inflected by the tropes and discourse of the prerevolutionary intellectual milieu out of which they emerged, they at times inverted their valorization, rendering their accounts highly ambiguous. In what follows, I ­w ill analyze the extent to which in their writings they “crossed the divide” of 1917, contributing material for a new, Eurasian, and anti-­imperialist literary commons. But first some brief biographical information on my principals. Raskolnikov had an admirable Bolshevik pedigree. His social origins ­were problematical in that he was the illegitimate son of a priest, Petrov (he bore his m ­ other’s last name, Il’in, and Raskolnikov was a pseudonym). During the ­Great War he had trained as a tsarist naval officer, but si­mul­ta­neously continued a prewar ­career in Bolshevik journalism (he had been a founding member of Pravda’s staff in 1912). In the Civil War his naval training made him invaluable, and he commanded ships in both the Baltic and the Volga-­ Caspian Fleets. A ­ fter the raid on Enzali in Persia, which he led (as mentioned in Chapter 2), he found himself in hot w ­ ater ­because of the Kronstadt rebellion (a 1921 insurrection of Soviet sailors, soldiers, and civilians against the Bolshevik government), for which he was held partly responsible, and alleg­ ecause he supedly fell out with Zinoviev (then head of the Comintern), b ported Trotsky’s position in their argument about trade ­u nions. So when Raskolnikov was assigned to head the embassy in Kabul it was essentially as an exile.16 In the literary world, though Raskolnikov with his occasional forays into print was a player, he was eclipsed by his wife, Larisa Reisner, a mediocre poet and prolific essayist but a legendary beauty (all of Moscow was allegedly infatuated) and an impassioned revolutionary romantic. Of Baltic baron extraction and bilingual with German, she had spent much of her childhood in Berlin, to which her ­father had been exiled; an academic ­lawyer, he had progressively made the switch from monarchist to Bolshevik sympathizer. A ­ fter her ­father was allowed back to Rus­sia in an amnesty following the 1905 revolution, she audited classes at St. Petersburg University, a rare w ­ oman permitted to do so, and attended the Psychoneurological Institute, a hotbed of radicals, which was coeducational and one of the few tertiary institutions open to Jews.17 She was also active in the literary world as a minor poet and

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dramatist. With the leading Acmeist poet Nikolai Gumilev, she had an ­affair, but a combination of his infidelities and her leftism led to their estrangement. During approximately the same time as their affair, 1915–1916, she self-­published (with her f­ ather) her own literary journal, Rudin, which in its very title suggests her self-­image as a passionate revolutionary: in Ivan ­Turgenev’s eponymous novel of 1856, Rudin dies on the Paris barricades during the 1848 revolution. In 1918 Reisner began a liaison with Raskolnikov, whom she subsequently married, and joined the Bolsheviks. With him she fought the White Army commander Anton Denikin’s forces in the South, the Volga and Caspian regions, working as a flag secretary on vessels Raskolnikov commanded. Allegedly, she was fearless ­going into ­battle and would often stand on the ship’s prow, as if inviting bullets. This image of the intrepid Bolshevik naval officer is captured in her friend Vsevolod Vishnevsky’s classic Soviet drama of the Civil War, The Optimistic Tragedy (Optimisticheskaia tragediia, 1933), in which a female commissar is sent to command a mob of uncouth and sexually hungry sailors, but soon subdues them with her larger-­than-­life presence and Bolshevik true grit. Reisner’s standing on the prow of her naval vessel, inviting bullets, was symptomatic of her exuberance, and I see her as a revolutionary ecstatic. In fact, more recently, the Rus­sian newspaper Limonka, mouthpiece of a neofascist party led by Eduard Limonov, published an article about her titled “The Valkyrie of the Revolution.”18 Reisner sought engagement in the whirlwind of revolution or war; any form of stasis was to her unbearable, a challenge as we ­shall see in “sleepy” Af­ghan­i­stan. Most of the diplomats in the Raskolnikov party w ­ ere highly cultivated 19 writers in their own right. Among them was Reisner’s friend Lev Nikulin, the pen name of Lev Vladimirovich Ol’konitskii (1891–1967), who was from Zhitomir in the Jewish Pale of Settlement. Between 1919 and 1920 he had headed the Po­liti­cal Enlightenment Department (Politupravleniia) of the Baltic Fleet, so that he was one of the many members of the expedition who ­were from Raskolnikov’s Civil War milieu. Another was Sergei Kolbas’ev (1899–1937), who had been with Raskolnikov in the expeditionary force to Enzeli in Persia.20 Kolbas’ev knew En­glish well, and in 1923 he worked in Af­ ghan­i­stan as an embassy translator but fell out with Raskolnikov, was recalled, and relocated to Finland ­until 1928.

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The activities of ­t hese writer-­diplomats could be seen as illustrating the phenomenon pointed to by Said in Orientalism—­t he crucial role played by philology and classical learning in colonialist conquest, a paradigmatic example for him being Napoleon’s bringing so many “savants” with him for his ­ ere more liteconquest of Egypt.21 The members of Raskolnikov’s mission w rati than philologists, though they knew several languages but not oriental languages. Raskolnikov, for example, dabbled in literary scholarship. Before the war he had studied bibliography with S. A. Vengerov, the literary historian, whose famous circle included the ­f uture Formalist theoretician Iurii Tynianov, and he knew French, German, and also En­glish (which he learned in British prison).22 That governments relied on intellectuals with knowledge of foreign languages and cultures has its logic given the need for such competence to mediate and govern in foreign territory. But in the history of imperialism from the early twentieth ­century, one finds also the line blurred between the scholar or writer and the po­liti­cal actor or agent of imperialism. The British agent T. E. Lawrence, who had fluent Arabic and was conversant with the g­ reat Arabic classics, provides a well-­k nown example.23 The writer-­diplomats in Af­ghan­i­stan also liked some writers generally seen as imperialist. They ­were all to a degree taken by Gumilev, for example. Kolbas’ev was an outright disciple. Th ­ ere was an imperialist tinge to much of the writing of Gumilev, who was shot in 1921 (while Raskolnikov and Reisner ­were in Af­ghan­i­stan) for his alleged participation in a White Guard plot. But he was revered as a poet by all my principals even ­after his arrest; the fiery revolutionary Raskolnikov was “sincerely sad” when he heard of Gumilev’s execution, while Reisner commented in a letter to her parents, “I never loved anyone with so much pain, with such a desire to die for him, as [I did] him, a poet, a Hafez,” but added “a monstrosity and a bastard.”24 The reverence for Gumilev as a poet might seem unexpected among t­ hese writers with totally dif­fer­ent po­liti­cal orientations, but in t­ hese early postrevolutionary years ­there was within Soviet lit­er­a­ture relatively ­little of the strict po­liti­cal demarcation between writers and groupings that characterized ­later literary periods and rendered many writers unpublishable, unmentionable, or victims of suppression. Another writer whose works ­were similarly suffused with imperialist sentiment, and who was also a favorite and model for ­these writer-­revolutionaries

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was Rudyard Kipling (Raskolnikov enthused about a Kipling poem about Af­ ghan­i­stan, while Reisner often used as her pen name, right ­until she died, Rikki-­Tikki-­Tavi or Rikki-­Tikki).25 Kipling was another of Kolbas’ev’s favorite poets, and he proselytized for him among the new generation of Soviet writers. But in the interwar years, Kipling actually was well received in the Soviet Union generally and continued to be published, starting in 1922, when an edition of his poems came out, translated by Ada Onoshkovich-­Iatsyny, a disciple of Gumilev.26 Gumilev, sometimes called “the Kipling of Tsarskoe Selo,” combined in his poetic persona the enthusiast for imperial power and military prowess with a penchant for exoticism. He also had a predilection for the fiction of another infamously imperialist British writer, H. Rider Haggard. But though Kipling and Haggard might be typecast as bards of imperialism, Gumilev was able before his death to get them published by the publishing ­house Vsemirnaia literatura (World Lit­er­a­ture), where he served on the board. Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885), which appeared in multiple Rus­sian editions before the Revolution, was published several times in the 1920s, including an edition of 1922 in the Vsemirnaia literatura series.27 His other famous novel, She (1886), also left its mark on postrevolutionary repre­sen­ta­tions of the East. In addition to promoting the works of Haggard and Kipling, Gumilev fashioned himself ­after the colonialist adventurer. He made several trips to the ­Middle East and three to the Horn of Africa. Rus­sia, anxious to gain a foothold in this area close to the new Suez Canal, encouraged the erroneous notion that the Chris­tian­ity of Abyssinia was akin to Rus­sian Orthodoxy and facilitated trips t­ here by missionaries and scholars (on one trip Gumilev worked as an ethnographer for the Acad­emy of Sciences), as well as by ­po­liti­cal emissaries. When Gumilev set out on the third of his excursions to Abyssinia in 1912, this one u ­ nder the auspices of the Imperial Acad­emy of Petersburg, he dressed himself in a white suit and wore a white pith helmet, the iconic garb of the British colonialist. He also produced poems and stories about Africa, which ­were indebted to the adventure tales of Kipling and Haggard, replete with accounts of hunting lions and leopards, but ratcheted up a notch with greater doses of sensuality and sadism.28 Perhaps the Gumilev prose piece that most suggests his implication in Rus­ sian imperialism would be “Did Menelik Die?” (“Umer li Menelik?,” 1914), which lays out the significance for Rus­sia of Menelik, the absolute ruler of

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Abyssinia, who claimed succession from Solomon and who had been using the Rus­sians to offset designs on its territory by other Eu­ro­pean powers. The story opens, “Did Menelik die? . . . ​If so . . . ​[i]t ­w ill be a pretext for the Eu­ro­ pe­a ns to divide Abyssinia among themselves,” adding ­later that his death would threaten Abyssinia’s in­de­pen­dence from Eu­ro­pean, as distinct from Rus­sian, colonialists.29 Gumilev was also taken by the Eu­ro­pean conquests in Latin Amer­i­ca. His early collection of verse was called The Path of the Conquistadores (Put’ konkvistadorov), published with his own funds in 1905. ­L ater, a source of ­inspiration for him was William  H. Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843), from which an abridged, two-­volume edition appeared in Rus­ sian in 1885.30 Reisner had recommended Prescott’s history to Gumilev, and in 1916, while he was at the front, he asked for a copy in Rus­sian to be sent to him. As he reported: “This book had an effect on me like doping for a h ­ orse.”31 At Reisner’s urging, he planned to write a play on Cortes, based on the Prescott text, and ­after the Revolution proposed the proj­ect to Vsemirnaia literatura, where he was on the editorial board. The proj­ect was approved but did not eventuate b ­ ecause of Gumilev’s execution in 1921.32 In l­ater years it became a commonplace of Soviet literary commentary that Gumilev was an unreconstructed imperialist; Radek, in the official speech on foreign lit­er­a­ture that he delivered to the Writers’ Union Congress in 1934, singled him out as a “swine” and mouthpiece of the Rus­sian bourgeoisie’s “conquistadorian, imperialist, colonizing” ideology.33 The mode of the adventure romance suited Reisner, my principal example ­here, who lived, loved, and fought in the hyperbolic (her Af­ghan­i­stan pieces are more a travelogue than an adventure romance, but, in her case, the distinction between the two genres is far from absolute). We do not necessarily have to take ­these texts by Haggard and Prescott as having had a direct influence on her Af­ghan­i­stan memoir, b ­ ecause in many ways they are typical of the generic imperialist narrative of the nineteenth and early twentieth c­ enturies—­the heyday of the Eu­ro­pean empires and of the adventure romance. Reisner effectively inflected her account of the journey through Af­ghan­is­ tan with the discourse of imperialist narratives about conquest, w ­ hether fictional or nonfictional. Perhaps her imagination was fired by Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico, which describes Cortes’s conquest as affecting “a revolution more tremendous than any predicted by [the Aztec] bards and prophets.”34 However,

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I am taking Haggard and Prescott as my main point of orientation b ­ ecause their texts not only w ­ ere impor­tant for Gumilev but are prime examples of imperialist exoticism.

Explorers and Conquerors The articles Reisner published in Afganistan are only loosely connected but are framed by her first chapter, which originally appeared as a separate item in the journal Krasnaia nov’ (Red virgin soil) in 1921, and functions as a prologue. Largely travelogue and somewhat overwritten, the chapter focuses on the landscape she traverses in the Soviet East (Turkestan) en route to Kabul, with ­little overt attention to politics or the local population, but her descriptions are ideologically charged. They manage to incorporate many of the ­clichés of colonialist writing but are in part re­oriented by a Bolshevik, anti-­ imperialist perspective, though only in part. In her nature descriptions she, as some have noted as typical of Orientalist art, represents the natu­ral geological formations as if monumental architectural structures, emphasizing that they are made of marble.35 She calls them “indescribable”—­“ ­human language does not have such words”—­conceding that perhaps a “­great poet” (in the Krasnaia nov’ version it is Goethe) standing on the “cloudless heights” could do it, adding that even the occasional “odes of Lomonosov pale before such a vast expanse” (she actually uses the word “steppe,” one of many signs of that she is translating what she sees into familiar tropes).36 It is impossible to read [the landscape],” she claims, naming Heinrich Heine and some Rus­sian intellectuals as examples of ­t hose she believed would fail to be able to describe it. That it is “incredible” literally is something of a cliché of nineteenth-­century imperialist adventure fiction, which has a proclivity for using the sublime for descriptions of the landscape in which they are set; Haggard’s novels provide particularly marked examples, though Cortes and his men are in Prescott’s account also represented as traversing a series of hyperbolically dramatic landscapes. Reisner’s account of the terrain was on one level descriptive. The towering mountains and precipitous passes of Af­ghan­i­stan are a gift to any writer who wants to attract and impress their reader. But it could also be said that in this chapter she is setting up an epic landscape that affords her trek epic dimensions. She herself modeled (consciously?) her traversal of the mountains and

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valleys on the literary conventions for a colonial explorer-­conqueror. On the Volga she had lived out her Rudin scenario as she stood fearless on the prow of the gunship when it went into ­battle with the British, bracing for the bullets. H ­ ere the fearless Reisner as she negotiated the rugged mountains on ­horse­back customarily rode a w ­ hole kilo­meter ahead of the rest of her party.37 As in narratives of colonial exploration, she conveyed, both in her texts and in actuality, the sense of being the first of the modern era to discover t­ hese dramatic reaches for the Eu­ro­pean. Thus, for example, when in the fall of 1921 Mark Izraelevich Nalëtnyi-­Izrail’son, who had served with Raskolnikov in the Volga flotilla, was sent on assignment to film in Af­ghan­i­stan at the disposal of Raskolnikov, as he recalls: “I had only been able to bring a ­limited amount of film stock with me and when I asked Raskolnikov what I should limit myself to Reisner said ‘­Don’t spare the film stock . . . ​keep in mind that you are the first person to enter the territory of Af­g han­i­stan with a film camera.’ ”38 The resulting two-­part film, Af­ghan­i­stan (Afganistan) of 1921, could be seen as an example of the popu­lar genre of the 1920s, especially in Germany, the “expedition film,” set primarily in exotic climes.39 A ­later film on Af­ghan­i­stan directed by Vladimir Erofeev (best known for films set in the Soviet Union’s remote and rugged Pamir Mountains), Afganistan: Serdtse Azii (Af­ghan­i­stan, the heart of Asia, 1929), was commissioned in connection with the visit of emir Amanullah to Moscow (shortly before he was ousted in 1929).40 In the highly charged years of the early 1920s, an infatuation with the g­ reat explorers was a common feature of Rus­sian intellectuals from all parts of the po­liti­cal and aesthetic spectrum. One of Gumilev’s biographers, Vladimir Polushin, provides an encapsulated description of him as “a passionate seeker of the unknown, the heroic and the romantic, someone recurrently drawn to dif­fer­ent versions of the exotic.” He was particularly taken by the g­ reat explorer-­navigators, such as Vasco da Gama, La Pérouse, and Cook.41 But Pavlovich, the Bolshevik orientalist, was also an avid reader of adventure lit­er­a­ ture on Asia and Africa and even a­ fter the Revolution expressed an admiration for the “ingenious” Eu­ro­pean scholars and explorers, who, as he had put it, “ventured heroically into the interior of Africa, explored the secrets of the African darkness [sic], and disclosed mystical places like Timbuktu.” 42 The Rus­sian and Eu­ro­pean avant-­gardes, for their part, ­were drawn to the g­ reat explorers and navigators as figures for their epistemological daring and often

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likened themselves to Columbus, or to some other navigator of e­ arlier times, or to the g­ reat aviator Charles Lindbergh (especially Brecht). We w ­ ill recall from Chapter 2 the lines from Khlebnikov’s “Ispahan Camel” “Liudi otkrytii, / Liudi otplytii,” which invoke the seafarers and discoverers who are forging on in uncharted territory to the totally new. In a typical imperialist adventure romance, the hero, an explorer (and often a scientist or scholar to boot), forges ahead and finds a lost trea­sure or more likely a lost civilization. Like a utopia, this civilization is cut off from the outside world, but the intrepid explorer discovers and masters it—an allegory for colonialist conquest (though unlike the colonial powers he does not occupy it in­def­initely). We find a similar scenario in Prescott. Part of the reason for the success with readers of his Conquest of Mexico and also his Conquest of Peru is that he introduced the Western world to the lost civilizations of the Mayans, Aztecs, and Incas. Fictional versions of such civilizations generally, as in Haggard, astonish the traveler with their vast riches, but t­ hese are not the riches characteristically appropriated by imperialists, who extracted resources and exploited the indigenous as cheap ­labor. More likely, they are a trea­sure trove, or vast caverns that dazzle the explorer with their encrusted precious stones. In Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico, the “riches” are less material: the prize Cortes seeks is allegedly the conversion of the indigenous heathens to Chris­tian­ity (an aspect of the history that attracted Gumilev). In setting up the magnificence of the terrain or of ­these lost cities, the narrator of the adventure romance generally invokes extravagant pre­ce­dents from the deep past, primarily from the classical era; in Reisner, “ancient” is a recurrent adjective. The narrator of Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, for example, is constantly making comparisons with ancient Rome, while in She the eponymous protagonist, though she has lived in the lost city for two thousand years, is originally from the g­ reat ancient civilizations and is, moreover, hyperbolically white. The narrator and She recurrently exchange remarks about or in classical languages (Latin, Greek, classical Arabic) or find material in the lost civilization they encounter from ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, or Rome. In other words, not only did philologists participate in imperialist expeditions, but they also w ­ ere inscribed into imperialist adventure romances. The vast space, the epochal landscape depicted in such romances, is, then, matched by a vast temporal sweep. With the recurrent reference to some clas-

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sical civilization, the adventure romances of Haggard and his ilk operate with two main times—­t hat of ancient civilization and that of the novel’s ­pre­sent—­but the intervening times have been elided. Consequently, the classical references become, as it ­were, the colonialist adventurers’ patrimony that elevates them to a position of superiority over the indigenous and renders them adequate to the monumental landscape they traverse, while the locals who actually inhabit it are rarely equal to their own heritage and remain unaware of this greater historical dimension. As Vera Tolz has put this, “Eu­ro­ pean Orientologists and other imperial agents evoked a glorious past of ‘Eastern’ socie­ties largely to highlight even more vividly their pitiful state at pre­sent.” 43 In the adventure romance rather than an account of progressive change over time, a linear pattern, we find a static world informed by / or contrasted with an ­earlier moment of glory. Linda Nochlin in an article, “The Imaginary Orient,” has made a similar observation for Orientalist art, pointing out that it is marked by a certain “absence of history.” “Time stands still,” she suggests, in “a world without change, a world of timeless, atemporal customs and rituals untouched by . . . ​historical pro­cesses.” 44 Af­ghan­i­stan provided Reisner an especially good example for this image of the East in that its emirs had largely sought to resist change, particularly concerned to keep out that icon and agent of modernization, the railroad. However, in presenting her impressions of the “East,” she exaggerates its timelessness. “How far we have travelled? Not hundreds of thousands of versts, but many hundreds of years, for an entire eternity into the past.” Her general conclusion is that “­t here can be no history h ­ ere,” effectively that t­ here can be no linear progression.45 ­Similarly, in geo­graph­i­cal terms, even though she foregrounds the moment when she crosses the border, she largely blurs the distinction between Central Asia and Af­ghan­i­stan, and the two emerge as one “East” (Vostok). In Reisner’s account of Af­ghan­i­stan a g­ reat past has been all but obliterated. As was,common among colonialist writers, Reisner’s narrative is obsessed with ruins. She comes across ancient frescoes that have been washed away by rain, but the virtual obliteration of ­great buildings and even towns by another natu­ral force, sand, is the main trope for ruination: the magnificent structures have ended up as “dust [prakh],” all of them to become “the ­ ill be sanded over, very desert out of which they arose.” An ancient viaduct w “the last remnants of a higher culture that dis­appeared long ago. And no one

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can understand the meaning or cause of the calamity, no one has the key to the old knowledge.” 46 Such iterative invocations of the erasure of a glorious past serve to underline the fact that the Afghans have not become heirs to the (to Reisner) ­great civilizations of their past, have not realized their potential. As Douglas Kerr has put it, “Ruins, especially if they are overrun by an encroaching nature, encourage thoughts about the mortality of civilizations, as they inspired Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, or Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias.’ ” 47 Historians of Orientalist art note how signs of modernity are often left out of pictures to relegate the country to a medieval timelessness, and how “realistic” detail is actually ideologically charged to emphasize the unworthiness of the oriental ­people, who have not nurtured their cultural trea­sures and have allowed them to decay. Nochlin in her article observes that “neglected, ill-­repaired architecture functions, in nineteenth-­century Orientalist art, as a standard topos for commenting on the corruption of con­ temporary Islamic society.” Its tableaus rather depict an idleness, an absence of scenes of work and industry. “What might at first appear to be objectively described architectural fact,” she continues, “turns out to be architecture moralisée,” an indicator of “the barbaric insouciance of the Muslim ­peoples.” 48 In Reisner, the moral judgment is implied in such rhetorical enhancement as the recurrent use of the biblical word “prakh,” for dust (as in “ashes to ashes, dust to dust”) rather than the more common “pyl’.” Reisner claims that her text is not exotic, b ­ ecause “what sort of exotic is ­t here in the East itself? ­Here ­people die simply and are simply buried in the earth. Neither a name nor recollections.” 49 But she exaggerates the bleakness of Af­ghan­i­stan, and consequently it conforms to what was already one clichéd version of the East in Eu­ro­pean exoticist writing. The terrain Reisner traverses is absolutely barren, both literally and figuratively. In this re­spect her narrative contrasts with that of the Rus­sian imperialist Ivan Iavorskii, whose ­account of his travels to Af­ghan­i­stan in 1878–1879, which Raskolnikov was assigned to read (and presumably Reisner read too), features verdant pastures, plantations of trees, and crops. Rather than fecund, Af­ghan­i­stan emerges in Reisner’s initial chapter as primarily dead; “dead,” “death,” “grave,” and “cemetery” are recurrent in her narrative, as if to confirm Ella Shohat and Robert Stam’s contention that “the portrayal of a ‘Third World’ region as underdeveloped is often reinforced by a topographical reductionism that figures the orient as desert and, meta­phor­ically, as dreariness.”50 The presence of such

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passages in typical orientalist texts provide, as they have pointed out, an aesthetic prelude for conquest.51 Implicitly the dust-­shrouded wastes await another conqueror or at any rate hegemonic power, who could offer another ­great civilization. Thus her book proj­ects a sort of imperial sublime manqué; the g­ rand geological formations are commensurate with a potential greatness that is obscured by the Lethe-­like “sand” of wanton neglect. In Reisner’s book, as in Nikulin’s Chetyrnadtsat’ mesiatsev v Afganistane, a critical ­factor in the tragic falling away from greatness is the destruction of civilization by the ­great conquerors. ­These authors’ point of reference from the deep past is not so much the ancient classical civilizations, as in imperialist adventure narratives, as it is the time of the g­ reat conquerors of Eurasia, who traversed this area. Reisner constantly remarks, in a virtual refrain, that her caravan through Af­ghan­i­stan is following a route laid out by Alexander the ­Great and by Tamerlane, the fourteenth-­century conqueror of Turkic-­Mongol descent whose dynasty survived in the Mughal Empire of India ­until 1857. Other ­great conquerors of Central Asia and the subcontinent are invoked at times as well: Genghis Khan and the Mughals Babur and Akbar (Reisner sometimes says Napoleon). But Tamerlane is the main referent, as in a typical invocation: “The roads, laid bare by the hoof prints of Timur [Tamerlane], burnt out by the heat and freezing cold.”52 The question arises, How can one reconcile the very considerable Soviet investment in the anti-­imperialist cause with a marked predilection seen not only in t­ hese two Bolshevik writers but in much of the lit­er­at­ ure of t­ hese early postrevolutionary years, for citing the conquerors who established vast empires in Eurasia centuries before? Reisner’s and Nikulin’s invocations of the conquerors get to the heart of some of the ambiguity in their accounts of Af­ ghan­i­stan. On the one hand, the introduction of the conquerors enhances their narratives and provides them with an epic historical sweep and referent for greatness: the conquerors and their deeds are adequate to the magnificent landscape the contingent are traversing, unlike the pre­sent inhabitants of Af­g han­i­stan. As in so many texts of ­t hese de­cades, the example of ­g reat conquerors offers the possibility of a greater geopo­liti­cal and ideological amalgamation or at any rate anti-­i mperialist federation, and through it of regeneration—­a lbeit through vio­lence—of the oppressed and “sleepy,” who can be, as the Baku manifesto proclaimed “aroused from their sleep of centuries.” But, on the other hand, the conquerors ­were destroyers and the

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vio­lence they wreaked was a major cause of Af­ghan­is­ tan’s decline, as Reisner implies when she describes how the wind raises on the slopes of “the dusty, sand mountains . . . ​clouds of yellow dust [prakh] and scatters it like the ashes of an entire world that has been burnt out by unknown conquerors.”53 ­These writers’ obsession with the conquerors of Eurasia could be read as a justification for Soviet Rus­sia’s assuming leadership in the area. As it w ­ ere, the Bolsheviks would prove more worthy than the marauding pre­de­ces­sors and assist in Af­ghan­i­stan’s return to greatness. Karl Radek in his speech to the Baku Congress said: We are calling, comrades for the spirit [chuvstvam] of strug­gle that once inspired the p ­ eoples of the East, when t­ hese ­peoples u ­ nder the leadership of their ­great conquerors attacked Eu­rope. We know, comrades, that our opponents w ­ ill say that we are appealing to the memory of Genghis Khan, to the memory of the conquerors of the ­great caliphs of Islam. But we are convinced, that yesterday you unsheathed your daggers and revolvers not with aims of conquering, not to turn Eu­rope into a cemetery, you raised them in order, together with the workers of the entire world, to create a new culture, a culture of the f­ ree laborer and consequently when the cap­i­tal­ists of Eu­rope say that they are threatened by a new wave of barbarity, a new wave of Huns, we respond: Long live the Red East, which together with the workers of Eu­rope ­w ill create a second culture u ­ nder the banner of communism [stormy applause].54 To write off the invocation of the ­great conquerors of Asia as clear indicators of an unacknowledged Bolshevik neo-­imperialism is reductive. Radek may have invoked the conquerors in Baku, but the conquerors w ­ ere more an obsession of intellectuals than of the Bolshevik platform and could be seen as a carryover from prerevolutionary conventions.55 Raskolnikov, however, in his writings on Af­ghan­i­stan rejects Alexander and the Mughals as pre­ce­ dents for Bolshevik policies, pointing out that they w ­ ere used by Rus­sian monarchs from the seventeenth ­century onward for motivating their designs on South Asia, a perspective he gained from reading Ivan Iavorskii and Andrei Snesarev prior to Kabul.56 Reisner would have been aware of this argument. Moreover, in Reisner’s and Nikulin’s Af­ghan­i­stan texts imperial Britain

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is the referent, sometimes implicit, at ­others explicit, for their invocations of the conquerors. The use of vio­lence was critical in the Asian conquerors’ gaining command of an unpre­ce­dentedly vast area. It was for Cortes, too, and Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico rationalizes the vio­lence Cortes’s army ­v isited upon the Aztecs and its territorial conquest by focusing on the iniquities of the Aztecs. In Prescott’s account, they repeatedly fill Cortes and his men with “disgust” and “indignation” at their “butchery,” especially with the ritual sacrifices of innocents (a topos also of adventure fiction).57 “Never did I see so pitiless a race,” Cortes is said to have exclaimed, “or anything wearing the form of man so destitute of humanity.” Prescott largely ascribes horrendous vio­lence perpetrated on the Aztecs not to the Spanish troops, but to their fellow “barbarians,” the tribes allied with Cortes. He also justifies their vio­ lence in terms of the Aztecs’ brutal repressions of them over many years: “They . . . ​in this hour of vengeance seemed to be requiting the hoarded wrongs of a ­century.”58 And in any event, the conquest was justified as a religious crusade.59 Nikulin and Reisner offer no such justification for the barbaric vio­lence and epochal destruction of the conquerors of Asia, especially not Nikulin. Among the examples he decries are the “ten g­ reat towns, that w ­ ere wiped off the face of the earth by Genghis Khan. Towns that ­were flourishing, [where] architects had built palaces, libraries, mosques and mausoleums, scholars discovered the law of the earth’s gravitation before Isaac Newton, poets rivaled each other for the most refined style. . . . ​The libraries and the palaces and the mausoleums w ­ ere reduced to rubble, the w ­ ater canals, the irrigation system, which amazes specialists to this day, w ­ ere wiped off the face of the earth.”60 Reisner, in a similar vein, lamented that “the entire valley of Kandahar is a cemetery of g­ reat, ancient cities.”61 Prescott in Conquest of Mexico, somewhat as in Nikulin’s text, laments the destruction by the conquerors of the magnificent capital, in this case of the Aztecs, but sees its reduction to ruins as a necessary mea­sure given the despotic and barbaric reign of Montezuma and his successor. He also reports a speedy recovery from the devastation. But in Nikulin and Reisner, the Afghans are faulted for failing to regenerate their ­g reat cities a­ fter they w ­ ere razed by the g­ reat Asian conquerors.

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Both Reisner and Nikulin in their treatment of the conquerors show a Eurocentric bias. They effectively draw a distinction between Alexander the ­Great and Genghis Khan, who stands for the general barbarity and cruelty that Nikulin recurrently identifies with “the East.” This bias is most marked in Nikulin, who maintains that “in the Greek campaigns t­ here was no senseless cruelty,” and he contrasts the campaigns of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, who “left b ­ ehind conflagrations and bodies,” with t­ hose of Alexander, where “flourishing towns w ­ ere created” that subsequently left “grandiose ruins”; that is, the Ozymandias theme is implicitly attached to Alexander but not to the Asian conquerors. Nikulin admits that with Alexander, though he destroyed one despotism that kept its p ­ eople in “a severe form of slavery,” he merely substituted another form, but he foregrounds the notion that the local populace saw the Greek conquerors as a “miracle,” and for reasons that ­Nikulin couches in terms reminiscent of the clichéd image of a Bolshevik: “Their talent for organ­ization [organizovannost’], their knowledge and fi­nally their sternness and strictness [surovaia strogost’], and the simplicity of their weapons and clothing amazed them, used as they ­were to the pampered luxury of the Persians” (potentially a hint at the de­cadent, bourgeois Westerners, and at the British imperialists in par­tic­u­lar).62 Reisner shows an anti-­ Muslim bias and dismisses at one point conquerors whose Qur’an “is full of crude inanities, an animal sensibility, in general it is a work worthy of the tent of ignorant nomads from which it emerged to the misfortune of humanity, only in order to burn down flourishing old towns [with] libraries and gardens, to bring art and architecture to total decline, and reduce all the achievements of ancient thought to naught.”63 This sense of outrage at the Mongols’ and Tamerlane’s barbarism remained for some time in Soviet culture. It informs, for example, Sergei Eisenstein’s conception of his film The ­Great Ferghana Canal, a topic assigned him in May 1939 and intended to celebrate the monumental new Soviet irrigation proj­ect then u ­ nder construction. Eisenstein had wanted to or­ga­nize the film in a historical triptych and devote the first of the three parts to the story of how Tamerlane, in capturing Urgenj, drowned masses of inhabitants by redirecting w ­ aters to flood the city. Soviet authorities did not permit a historical excursion into the medieval period, and Eisenstein was so committed to including the Tamerlane story that he refused to continue filming without it

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and abandoned the proj­ect.64 But in his plans the repre­sen­ta­tion of the destruction of Urgenj, though he attributes it to Tamerlane, actually conflates the accounts in V. V. Barthold (Bartol’d) of the city’s devastation by first Genghis Khan and then Tamerlane. As with Eisenstein, in most instances Soviet writers and filmmakers who represented the ­great conquerors of Asia in their texts ­were drawing on the work of scholars like Barthold who emerged to prominence in the prerevolutionary years but continued publishing ­after that. ­These scholars’ evalua­ ere highly controversial and often diametrically tions of the conquerors w opposed, especially as concerns the vio­lence, which contributed to the ambiguous repre­sen­ta­tion of the conquerors in the texts of Reisner and ­Nikulin. Iavorskii, for example, in his 1882 account of his trip to Af­ghan­i­stan rec­ords a much longer cata­logue than Reisner and Nikulin of successive sackings of ­great Eastern cities by marauding conquerors, attributing the destruction of Balkh, for example, to a “crazed, elemental force” (bezumnaia stikhiia). His cata­logue culminates in the sackings of Genghis Khan as a sort of ultimate in devastation from which the g­ reat cities w ­ ere never able to recover, re65 maining ruins to Iavorskii’s day. Barthold, however, in part 2 of his book Turkestan v ėpokhu mongol’skogo nashestviia (Turkestan in the epoch of the Mongol invasion, 1900), argues that, absent sufficient sources, it is impossible to give an objective assessment of the Mongols’ actions in the devastating destruction of Balkh, pointing to conflicting assessments, some of which do not contain damning material. He cites, inter alia, some non-­ Russian sources that represent the massacre as occurring not in the aftermath of the conquest, but l­ ater in response to an uprising. And his concluding assessment is that Genghis essentially acted “like all conquerors” in using vio­ lence but applied extreme mea­sures “only when it was necessary for securing his power.” In accounts of him that Barthold considers at all reliable “­t here was no sign of gratuitous vio­lence or tyranny.”66 ­After the Revolution ­these scholars updated their accounts of the conquerors, giving them something of a class analy­sis, Barthold in “Kul’tura musul’manstva” (The culture of the Muslims, 1918), one of many influential texts by him, pre­sents a more positive evaluation of Tamerlane than in his ­earlier texts. He vividly describes the achievements of his Timurid dynasty in vari­ous spheres of Central Asian life, from architecture to agriculture, arguing that ­these achievements refute

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“perceptions that the Muslim world had been in a ‘deep dream’ u ­ ntil its ‘awakening’ by Eu­ro­pe­ans,” but this version of Tamerlane was also the opposite of what Eisenstein wanted to pre­sent in his film on the Ferghana Canal.67 In Rus­sia, the controversy about ­whether the Asian conquerors ­were ­bearers of civilization or barbarians was at its height in 1919–1925, precisely when Nikulin and Reisner ­were in Af­ghan­i­stan or writing about it. It was in ­these years that Boris Vladimirtsev’s book Chingis-­Khan (Genghis Khan), regarded by many as a virtual apologia for the destruction Genghis wreaked, first appeared, in 1922.68 And in 1925 the émigré Eurasianist Nikolai Trubetskoi published in Berlin his book Nasledie Chingiskhana (The heritage of Genghis Khan), in which he presented another positive evaluation of this Asian conqueror’s contribution to Rus­sian history and culture, though Trubetskoi also suggested that the Mongols’ subordination to Christian Rus­sia was the decisive step that ensured the development of a g­ reat nation, that is, essentially the Rus­sian Empire.69

“Roar” and “Thunder” in “Sleepy” Af­ghan­i­stan? The Eu­ro­pean colonialists’ awakening of Asians from a deep sleep is the absolute cliché of their lit­er­a­ture. Edward Said remarks in Orientalism that “the idea of regenerating a fundamentally lifeless Asia is a piece of pure Romantic Orientalism.”70 It was also central to the self-­justificatory rhe­toric of the imperialists. But most imperial powers have insisted that their colonial rule was better than ­t hose of o ­ thers.71 The Rus­sians did too. In the imperial period they claimed that in their rule over Central Asia they ­were unlike other imperialists. Iavorskii, for example, in his account (published in 1882) waxes lyrical about alleged extraordinary pro­gress that has come as the Rus­sians have lifted Central Asia out of its backwardness and torpor during the mere ten years since they controlled the area (from the 1870s). As for the Bolsheviks—­t heir rhe­toric also used the trope of a sleepy Asia, as is glaringly apparent in the Baku manifesto. Their cultural products of the 1920s and 1930s often used what I am calling the Sleeping Beauty narrative, whereby the Rus­sian / Soviet “prince” arrives to awaken the indigenous from their slumber. Examples include Mikhail Kalatozov’s Georgian documentary film Salt for Svanetia (Sol’ Svanetii, 1930), where in the climactic final se-

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quences Soviet workers dynamite through a mountain pass to build a road to the remote village of the Svans, an ethnic group locked away from the outside world in a valley of the Caucasus. Another would be Viktor Turin’s film Turksib (1929), where surveyors arrive in a sleepy hamlet to survey the terrain for a railway that w ­ ill rescue the local ethnics from their nomadic and feudal existence. But ­t hese films came from a l­ater and dif­fer­ent historical moment. In texts of the early postrevolutionary years when Reisner and Nikulin w ­ ere in Af­g han­i­stan, the oppressed and downtrodden w ­ ere often expected to awaken by themselves, albeit following the example of the Soviet Rus­sians, that is, more autonomously, though this was another area of ambiguity. Several passages of Nikulin’s and Reisner’s writings on Af­ghan­i­stan effectively challenge the standard rationale for colonialism, its “civilizing mission.” They see the British as paradigmatic colonialists whose nefarious deeds take the barbarity of the conquerors of old to new heights. Nikulin, for example, characterizes the first Anglo-­A fghan war as a time “when General Knott burnt down that Kabul bazaar so much as not even Timur destroyed it.”72 In Reisner, the British kill the locals insouciantly, proving themselves bastard versions of the Eu­ro­pe­an.73 The issue of vio­lence was no innocent one for Nikulin and Reisner in the wake of the Revolution and a brutal civil war in which they both fought. But in their texts it was closely tied to the issue of empire. Reisner in the introductory sections to Afganistan alludes to the reign of Elizaveta Petrovna (1741–1762), during which Rus­sia made headway in settling the Kazakh steppe, and also to Pushkin’s Captain’s ­Daughter (Kapitanskaia dochka, 1836), which, though Reisner does not make this explicit, gives a romanticized account of the rebellion of Pugachev of 1773 in Orenburg, a town located at the time at the southern border separating the Rus­sian Empire and Central Asia.74 In other words, the role of imperial Rus­sia in Asia and of re­sis­tance to imperialism are implicitly pre­sent from the very beginning of her text as a fundamental binary matched by, and linked to, her other fundamental binary of civilization and vio­lence. The treatment of both is marked by an ambivalence. For example, Reisner’s references to the reign of Elizaveta Petrovna highlight culture and magnificence, an unexpected stance in a writer committed to unmasking imperialism.

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Lowell Thomas Reisner’s and Nikulin’s accounts of Af­ghan­is­ tan ­were implicitly challenged in a rival account of the country by an American t­ here at the same time as they w ­ ere, the journalist Lowell Thomas, who in 1922, together with his cameraman Harry Chase and the American entrepreneur David Wooster King, motored across to Kabul from India, taking pictures and filming all the way. Thomas had become famous when in 1919 he toured the world with a film about Lawrence of Arabia, accompanied by an exhibition of photo­graphs and a lecture about his experiences, “With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia.” He had created the mythical heroic image of Lawrence, implying that British territorial gains in the M ­ iddle East had been the work of a rugged individualist in the desert wilderness rather than that of a highly disciplined En­glish army. Lawrence’s very eccentricity in a sense camouflaged the imperialist nature of the conquest. The journey through extraordinary terrain, effectively a topos of imperialist texts, is also central to Thomas’s accounts of both Af­ghan­i­stan and ­Lawrence’s campaign in Arabia. The centerpiece of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962), which is heavi­ly indebted to Thomas, is the epic trek through an extraordinary landscape (the Nafud desert). The ensuing ­battle at Aqaba, ostensibly the reason for the trek, is scarcely covered. And throughout the film the extreme long shot is favored by Lean for the panoramic view of the vast expanses of desert on which the ­human is often no more than a dot on the horizon. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, written between 1919 and 1921 and published in successive redactions in 1922, 1926, and 1935, was not read by Reisner, but quite possibly piqued the interest of Eisenstein, who in 1940 began to plan a film on Lawrence, transposing the locale to Persia.75 ­After his stint in Arabia Lawrence had worked in Af­ghan­i­stan, too. To escape the pressures of fame, he had joined the Royal Air Force ­under a false name (Aircraftsman Shaw) and was stationed from 1928 to early 1929 on what is now Pakistan’s North-­West Frontier. Th ­ ere is some controversy over ­Lawrence’s exact role in (then) India. The official line of the India Office and the Foreign and Colonial Office is that he spent his time translating Homer’s Odyssey, again the imperialist operative-­philologist. True, but Lawrence was also deployed in a secret role in Af­g han­i­stan to destabilize the regime of Amanullah and was reassigned ­after Amanullah was ousted. Nikulin appar-

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ently became aware of Lawrence’s Afghan episode and incorporated it in the 1933 expanded version of his Afghan memoir.76 Thomas’s book Beyond Khyber Pass into Forbidden Afghanistan—­t he very title reeking of imperialist romance—­begs comparison with Reisner’s Afgan­ ere first published in 1925. In fact, the two authors met istan in that both w in Af­ghan­i­stan. Among the photos Thomas included in this memoir w ­ ere two taken at a diplomatic reception in Kabul, with Reisner and Raskolnikov on facing pages.77 Thomas and Chase had journeyed to Kabul from the southeast; Reisner, Raskolnikov, and Nikulin had come from the northwest; however, the two groups entered Af­ghan­i­stan not only from dif­fer­ent directions but also with dif­fer­ent perspectives. Thomas had a pro-­Western outlook. Where Reisner sought to create an epic narrative, he strained to create an ­adventure romance. The locals w ­ ere typed as “brigands,” “war fanatics of Islam,” “no men more worthy of the title ‘desperado.’ ” His small party are at the mercy of constant raids from such marauders, often described using the pre­sent tense to make the action all the more riveting. He also added exotic touches by, for example, frequently invoking the Arabian Nights and pre­sents Peshawar as “A City of a Thousand and One Sins.”78 But Reisner and Nikulin sprinkle their travelogues with reference to that text, too. In fact, M. N. Roy, a friend of Raskolnikov, reports that before ­going to Af­ghan­i­stan Reisner “was reading the Arabian Nights all over again, hoping to get a feel for the court of King Amanullah. Was he something like Harun-­al-­Rashid, she wondered. No, he was reported to be a modern man.”79 Thomas, ever seeking the dramatic, in his account of Af­ghan­i­stan gives prominence, like Reisner, to the ­great conquerors of Asia such as Genghis Khan, Hulagu, and Timur, who, in his words, “debouched over the plains of India, seven or eight centuries ago.” Thomas sees Alexander as having been successful ­t here partly b ­ ecause of the brutal regime he instituted to keep the Afghans u ­ nder control. But, like Reisner, he laments the fall from the magnificence of the eras of the conquerors: “Where are the palaces and the mosques that might for a moment detain the eye of the passing traveler? . . . ​ The thousand and first sin of her ­people . . . ​[is] . . . ​faithlessness. They are rich . . . ​t he material for building soundly is in their hands, but not in their hearts.”80 Both Thomas and Reisner in their memoirs, then, view Af­ghan­i­stan as reduced to somnolence by willful neglect, but the two recommend opposing

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resolutions to this predicament. For Thomas, who was in Af­ghan­i­stan in part as a cap­i­tal­ist entrepreneur, the Afghans can emerge from their sleep through Western investment. In casting around for a hero for the sequel to his highly successful account of Lawrence of Arabia he latched onto the current emir, Amanullah, as a savior-­modernizer, billing him as a “direct descendant of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane,” in other words as potentially a ­g reat hero ­under whom their ­great eras can be reborn.81 To realize his, and the country’s, potential would to Thomas be to allow cap­i­tal­ist investment. “­There is ­considerable wealth in the country, which only the capital and experience of the West can develop. More and more, the pre­sent amir w ­ ill be drawn into the vortex of Western industrialism.” If he “is to pro­g ress along the path of material prosperity, the amir w ­ ill undoubtedly have to look to foreign investors.”82 Thomas in proposing this improbable scenario exaggerates the extent to which Amanullah, known to be a lover of automobiles and planes, was a modernizer, who looks to the West for expertise and investment, though shortly ­after Amanullah became emir he sent his foreign minister on a tour of the West, and ultimately traveled t­ here himself. In actuality, the emir was profiting from the rivalry between Western countries as to who would become Af­ghan­i­stan’s chief ally and chief facilitator of modernization. The players included the Italians, who sent planes, allegedly arriving from Italy via elephant and camel caravan, and the En­glish, who set up a telegraph connection from Kandahar to Herat.83 But the Soviets soon superseded the Italian effort. In 1925 they brought more planes, actually flying them over the treacherous mountains. Then, in 1930, they made Kabul the end point of an epic journey that took Soviet aviators ­t here via Ankara, Tiflis, and Teheran, with the return via Tashkent.84 The leading Pravda journalist Mikhail Koltsov, who went on the flight, boasted that to get to Kabul they had to cross the Hindu Kush at a height if 5.5 kilo­meters.85 But the squadron arrived too late; that ­great lover of planes, Amanullah, had been ousted. Amanullah also sought to transform his capital and, like Atatürk for Ankara, recruited Eu­ro­pean architects to redesign it. At one point Albert Speer, who was to go on to become Hitler’s chief architect and designer of a monumental Berlin, was about to go to Kabul for this purpose. In the event, the venture was cut short with Amanullah’s death. However, a French architect did redesign the Afghan capital.86

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Modernizing ventures can be problematical for Bolshevik commentators in that they are likely introduced by cap­i­tal­ists. Though Reisner in her book admits to certain efforts at modernization ­under Amanullah, she applies a searing irony to deprecate the kind of pro­gress and enlightenment provided ­under him. What she represents as the single factory—­for wool textiles—­she deprecates for its pure exploitation of the toiling ­people. In point of fact, as her b ­ rother, Igor Reisner, wrote in his introduction to the booklet F. Raskol’nikov i angliiskii ul’timatum (F. Raskolnikov and the En­g lish ultimatum, 1924), the only factories in Kabul w ­ ere military ones set up by the 87 En­glish between 1885 and 1887. His s­ ister in her travelogue also sees Western efforts at modernization as largely directed ­toward improving Af­ghan­i­stan’s military prowess, representing the army as a “militaristic carcass of iron with, hidden inside, beneath the telegraph and telephone poles, a primitive, rapacious soul.”88 The British, she admits, have modernized eastern Af­ghan­i­stan by building a highway to India and bringing electricity, but comments that the “lines of communication have crossed the burnt out villages of the ­Wazirs, sprayed with airplane bombs,” and the “treacherously slim columns” for the electricity have been “poured from the same metal from which the cannons and bayonets of the colonial armies are made.”89 One can sense the differences between Thomas’s and Reisner’s accounts of Western investment in Af­ghan­i­stan in the way they respectively represent the American entrepreneur Washington B. Vanderlip, who was in Af­ghan­i­ stan at the same time as they w ­ ere. Reisner casts him as imperialism incarnate, reporting that he came to Af­ghan­i­stan to launch his “campaign for Asia, [involving] a monstrous unification of China, Af­ghan­i­stan, Persia, Mesopotamia and Turkey in the one bank and railway dominion.” In, as it w ­ ere, a rival version of Eurasia without borders, he had plans for “covering the routes of Alexander the ­Great, the Mughals, and the Caesars with railway sleepers, of incorporating in the one electrical grid all the disparate parts of Muslim governments . . . ​a nd linking all the markets of Central Asia and the Near East, opening for Amer­i­ca new gates to Asia, laying down with goods a triumphal way through the entire East.”90 In a chapter of Reisner’s memoir (published initially as an article in Pravda), Vanderlip emerges as the b ­ earer of a sort of false consciousness.91 His capitalistic, modernizing schemes cannot lead Af­g han­i­stan to something that would match or surpass its ancient glory ­under the conquerors, even though

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the rails for a new railroad ­were to be laid over the routes of Alexander. She pre­sents his failure in a scene of clear allegorical import. As Vanderlip confidently awaits approval of his plans, he attends a nine-­day national festival of in­de­pen­dence or­ga­nized by the wily emir. On day four the emir changes from Eu­ro­pean dress to the clothing of the Eastern border tribals (the population Lowell Thomas characterized as “desperadoes,” but are represented in Raskolnikov’s booklet as in­de­pen­dent and virulently anti-­British border tribes that Britain has been struggling to contain).92 The British ambassador, sensing an increasingly anti-­British drift to the cele­brations, drives off in his Rolls-­Royce, sending up a cloud of dust. Then begins frenetic dancing and swordplay. “From the morning on the Wazirs and Afrids work themselves into a state of elated militancy, which by four to five ­o’clock has reached a state of ecstasy.” L ­ ater a featured dancer ritually cuts down historical enemies of Af­ghan­i­stan in turn, listing by name each prominent En­glishman who was killed in an encounter with the Afghans or dis­appeared without trace.” “Then suddenly the circles of dancers break up, the ­music melds with a flaming roar, the warriors, . . . ​[mine] in the one menacing black-­blue flame, the sword above the head, and dust [pyl’], like smoke, and dancing, like a conflagration [pozhar].” “The tribune is burning, all the square, the sky, the mountains, the entire country and all the p ­ eople, and through the thunderous sound of this victory born [by ­horse­men] proceeding at a gallop, the emir, his face charred, calls out in a voice that rises above all else”—in Farsi—­“I ­will not accept any concessions. [You] must leave.” And so Vanderlip, the foreigner would-be developer, does, or rather he leaves in Reisner’s version though not that of Thomas, where he is said to have already received a contract to extract natu­ral resources before Thomas arrived.93 In Reisner’s account of this event several ele­ments come together, including the myth of the yellow peril, the Asian hordes threatening Eu­ro­pe­ans. But ­here Reisner effectively rejects the notion that the hordes are a negative force. As she describes it, a “horde” of nameless militants from among the downtrodden, rises up (represented figuratively as locusts in khaki—­i.e., military uniforms). They meld together to form a “flame”—­a common symbol of r­ evolution—­a conflagration (pozhar). The ­music itself “merges in a fiery roar” of ­t hose liberating themselves from the imperialists. While this passage fleshes out the rhe­toric of Baku, it is also clearly inflected by the notion of a Dionysian “ecstasy” that Nietz­sche outlined in his

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Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of M ­ usic (1872), which was enormously popu­lar and influential in the early twentieth ­century among Rus­sian intellectuals. We ­will note also in ­t hese passages an opposition between the wild and unruly tribals, the indigenous and chthonic hordes, and the cultured—­the British ambassador. E ­ arlier in the book, Reisner in describing a musician playing in a cele­bration of Afghan in­de­pen­dence remarks: “In e­ very cell of his ner­vous body hides the god of m ­ usic—­implacable, mystical, cruel.” The drum fires up the “militant nomads to dance.” The dancers with “half-­closed eyes,” their f­aces with a “drunken, terrifying pallor,” respond to the m ­ usic as if “a fiery hot bow [had touched] the strings of an ancient violin,” in a sense realizing themselves, for “the dance itself is the spirit of the tribe.” The “toilers of the East” are, as it ­were, enacting re­sis­tance to the imperialists but, as Reisner tells it, do so in a Dionysiac frenzy (“drunken” dance) taken almost directly out of Nietz­sche, while the cool and collected Bolshevik onlookers provide the essential Apollinian counterpoint. Th ­ ere are ele­ments in her description of the dance that do not belong to tribal Afghan culture but more to the Eu­ro­pean cultural tradition, such as violins—­and “­people from ancient Greek vases,” impor­tant in the practices and ideas of prerevolutionary dancers such as Isadora Duncan and Mikhail Fokin (Fokine), whose per­for­mances ­were in Petersburg and Paris major cultural events in the first de­cades of the twentieth c­ entury. M. N. Roy claims in his memoir that Reisner danced Salome for the emir, a highly erotic dance popu­lar among Duncan-­like dancers early in the twentieth ­century.94 In Reisner’s description of the dance on In­ de­pen­dence Day, Nietz­schean frenzy has been harnessed in the ser­v ice of a po­liti­cal cause. As the dance comes to its climax, participants shout out: “The En­glish took our land from us. . . . ​We ­will wipe them from the face of the earth” (in Raskolnikov’s less dramatic report on this to the Soviet Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, it is the “Eu­ro­pe­ans” who have taken the land).95 The En­glish ambassador blanches, while the crowd enthuses about the Bolsheviks, about whom “they sing songs at the edge of the earth, on the borders of India.”96 Potentially such scenes of wild dancing represent a variant on a common notion of recent anticolonialist theory. As Shohat and Stam put it in Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media, “Colonialist / racist discourse renders the colonized as wild beasts in their unrestrained libidinousness.”97 But though Reisner utilizes that cliché, she inverts its valorization. She is taken by the romance of revolution as a form of ecstasy. What

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she pre­sents is some kind of fantasy of revolutionary triumph over capitalism and imperialism (as represented by Vanderlip or the British ambassador). The “upsurge of national creativity, inspired by the century-­old strug­gle for in­ de­pen­dence, flowed into the primordial and mighty forms of military songs, the militant dance and the ­music accompanying it,” she claims.98 The downtrodden are rising up in a vertiginous dance of defiance: Nietz­sche meets the Baku manifesto. Nietz­sche identified the Dionysian and its confrontation with, inter alia, Persian poetry, and in par­tic­u­lar with the poetry of Hafez, whom Goethe had promoted in his East-­West Divan, a work that many have taken to be a founding moment for world lit­er­a­ture. It has become something of a cliché of recent writing that, as Siraj Ahmed has put it in Archaeology of Babel: The Colonial Foundation of the Humanities, “Western writers from Goethe to Nietz­sche would identify Hafez’s poetry with Dionysian desire and hence with the potential revitalization of Eu­ro­pean culture.”99 Reisner also assigns a special role to Persian poetry: “Only the Persians,” she claims, “have moderated the wild, petty strictures of Mahomet with the wisdom of Zoroastra [i.e., Zarathustra], with the humanism of the ancient fire worshippers [as the Zoroastrians w ­ ere known to be], the first magi and astronomers of the 100 world.” It is in t­ hese terms that classical Persian culture is contrasted with the “all-­castrating . . . ​religion of the Arab conquerors,” destroyers of the achievements of civilization. But it is not the Persian epic, beloved of Lahuti, to which she ascribes this liberating effect, but its lyr­ics. By contrast with Khlebnikov and Lahuti, she effectively dismisses Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh as having been “written a long time ago” and how it “managed to grow decrepit ­ eople still argue over its “dead ideas.”101 In effect, then, [obvetshat’],” though p Reisner is against the legitimizing national narrative of Ferdowsi, and no doubt against its nationalistic prejudices (for the Ira­ni­a ns and against the Turanians) and its provenance at the beginning of the Muslim era in Persia. She prefers Persian lyrical verse, though like Nietz­sche she ignores its deeply religious tenor.102 E ­ arlier in Afganistan she had invoked the “melancholy-­ militant songs of Saadi.”103 In imperial Rus­sia t­ here had been an infatuation with Persian poetry, which reached its peak during the Silver Age when periodicals such as Russkaia mysl’ (Rus­sian thought) frequently published translations of classical Persian poets or articles on them.104 Most of the major poets of the Silver Age,

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such as Konstantin Bal’mont, Ivan Bunin, Nikolai Gumilev, Viacheslav Ivanov, and Mikhail Kuz’min, produced poems ­either about, or in imitation of, the classical Persian writers.105 But overwhelmingly, as in Goethe, whose East-­West Divan inspired a craze for Persian poetry already in the nineteenth ­century, the interest was in classical Persian lyric poetry rather than the epic—so that Reisner’s scorn for Shahnameh was not completely anomalous. Among the Persian poets who captivated the Silver Age literary imagination, Hafez occupied a special place. In 1906–1907 in the famous “tower” in Petersburg of the Nietz­schean and poet Viacheslav Ivanov, a haunt where de­ cadent writers gathered for soirées, they formed a “Friends of Hafez Society,” whose members ­were called Hafezites and given special names. Hafez became the sign u ­ nder which their distinctly bohemian society flourished; they identified his poetry with the Dionysiac (wine, sexual orgy, and frenzy). Members practiced all manner of be­hav­ior that might offend the bourgeois, including homo­sexuality and multipartnered couplings, and frequently their meeting dissolved into bacchanalian dances. ­L ater, when Reisner and Gumilev became intimate, they developed private names for their correspondence, and he was Hafez and she Leri; t­ hese names derive from Gumilev’s play Ditia Allakha (1916), where the central character is a poet called Hafez and his ­great love is Peri.106 This enthusiasm for Persian poetry continued well into the Soviet period. ­After the Revolution, the publishing ­house Vsemirnaia literatura put out several more collections of Persian poetry, including one of Saadi, and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, though the Rus­sian translation was not from the Persian but from Edward FitzGerald’s adaptation in his En­glish translation.107 Even the unruly peasant bard Sergei Esenin could for some years be seen clutching a popu­lar anthology of Persian lyr­ics in translation, Persidskie liriki, published in 1916. Esenin went on to write his own Persidskie motivy (Persian motifs) and also l­ater contrived to visit Persia himself.108 Persian verse was so popu­lar in the 1920s that when in 1926 VOKS or­ga­nized an eve­ning of readings in Moscow, it had to find a larger room ­because of the demand, and even then ­t here ­were not enough seats and ­people ­were turned away.109 Consequently, the writers’ Party Committee requested that another eve­ning be or­ga­nized in an auditorium that would hold more and in which “our poets who reflect Persian influences in their poetry [could] take part.”110

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Recent literary historians have highlighted the origins of the Eu­ro­pean cult of Persian poetry, and of Hafez in par­tic­u­lar, in work of scholars from the British East India Com­pany who translated and promoted their verse.111 At the time of the ­great Indo-­Persian empires, such as the Mughals, in a huge swathe of territory, stretching from Persia to the northern subcontinent and Af­ghan­i­stan to Iran, Turkey, and Central Asia, Persian had been the language of the educated and the administrators, and Persian poetry the culture-­franca of the region. Though the g­ reat empires that had disseminated it w ­ ere long gone, Persian cultural dominance had lingered in Af­ghan­i­stan, especially in Herat, formerly part of Persia, where Nikulin ran the Soviet consulate for a time. It also remained impor­tant in India, where it was sold widely in the bazaars. In short, in citing Persian poetry Nikulin was in effect invoking a vast transnational cultural sweep, but also identifying Eu­ro­pean high culture with an Asian tradition. Neither he nor Reisner invoked Sanskrit texts, however, favorites of the Theosophists, but not of Nietz­sche. Persian poetry was part of the Euro-­Russian literary commons, of the vocabulary of its intellectuals. As might be expected, t­ here is a sprinkling of references to Persian poetry in Reisner’s Afganistan and in her letters to Raskolnikov and also in Nikulin’s Chetyrnadtsat’ mesiatsev v Afganistane. In the ­later and expanded version of that text, Afganistan, written in 1931 Nikulin takes the cult of Persian poetry to an extreme and is constantly embellishing his text with lines from it (mostly Omar Khayyam), not always with relevant quotes.112 He also dwells on the centrality for the cultural memory of the Afghans of the poet Jami (Djāmī), one of the greatest Persian Sufi poets of the fifteenth ­century. Nikulin describes how Afghan intellectuals would gather at his grave in Herat for a reading aloud of his poems, together with some by Saadi, Hafez, and Omar Khayyam, adding that “no p ­ eople are as inclined to poetry as the Persians” and “possibly no one loves their poets as much as they do.”113 Persian poetry, then, is a relic of the g­ reat imperial past of Western and Central Asia. Are the citations from Persian poems meant to enhance the text with exoticism, cryptic references to a g­ reat empire and its culture, a gesture of internationalism, or an expression of a deeply held belief in world lit­er­a­ ture? Doubtless, they represent Nikulin’s own taste, a taste he held in common with so many Rus­sian and Eu­ro­pean intellectuals. In frequently citing lines from Persian poetry he could also be seen as attempting to establish literary

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bona fides and displaying a deep appreciation for the area’s cultural patrimony. In attempting to anchor his love for Persian poetry in the Bolshevik cause, he tried to establish a line of continuity between the Persian poets and the Rus­sian revolutionary movement by calling one of them, a renegade, a “Persian Riego,” thereby referring to a Spanish revolutionary who had been an inspiration to the Rus­sian Decembrists when they staged a small revolt in 1825; Riego’s rebellion in 1812 was in Soviet lore a precursor of 1917. One might nevertheless see Hafez, Persian poetry in general, and Hafez in par­tic­u­lar, as improbable choices for an agent of Soviet Rus­sia playing the ­Great Game in darkest Af­ghan­i­stan. Hafez was primarily a lyric poet, wrote of the erotic and lamented the impermanence of existence. His verse was suffused with melancholy and a touch of mysticism—­hardly Soviet attitudes. Omar Khayyam, whom Nikulin quotes most frequently, was actually a Sufi mystic, and his poetry extolled wine and the pleasures of life, the sort of t­ hing Gumilev celebrated in his poem “The Drunken Dervish,” which was influenced by another Persian poet, the Sufi mystic Nasir-­i-­K husrau, founder of Ismailism. The de­cadent writers in Viacheslav Ivanov’s tower essentially took Hafez as their emblem for inebriation and sexual license (implicitly counterposed in Reisner’s Af­ghan­i­stan text to “castrating” Mohammedanism). But in seeing him this way, Reisner and the com­pany in the tower ­were ignoring the fact that Hafez was a devout Muslim. Nikulin used Persian poetry as a way to stress Afghan culture’s cosmopolitan nature, a point Thomas also stressed and one that is commonly found in historical accounts ­today.114 In Nikulin’s case, this characterization is implicitly counterposed to the British imperialist hegemonic impulses in the subcontinent. He keeps reminding the reader that Af­ghan­i­stan has not always been a separate country but had been part of a much larger, Persianate entity. Jami, though a native of the Herat environs, had at dif­fer­ent times dif­ fer­ent domiciles within the Persianate cultural world. Nikulin also, h ­ ere in contrast with Reisner, whose vehement rejection of Mohammedanism leads to a distorted picture of con­temporary Af­ghan­i­stan, was not anti-­Muslim. Reisner was attracted to revolution as a Dionysiac experience, a conviction that structures her juxtaposition of the Bolsheviks and the British imperialists as we saw in the account of the in­de­pen­dence cele­bration. Her Af­ghan­i­ stan memoir contains another fanciful allegorical passage built on a similar contrast. This passage opens as she likens the Bolsheviks’ presence in the

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diplomatic world to (pace Lowell Thomas) that of the wild and uncouth, and continues: In the cultured consciousness of a Eu­ro­pean diplomat with his subtle grasp of juridicial ­matters the Bolsheviks occupied roughly the same place as was occupied in the scholastic worldview of his forebear by some kind of four-­legged Ostrogoth, who has come straight from his barbarian shield to clamber onto the sacred throne of the Roman Empire and been crowned in Saint Peter’s Cathedral with the wreath of the emperor, woven from h ­ orses’ halters. . . . ​[T]he wild steppe h ­ orse­men of Otto or Theodoric [the ­Great] stood at the very walls of the Eternal City and the drunk armored soldiers [latniki], belching, smelling of ­horse sweat ­u nder their plundered silk clothing, had not lost the ability to wield a sword, burn down towns and dispatch popes to rest with the angels.115 This dramatic scenario seems almost a response to Radek’s statement in Baku that “when the cap­i­tal­ists of Eu­rope say that they are threatened by a near wave of barbarity, a new wave of Huns, we respond: Long live the Red East, which together with the workers of Eu­rope ­will create a second culture ­under the banner of communism [stormy applause].”116 The British Empire was the con­temporary equivalent of the Roman, and the Bolsheviks in Af­ ghan­i­stan “stood at the very walls” of that empire’s jewel, the Raj. Throughout this book Reisner is obsessed with ­England as the rival power. H ­ ere, she has repurposed the common and self-­serving imperialist narrative of the British that charts a historical progression from Pax Romana and culminates in Pax Britannica (seen, for example, in T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” written in 1919, but two years before Reisner left for Af­ghan­i­stan). Implicitly, she is proposing ­here a dif­fer­ent trajectory, re­orienting the line of pro­gress to pass through Moscow. The folly of the proud conquerors of Asia is written in the Lethe-­like sands of Af­g han­i­stan that presage the fate of the ignominious British Empire. In making this point, Reisner clearly draws on Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1789), a full translation of which into Rus­sian appeared in 1883–1886. In her account Reisner has drawn on several accounts in Gibbon of “barbarians” attacking Rome, including that of Otho, Alaric,

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and Theodoric. But she has also conflated details of each of ­t hese assaults on Rome with a self-­image popu­lar among Rus­sian radical intellectuals of the early twentieth ­century who saw themselves, if only figuratively, as defying convention and like the barbarian Scythian h ­ orse­men, who allegedly rode over the steppes, wild and f­ ree. Gibbon frequently identifies the “barbarian” forces that overrun Rome as “Scythians,” and often uses that as a general term for Eastern “barbarians.” But in this passage, though she does not identify the attackers as “Scythians,” Reisner, in her invocation of “wild steppe ­horse­men” is effectively drawing on romantic tropes that w ­ ere popu­lar in the years 1915–1922, which straddled the Revolution, and are particularly associated with Scythianism (an ism we w ­ ill encounter again in Chapter 5). This movement provided an alternative to accounts of the Rus­sians as Eu­ro­pe­ans. The image of “wild steppe ­horse­men” also fits with her own sense of the thrill of revolution as a form of Dionysiac frenzy, and with her self-­presentation as a fearless ­horse­woman advancing on a route that ends at the Indian border, “at the very walls” of British India (Rome). She is applying a template from her own intellectual milieu to render what proved to be a mirage of revolutionary Asia. At Reisner’s pen the Sleeping Beauty narrative has been transmogrified into a phoenix narrative, though only for a moment of fantasy. In the passage cited ­earlier she parlayed a wild dance into a vision of the oppressed rising up in Dionysiac frenzy. Her image h ­ ere of the “wild ­horse­men” affronting the imperial capital inverts the valorization of the binary wild / ​ ­civilized that is a commonplace of apologia for colonial conquest. The Roman Empire is considered to have become degenerate in its final phases, so that the barbarians who sacked it could be seen as a revitalizing force. “Smelling of h ­ orse sweat,” they stand for bald male virility. The impermanence of empires was amply evident in this post–­World War I time, when Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West was all the rage, particularly in Soviet Rus­sia. We also sense Spengler as a shadow text as Lowell Thomas proclaims in his Af­ghan­i­stan memoir: “Four thousand years of civilization with this result! . . . ​Or must the history of each civilization be the same in the end? Birth, growth, and death.”117 Reisner, locked as she was into her narrative of the absolute decline of Af­ ghan­i­stan from greatness ­under the conquerors to eternal “sand,” with the country’s only pos­si­ble salvation to come from spontaneous uprising of the oppressed hordes, appears to have been blind to a competing cosmopolitan

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vision represented among the Afghan elite at the time of her visit—­versions of the pan-­Islamic movement that she surely encountered but obviously chose not to cover. In par­t ic­u ­lar, she omits the enlightened newspaper founder Mahmud Tarzi, who had close ties to the Ottoman intellectual world and advocated modernizing Af­ghan­i­stan along Eu­ro­pean lines together with a non-­jihadist, nonfundamentalist pan-­Islamism that could challenge the global British Empire. Tarzi provided Af­g han­i­stan with what, in his judgment, was “ ‘one of the most essential tools of modern civilization,’ a newspaper” (Saraj-­al-­Akhbar, 1911–1919), but he was not alone in his vision for Af­g han­i­stan. During the G ­ reat War, Af­g han­i­stan had been a magnet for Asians (and Germans) seeking to challenge the global British Empire, turning Kabul into a hotbed of anti-­British agitation, and Raskolnikov during his time ­t here made repeated and largely unsuccessful attempts to make it a staging point for Indian revolutionaries who had gathered in Central Asia.118 ­After the G ­ reat War, and u ­ ntil 1923, when Turkey gained in­de­pen­dence, Af­ghan­ i­stan was viewed as the only in­de­pen­dent Muslim nation and potentially the center of a confederation of anti-­imperialist nations.119 In 1922 Nikulin published an article on “Af­ghan­i­stan and Angora [Ankara]” in the journal Novyi Vostok in which he argued that since Turkey was in no position to revive the caliphate, embroiled as the republic was in the war to drive out the British, French, and Greeks, this mantle could be assumed by Af­g han­i­stan, which could become a center of the Muslim world. He proposed a confederation of “Persia, Bukhara, Ankara u ­ nder the aegis of Af­ghan­i­stan.”120 But his views ­were not shared by the Bolshevik leaders, who, although initially intrigued, feared that ­were Amanullah to head such a confederation he would be driven by an expansionist pan-­Islamism that might frustrate Soviet aims.121 Reisner’s Afganistan pre­sents a contradictory image of the Afghans They are shiftless and uncultured, yet, in some passages, they are impassioned insurgents who prevail over the presumptuous British in a rising up. But their Dionysiac dance of defiance is only a phantasmatic moment. Rebellion did not occur. Reisner’s sense of the utter barrenness of the country prevails, barrenness in both a literal and a figurative sense. She personally could not resolve the contradiction between having to operate as a diplomat’s wife in a country where a medieval sense of ­woman’s role prevailed and her inner drive as a Dionysian revolutionary and her Bolshevik firm belief in gender equality. In “sleepy” Af­ghan­i­stan the Raskolnikov contingent had had to adjust to a

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life without the smell of gunpowder and the excitement of po­liti­cal and military b ­ attles and w ­ ere frustrated by their tenuous links with the whirling events to the north. As Nikulin put it in his l­ater, expanded version of his Af­ghan­i­stan memoir: “Thirty-­two ­people left the only advanced government order in the world—­t he republic of the Soviets—­and set out into the M ­ iddle Ages, into a medieval Muslim country. We left [a place] where in Ukraine the ­peoples’ commissar for propaganda was a ­woman and went to a country where for fourteen months not one of us saw a w ­ oman without a chador. Poor Larisa Reisner, used to leading troops into ­battle, found herself relegated to socializing with the wives and mistresses of Afghan dignitaries and Eu­ro­ pean ambassadors.”122 This was not completely a relegation, however. In becoming friends with the emir’s m ­ other and his favorite wife, Soraya—­who was actually Tarzi’s ­daughter and a feminist—­she was able to make the court more favorably disposed to the Soviet mission and to gain some intelligence (she devoted several sections of her memoir to the situation of ­women in the country).123 But although she was skillful b ­ ehind the scenes, in public Afghan mores relegated her to the role of the meek l­ittle wife of the diplomat who was to associate with the wives and mistresses and appear unassuming at diplomatic receptions. In Lowell Thomas’s photo of her at a Kabul diplomatic reception she is dressed demurely, and his accompanying comment is, “Kingdoms wax and wane, but the eternal feminine remains. M. Raskolnikov, envoy from Moscow, and his charming wife.”124 It is quite striking that, in contrast to Soviet cultural envoys in Turkey and Persia, neither Reisner nor Nikulin, nor any other representative of Soviet officialdom, made any attempt to explore con­temporary Afghan culture, as distinct from the classical Persian. Both ­t hese writers saw the cultural scene ­there as barren as the country’s terrain. Nikulin in his ­later version of his Afghan memoir, colored no doubt by the fact that Amanullah had been ousted in 1929, leaving the position of the Soviet Union t­ here, always fraught, even worse, exclaims: “What had happened, what had taken place over ­t hese five to six centuries? . . . ​It was immobile and eternal, this accursed East! Dynamite, melinite, gases—­what could crush this hardened stone of custom, this imperishable beauty that kills and lulls all to sleep.”125 Far from following a Sleeping Beauty scenario, a­ fter a year in Herat, he recalls, the six Rus­sians in the consulate found “unbearable” the “exotic magnificence” of the landscape “which would move any orientalist novelist.”126 Reisner and Raskolnikov

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reported back to Moscow similar revulsion: the “half-­biblical, half medieval exotics of the feudal pastoral mores . . . ​summon in me a feeling of hopeless boredom.”127 ­After so much initial hope and enthusiasm, in the end the party that crossed the mountains on their epic trek to Kabul w ­ ere despairing of Af­ghan­i­stan. Raskolnikov called it a horrible “hole”—­a nd could not wait to get out; his wife, who yearned to be at the center of a revolutionary maelstrom, was even more impatient. She could not stand the torpor and retreated to Moscow, where she soon gained permission to join Karl Radek, as they both attempted to facilitate the 1923 revolution in Germany. She soon became Radek’s lover, replacing one set of intense passions (sexual and revolutionary) with another. But her g­ oing to Germany could also be seen as a retreat from an alien Asia to the more familiar Eu­rope, raising questions about the viability of the Baku mandate. The German revolution of 1923 proved abortive, like the attempted one of 1918–1919, and Radek was ousted as deputy head of the Comintern. Soviet interest in fomenting revolution in Eu­rope faded and attention was turned to China; the Sun Yat-­sen University was founded in Moscow, an offshoot from KUTV for students from China and a place where it was hoped revolution in China would be fomented. Radek became its first head (1925–1927), and Reisner taught Rus­sian lit­er­a­t ure ­t here, though her main occupation ­after Germany was producing reportage items for Pravda on economic enterprises.128 In 1926 Reisner died in another delirium, when she succumbed to typhus. Both Raskolnikov and Radek ­were inconsolable. Tragic though her death at a young age was, however, she was in consequence spared the fate of the three Bolsheviks leaders with whom she associated in t­ hese early postrevolutionary years: Raskolnikov, Radek, and Trotsky. Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party in 1927 and exiled to Almaty in Central Asia in January 1928, before being expelled from the country in 1929 and ultimately assassinated in Mexico City in 1940. Radek, as a Trotskyite, was likewise expelled from the Communist Party, and he was exiled to Siberia in 1928. He recanted in 1929 and returned to grace, addressing, for example, the First Writers’ Union Congress in 1934, but he was arrested and tried in the second Moscow Show Trial of 1937 and sent to a prison camp, where he subsequently died (or was murdered). As for Raskolnikov, he returned from Af­ghan­i­stan in 1923, dis-

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traught about his recent divorce from Reisner, and plunged into literary affairs and journalism. He headed the Repertoire Commission from 1924 to 1930 and served as editor of the literary journals Molodaia gvardiia (Young Guard), from 1928 to 1930, and Krasnaia nov’—­both a­ fter the alleged Trots Aleksandr Voronsky was ousted as editor. He also for a time ran the publishing ­house Moskovskii rabochii and served as an office ­bearer in the Comintern international literary movement.129 Raskolnikov’s role in the literary sphere was fairly hard-­line. He took positions close to ­t hose of the militantly “proletarian” literary organ­ization Na Postu (On Guard) and is known for a heated exchange, during the critical meeting of May 9, 1924, in the Press Department of the Central Committee, with Trotsky (an advocate of opponents of “proletarian lit­er­a­ture,” the fellow travelers).130 On his return from Af­ghan­i­stan in the 1920s, Raskolnikov—an example of how so many in the international movement of that time combined in their ­careers both literary work and po­liti­cal office—­a lso continued to play an impor­tant role in the Comintern, serving from March 1924 ­until 1928, si­ mul­ta­neously with his literary c­ areer, as the new head of its Eastern Section (as Fyodor Petrov—in a sense, not a pseudonym, given that Petrov was the last name of his biological ­father).131 He resumed his ­career as a diplomat only in 1930 and was posted to Estonia, then Denmark, and fi­nally Bulgaria. Raskolnikov is perhaps best known for writing his “Open Letter to Stalin” ­after he was recalled from Bulgaria to Moscow in 1938, during the ­Great Purge. In the letter he accused Stalin of flagrantly contravening basic Bolshevik princi­ples with his repressive regime. Anticipating his own repression, rather than return to the Soviet Union as ordered, Raskolnikov fled to France, where he soon died, ­whether from natu­ral or unnatural c­ auses is still being debated. Nikulin, however, was to suffer no such fate. Not yet a Bolshevik (he joined the Party only in 1940), he went on, by contrast, to enjoy a middling literary ­career writing historical novels and plays (some about the Civil War) and was occasionally sent abroad as a semiofficial literary delegate. Thus, for example, he was assigned to visit Turkey at the time of the tenth anniversary of the republic, where he produced the travelogue Stambul, Ankara, Izmir.132 Despite Nikulin’s call for dynamite, he had another perspective on Af­ghan­ i­stan. Like Khlebnikov, Raskolnikov, and most of the Rus­sian imperial historians, he saw it as a crossroad. Igor Reisner, in his introduction to Raskolnikov’s 1924 booklet, calls Af­g han­i­stan “a transit corridor,” adding: “The

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strategic value of Af­ghan­i­stan lies in the fact that it is situated between two critical routes that converge on India, both from Central Asia and from Persia.”133 Approximately half of Nikulin’s book (the first half) treats Persianate Af­ghan­i­stan, but as he treks ever further eastward, he is excited as he senses “the wind of India.”134 His excitement evokes the infatuation of so many Rus­sian and Soviet intellectuals with an idealized India, a crossroad of world cultures and a locus of spirituality, which was being suppressed by the rapacious British. But as we ­w ill see in Chapter 4, while the prerevolutionary mystique of India lingered on among Soviet intellectuals, even among ­ ere challenging that Bolshevik officialdom, at the same time some of them w mystique, implicated as it was in British colonial institutions and officialdom. They created alternative cognitive maps and world systems that ignored the subcontinent or incorporated India in some pan-­Asian entity that excluded Rus­sia and Eu­rope.

4 India’s Place in Eurasian Cultural Geographies

I

n the 1933 version of Nikulin’s Af­ghan­i­stan memoir, as he visits a bazaar ­there he exclaims: “­Here are the gates to India, the hub [uzel] of the g­ reat ancient route from the Baltic to the ­Indian Ocean, the key to the mystery of Asia, the cradle of tribes, ­peoples and races.”1 The “­great ancient route from the Baltic to the Indian Ocean” was, as we saw in Chapter 2, also the inspiration of Khlebnikov in his proposal for a Eurasian confederation. But in the early twentieth ­century, Khlebnikov was far from alone in proposing some transnational confederation, sometimes geocultural, sometimes geopo­liti­cal, stretching over a vast expanse of space and time, a confederation that incorporated much of Asia and sometimes ­Eu­rope as well. Often such schemes w ­ ere presented as a c­ ounter to the colonialists’ hegemonic narratives. But they ignored the real­ity of the extraordinary heterogeneity in Asia of languages, p ­ eoples, and cultures. India had, as Perry Anderson has observed, “never formed a single po­liti­cal or cultural unit in pre-­modern times” even though ideologues of its in­de­pen­dence movement such as Gandhi and Nehru insisted that it had been “one nation” before the British arrived.2 In the 1920s throughout Eu­rope one finds thinkers nourished on some sense of India as a “hub,” or “cradle,” as the nodal point or point of origin in a synchronic or diachronic account of world culture that saw classical Indian culture as the progenitor of a superior spirituality. Symptomatically, T. S. Eliot, that stalwart champion of the ­Great (Eu­ro­pean) Tradition and of the cultural value of empires, inserted a brief (and actually garbled) citation from

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an ancient Indian Upanishad in his most famous poem, “The Wasteland” (1922), regarded as an iconic text of Modernism.3 Other well-­k nown Eu­ro­ pean enthusiasts include Hermann Hesse and Romain Rolland. We also find India represented as a Dionysiac source in Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice (1913), where an unsettling wind blows from the Ganges Delta. In the early twentieth c­ entury, Eu­ro­pean and Asian intellectuals formulated a plethora of proposals for some transnational entity that was presented as a geocultural configuration anchored in India. Each of them suggested a dif­fer­ent territorial agglomeration, but mostly the contours of this agglomeration, though this was generally unacknowledged, corresponded to the reach of one or other of India’s three dominant religions, the Mohammedan, Buddhist, and Hindu. A common religion offered a cultural framework that could mitigate differences of language and custom—­but would also ignore confessional heterogeneity. One version, a pan-­Islamic movement, envisioned a ­great swathe of territory stretching from South Asia to Morocco. Another was a Buddhist u ­ nion, which might unite India and East Asia. And then ­t here was a more Hindu-­oriented cultural confederation generally centered around texts in Sanskrit. But a­ fter 1917, another possibility was floated of a vast agglomeration knit together not by a religious belief system but by the communist. Each of the schemes for transnational cultural amalgamation in Asia or Eurasia, then, involved a version of hegemonic cosmopolitanism, cosmopolitan ­because of the range of territories, ­peoples, and languages to be incorporated, and hegemonic in the sense that all that variety was to be subsumed by some overarching megaculture. The general thrust of most of ­these schemes was to ­counter the hegemonic cosmopolitanism of colonialist occupiers. The pro­cess of rethinking Eu­ro­pean dominance in Asia and proposing alternative cartographies took off a­ fter 1905 when the Rus­sian Empire suffered an ignominious defeat at the hands of the Japa­nese in the Russo-­Japanese War. It accelerated ­after the G ­ reat War when the German and Austro-­Hungarian Empires ­were dismembered, the rump of the Ottoman Empire collapsed, and the Rus­sian land-­based empire, which had had to cede territory to the West in the Treaty of Brest-­Litovsk (1918), was threatened by the possibility that territory in the Caucasus, Central Asia, or Siberia would secede or be conquered by another power.

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Despite this fragility in their hold on their own country, the Bolsheviks ­were hoping for uprisings in Asia on a massive scale that would be directed against the colonialist occupiers. Lenin had predicted this when he wrote in an article of 1908: “­There can be no doubt that the age-­old plunder of India by the British, and the con­temporary strug­gle of all ­t hese ‘advanced’ Eu­ro­ pe­ans against Persian and Indian democracy, ­will steel [zakalit] millions, tens of millions of proletarians in Asia to wage a strug­gle against their oppressors which ­will be just as victorious as that of the Japa­nese [in 1905]. The po­ liti­cally conscious [soznatel’nogo] Eu­ro­pean worker now has comrades in Asia, and their number ­w ill grow by leaps and bounds.” 4 Britain, which saw itself as the agent of modernization in India, was the principal bête noire of the Bolsheviks through 1930. Believing the new Rus­ sian state to be ahead of the curve of history, theorists and activists sought to replace British po­liti­cal and ideological domination in India with the Bolshevik. Revolution in India assumed par­tic­u­lar importance for them ­because she represented the one major country in Asia where Britain held sway. ­Nikulin subscribed to this scenario. Yet he was at the same time in the thrall of India’s “mystery.” His sense of India might seem unexpected—­romantic and retrograde—in a Soviet po­liti­cal envoy. But for many Rus­sians, including some Bolsheviks, the “wind of India” conveyed the exciting possibility not of revolution t­ here and throwing off the colonial yoke, but of experiencing Indian spirituality. This chapter ­will discuss several alternative cartographies from this time that saw India or the Himalayas as a focal point or “hub” in a vast transnational amalgamation anchored in some version of spirituality, and counterpose them to the theories of Nikolai Marr, who vehemently opposed according a central role to India and became the formulator of an anticolonial—­effectively anti-­British—­linguistics that reigned for de­cades as official Soviet doctrine. In the early Soviet years, India had been the dream destination of a number of Soviet writers and some even attempted to go t­ here.5 Af­ghan­is­ tan’s potential as a gateway to India attracted many of Reisner’s friends, and when the Raskolnikov expedition left for Kabul several of ­t hose who came to bid her farewell at the railway station, including even Osip Mandelstam, hoped to join the party of Bolsheviks as a way to reach India.6 But the real­ity was that the border was closed and India remained elusive to all.

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­ nder the tsars, when the ­Great Game was in full swing, the Indian border U had been largely closed to Rus­sians (other than traders). But in 1919, alarmed by the Rus­sian Revolution, the government of India decreed that the northern borders should be further reinforced to keep out Bolsheviks.7 The closed border and internal repressions of leftists w ­ ere major impediments to the spread of communism in India. Large numbers of its would-be revolutionaries ­were forced to seek alternative centers for their operations and went into exile, largely in Germany, ­Great Britain, or the Soviet Union (where many of them clustered in Moscow or Tashkent). Prominent among them was M. N. Roy, the Indian communist leader for most of the 1920s. Roy was a consummate adventurer, who operated in a succession of countries, serving first the anticolonial nationalist and then, from 1921, the communist cause, operating ­u nder a slew of pseudonyms (M. N. Roy was itself a pseudonym). In November 1919 he helped found the Mexican Communist Party (with Mikhail Borodin), and in 1920 he went to Soviet Rus­sia, where he played an active role in the Comintern, becoming (­u ntil 1927) its most se­nior Asian and a major theorist for revolution in the East. Roy was sent to Tashkent, the main city in Soviet Central Asia and a desired stop-­off point for revolutionary incursions into India through Af­ghan­i­stan. While ­there he and a handful of associates (including his American wife) founded the Indian Communist Party on October 17, 1920, but he could not overcome differences with intransigent factions of the Indian left and Muslim activists ­there at the time who had quite dif­fer­ent anticolonialist agendas. Roy tried to move the party headquarters to Kabul as a first step to reaching India, but the Afghan emir was not obliging. Though periodically in Moscow, where he inter alia became one of the early po­liti­cal directors of KUTV, Roy based himself in Berlin, at the time the administrative center of the international communist movement in Eu­rope and a mecca for anticolonialist Asians, including a sizeable number of Indian leftists in exile.8 From ­t here Roy established contact with f­ uture communists in India, smuggling in his writings and other Marxist texts and helping guide the formation of a Communist Party within India.9 As for Soviet efforts in India, since their envoys ­were stymied in trying to cross the borders with India physically, making cultural inroads, “soft power,” presented another way of transcending them. V. M. Tsukerman, then head of the Eastern Department of the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, stressed to a VOKS meeting of September 27, 1928, that India has “huge importance

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for us.”10 However, it was heavy g­ oing even for VOKS, which was not able to send a representative to India. D. I. Novomirskii, a VOKS official, in his report to the same meeting emphasized that ­until 1926 all VOKS dealings with India had a “random” (sluchainyi) character. In that year t­ here was a serious attempt at establishing channels of exchange with academic institutions at least, and eigh­teen letters ­were sent out to universities and other scholarly bodies. The response was tepid. Several of ­t hose who replied ­were not aware that Rus­sia was no longer tsarist. ­Others reported that no one at their institution knew Rus­sian and so the materials sent by VOKS ­were useless. And some scholars w ­ ere interested only in finding out about Soviet scholarship on classical Persian poetry. A book exchange was instituted, but it was very uneven, with VOKS sending at least five times as many books as it received, and even then they did not always get through, or ­were confiscated by the police (it was easier, though not easy, for Roy’s materials from Berlin to get through).11 The Indian press was generally sympathetic to the Revolution (though Indian leftists largely got accounts of revolutionary Rus­sia from the writings of British figures like Bertrand Russell), and Indian journals of the time regularly published translations of Rus­sian poetry and fiction.12 ­There ­were also sporadic, quixotic attempts by Soviet Rus­sian envoys to penetrate the Indian borders. The writer Boris Lapin tells in his memoir, Dvadtsat’ dnei v Indii (Twenty days in India), of his hair-­raising adventures when, in 1927, he penetrated the borders of India’s northern territory. The British press accounts of the events represent him as a Soviet spy who came with a cache of weapons and was bent on fomenting an insurrection by locals. The Lapin memoir, which proudly cites this allegation, tells a dif­fer­ent story of his crossing the border while working as a census taker in a remote part of Tajikistan in the Pamir Mountains. He was enticed across the border by the possibility of gaining greater ethnographic knowledge of a largely unknown tribe that had strayed t­ here from the Soviet side: “I could not let such a good opportunity pass,” he reports. In the event, the ungrateful tribespeople arrested Lapin and handed him over to local En­glish authorities, though ­after twenty days of imprisonment and interrogation he managed to escape, and a more friendly tribe of Tajiks (whose language he spoke) conveyed him back to the Soviet Union.13 The case of Lapin in India provides another example of the military or intelligence operative, like T. E. Lawrence for the British or Max von Oppenheim

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for the Germans, whose broad knowledge of less-­k nown languages and cultures played a critical role in furthering their country’s geopo­liti­cal designs, ­because it enabled them to operate in remote areas, without protection. Lapin’s activities in vari­ous border areas provide instances of the phenomenon about which both Michel Foucault and Edward Said (inter alia) have written, the implication of knowledge with power. Knowledge was essential for any state in pursuing its colonialist or imperialist ambitions, but a fringe benefit of this alliance of ­t hose with knowledge and ­t hose with power, was the furtherance of scholarship (as Lapin had hoped to achieve). He was, like Lawrence, something of a philologist, having learned in his youth En­glish, French, German, Persian, Tajik, and ­later Mongolian, as well as some Polish and Bulgarian. ­Later, in Vladivostok, he studied Chinese, and for a brief time he worked on Japa­nese in Japan.14 He was also a writer, but his literary tastes ­were somewhat imperialist. He began his literary ­career as a poet palpably influenced by the German Romantics, admixed with a goodly dose of Khlebnikov and of Kipling, but he ended up as a Soviet operative and journalist (which ­after all Kipling had been also, working on the Pioneer, a conservative newspaper and one of the periodicals that Raskolnikov and his colleagues pored over in Kabul).15 Though Lapin kept changing occupations, somehow he generally contrived to be positioned on borders. In fact, for five years when he published his sketches in the press, he signed himself “Pogranichnik” (border patroller).16 The assaults of assorted Soviet operatives and Moscow-­i nspired Indian rebels on the borders of India ­were doomed to be ineffectual, though Roy was able to have some impact on po­liti­cal formations inside India, if by all-­too remote control. But British hegemony in South Asia was not only invested in the political-­cum-­military ­Great Game. It also had its ideological apparatus. One field that played an impor­tant role in establishing this apparatus, and providing narratives bolstering and justifying British hegemony, was philology.

The G ­ reat Game Transposed to the Cultural Sphere: Nikolai Marr’s Challenge to Indo-­Europeanism Much of the intellectual framework for the notion of India as a hub and spiritual home derived not from India itself but from Eu­ro­pean movements. By

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the time of the Revolution, India had for over a ­century assumed a central place in an impor­tant narrative of Eu­ro­pe­a ns about themselves, their languages, and their cultural provenance, Indo-­Europeanism, a philological theory that was implicated in British colonialism-­cum-­imperialism in that it emerged from the writings of individuals associated with the British East India Com­pany. Scholarly investigations of Indian culture, and of the Sanskrit literary and linguistic traditions in par­tic­u­lar, took off and assumed a life of their own, playing a major role in intellectual history in their own right, while yet still yoked to the geopo­liti­cal. The cult of Indian spirituality, a version of which informs the apostrophe of Nikulin with which I opened this chapter, emerged in Eu­rope in the late eigh­teenth and early nineteenth centuries somewhat in tandem with what I am lumping together ­u nder the heading “Indo-­Europeanism.” Indo-­ Europeanism and its proselytizers formed a sort of intellectual arm of imperialism, but, as we ­shall see, in the Soviet 1920s its main narratives ­were challenged when another master theory of philology emerged to prominence, one that provided a dif­fer­ent transnational cartography, a dif­fer­ent genealogy, and a dif­fer­ent “hub.” The story of the evolution of Indo-­Europeanist thought is situated at the intersection of philology and biology—or more specifically race—­and has to do with the evolution of an (unacknowledgedly) imperialist philology in the nineteenth c­ entury somewhat in tandem with the high point of imperialist conquest in Africa and Asia. ­Here I propose to show how, in the early postrevolutionary years, the Rus­sian linguist Nikolai Marr countered the prevailing, Indo-­Europeanist theory of transnational language evolution, proposing an alternative account involving a dif­fer­ent diffusional map that represents an adaptation of his prerevolutionary linguistic theories to the new historical moment. His maverick theories became the dominant school of Soviet linguistics. But in order to set up my argument I have to make a historical excursion. The nineteenth ­century saw a shift in philology as much of the energy went out of the study of the classical languages, Greek and Latin, and the discipline recentered on the study of Sanskrit and the putative Indo-­European ­family of languages. This development was due in part to the German Romantics, such as Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis and their cult of the ancient Sanskrit texts, which w ­ ere first translated in the late eigh­teenth ­century. India

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was, they claimed, neither foreign nor extraneous to Eu­ro­pean culture; it was a key component of their own spiritual tradition, a homeland from a forgotten deep past. Often, they considered Indian “spirituality” an antidote to Eu­ro­ pean materialism.17 But the shift to giving Sanskrit a central role in philological theory occurred ­earlier and is generally associated with a se­nior o ­ fficial of the British East India Com­pany, a major institution of imperialist exploitation. The com­pany’s headquarters, East India House in London, contained a trove of Sanskrit manuscripts that attracted scholars from around the world, but the origins are generally traced to an office b ­ earer in Bengal, Sir William Jones, a magistrate, who set in motion the study of what came to be called Indo-­European with his late eighteenth-­century observations of the kinship of Sanskrit with Eu­ro­pean languages. Jones actually preceded his observations about Sanskrit with work on Persian grammar, and with writings and translations of classical Persian verse (which played a prominent role in the cultural heritage of Northern India). The translations caught the attention of Eu­ro­pean Romantics, among them Goethe, whose East-­West Divan, with its stylizations of Hafez, is often taken as a foundational moment in the history of world lit­er­a­ture.18 In other words, as a lot of recent scholarship has noted (though it generally foregrounds one or the other of them) both Indo-­Europeanism, which had at its heart the priority of Sanskrit as the originator of a proliferation of languages spread over Eurasia, and the impact of the Persianate literary tradition on Eu­rope and on world lit­er­a­ture have been attributed to the scholarship of the one genial part-­time scholar, Sir William Jones. Both theories depended on an e­ arlier moment of imperial glory, ­whether that of the Sanskrit cosmopolis about which Sheldon Pollock writes or that of the Persian Empire. Thanks to Jones’s work, Eu­ro­pean scholars began to explore and further elaborate one or other of ­t hese alternative, but complementary, accounts of transnational cultural development—­from the Persian or the Sanskrit. British scholars paid more attention to Sanskrit. Though Jones’s account of its preeminence seemed to challenge the dominant models of Eu­ro­pean cultural development from Greek and Latin, they actually incorporated t­ hose languages in a longer and broader geocultural model, affording them a more illustrious pedigree. The British also favored Sanskrit scholarship more than Persian ­because Persian culture was at that time too tied to the Muslim, and Britain was challenged in its colonial ventures by the pan-­Islamists.19 This is also a pos­si­ble reason

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why Nikulin (a representative of the other side in the ­Great Game) in his memoir of Af­ghan­i­stan cites classical Persian verse liberally but t­ here is no sign of Sanskrit. B ­ ecause of its centrality in British scholarship, I w ­ ill take up the story only for the case of Sanskrit-­centered Indo-­Europeanism. In the second half of the nineteenth c­ entury, the discourse about Indo-­ Europeanism expanded in its range beyond the purely philological to encompass other disciplines. Philologists came to regard language and thought as inseparable, both playing major roles in the history of humankind. Philology was effectively claimed to be a transcultural “science” of language, mind, and civilization. And, like Nikulin in the quotation that opened this chapter, philologists of the Indo-­European school saw India as the “cradle of tribes, ­peoples and races.” A major figure in this development was Max Müller, a German philologist and translator of the ancient Sanskrit texts. Müller worked in Oxford for the second half of the nineteenth ­century, popularizing his theories with prolific tracts. He was attracted t­ here by its Bodleian Library, which contained a number of ancient Sanskrit manuscripts, but also by East India House in London, and he periodically enjoyed the patronage of the British East India Com­pany. In other words, he was implicated in British imperial power. Some of his less-­k nown publications indicate this, such as Suggestions for the Assistance of Officers in Learning the Languages of the Seat of War in the East (1854), though he was at the same time actually something of a German nationalist.20 In 1882 Müller gave a set of seven lectures at Cambridge, “India, What Can It Teach Us?,” to candidates for the British Indian civil ser­vice. One has a hard time imagining that audience being very responsive to his etymological excursions and talk of the transcendental, or to his overall message that they should learn Sanskrit (as distinct from the vernacular of the area they would administer). The lectures, ­later issued as a book, came ironically to mean more to Indian nationalists than to ­t hose who set out to govern India. But the very terms in which Müller couched his appeal for studying Sanskrit suggest an imperialist mentality. “That very Sanskrit,” he proposed to the assembled trainees, “the study of which may at first seem so tedious to you and ­useless . . . ​­will open before you large layers of lit­er­a­ture, as yet almost unknown and unexplored, and allow you an insight into strata of thought deeper than any you have known before, and rich in lessons.”21 In this account of

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the cultural significance of Sanskrit texts we see standard accoutrements of colonialist narratives—­exploring, mastering, mining—­though the trainees ­were to mine “deeper” to reach India’s trea­sure, its spirituality. Müller’s texts, like ­those of the other linguists in the Indo-­European school, are interspersed with dense thickets of etymological examples that I am not competent to enter. H ­ ere I w ­ ill summarize his most famous theoretical positions. Impor­tant in Müller’s writings is the idea of the Aryans as a superior race who lived in India, a contention he supports with his etymological excursions, thus confusing language and ethnicity.22 He maintained, for example, that “Ȃrya is a Sanskrit word, and in the ­later Sanskrit it means noble, of a good ­family.”23 Müller saw “nobility” as entailing prowess in conquest, which was demonstrated when, centuries ago, the Aryans entered India and conquered the Dravidians. ­There was clearly an ele­ment of elitism and racism in his theory of Aryanism, which contrasted the northern Indians with the darker Dravidians of the south. Subsequently, according to Müller, some of the Aryans undertook a long northwest migration ending in Eu­rope, where their superior civilization developed further, so that India became a “cradle” of Western civilization, though India itself was doomed to decline.24 Implicit in Müller’s ideas is a narrative of double salvation, a parable or rationalization for the colonization of India: the Eu­ro­pe­ans save the Indians from their decline, while the Indians, in offering a true spirituality, save the Eu­ro­pe­ans from their overemphasis on materialism and their spiritual malaise. At the same time, thanks to the dedication of agents of the British East India Com­pany and ­others to the cause of Sanskrit culture, long-­lost relatives ­were re­united, making pos­si­ble a recovery of the g­ reat tradition of Indian culture. An implication of Müller’s ideas is that the Eu­ro­pe­ans and the Indians form two poles in the one civilization. Consequently, the British conquest could be read as a restoration of a civilization, not a rape but a rescue. The British, ­ ere d ­ oing with by reviving the tradition of the Vedas, as they believed they w institutions such as the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, could lead the Indians to recover their old glory, their patrimony. In India, it was implied, since Aryan culture had degenerated over time, the arrival of the British would enable the Indians to discover their own civilization (and establish institutions for this spiritual recovery). For the British, in turn, their arrival in India

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could mean returning to the old home, discovering the bonds between the Eu­ro­pean British and the Asian Indians. Large sections of the educated Indian public of the 1920s subscribed to the Aryanist theory. This is particularly evident in the Indian Review, a journal published in En­glish. Its contributors, in a colonialist version of cultural cringe, all appeared with their degrees and titles listed, indicating their adoption of En­glish markers of cultivation and status, but also as if the citation of degrees was necessary to add gravitas to the ideas they express. The journal was relatively catholic in the range of po­liti­cal positions it aired; for instance, it reported extensively on the visit of the British crown prince to India in 1921. But its primary obsession in the 1920s was with the story of, as it was put in one article, “the g­ reat Aryan migration to India when a young and gifted nation passed through the passes of the Himalayas and began to ­people the fertile places watered by the Indus and the Ganges,” an event that is celebrated in that “bedrock of the Vedas, the Brahamanas [lengthy commentary on the Vedas] and the Upanishads.”25 Contributors boasted that this migration saw the flowering of a ­great, Sanskritic culture that was prior to, and perhaps superior to as well, the classical culture that had traditionally been seen as the guarantee that Eu­ro­pean “civilization” was g­ reat. Such claims ­were derived quite explic­itly from the writings of Eu­ro­pean Indologists, seen as responsible for an “improved outlook and the attainment of a new perspective in India culture-­history.”26 Vari­ous scholars ­were cited, including Jones, Schlegel, and Müller, but the main hero in such articles was the French Indologist Silvain Lévi, who visited India in 1922, and whose writings and pre­sen­ta­tions provided a transnational map of Indian cultural preeminence to ­counter the reduced status afforded India by the occupying British. Lévi had said in concluding an ­earlier article in the Journal asiatique for 1890: “From Rus­sia to the Chinese Sea, from the icy regions of Siberia to the islands of Java and Borneo, from Oceania to Socotra, India has propagated her beliefs, her genius, her tales and her civilization. She has left indestructible imprints on one-­fourth of the h ­ uman race in the course of a long succession of centuries. She has a right to claim in universal history the rank that ignorance has refused her for a long time, a rank to hold her place amongst the ­great nations, summarizing and symbolizing the spirit of humanity.”27 Lévi is, then, claiming a vast expanse—­like an imperial expanse—of

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territory where Indian culture has spread its “civilization.” In this re­spect his account is similar to that of the Sanskrit Cosmopolis outlined in Pollock’s book The Language of the Gods in the World of Men (discussed in the Introduction). But, unlike Pollock, Lévi suggests that India consequently deserves the title “­great nation,” a claim to cultural hegemony, as it ­were, a compensatory claim for a subjugated ­people. Lévi also subscribed to the myth of India as one culture-­nation. In an address during his 1922 visit to the Asiatic Society in Calcutta, that bastion of British colonial scholarship, he marveled at “the multiplicity of the manifestations of the Indian genius as well as their fundamental unity,” adding: “Her civilization, spontaneous and original, unrolls itself in a continuous line across at least thirty centuries, without interruption, without deviation. Ceaselessly in contact with foreign ele­ments which threatened to strangle her, she persevered gloriously in absorbing them, assimilating them and enriching herself with them. Thus she has seen the Greeks, the Scythians, the Afghans, the Mongols to pass before her eyes in succession and,” he a Frenchman contended, “is regarding with indifference the En­glishmen confident to pursue ­under the accidence of the surface the normal course of her high destiny.”28 Indian appropriations of Lévi’s account of the Aryans in the Indian Review are often tied to a narrative of conquest. Mr. P. K. Anant Narayan, for example, in his article “A Vision of Vedic India,” waxes lyrical about India’s “vast primeval forests [n.b. not jungles]” in declaring that “this veritable paradise on earth is eminently fitted to be the cradle of Aryan civilization.” Narayan proceeds with a narrative of internal colonization in which he unapologetically recounts the vio­lence it took to establish Aryan superiority in India. “Fair and noble are the Aryans who inhabit the land. . . . ​The barbarian tribes . . . ​barbarous and warlike ­children of the soil, have to be subjugated and taught to obey and revere the new masters.” The Aryans are, he contends, “the pioneers and torchbearers of a new and enlightened civilization. Endowed by nature with high intellectual capacities and refined moral feelings, they evince ­great powers of courage . . . ​and . . . ​a deep religious sense.”29 In the articles for the Indian Review, the story of how the Aryans conquered northern India, a narrative of colonial conquest, buttresses a notion of Indian exceptionalism or more accurately of exceptionalism for the “Aryans” ­ ese articles, with of northern India, not for the Dravidians of the south. Th their built-in implications of superiority for Brahmins and Kshatriyas (the

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two highest castes in India) also provided a rationale for maintaining the caste system. Violent conquest, taking possession of an Edenic landscape, is a cliché of colonialist narratives, and the notion of India as a paradise was common in the writings of the Indo-­Europeanists, too. William Jones as he was first arriving in India called it a “wonderland,” while Müller described the India he had never seen as a “paradise on earth.”30 It might seem that Indo-­Europeanism was a West Eu­ro­pean and Indian phenomenon, but in fact it loomed large on the horizon of linguists in Rus­sia as well, where several of Müller’s works appeared in translation, including his Science of Language, which came out in multiple editions.31 And, as mentioned, many Rus­sians ­were in the grip of the cult of Indian spirituality. But the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, with its militant atheism, made any emphasis on that problematical. Likewise, Indo-­Europeanist theories became potentially more suspect given the Soviet state’s strong commitment to the cause of liberation of ­peoples, while Indo-­Europeanist theories ­were associated with ethnic elitism (Aryanism) and with the British colonial administration, the bȇte noire. Yet some of the prerevolutionary cult of “Indian spirituality” lingered well into the 1920s. In the postrevolutionary years the ideas of the nineteenth-­century Indo-­Europeanists continued to be promoted, as ­were India’s ancient texts, though their religious content had to be de-­ emphasized and the veneration for them became more the preoccupation of Orientalists than of the intellectual community at large. One such Orientalist was Sergei Oldenburg, a noted Sanskritist and Buddhologist (also a friend of Lévi). A ­ fter the Revolution, Oldenburg, remarkably, was retained as permanent secretary of the entire Acad­emy of Sciences, a position he had held since 1904. Yet Oldenburg continued to support an Indo-­Europeanist position. In his first editorial of 1922 for the new journal Vostok (East) he alludes to “the victories of comparative linguistics which have revealed a ‘kinship’ between many Asian and Eu­ro­pean languages.”32 Also, in the article “Indian Lit­er­a­ture” that he published in the anthology Literatura Vostoka (Lit­er­at­ ure of the East), he asserts: “We talk of Indian lit­er­ a­ture, but more accurately we should talk of Sanskrit lit­er­a­ture. [India has] many languages,” but Sanskrit is an “all-­Indian culture.” As if taking a page from Mūller, he praises “the Aryans who came to India and are the kinsmen of our ancestors” and progenitors of a “single language” (edinyi iazyk) for India.33

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Oldenburg was no isolated voice or minor figure. He remained an authoritative scholar throughout the 1920s and was not ousted from his post as secretary of the Acad­emy of Sciences ­until the campaign for “Bolshevization” of all intellectual life in 1929.34 Even then, he was not sidelined and ran several academic institutions and publishing ventures. Notably, in 1930 the old Asiatic Museum in Leningrad was upgraded to a full-­fledged Institute of ­Oriental Studies with Oldenburg as its director. In the same year, the more aggressively Marxist All-­Soviet Scientific Association, founded by Pavlovich (by then deceased), was disbanded.35 One might not have expected that the basic ideas of Indo-­Europeanism, an ism so closely associated with the British rule in India, should still be promulgated in Soviet periodicals and that its adherents would occupy such prominent positions in the Soviet acad­emy. And indeed a major challenge to this entire intellectual edifice was delivered in the 1920s, though not by a Bolshevik, but by the linguist Nikolai Marr (1865–1934), albeit with strong backing from the Party and state. Marr’s theories essentially amounted to playing the G ­ reat Game in the area of linguistic scholarship, countering the British (and West Eu­ro­pean generally) versions of comparative linguistics (Müller could be counted as British by institutional affiliation). Marr’s countertheory, what he called the Japhetic theory (named ­after the third son of Noah) had been evolving progressively since 1908, but in 1920, that is, shortly ­after the Revolution, a major shift occurred in his thinking, which effectively demanded a reconfiguration of the symbolic geography that underpinned the entire nexus of Indo-­Europeanist thought.36 During the 1920s, Marr published a series of scholarly books and articles arguing for his Japhetic theory, what in 1925 he came to call the “new theory of language.” The list of his major publications on this includes the article “Iafetidy” (The Japhetides), which appeared in the same, first issue of the journal Vostok as Oldenburg’s editorial.37 For our purposes, the most significant of ­t hese publications of Marr is an article that appeared in the journal Novyi Vostok in 1924.38 The journal, founded in 1922, was the organ of the Scholarly Association of Orientalists, a body founded by Pavlovich that answered to the Central Executive Committee of the USSR and was a venue where policy makers and advisers jostled with scholars, most of them doubling as implementers or advisers on Soviet policy in the international arena. Novyi Vostok was to report on, and strategize for, the new (novyi), postcapi-

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talist East (Vostok). That Marr was published in this journal suggests in itself the strategic importance of the Indo-­European debate within the overall Soviet conception of “the East.” Marr’s theories recentered the standard Eu­ro­pean sense of that East. They provided a new genealogy of “culture,” and a new account of the interrelation between Eu­rope and Asia. He in effect proposed a revolutionary overhaul of the conventionally understood synchronic and diachronic axes of civilization. But they also attacked Indo-­Europeanism as an ideology of imperialism. In this article in Novyi Vostok, Marr translates his basic charge against the Indo-­Europeanists into the discourse of Marxism-­Leninism and of Soviet anti-­imperialism as he declares: “Indo-­European linguistics is itself the flesh and blood of the bourgeois social order [obshchestvennost’] that ­ eoples of has outlived its time and which is based on the oppression of the p the East by the Eu­ro­pean ­peoples with their murderous colonial policies.”39 Marr also sought to discredit Eu­ro­pean linguists and their research by pointing to their implication in “the imperialist development of Eu­rope.” 40 In effect, in such statements he implied that Indo-­European linguistics was an imperialist plot to keep what he called the “enslaved” out of true citizenship in culture. Marr, as if imitating Marx, who in The German Ideology inverted the model of “base” and “superstructure” that subtended the then dominant models of philosophy, inverted several binary hierarchies that informed Indo-­ Europeanist writings. One such hierarchy was of written versus oral language. In texts published during the 1920s, Marr argued that the Indo-­ Europeanists, by overlooking languages that ­were lesser from a geopo­liti­cal perspective and by favoring written cultures over the oral, ­were in effect keeping out of their purview the vast majority of any country’s population. He insisted that linguists should study not the old manuscripts but the preliterate languages and the “oral languages of enslaved ­peoples.” 41 The Subaltern was to speak.42 Given that the Bolsheviks’ ideology privileged the (largely illiterate) masses over the bourgeoisie, his position on this dovetailed well with theirs. Another target of Marr’s writings in the 1920s was the bourgeois sense of “culture.” He sought to scuttle “imperialist” Aryanism and Indo-­Europeanism, two isms that enjoyed pride of place in Eu­ro­pean and Indian scholarship and in their national narratives. In their place, he proposed a transnational

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account of linguistic evolution that provided an alternative, anti-­imperialist genealogy, which excluded India. By, for instance, giving a privileged place to Etruscan and Pelasgian over Latin and Greek (respectively), he downgraded the prime conduits of Indo-­European to minor players in linguistic and cultural evolution, in effect challenging the suppositions b ­ ehind the core curriculum of elite education in Western Eu­rope and tsarist Rus­sia.43 According priority to the Etruscans and Pelasgians was but one of the many ways Marr favored the overlooked and “lesser” languages on the Eurasian linguistic horizon, downplaying the significance of t­ hose formerly considered major. He focused on languages conventionally regarded as peripheral such as non-­Indo-­European Basque, and, within the Rus­sian context, the languages of the Sarmatians and Scythians (as we ­w ill recall, in Müller the latter w ­ ere enemies and destroyers of the g­ reat culture of the Aryans).44 Müller had written of Sanskrit as “the greatest museum of antiquity, as a place where the past could be seen,” but Marr claimed that he could divine “prehistoric” civilization by a study of preliterate (nonrecorded) languages.45 “Language is . . . ​a creation of prehistorical and protohistorical society. Consequently, in the very forms of grammatical categories language reflects the structure of society [obshchestvennost’] in ­those remote creative eras.” 46 Such inversions ­were part of a major displacement, a recentering of the map of languages, and reor­ga­ni­za­tion of the standard hierarchy, giving priority to the languages of the Caucasus, which perhaps not coincidentally included his own, Georgian, language (and, as may have helped his meteoric rise, also the language of Stalin).47 This shifted the center of comparative linguistics from Northern India, home of the Aryans, linked in theory with Western Eu­rope, to Soviet territory, but also provided a new, non-­Russian center t­ here, an ex-­centric one. India was now off the linguistic map, since in Marr’s account the Japhetic languages did not venture into imperial British South Asia but extended in that direction only to the Pamirs. Marr also claimed a longer genealogy for his Japhetic languages than could the Indo-­Europeanists. As revisionists, they had promoted Sanskrit culture as more ancient than classical Greek or Roman. Marr announced triumphantly that “Indo-­European linguistics does not reach into prehistory, but Japhetic linguistics goes back many tens of millennia e­ arlier” and provides “a basis for corrections in the history of material culture.” 48 Though Marr im­ ecause of this longer linplicitly claimed priority for the Japhetic theory b

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eage, in fact Müller allowed for both a preliterate Sanskrit and oral transmission. But the ambitious Marr had reached back even e­arlier than him, claiming to be studying not just preliterate language but also prelanguage, a time when ­humans merely uttered “inarticulate sounds.” 49 This was an aspect of his work on language that he developed further ­later in the 1920s and early 1930s when he was involved in a study circle with Sergei Eisenstein, Aleksandr Luria, and Lev Vygotsky. At the time, Eisenstein attempted to in­ umans in his scenario of 1933– corporate this sense of the speech of early h 1934 for the film Moscow in Time (Moskva vo vremeni, or Moskva), which took the history of Moscow back to prehistorical times, one of several Eisenstein film proj­ects of the 1930s that never reached the shooting stage.50 Marr in his l­ater writings also pronounced the hand a g­ reat “creative agent,” the center of production, and the center of presound language (gesture). By elevating the hand to the status of hero of prelogical speech, he was able to make an identification between speech and l­abor, that all-­important value for the Marxists. The pro­cess of linguistic evolution is in Marr represented by analogy with evolution in the natu­ral world, but only by analogy. A key term in his account of the dynamic of linguistic evolution is “crossing” or “hybridization” (skreshchenie): when two tribes or other language groups are thrown together by common economic need or practice, their two languages are crossed, resulting in a single language. But unlike many Indo-­Europeanists, Marr was against seeing language evolution in terms of biology and insisted that the term “hybridization” had nothing to do with it.51 He consistently maintained that the history of linguistic evolution is not about bloodline or race, not even figuratively, m ­ usic no doubt to the ears of ­t hose who sought to represent the Soviet Union as multinational and anticolonialist.52 Rather, he represented linguistic evolution and linguistic “crossing” as a consequence of changes in the material world and socioeconomic organ­ization, such as when par­tic­u­lar ­peoples learned to use metals.53 ­Later, in a general account of his “New Theory of Language” published in 1929, he outlined three main phases for the progression of language evolution, which happened (?) to correspond to the three main phases of history in Marxist analy­sis.54 At the center of Marr’s attack on Indo-­Europeanism was another inversion. He likened the Indo-­European account of the history of language to an upside-­down pyramid, in which a “single language” (edinyi iazyk) branched

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out over time into ever more languages. He maintained that the history of language evolution was a reverse pro­cess, g­ oing not from the one to the many, but from the many to the one, as if in alignment with the dream of Baku. The notion of “a single protolanguage of the Indo-­European f­ amily is a fiction,” he claimed.55 Furthermore, “according to Japhetic linguistics the emergence, growth, and further or final achievement of ­human speech can be represented as a pyramid . . . ​­going from the broad base of prelanguage [where you see] a host of mollusk-­like, embryonic languages, ­human speech rushes on [stremitsia], passing through a series of typological transformations to its summit, to the unity of the languages of the entire world.”56 Marr’s vision of languages “rushing on” to realize themselves in the “summit,” the telos, of “edinyi iazyk” (a single and unified language) might seem to be in sync with the Hegelian-­cum-­Marxist model of the way the ­human spirit proceeds through ever higher stages of consciousness to attain consciousness itself. Indeed, the “crossings” he sees as punctuating and enabling this pro­cess might be seen as analogous to the Marxian interim resolutions of the dialectic, whereby the successive clashes over time between thesis and antithesis (class and class) are resolved in a synthesis. This bespeaks a spontaneous evolutionary pro­cess, which in that re­spect c­ ounters the more voluntarist formulations of Lenin about the possibility of revolution in Rus­sia. But ­later formulations by Marr advocated what I have called a “linguistic Prometheanism,” a vision that h ­ umans could be changed by changing their ­language. In his writings of the 1920s he exhibited a certain evolutionary impatience, advocating a “creative” approach to linguistics, guiding it and helping it to “accelerate” the evolution of language.57 On the same page as the above statement about how language evolution accelerates, Marr followed with the suggestion that the “nonliterate languages of p ­ eoples that are culturally deprived [­here using poraboshchennykh, literally “enslaved”]” need “assistance” and the “speeding up of this inevitable worldwide pro­cess of perfecting linguistic techniques” that would come about b ­ ecause “strug­gle” is inevitable (­here he uses the standard Marxist-­Leninist term for class strug­gle, bor’ba, which he places strategically at the beginning of the sentence for emphasis).58 In Bolshevik narratives the working classes w ­ ere meant to become literate as part of the pro­cess of attaining consciousness, and Marr would appear to be offering a formula for facilitating this, inflecting his account of language evolution to fit Soviet narratives of the time about liberation of what we would

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call Third World ­peoples. But the breathtaking geo­g raph­i­cal reach of the ­Japhetic ­family of languages also bespeaks a new hegemonic geography. In successive publications of the 1920s, Marr kept extending the reach of the Japhetic ­until by the end of the de­cade it stretched from sea to shining sea, or more specifically from the Pacific Ocean in the Far East to the Atlantic, extending southward from Eu­rope to incorporate some of Africa, and even potentially embracing some Native American languages.59 Marr, then, in some senses sought to outdo the Indo-­Europeanists in the role of hero-­philologist by “conquering,” by gaining dominion for his theory over, a breathtakingly broader sweep of languages and locations. And he believed he had defeated t­ hose British Indo-­Europeanists at their own game.

India as Hub of Cosmopolitan Spirituality Marr’s “new teachings” on language ­were promoted quite aggressively by the Soviet establishment, and he enjoyed an extraordinary c­ areer, becoming by the early 1930s the unassailable authority in Soviet linguistics, presiding over an empire of institutes and publishing ventures. But, as we sense in the quotation from Nikulin cited at the beginning of this chapter, where India is called “the hub . . . ​the key to the mystery of Asia,” an idealized image of India retained considerable pull in the Soviet period, even among scholars, who ­were often still in the thrall of the Indo-­Europeanist ideas, which posited India or the subcontinent generally as a point of origin for a superior civilization.60 In the early de­cades of the twentieth ­century, versions of this position w ­ ere taken up by many Eu­ro­pean, Rus­sian, and Asian intellectuals. They formed networks that during the 1920s and 1930s could be seen as rivaling, though they also partly overlapped with, the networks of the literary international generated by VOKS, the Comintern, or other Moscow-­oriented cultural-­cum-­political bodies. One colorful example would be Mahendra Pratap, whose activities in the pan-­Asianist cause underwent a series of mutations, though they ­were always colored by a desire to drive the British from India. During the ­Great War he had joined an Indo-­German expedition to Af­ghan­i­stan, part of Germany’s attempt at driving Britain from the East. The early 1920s saw him working for the cause of Indian revolution in Tashkent and Kabul (he even took out Afghan citizenship for the cause), but he

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expanded his vision in founding a movement for uniting Moscow, Kabul, Peking, and Tokyo—­a nd points in between—in a “Pan Asia.” By the 1930s, Pratap had begun to identify his ­grand schemes less with Marxism than with Asian spirituality; he gave “Pan-­Asia” a second name, “praise of Buddha.” And he had begun to propose that the “Aryan” would form part of an “autonomous Asia” in a “World Federation.”61 Pratap’s ­career provides but one of many examples of the way the lines between leftism and the cause of Asian “spirituality” ­were at times blurred during the 1920s and 1930s (as we saw in the quotation from Nikulin). Support for his movement dwindled over the course of the 1930s, but ­earlier ­there had emerged a much more successful movement for a world order grounded in an Asian belief system and with a vast network of associations and journal outlets, Theosophy (and its offshoot, Anthroposophy). A major source, direct or indirect, of the transatlantic world’s fascination in the early twentieth ­century with India’s purported spirituality was the writings of a Rus­sian, Madame Blavatsky (Helena [Elena] Petrovna Blavatsky, 1831–1891). Together with Col­o­nel H. S. Olcott she founded the Theosophical Society in Amer­i­ca in 1875, from where it spread to E ­ ngland, India, and, in 1908, Rus­sia. As a self-­proclaimed international spiritual movement, Theosophy believed t­ here was a kernel of truth in all religions and sought to bring the major religions of the world together in the one belief system. But, despite Blavatsky’s claim that Theosophy represents “the synthesis of science, religion and philosophy,” her excursions into the religions of the world ­were presented with a good mea­ sure of esoteric knowledge and occult science.62 One of her sell-­out texts was the sprawling, eclectic and heavi­ly occult work Isis Unveiled (1877), which advocates the under­lying unity of all religions. At a breathless pace, its readers are taken through an unending series of the religions and religious cults of the world, major and minor, well-­k nown and obscure, in which all distinctions between them are blithely ignored in an act of pseudo-­scholarship. In Isis Unveiled Blavatsky claims she is reviving an “Ancient Wisdom” that underlies all the world’s religions, but in this book and other writings by her, Hinduism and Buddhism, two of the three ­great religions of India, are accorded a special place. In 1879 she and Olcott made a pilgrimage t­ here, remaining in the country ­until 1885. This trip gave rise to another seminal text, From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan (Iz peshcher i debrei Indostana), which she originally presented in a series of letters that she, as Radda-­Bai,

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published in serial form in Rus­sia between 1879 and 1882 in Mikhail Katkov’s periodical Moskovskie vedomosti (Moscow news). The series was so popu­lar that a year ­later Katkov resumed serialization in another journal he edited, Russkii vestnik (Rus­sian messenger), and in 1892 the two sets of letters ­were published in En­glish translation by the Theosophical Publishing Society of London as From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan.63 By then, Blavatsky’s espousal of world religions had become less eclectic, and she had begun to focus on the spiritual superiority of India as the “ancient country of the Aryas and the Vedas.”64 In other words, her theories came close to t­ hose of Müller, though their relationship was a fraught one. They both saw as a foundational moment in the history of this patrimony the migration of the Aryans, associated with Iran, who in Blavatsky’s words, “first invaded the country [India] and began an endless war with the dark aborigines.”65 ­There ­were major differences in the theories of the two, however. Though Müller took an interest in the work of the Theosophical Society and its leaders, he was distressed by Blavatsky’s dubious etymologies (the inevitable result of her superficial acquaintance with the relevant languages) and her occultist tendencies. Blavatsky had been carried away by her own imagination, he contended, and had not understood Indian religions at all. He also argued that she willfully ignored the fact that, as he saw it, the convergence of the major religious systems “found . . . ​t heir most perfect expression in Chris­tian­ity.”66 Blavatsky, for her part, was particularly irked ­because Müller did not acknowledge the Sanskrit sacred texts as being as ancient as she insisted they w ­ ere, and she repeatedly tried to discredit Müller, pointing out with glee that he had never been to India, as he admitted.67 An impor­tant difference between Müller and Blavatsky was their attitude to the British administration of India. While, as we have seen, Müller was essentially implicated in the British colonialist proj­ect, Blavatsky’s writings ­were scathing about the entire colonialist edifice, including the British East India Com­pany, the Royal Asiatic Society, and the Raj. She saw the Raj as having ruined the country with its suppression of the vernacular culture in f­ avor of the Eu­ro­pean, and its support of the rights of idol-­worship.”68 ­After Blavatsky’s death in 1891, she was succeeded as head of the Theosophical Society by Annie Besant, who immersed herself in the movement for reform of India’s relationship with imperial Britain. She advocated not in­de­pen­dence, but home rule, which she contended would accord the country an enhanced

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status, greater autonomy, and re­spect for India’s spiritual traditions. Blavatsky herself had also opposed Müller’s theories for their racist coloring. She was doggedly against distinctions of race, caste, or nationality, and gave the Theosophical Society the subtitle “the Brotherhood of Humanity.”69 Rather like the more secular Marr, she stood for a form of Euro-­Asian miscegenation that was not biological, but cultural and saw British India as incapable of achieving such “Brotherhood.” In Rus­sia, Blavatsky’s Theosophy was looked upon somewhat askance, due in part to her scandalous early c­ areer, her dubious etymologies, and her flawed scholarship, but also to suspicions that she had worked as a spy, an accusation based on an alleged letter she wrote to the Rus­sian Third Section (state security agency) in Odessa.70 Nevertheless, in the 1910s and 1920s Theosophy enjoyed a devoted following, especially among artists and writers (including Khlebnikov, Petr Uspensky, Malevich, and Kandinsky—­most of t­ hese names, it w ­ ill be noted, w ­ ere prominent in the short-­lived International of the Arts discussed in Chapter 1). In the Rus­sian journal Vestnik teosofii (Messenger of Theosophy), which ran from 1908 ­until 1918, excerpts from many of the classic Sanskrit texts ­were published in translation, though they ­were based on En­glish translations. But ­after the Revolution, when all religious systems ­were subject to persecution, the Vestnik teosofii was closed and adherents ­were no longer able to get their ideas into print. Despite this proscription, and as several historians have documented, The­ ere to be found among Bolosophist tendencies and a love of the occult w shevik officials and office b ­ earers, even in the hard-­nosed OGPU (secret police). This is amply demonstrated in the case of their association with Nikolai Roerich, an artist, archeologist, and mystic, and his wife, Elena, whose beliefs could be very approximately described as a sui generis version of Theosophy. An exoticist since well before the Revolution—­Gumilev called him a “Rus­sian Gauguin”—­Roerich had been caught up in the Indomania of ­Rus­sia’s Silver Age.71 A dual historical model for spiritual evolution emerges from Roerich’s texts. On the one hand, following Blavatsky and o ­ thers, he saw India as the “cradle of Eu­ro­pean civilization and at the same time the home [ochag] of ancient esoteric knowledge,” and, like her, he privileged ancient Sanskrit as providing the foundational texts.72 Like Blavatsky, too, he claimed that his esoteric knowledge was based in the new science, but he updated this claim,

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associating “the power­f ul forces of cosmic energy” not only with the most ancient traditions of the Vedas but also with the new formulae of Einstein.”73 Like the Theosophists, too, Roerich was especially partial to Buddhism and like them claimed that ­behind Buddha’s public doctrine ­there was an “Esoteric Buddhism.”74 The Buddha allegedly had withheld some teachings from his followers that w ­ ere only available to a few initiates. Theosophists claimed that they had access to the teachings of this inner circle through writings and descendants of Buddha’s ancient disciples. Roerich extrapolated from such views to posit a divine authority, Morya, accessible to the few, such as, n ­ eedless to say, himself. Like Blavatsky, Roerich lumped a lot of disparate cultures together in a mega geocultural formation, ignoring the discriminations. He claimed, for example, that “in Sanskrit, Hindustani, Chinese, Turkic, Kalmyk, Mongol, and Tibetan languages and in a host of minor Asian dialects the same ideas and the same thoughts about the ­f uture are expressed.“75 But, on the other hand, Roerich was not an Aryanist and his domain of the spiritual extended well beyond India (in India it r­ eally only encompassed the Himalayan region of the north) and gave greater emphasis to regions further eastward than Blavatsky did. Drawing on recent archeological and folkloric investigations, Roerich privileged the culture of Siberia, and especially of the Altai and Mongol regions, contending that the “highly artistic Siberian antiquaries ­were historically prior to that of Eu­ro­pean Rus­sia, as ­were the Scythian, Gothic, Altai, Ural, and Mongol cultures.”76 ­There ­were utopian strains in Roerich’s writings about this vast domain that w ­ ere centered around the legendary site of Shambhala in the Himalayas, a mystical locale that in some Indian, Tibetan, and Mongolian my­t hol­ogy is a place of absolute justice, higher wisdom, and suprahuman powers. This legend had been incorporated by Blavatsky into her Theosophical writings, but it played a much more minor role t­ here than in Roerich’s teachings, where it became the central obsession (like Blavatsky, Roerich found textual sources for Shambhala in the Vedas, also in the Puranas). He described Shambhala as “a sacred place where the terrestrial world touches the higher state of consciousness [soznanie],” and posited two Shambhalas, “one terrestrial and the ­ ere the “New Country,” which other invisible.”77 His twin privileged sites w he proposed to set up with a center in the Altai, and the most sacred, Shambhala, the ­great world center putatively in Tibet.

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Roerich’s quest for Shambhala was closely associated with his utopian schemes for a world government, which he would lead, a confederation of two Asian belief systems, the Buddhist and the Muslim. His ideal state of the ­f uture, in its way an earthly Shambhala, he variously called “United States of Asia” (Soedinennye shtaty Azii), “Union of the ­Peoples of the East” (Soiuz narodov Vostoka), “Rus­sian Asia” (Rossiiskaia Aziia), but most often “the New Country” (Novaia strana) or “New Dominion” (Novaia derzhava).78 He wanted to build t­ here a ”City of Learning,” Zvenigorod, its capital, which was to have a mystical university and a ­temple of a united religion and spiritual knowledge to prepare “teachers of mankind.” The top of the high mountain ­t here was to be the place where the heavens and the earth met. As in many Indo-­Europeanist theories, ­t here was an ele­ment of eugenics in Roerich’s writings about his new social order. The commune of “new p ­ eople” would be the forerunner for the evolution of a more developed “sixth race,” another master race but in this case not Aryan. Though Roerich, a mystic, was u ­ ntil the mid-1920s rabidly anti-­Soviet, ­after that for a period he recruited Soviet power for his mission. For this purpose, perhaps, he adapted his teachings and propounded a theory that the true, original Buddhism had much in common with communism, being ­likewise anticommercial and anti-­individualist. The new socioeconomic formation he proposed would be based on “communal-­cooperative (Buddho-­ communist) princi­ples.” He planned to undertake a g­ reat Asian trek the culmination point of which would be Lhasa, where he would negotiate with the Dalai Lama in his self-­ordained capacity as leader of “Western Buddhism,” the Dalai Lama being a head of Eastern Buddhism. The Soviet Union had for some time been making futile attempts to get some envoy into Tibet, so that when Roerich proposed that the Soviet state sponsor this trek some officials saw in it a potential for realizing their aim of trying to get to India, not by Af­ghan­i­stan, as had been attempted multiple times and in vain, but by g­ oing first to Mongolia, which had had a pro-­Soviet government since 1921. From ­t here they would go to Tibet, and through t­ here on to neighboring India. Moreover, several leading members of the OGPU (secret police) ­were at that time mystics and supporters of Theosophy.79 Roerich revised his account of Shambhala for this collaboration. In an enlarged version of his g­ reat geocultural agglomeration, it was to be a vast Eurasian federation u ­ nder the protectorate of the Soviet Union and encompassing

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all Central Asia (from Altai to the Indian border), China (including Manchuria and Inner Mongolia), Japan (including the Japa­nese islands), and in further perspective Af­ghan­i­stan, Persia, and Turkey.80 But in Roerich’s conception of this vast dominion, spiritual quest was paramount. Before setting out he consulted his adviser, Morya, who instructed the expedition to reread such spiritual classics as P. D. Ouspensky’s Tertium Organum (1912) and Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine (1888) in order to be armed philosophically for the ­great Asian journey.81 From 1925 to 1929, the Roerichs went on their epic trek in search of Shambhala and also to seek out sites for a communal settlement in Altai. The trek took them from India to Moscow, where they ­were equipped with state help, and from ­t here to Mongolia, China, and Tibet. Their son George (Iurii), who had studied Tibetan, Mongolian, Pali, and Sanskrit in London, at Harvard, and in Paris, accompanied them and was able to negotiate with locals. ­Roerich’s account of this expedition is full of tales of adventure and resilience as they, like the intrepid imperial hero David Livingstone in the jungles of Africa, pressed on through extraordinarily challenging conditions, and in largely uncharted terrain.82 The expedition was exposed to incredible risks from armed and hostile locals, extreme cold and heat, desert, and the high elevations (George almost died from altitude sickness on one high pass), a necessary accoutrement for their narrative justifying the establishment of a new transnational empire (the “New Country”). Despite Roerich’s insistence on the absolute claim of the spiritual, an aesthetic of vio­lence runs through his writings and is especially marked in his short piece “Genghis-­K han,” written in 1928, that is, at the time he made this trek and published (in En­glish) his signature text of 1930, Shambhala.83 Many versions of the Shambhala legend have an Armageddon as their culminating point, the b ­ attle of Shambhala, which was said to have planetary and even cosmic dimensions. The Roerichs gave this ­battle a central place in their cos­ attle would take place in Tibet and mography. In some of their versions the b in it the mahatmas would fight the imperialist En­glish.84 In Shambhala, the Heart of Asia, Roerich published as an illustration his own painting of Rigden-­ Dzhapo, who, according to the prophecies, was preparing his invincible troops for the final ­battle as an avenging god on h ­ orse­back wielding his sword.85 In other words, the story of the final ­battle is a version of the avenging Asian hordes that became so central to the narratives of Rus­sian intellectuals

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around the time of their crushing defeat by the Japa­nese in 1905 (see Chapter 5). But Roerich, in his repeated coverage of the theme of b ­ attle led by Rigden-­Zhapo, insisted that “of course the b ­ attle is only meta­phorical, symbolizing the victory of wisdom and spirituality, given that killing is incompatible with Buddhism.”86 The search for Shambhala was at root, then. a spiritual quest; his utopian schemes involved privileging an elite, who ­were cordoned off from the masses and had attained an enlarged h ­ uman consciousness, not the po­liti­cal consciousness of Bolshevik writings, but essentially an aesthetic consciousness with enhanced powers of clairvoyance.87 The “new country” was not just a geopo­liti­cal entity. It was also a realm of the pure aesthetic. Roerich of the 1920s was an exoticist aes­t he­t i­cian like Loti, in that he sought out places far from the hustle and bustle of the modern city; Shambhala decries “the tastelessness of the market.”88 But his preference for the exotic was not for coastal areas, as with Loti, but for areas deep inland. In the 1920s and 1930s the main subject of his art became the Himalayas, rendered in a dif­fer­ent and darker register of colors than in his e­ arlier art: dark purples, blues, greens, and black. Generally ­there ­were no ­people on the canvas, no signs of habitation, just broad brush strokes. At most, à la Caspar David Friedrich, the iconic Romantic artist, he placed a solitary figure in his sublime landscapes. Much of the rhe­toric of his writings is also in a sublime mode and features “the boundless expanses of Asia [neob’iatnye prostranstva Azii].”89 The Himalayas function as the site of the transcendent and mystical, their soaring peaks tending heavenward, ­toward, in his terms, the nonphysical, astral world.

Art, Spirituality, and the Competing Maps and Trajectories The Roerich trek was but one of many undertakings in the 1920s by Eu­ro­ pe­ans and Asians that w ­ ere inspired by some transnational vision. Another would be the Calcutta exhibition of 1922 of art from the Bauhaus. The exhibit displayed 250 graphic works, including 35 prints and woodcuts by ­Lyonel Feininger alongside drawings by Johannes von Itten and Wassily Kandinsky and watercolors by Paul Klee.90 ­These artists did not represent the Bauhaus as most see it, an institution known for industrial design, mass production, modernist architecture, New Objectivity, and Constructivist

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photography. The artists exhibited in Calcutta ­were, typically for a Bauhaus member, modernists in the sense that they sought to challenge Naturalism and so ­were interested in formal experiment. But the informing philosophy for their work was in another sense antimodernist. They ­were closer to Theosophy and the breakaway movement Anthroposophy than they ­were to Constructivism, Kandinsky in par­tic­u­lar. His book Concerning the Spiritual in Art (published in 1912 as Du spirituel dans l’art) foregrounds Blavatsky’s ideas as guides for the artist.91 The Bauhaus show in Calcutta was a cosmopolitan exhibition, in that the four artists came from Amer­i­ca and Germany (Feininger), Austria (Itten), Rus­sia (Kandinsky), and Switzerland (Klee). But it was made more so ­because their art was hung together with work by the so-­called Bengal School, led by Rabindranath Tagore’s nephew Abindranath Tagore. This school set its art up in opposition to the classical art approach that prevailed in the British-­ founded art schools and museums in the Raj. Thus, even though the exhibition featured Eu­ro­pean artists, it was in effect an anticolonialist gesture, ironically since the Tagore f­ amily had been connected to the British East Indian Com­pany from the very moment Calcutta was settled, in 1690, a reason for its considerable wealth enabling it to play such a leading role in the arts.92 The German / Indian joint exhibition in Calcutta potentially inscribed Indian art into transnational modernism. The flow was, however, not one-­way, given the influence of Blavatsky’s Theosophy on the Eu­ro­pean artists and its purported indebtedness to ancient Indian culture and Indian religions. An exhibition of Indian art was staged in Berlin the following year. But the Indian artists’ incorporation into international modernism via Germany was not their only transnational orientation. Even before the Calcutta show, the Bengal School had established links with a new movement in Japa­nese art, again largely brokered for India by members of the Tagore ­family. This movement, part nationalist, part internationalist—­so-­called Asian universalism—­was set up in opposition to the growing Western influence in Japan. In the early years of the twentieth ­century, Tokyo had become a mecca for Asian nationalists, especially ­after the Japa­nese defeated the Rus­ sians in the war of 1904–1905, and among the pan-­Asian movements was the Pan-­Asiatic League, centered in Japan.93 Another pan-­Asianist movement originating in Japan was headed by Okakura Kakuzo, who outlined his position in his The Ideals of the East, first

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published 1904. Okakura’s transnational vision for Asia was largely focused not on India but on East Asia. It encompassed what he saw as the three major civilizations, the Chinese, Japanese—­and Indian. In his fanciful scheme for pan-­Asian unity the Himalayas play a major role, not as a barrier, as in the experience of the Soviet Rus­sians who attempted to penetrate them and reach India, but as emblematic of the overcoming of sheer geo­graph­i­cal limitations to achieve a unity conceived in spiritual terms. The text opens: “Asia is one. The Himalayas divide, only to accentuate, two mighty civilizations, the Chinese with its communism of Confucius, and the Indian with its individualism of the Vedas. Not even the snowy barriers can interrupt for one moment that broad expanse of love for the Ultimate and Universal, which is the common thought-­i nheritance of e­ very Asian race, enabling them to produce all the ­great religions of the world.”94 By his ­great religions of the world, Okakura meant primarily Hinduism and especially Buddhism, which had originated in India and spread to China and Japan. In suggesting some sort of intellectual-­ cum-­spiritual unity among Asians, he ran roughshod over the old enmities and the distinctions between and also within their cultures and faiths. In Okakura’s par­tic­u­lar account of “Asian” culture he claimed priority for Japan, arguing that it had enjoyed a stable government for centuries; it had resisted foreign incursions, and hence the Japa­nese ­were an “unconquered race.” Consequently, he contended, an “Asian consciousness” remained more intact ­there than elsewhere.95 But in fact, just as Tagore was by his own admission greatly influenced by Western Orientalist scholarship that idealized India’s classical past, Okakura was also influenced by Westerners in formulating his ideas, particularly by the Japanophilia of Ernest Fenollosa, which “suffuse Okakura’s idealized notion of Asian unity.” But then Okakura, in turn, left his mark on the conception of Asia of figures such as Frank Lloyd Wright, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and even Martin Heidegger.96

Tagore and Nationalism Okakura had a long intellectual and creative association with the Tagore ­family. In fact, he completed Ideals of the East, while staying with them in 1903.97 In India, Rabindranath Tagore played a leading role in public discussion about the way forward for the country and its place in world culture. In a series of major statements he made, some in India, some during his exten-

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sive world travels, Tagore expounded an idiosyncratic kind of national internationalism, whereby India’s first task was to recover and develop further its indigenous traditions that had been sidelined by the British. Only then should it reach out to the rest of Asia in an effort to establish a common Asian cultural core, and once that had been established, it was to move out to cultural dialogue with the rest of humankind. In a series of lectures he delivered in 1916–1917 in the United States and Japan (­later incorporated in the book Nationalism of 1921), Tagore argued against cosmopolitanism for its “colorless vagueness.” At the same time, he was opposed to nationalism, arguing like Perry Anderson that India had never been a “nation” and never saw itself as contained by set borders, or susceptible to “politics.”98 Though he praised the positive contributions of Western civilization, he largely condemned the West for its “commercialism,” its emphasis on what he called “the nation” (generally in his writings an Aesopian term for the British colonizers). This “nation” he decried as an “abstract,” dehumanizing entity “or­ga­nized for a mechanical purpose.”99 In an ­earlier article, “Nationalism in Japan” (based on lectures he delivered in Japan in June and July 1916), however, Tagore presented ideas that bear comparison with ­t hose of Okakura. He points out, “We forget that in Asia ­great kingdoms w ­ ere founded, philosophy, science, arts and lit­er­a­tures flourished, and all the ­great religions of the world had their cradles in Asia.” But by “Asia” he, like Okakura, largely means an East Asia that incorporates South Asia and in which India, China, and Japan play the leading roles. Eastern Asia, he argues, has been pursuing its own path, evolving its own civilization. In distant times, “the ­whole of Eastern Asia from Burma to Japan was united with India in the closest tie of friendship.” He also critiques the stock colonialist scenario about awakening a “sleepy” East, pointing out that “it cannot be said that ­t here is anything inherent in the soil and climate of Asia to produce ­mental inactivity and to atrophy the faculties which impel men to go forward. For centuries we did hold torches of civilization in the East when the West slumbered in darkness.” Moreover, “One morning the ­whole world looked up in surprise when Japan broke through her walls of old habits in a night and came out triumphant,” but not, he contends, and as would be the case in the stock anticolonialist scenario, “by imitating the West.”100 Not only w ­ ere Tagore’s and Okakura’s projections of a common East Asian culture somewhat dubious, but Tagore himself was not appreciated in China

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as much as in Japan. When he visited in 1923, leftists and communists, alarmed at his support for Buddhism and Confucianism, denounced him in articles and speeches (e.g., by Mao Dun and Lu Xun, writers discussed in Chapters 6 and 8). He was heckled so much when he gave his speeches that he cut the visit short (­later some of the attackers, such as Lu Xun, reevaluated their positions ­because of his support for anticolonialism).101 Tagore was popu­lar in the West, however, including among nonleftists. Previously virtually unknown ­there, he was propelled into the limelight with the publication in London early in 1913 of his collection of poems, Gitanjali, in his own En­g lish translation. By November of that year, he had been awarded the Nobel Prize for lit­er­a­ture for the collection, the first Asian to be so honored, and the only one for some de­cades. His poems created a sensation in Rus­sia, Eu­rope, and India. Many leading Eu­ro­pean intellectuals, such as André Gide (who published his own French translation of the En­glish), Ezra Pound, and, notably, W. B. Yeats, who wrote effusively about Tagore’s poems in his introduction to the 1913 London anthology. But, as in China, some Eu­ro­pe­ans on the left expressed reservations. Georg Lukács, writing in the Berlin communist paper Rote Fahne in 1922, attributed the award of the Nobel Prize to Tagore to “Britain repaying its intellectual agent in the strug­gle against the Indian freedom movement” and to his support for the “ideology of the eternal subjection of India” (Lukács’s italics). To him, India’s “ ‘wisdom’ was put at the ser­v ice of the British police.”102 The Tagore craze soon reached Rus­sia, and t­ here was a flurry of publishing his writings, including in two six-­volume editions that came out between 1914 and 1916. In both, Gitanjali (Zhertvopesni [Gitanzhali]) was featured in volume one.103 That cycle appeared as well in separate editions in 1914 edited by the ­future Nobel laureate Ivan Bunin, and went through three more editions (1914, 1916, 1918).104 Additionally, several stories by Tagore appeared in the Theosophists’ journal Vestnik teosofii.105 ­After the Revolution, discussions of Tagore in terms of his spirituality dis­appeared from the Soviet press, although Tagore himself continued to receive letters from Rus­sians and Ukrainians who ­were taken by him for that very quality (“My F ­ ather! My soul is yearning ­toward you”).106 In official sources, however, Tagore was billed not as a source of Indian “spirituality” but as a leader in the anti-­imperialist movement in India. In ­t hese early postrevolutionary years the Soviet press looked favorably on virtually any Indian who opposed British rule, and Gandhi was commonly represented as an Indian “revolutionary.”107

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Tagore could be counted on to express support for anticolonialist or peace platforms that the Soviet Union was sponsoring.108 In the 1920s, thanks partly to such participation, and also to the de­cade’s zeal for “world lit­er­a­ture” (in which terms he was promoted by Anatoli Lunacharsky), a spate of transla­ ere from the En­g lish tions of his work appeared.109 But the translations w rather than the Bengali (not so in l­ ater translations published u ­ nder Khrushchev). Tagore’s only early translator who worked from the original Bengali was Mikhail Izrailevich Tubiansky, a member of the Bakhtin circle and an expert on Tibet, Buddhism, and ancient Indian and Bengali lit­er­a­ture. He translated a collection of short stories, Svet i teni (in En­g lish Light and Shadow), from Bengali and also wrote introductions and provided scholarly apparatus for most of the translations of Tagore published in the 1920s. Symptomatic of the hold of the old Indo-­Europeanist model, Tubiansky was reproached by his mentors Oldenburg and F. I. Scherbatskoi for wasting his time on modern Bengali lit­er­a­ture; to them, the cause of classical Sanskrit was paramount.110 The postrevolutionary shift in the account of Tagore that downplayed his ­ ere favored. A ­ fter spirituality is reflected in the kinds of works by him that w the Revolution, it was almost exclusively his prose or drama as distinct from his poetry that was published, and particularly his two “realist” novels, Gora and At Home and Abroad (scorned by Lukács for its “unctuous tediousness”).111 Raskolnikov was translating Tagore assiduously while serving as the Soviet ambassador in Kabul.112 Also, Nikulin refers to Gora in his book on Af­ghan­i­stan. Most of Tagore’s short stories, as well as t­ hese two novels, the best-­k nown, ­were concerned with the plight of Indian w ­ omen and the need for their liberation, a theme that dovetailed well with the sexual politics of early Soviet society.113 In the 1920s, Soviet cultural authorities courted Tagore. VOKS began to send him lit­er­a­ture for the university he founded in Santiniketan, especially Rus­sian classics such as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev.114 And in 1928 VOKS proposed that Scherbatskoi be sent to Santiniketan as one of two Soviet professors (he was to teach Rus­sian language and lit­er­a­ture).115 Tagore was also repeatedly invited to visit the Soviet Union.116 Tagore declined several invitations to visit, but during his 1926 tour of Eu­ rope, VOKS wrote to him while he was in Berlin that September, extending another invitation, which he accepted. A centerpiece for the visit was to be a musical-­theatrical concert of Soviet minority ­peoples at the Bolshoi at which

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the Rus­sian poet Georgi Shengeli, who was at the time president of the All-­ Russian Union of Poets, was to read his “Ode to Rabindranath Tagore,” especially composed for the occasion. Translations of the ode into both En­glish and Latin ­were to appear in the Bolshoi Theater program, as if to give the occasion an air of gravitas. The ode was not a modern form for Rus­sian poetry but most associated with the aristocratic age of the eigh­teenth ­century when odes w ­ ere written in praise of tsars, prominent aristocrats, or heroic ­battles; in other words, they ­were a genre of the aristomilitary class.117 Incidentally, Shengeli, l­ ater, in the mid-­t hirties, was no longer able to publish his poetry ­because of his ­earlier attacks on Mayakovsky (pronounced by Stalin in 1935 the poet of the Revolution) and made a living by translating. He served as one of the translators for Lahuti, who also wrote odes. In Shengeli’s ode for Tagore we see ele­ments of Indo-­Europeanism, with prominent references to Sanskrit words, once again inflected with West Eu­ ro­pean notions of elite culture (such as the translation into Latin, a language downgraded in significance by Marr). This provides another example of philology as the servant of power, though the prominence of Sanskrit in the ode could be construed as appropriate since Indo-­European theory, which gave primacy to Sanskrit, originated in his native Bengal. Like Oldenburg (as noted ­earlier), the ode identifies Sanskrit as the “Indian” language (indiiskii). In its early stanzas Shengeli’s ode stresses the closeness of India and Rus­sia, even suggesting that their respective words for “fire” and “know” are derived from the same roots (“Indiiskii ‘agni’ v russkom est’ ‘ogne,’ / I ‘Vedi’ i ‘vedat” otozvalos’ ”). Actually, the primary meaning of “vedi” in Sanskrit is altar, but it can also mean knowledge. “Ved-’ ” and “ogon’,” knowledge and fire, are both central tropes in Bolshevik rhe­toric. But then the ode goes on to suggest that both countries yearn to draw closer and unite in the anticolonial effort: as in Okakura’s Ideals of the East and also in the writings and art of Roerich, the “snowy” Himalayas function not as a divider of East, but as a sort of backbone that holds together dif­fer­ent cultures. Across the vast expanses our frozen Pamir looks yearningly ­toward the snowy Dhaulagiri [a mountain near Nepal]   But we are not destined to be separated forever / To hide our riches in secret places / The spirit of the times demands that we unite / in the bonds of brotherhood. . . .

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We ­w ill get your wisdom, you ­will get our youthful ardor / We ­w ill get depth, you ­will get anger and flame / so that in the entwinement of two ­great forces / The planet ­will be renewed by us. Rus­sia is the key and India the lock / If you put them together the chains ­w ill sunder / And a new world, ­free and lofty / ­w ill sparkle in a play of magnificence.118 Shengeli’s ode was not destined to be delivered. At the last moment Tagore canceled the trip, officially ­because of ill health (though he may have feared reprisals from the Raj).119 He did actually come l­ ater, in 1930, but that was in an entirely dif­fer­ent historical moment, the height of the “proletarian” moment in culture when Tagore, with his long beard and flowing hair and robes, looked incongruous in photos where he was surrounded by beardless workers and w ­ omen with modern dress and close-­cropped hair. The visit received ­little press coverage. The press was preoccupied at the time with the foreign writers convening to attend the Second International Congress of Writers held in Kharkov (see Chapter 6). Dhaulagiri and the Pamirs may have longed to join each other, but this was not to happen, not for some time at any rate. Stymied in attempts at penetrating the Indian borders, Soviet and Comintern officials redirected their efforts in Asia ­toward fomenting revolution in China. In the mid-1920s virtually not a day went by when some major news item or lead article about China did not make it to the front page of Pravda, and Communist Party and Comintern officials w ­ ere sent ­there to bolster the revolutionary effort. The list of ­t hose sent includes Ho Chi Minh, who went in 1924, and M. N. Roy, who went in late 1926, and also many gradu­ates of KUTV and Sun Yat-­sen University (including Hikmet’s friend Ėmi Xiao). The Soviet government also sent filmmakers and writers to penetrate with soft power and to convey to the world an account of modern China and its revolutionary potential. Their visits and the resulting texts w ­ ill be the subject of Chapter 5.

5 The “Roar” of Revolution in the Far East

T

he Far East was sparsely represented among the delegates to the Baku Congress of 1920. They came predominantly from the Muslim areas of the former Rus­sian Empire and the ­Middle East, and t­ here w ­ ere only eight Chinese delegates in a total of 1,891.1 But this lack was redressed in ­little over a year when a large contingent of East Asians attended a second such congress, the First Congress of the Toilers of the Far East, held in Moscow from January 21 to February 1, 1922, with a closing session in Petrograd on February 3.2 Though only a ­little over a year had elapsed since the Baku Congress, the content of the speeches was radically dif­fer­ent from t­ hose given in that pre­de­ces­sor. Despite the now standard emphasis on spreading a “common language, the language of Communism,” the cause of creating a “new culture” dis­appeared from view. Lit­er­a­ture was scarcely mentioned, even by writer delegates.3 Rather, the obsession was with international affairs, in par­tic­u­lar with the recent conference in Washington, D.C., on the situation in the Far East. Speakers argued that, given the Japa­nese and Western aggression that was justified in Washington, it was imperative that, as Zinoviev put it, communists and leftists in ­Korea, China, Mongolia, and Japan “unify for the cause of wresting in­de­pen­dence from the imperialists.” 4 As in Baku, he and other speakers invoked the ­ nder—­here an addiMarxist doctrine of the one, international proletariat, u tion from Marx—­Moscow as “the centre of the world proletarian revolution,” and counterposed to Washington as “the centre of the world’s cap­it­ al­ist ex-

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ploitation” (another shift from Baku, where Britain was seen as imperialism incarnate).5 By this point Japan, with its occupation of K ­ orea and its economic inroads in China, had effectively joined the category of colonialist / imperialist, together with power­f ul Eu­ro­pean nations such as Britain and France (though as a ju­nior partner). But as Zinoviev in his speech insisted, “­There can be no nationalism among the toilers of Japan, China, ­Korea, Mongolia, ­etc. who are ­here represented,” adding: “We are absolutely certain, that the pre­sent representatives of the Japa­nese proletariat . . . ​are sufficiently internationalized in the true sense of the word in their relations with the Chinese, the Koreans, and all other nations who are oppressed by the Japa­nese bourgeoisie” and that “the ­enemy is within the country, . . . ​the principal enemies of the toilers are their own bourgeoisie.”6 To counteract such retrograde forces, Zinoviev assured the delegates, “The pre­sent Congress w ­ ill strengthen the brotherhood of the toilers of all countries in the form of organ­ization.” Several delegates lamented that the networks of leftists from the countries represented existed only marginally and that they knew very l­ ittle about each other. As if to make up for this, the main speaker from each country provided in their pre­sen­ta­ tions extensive background information on the history of their anticolonialist movement and their current po­liti­cal and economic situations. The Comintern and an assortment of other bodies sought to redress t­ hese two critical deficiencies identified in the Congress of the Toilers of the Far East: the lack of transnational organ­ization among leftists in East Asia and the paucity of information or “knowledge” in each country about the o ­ thers, overcoming what the manifesto of Baku had called “the darkness of ignorance.”7 Zinoviev’s lament about how the oppressed of the East knew very ­little about each other might suggest a need for lateral exchanges of information between leftists in the relevant countries, but, as discussed in the Introduction, this was discouraged by the Comintern, which wanted Moscow to play a guiding role.8 By the mid-1920s, the subject of this chapter, the main focus of anti-­ imperialist proselytizing was China, foregrounded at Baku as the prime victim of colonialist oppression. ­There was a revolutionary surge ­there, starting in 1923, in which the nationalist Guomin­dang was in a united front with the Chinese Communist Party. The Soviet Union sent hundreds of

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advisers to help in the revolutionary effort, a group that included a lot of Chinese gradu­ates from KUTV or Sun Yat-­sen University, ­after it was founded in 1925. They even sent a fleet of planes in a pioneering “­Great Flight” all the way to Beijing from Moscow that was accompanied by several journalists and a film crew. Their reports on the places that the “­Great Flight” visited and the revolutionary situation ­t here ­were but one of the many ways the Soviet Union sought to bridge the information gap. Though lit­er­a­ture was not prominent in the speeches made at the congress, it assumed a critical role in the revolutionary effort in the Far East, both as a purveyor of “information” and in providing inspirational narratives. The exchange of “knowledge” through lit­er­a­ture was to be two-­way rather than multilateral: Soviet readers and viewers ­were to receive “true information” on East Asian countries to overcome their ignorance, while in turn readers and viewers in East Asia ­were to be given “true” information on the Soviet Union. But Asian readers ­were also to receive “true” information about themselves from the Soviet Union. In practice, however, as we ­shall see, the flows of information w ­ ere not only directed from Moscow. Often Asian intellectuals w ­ ere spontaneously drawn to Moscow and individually sought out “information” on Soviet Rus­sia. In the campaign to found a “new Asia,” the Soviet government and the ­Comintern strug­gled in the 1920s to compete with Western sources of their “knowledge.” In their efforts to redress this, the Soviet Union plied East Asian readers with Rus­sian texts. This was no new enterprise. Translations of Rus­ sian texts had been popu­lar in China, ­Korea, and Japan well before the Revolution, though given that few Chinese or Koreans knew Rus­sian many of the impor­tant Rus­sian texts had been translated for them from Japa­nese rather than the original. Rus­sian authors w ­ ere particularly popu­lar in East Asia, especially Tolstoy, but also Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Gorky, and Turgenev, and the anarchist Petr Kropotkin.9 ­After the Revolution translations from Rus­sian picked up, in part b ­ ecause many East Asians had begun to see Rus­sia as an alternative possibility to the West. As the Japa­nese writer Ujaku Akita put it in an article of 1927, “The culture of Eu­rope has in the clearest pos­si­ble fashion gone into a dead end and t­ here is hope for a new culture in Rus­sia.” In consequence, he claimed, no Eu­ro­pean lit­er­a­ture was as much studied and translated as the Rus­sian.10 VOKS played a key role in the growth in popularity of Rus­sian and Soviet

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lit­er­a­ture, recurrently sending consignments of texts to China and Japan.11 ­ ere classics of Rus­sian lit­er­ Initially, a good percentage of the works it sent w a­ture, but ­under its sponsorship more and more translations appeared of con­ temporary Soviet lit­er­a­ture.12 VOKS oversaw as well the publication of multivolume editions of Lenin, and works by Trotsky, Bukharin, Lunacharsky, and Stalin.13 The increase in Soviet material that appeared in translation in China and Japan was not only due to the efforts of VOKS, was not only an example of the center directing the intellectual life of the periphery, but came from the initiative of Chinese and Japa­nese intellectuals as well. The number of translations of Rus­sian, as distinct from Western, authors had picked up in East Asia in the early 1920s, before VOKS even existed.14 In China, during the 1920s and early 1930s the translation effort was fostered by leading leftist writers such as Lu Xun, who translated a se­lection of the Rus­sian radical author Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s writings u ­ nder the title On Art and Art and Criticism, and by members of his Unnamed Society, but also by Qu Qiubai, Mao Dun, and Guo Moruo, communists who ­were to play leading roles in the history of Chinese communist lit­er­a­ture.15 Also, Chinese leftists received Soviet materials by less formal routes. Between 1930 and 1933 Lu Xun received package ­after package of Soviet materials from Cao Jinghua, a gradu­ate of KUTV then teaching Chinese at the Institute of Languages in Leningrad.16 This chapter w ­ ill focus, however, not on the translations but on literary works. It w ­ ill look in par­tic­u­lar at the efforts of four writers, two Rus­sians, one Eu­ro­pean, and one East Asian, to mitigate the information gap on both sides (the East Asian and the Soviet, or more broadly the Eu­ro­pean), while si­mul­ta­neously engaging the topic of revolution. The first is Sergei Tretiakov (1892–1937), who spent sixteen months from February 27, 1924, ­u ntil late June, 1925, as professor of the history of Rus­sian lit­er­a­ture at Peking University, while si­mul­ta­neously serving as a special correspondent for Pravda and its associated periodicals.17 The second is Boris Pilniak (1894–1938), who in 1926 visited China, Mongolia, and Japan.18 Both Pilniak and Tretiakov ­were sent by Soviet institutions (VOKS in Pilniak’s case and the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs and Pravda in Tretiakov’s) to act as cultural emissaries, setting up or furthering the faltering outposts of Soviet cultural activity in ­these countries, in Pilniak’s case versions of a “friendship society”

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and in Tretiakov’s, breathing life into the teaching of Rus­sian lit­er­a­ture at ­Peking University, where the numbers of enrolled students w ­ ere dwindling in ­favor of En­glish.19 Both visits ­were also tied to moves in the sphere of diplomacy: Tretiakov arrived in Beijing at about the same time as the first Soviet ambassador Lev Karakhan, while Pilniak’s trip was largely occasioned by the signing of a Soviet-­Japanese accord in 1925. André Malraux, a third writer to be treated ­here, was no cultural envoy in East Asia but a sui generis French intellectual. He lived in French Indochina from 1923 to 1925 (but for a brief time back in Paris), where he became progressively radicalized and joined forces with Annamites bent on wresting in­ de­pen­dence from France.20 Though while he was ­t here he was sympathetic to Marxism, he was at the time unaffiliated with any Moscow-­centered literary or po­liti­cal organ­ization. In t­ hese years the Indo-­Chinese communists ­were largely located in China, where Ho Chi Minh founded the Viet­nam­ese Youth League in 1925, a precursor to the Viet­nam­ese Communist Party, founded in 1930. The fourth writer I w ­ ill discuss, Qu Qiubai, came to Moscow in the early 1920s as a journalist and unaffiliated leftist, but became a communist while ­t here. Not all four of ­t hese writers w ­ ere fully committed to a central role for Moscow in the revolutionary movement, but all four ­were internationalists. Thus ­these cases illustrate my general argument that the ecumene not only was a centrifugal movement with Moscow as metropole but also comprised individuals and groups who sought lateral links, a looser pattern of affiliation, and a more fluid aesthetic. Among the four, I am categorizing two as “hegemonic cosmopolitans” (Qu, Tretiakov) and two as “cosmopolitan leftists” (Malraux, Pilniak), inevitably imprecise categories. But whichever of ­t hese two categories each belonged to, they ­were all committed to purveying a more realistic account of the country they reported on than was to be found in “bourgeois” writings. For all four of ­t hese writers, journalism was at the center of the lit­er­a­ture they generated about the countries they visited. While abroad they published accounts of their experiences both in local periodicals and in their home country. All four sought in their writings, ­whether they w ­ ere presented as memoir, fictional, drama, or articles, to purvey “true information” on the Far East (or in Qu’s case the Soviet Union) to overcome ignorance at home. Even ­t hose works by them that ­were ostensibly fictional had a marked nonfictional aspect in that in composing them the authors drew

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on their journalistic writings or personal diaries. But what­ever the genre used, ­these writers also sought through them to or­ga­nize their “facts” into new narratives about the Far East or the Soviet Union that ­were to ­counter standard Western accounts. All four writers, then, had to tackle the prob­lem of how to pre­sent an au­ then­t ic, leftist account of the country they w ­ ere covering. This issue was tackled most directly in the writings of Qu Qiubai, who attempted to represent revolutionary Moscow for Chinese readers rather than, as in the case of my other three principals, revolutionary Asia for Asian, Soviet, or Eu­ro­pean readers. Qu explic­itly strug­gled with the prob­lem of how to make what he reported “true,” and his writings on his experiences in Soviet Rus­sia provide the most transparent example of the quest for au­t hen­tic repre­sen­ta­tion.

Qu Qiubai Qu Qiubai (1899–1935), a major figure in the history of Chinese communist culture, visited Moscow from January 1921 ­u ntil January 1923 and again from April 1928 to August 1930. On his first trip, he had been sent as a correspondent for a leftist periodical, not through any Comintern affiliation. Unlike most of the Asian cultural intermediaries discussed in this book, he knew Rus­sian even before he arrived, having studied it at the National Institute of Rus­sian Language in Beijing. Though his command was imperfect, that he had Rus­sian at all was a major ­factor in his being propelled to prominence among Chinese leftists—­one of many examples of the ele­ment of contingency and also the role of philology in their political-­cum-­literary ­careers.21 During his first visit to Moscow, Qu served as an instructor at KUTV and as a translator for the Chinese del­e­ga­tion to the Comintern’s Congress of the Toilers of the Far East (he also attended several subsequent Comintern congresses). A Marxist even before he first visited Moscow, he was further radicalized t­ here, especially while at KUTV, and joined the Soviet Communist Party ­after the Congress of the Toilers of the Far East. On his return from Moscow in 1923, he ­rose in the Chinese Communist Party hierarchy, and became a dean and lecturer at the (communist) University of Shanghai, where he taught would-be leftists many of the same texts as he had at KUTV, in par­ tic­u­lar two by Nikolai Bukharin, Historical Materialism and The ABC of Communism.22

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Qu was one of the most impor­tant cultural intermediaries of the 1920s and early 1930s between the Soviet Union and China but also held leading roles in the Chinese Communist Party, which he headed briefly ­after the 1927 Shanghai debacle (see Chapter 6). In other words, he was one of many Asian figures discussed in this book who had been at KUTV and on graduation held high po­liti­cal or administrative office but ­were also major players in the literary sphere. Qu allegedly believed one could “save China by cultural means.”23 ­After each visit to the Soviet Union, he both promoted and undertook personally translations into Chinese of impor­tant texts of Marxism, Marxist aesthetics, and con­temporary Soviet lit­er­a­ture, and published articles on t­ hese subjects, frequently paraphrasing leading articles from the Soviet cultural press. But he also translated in the more meta­phorical sense of representing the Soviet Union to East Asian readers. From Rus­sia he sent dispatches about his Soviet impressions to the Chinese periodical he  represented, a se­lection of which he l­ater incorporated in two books, Journey to the Land of Hunger (1922) and Impressions of the Red Capital (1924).24 The title of Journey to the Land of Hunger is a play on an old conception of China, that it was the land of plenty as contrasted with the outside world, the land of hunger. This text covers Qu’s overland journey to Moscow, but Impressions of the Red Capital provides his commentary on the new society. In it, Qu recurrently asserts his determination to counteract the “cock-­and-­ bull stories” and “malicious calumny” about Soviet Rus­sia from the Western bourgeoisie. He also addresses directly the prob­lem of how, in his account of Moscow, to reconcile ­actual experience and the ideologically based template. As he puts it, he wants to calibrate the “abstract and general” with what has resonance in his “soul” as an individual observer. In the interests of greater authenticity he proposes to write about “real events,” but not to outline them systematically. Rather, he ­will pre­sent them in the more haphazard way they occurred in his a­ ctual experience. Consequently, Qu’s “real events” are conveyed in snatches of conversation, often overheard by chance and in exchanges during random encounters with workers. But despite the alleged randomness of the conversations he reports, the conclusions to be drawn from them are somewhat predetermined and predictable. What he “overhears” is workers enthusing about how Soviet Rus­sia has improved their lives and marveling at the country’s ­g reat economic advances. ­These comments are framed by

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such statements by the narrator as “­After the October victory Moscow became the center of world revolution” and “Now the Kremlin has truly become a symbol of an amazing confluence of the dif­fer­ent cultures of mankind,” a version of the “single common international ocean of poetry and knowledge of the toiling humanity” from Zinoviev’s speech at Baku.25 Though in the early 1920s Qu was one of the very few writers supplying Chinese readers with a firsthand account of con­temporary Moscow, thanks to VOKS and all the translations East Asian intellectuals had a ­great deal of information about the con­temporary Soviet Union. The reverse was less the case. At an eve­ning of Japa­nese culture held in Moscow on April 5, 1926, Adolf Ioffe, the Comintern representative for Japan, lamented that “the Japa­ nese know more about us than we about them.”26 This disparity applied to China and ­Korea no less than Japan. Tretiakov and Pilniak ­were sent to East Asia to rectify this, and also to facilitate closer cultural ties through a network of Moscow-­generated organ­izations. In addition to fulfilling their roles as cultural envoys, both Tretiakov and Pilniak w ­ ere expected to draw on their experiences in contributing to the development of a new, postimperialist, nonexotic lit­er­at­ ure that celebrates a new East and also provides for Soviet readers, and for readers in the East and in the world at large, “new images.” To that end, both produced a lot of semi-­journalistic work, much of it supplying a wealth of ethnographic detail. Pilniak was less consistent in meeting this task, but Tretiakov was deeply committed to it.

Sergei Tretiakov Tretiakov wrote dozens of information-­packed articles for the Soviet press on topics such as Chinese students, Chinese ­women, the new Soviet ambassador, the funeral of Sun Yat-­sen, and Mongolia. Many of them w ­ ere incorporated in his book Chungo (“China” in Chinese), published in 1927.27 He also published several poems on China (notably “Roar, China!”); scripts for three feature films that he planned to make with Eisenstein during a return visit to China, a proj­ect that never materialized; and Dėn Shi-­khua (published in En­glish in 1934 as A Chinese Testament: The Autobiography of Tan Shih­hua).28 Several of his works on Asia also appeared in the West in translation, especially in Germany, Eu­ro­pean headquarters of the Comintern.

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All of Tretiakov’s writings on China and Mongolia ­were intended to be models of how “true,” or in Zinoviev’s words “appropriate,” information on the Far East was to be incorporated in texts. A point of departure for them, as for many Soviet writings of this time, was the fiction and travelogues of Pierre Loti (discussed in Chapter 1), who at the time functioned in Soviet criticism as exoticism incarnate, his works objects of scorn or ridicule. In a typical Soviet critique of Loti, expressed in an unsigned article in Ogonëk of 1923, he is reproached for essentially not taking an anti-­imperialist stance, for failing to expose “what was truly capable of captivating Eu­rope”: “The strug­gle of the Chinese, Indians, Australians with the white conquerors, a strug­gle for gold, pearls, copper, rubber—­a ll ­t hese subjects of world significance did not attract the sated Pa­ri­sian. Loti retreated to the tea ­houses, harems, the haunts of low repute in the ports. For the Eu­ro­pean reader was revealed all the romance, exotica and erotica of distant Eastern countries.”29 This quotation contains two themes that ­w ill be impor­tant in my discussion ­here: first, “the strug­gle . . . ​w ith the white conquerors,” in other words a narrative of anticolonialist or anti-­imperialist revolution, and, second, what some have labeled “imperialist erotics” (“the haunts of low repute . . . ​ erotica”).30 Typical Loti novels purvey what Tsvetan Todorov has described as an enchanted exoticism. In them, a non-­European ­woman has an affair with a Loti-­like Eu­ro­pean, who is generally a naval officer or member of the military that is enforcing colonization. Th ­ ere is an oneiric atmosphere, and the texts are suffused with a nostalgia for a more innocent age such as the Orient purportedly offers.31 ­These incidents of miscegenation are often considered allegories of rapprochement between East and West—or of the impossibility of rapprochement. Another cliché of reductivist Western accounts of the East, one that hovers over Loti’s novels, is the idea that the Asian ­woman is fundamentally unknowable, inscrutable, impenetrable. Her “veil” (the mysterious East) is lifted, however, in Loti’s book about China, Les derniers jours de Pékin (The last days of Peking, 1902)—to his chagrin. This novel is based on his experiences during the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion of 1900–1901, a landmark moment in the history of imperialism. The book’s narrator, a Loti figure, is sent to Peking as an envoy from the French naval forces stationed offshore and is able to “penetrate” the Forbidden City (in fact, he is billeted t­ here). He even enters the chamber of the empress dowager (Cixi), who has fled, but he

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laments that this intrusion has destroyed the “mystery,” has exposed what had been deemed the “unknown and marvelous.”32 In other words, paradoxically, the “mystery of the East” seen by Soviet commentators as so much imperialist cant that must be expunged in any quest to represent the “true” Asia has been dispelled in this book by military operations of the imperialists. The cliché of the “impenetrable” East challenges the idea that ”the proletariat is in essence international.” Consequently, in providing “true” information about the East, Soviet writers ­were to ­counter “exoticism,” one of the trends that, in Zinoviev’s words at Baku, “divide us” by emphasizing the “otherness” of Easterners and presenting a patronizing, anachronistic account of them. Solomon Vel’tman, in a 1925 article in his Novyi Vostok series that attacked the “colonialist novel,” provides a capsule formulation of its insidious essence, arguing that it primarily purveys “material for po­liti­cal propaganda.” In it you find “instead of colonial realia [byt] colonialist fantasy [vydumka].”33 In Soviet critiques of colonialist fiction, the opposition “invention” (or fantasy-­ vydumka) versus “truth” became the operational binary, and “Loti” came to stand as a cipher for colonialist fiction in general and for overly “fabular” narratives. In using this binary, writers and critics ­were claiming that Soviet versions of the Far East w ­ ere more au­t hen­t ic. Since at least the early Goethe, who showed contempt for voguish images of China that foreground “the dreamy luxuries associated with tea, porcelain, ceremonies and gardens,” Eu­ro­pean intellectuals had periodically mocked “Chinoiserie.”34 The attacks of the 1920s on Loti and his ilk, directed as they w ­ ere against t­ hese writers’ alleged implication in colonialism, gave a new focus to the debunking. Early Soviet sources effectively contended that the “mystery” of the East can be dispelled, the princess awakened, not by the cannon, not by military might (not by “imperialist interventions,” as is implicit in Loti) or economic domination, but by “scientific socialism,” a comprehensive knowledge system that its adherents believed to be more advanced than that of the imperialists. Its light ­w ill penetrate the veil of unknowability and bridge the absolute gulf between East and West. Tretiakov’s writings ­were to dispel the “mystery,” to get further b ­ ehind the “veil” than did Loti and replace “fantasy” with “realia,” which demonstrate the economic realities of imperialist exploitation and the spirited response to them by the Chinese or Japa­nese. He wanted to

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counteract routinized, exoticist narratives, replacing them with “facts.” The danger, however, is that works informed by “scientific socialist” internationalism ­w ill devolve into utopian generalizations or abstractions, which ­presuppose a common humanity or a truly international proletariat or essentialist notions, such as the “sleepy” East. Such static, “synchronic essentialism,” as Talal Asad has called it, is at cross-­purposes with the diachrony of a dynamic dialectics.35 The question facing all three of my Euro-­Russian writers was what was “true” or “appropriate” knowledge? Was it to be “objective,” scientifically based knowledge such as ethnographic, statistical, or geo­graph­i­cal facts (assuming even that they can be neutral), or was knowledge “true” and “appropriate” only when it was inflected with Marxism-­L eninism and oriented around Bolshevik anti-­imperialist discourse and narratives?—to some a false dichotomy. Not all facts proved equal when they ­were incorporated in a revolutionary narrative. While seeking in their accounts of the Far East to diminish the yawning gap between exoticist repre­sen­ta­tion and actuality, ­these three writers also had to reconcile the disparity between a­ ctual events and the standard narratives of Asian revolution to be found in such sources as the Baku manifesto. ­ ere. Ahmad has An observation of Aijaz Ahmad seems particularly apt h pointed out that “ ‘ description’ has been central, for example, in the colonial discourse” but that the seeming air of neutrality and objectivity that description proj­ects is illusory. He argues, “When it comes to a knowledge of the world, ­there is no such t­ hing as a category of the ‘essentially descriptive’; that ‘description’ is never ideologically or cognitively neutral; that to ‘describe’ is to specify a locus of meaning. . . . ​To say, in short, that what one is presenting is ‘essentially descriptive’ is to assert a level of facticity which conceals its own ideology, and to prepare a ground from which judgements of classification, generalization and value can be made.”36 The years 1925–1929, when Tretiakov was writing up his China material, are commonly regarded as the high point for a literary movement he led, “the lit­er­a­ture of fact” (literatura fakta).37 Most of his “fictional” works on China of this period are declaredly “fact-­based.” The movement for a “lit­er­a­ture of fact” involved, as it was put ­later in the preface to the 1929 collection of programmatic articles, Literatura fakta, a canonical source, “turning away from the lit­er­a­ture of idle invention [vydumka].” In other words, adherents used

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the same term to dismiss writings that ­were not based on facts as had been used in standard critiques of Loti-­like exoticism. Actually, Tretiakov did not always live up to his stance against “invention.” The film scripts on China he wrote at the time that ­were to have been produced t­ here by him and Eisenstein include adventure action films and melodramas with impoverished ­fathers reduced to selling their ­daughters as concubines—­Hollywood-­style scripts to counteract Hollywood’s lion’s share of the Asian market.38 But as the preface to Literatura fakta made clear, the movement’s emphasis on the “fact-­based” did not mean they w ­ ere advocating some kind of transparent reproduction of “real­ity” in their texts, impossible anyway b ­ ecause of the necessity for some mediating use of language and the inevitability of using some delimiting “structure,” or organ­ization, of the verbal text. It went on to define their goal as “a lit­er­a­ture not of naïve and false verisimilitude but rather of the most honest-­to-­goodness and maximally precisely expressed truth.”39 ­After all, Loti’s books are in a sense almost all “fact”-­based in that they draw on his own travel experiences, as are the texts of all four of my writers. In effect, then, repre­sen­ta­tions, while they ­were not to be “fictional,” would be framed or inflected by a Marxist or Marxist-­Leninist point of view. “Facts” ­were to be or­ga­nized in the ser­v ice of a counternarrative. Tretiakov’s puritanical rigidity about rooting out all “fiction” in ­favor of “fact” extended to calling his life of a revolutionary, Dėn Shi-­khua, not a biography, or biographically based fiction, but a “bio-­interview,” an act of extended, fact-­based journalism. The book was based on a long series of interviews conducted with a former student—­called ­here Dėn Shi-­k hua—­who had gone on to study at Sun Yat-­sen University in Moscow.40 Some of Tretiakov’s journalistic works ­were or­ga­nized in a binary that counterposed Loti’s account of the Far East to the “real­ity” of ­today. A good example would be his article “Love China” (“Liubit’ Kitai”) he published in September 1925, ­after his return, in the Odessa journal Shkval (Squall). He opens the article with a long list of associations that “90 ­percent of our population” have about China (fans, Princess Turandot, Chinese porcelain, e­ tc.). They see China as a “mysterious enigma” (tainstvennaia zagadka), but now in China “­there are exploited workers and trade u ­ nions, and their porcelain is exported and their divinities and copper incense burners are now made in factories in Japan and Germany.” “Silk oriental robes are bought and worn by idle white travelers who imagine themselves as Princess Turandot. . . . ​‘Ah,

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alas,’ the lovers of the exotic ­will say. Real­ity is grayer than the fantastic.” But “of what fantasy can one speak when millions of bare-­a rmed students and workers beat against the walls of the foreign concessions, and fall u ­ nder En­ glish bullets, and at inflamed meetings they cut their fin­gers so that with the stub they can write on the screen a vow of hatred,” adding, “Before this new China, explosive, that has risen up the fantasy of the ­idiots are scattered like dust. . . . ​Miraculous China . . . ​t hat is developing to become a lever of world revolution, loves Moscow and the land of the Soviets.” And he concludes: ­ ill be clear when we begin “Fantasy [fantaziia] is grayer than real­ity”; “This w to understand China not only schematically, but when we take her by touch, we s­ hall know her and love her.” 41 Tretiakov’s closing claim h ­ ere that he is taking China “by touch” rather than “schematically” implies that he is privileging empirical observation over any template. Yet his commitment to “Moscow and the land of the Soviets” inevitably leads to a tension in his writings on China between the aim of au­ then­tic repre­sen­ta­tion of actuality and the capsule narrative of revolution in the Far East to be found in sources like the Baku manifesto.

Roar, China! The manifesto of the Baku Congress of 1920 provided a narrative for revolution in the East. ­After identifying Britain as imperialism incarnate and China as its principal victim, the manifesto pronounces: “This s­ hall not be!” “The roar of the world-­wide conflict, and the thunder of the Rus­sian workers’ revolution, which has released the Eastern p ­ eoples of Rus­sia from their century-­old chains of cap­i­tal­ist slaves, has awakened them, and now aroused from their sleep of centuries, they are rising to their feet.” 42 This manifesto and similar formulations in other authoritative sources provided the bare bones of a progression: stagnation ­under the oppressive yoke of the feudal lords and colonialist cap­i­tal­ists > righ­teous indignation > the “roar” (revolutionary uprising). This narrative, a sort of lowest common denominator of Soviet anti-­i mperialist rhe­toric, was meant to supersede the dominant narratives of colonialist-­cum-­imperialist culture. Tretiakov’s writings provide illustrations of how this general narrative ­shaped writings about the Far East. The scenario presented in the Baku manifesto is illustrated proleptically in one of Tretiakov’s most famous works, the play Roar, China! (Rychi, Kitai!).

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Often considered the most successful of all revolutionary plays, it was first performed at the Meyerhold Theater on January 23, 1926 (directed by his disciple V. Fëdorov), and published the same year. Roar, China! is about a revolutionary uprising in provincial China and culminates, as its title suggests, in a Baku-­mandated “roar.” As Tretiakov stressed in his writings about it, this play is based on an a­ ctual incident that took place between June and August of 1924 in Wanxian (formerly Wan-­Hsien) on the upper Yangtze, where ­there had been a simmering conflict between local Chinese who earned their living transporting goods on junks and the British and American cap­i­tal­ists who wanted to transport the goods on larger vessels. The conflict came to a head when an American working for a British firm, Edwin C. Hawley, attempted to load a boat with wood oil in defiance of an agreement with local Chinese officials that the large Eu­ro­pean vessels would not supplant the junks in transporting it (the Eu­ro­pe­ans’ rationale for breaking the agreement was that it was summer and the junks could not ply the river at that time). A scuffle ensued (attributions of culpability vary in the dif­fer­ent accounts of the incident), and Hawley ended up in the river, badly beaten, and subsequently died. A British gunboat, the Cockchafer, had previously been summoned by Hawley, who anticipated trou­ble, and a­fter his death its captain, Lieutenant Commander Ivan Whitehorn, ordered that if the culprits could not be produced, local officials should execute two of the leaders of the junkmen’s guild, attend Hawley’s funeral, and pay his ­family handsome compensation.43 The junkmen closed ranks and no culprits w ­ ere produced, so that the two w ­ ere executed.44 Tretiakov made t­ hese events the basis for his play. In assorted statements about it, he said that the play was intended to ­counter “the colonial novels of the Pierre Loti type” and that the facts of the incident make any account “sharper than a razor and more fantastic than [anything in] Farrère and Stevenson.” Their orientalist texts “have as their task dispelling the smell of poverty, illness, hatred and h ­ uman meat that is ground down on colonialist millstones with their exotic, sweet-­smelling fare.” Tretiakov went on to pronounce Roar, China! an act of journalism: The genre of the text is not a play, he claimed. “It is an article . . . ​publicizing burning issues of the day,” but they are presented “not from the pages of a newspaper, but from the theater stage.” 45 And, in fact, Tretiakov also wrote several articles at this time that follow a similar trajectory to the one that structures this play.46 Tretiakov wrote in his introduction to a 1930 edition of the play: “Such are the facts [actually singular in Tretiakov, in a sense to underline the single

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truth]. // I almost d ­ idn’t have to alter them [it]. // Moreover, the incident turned out to be typical [tipovym]. ­People now see this play as prophetic. // But all its prophetic nature consists only in the correct fixation of the amazing consistency of form [odnoobrazie] and consistency of the imperialists’ methods of [implementing] colonialist politics, especially of the En­glish.”  47 In other words, Tretiakov sees the events as conforming to the paradigmatic dynamic of colonialism. But Tretiakov did “alter” the “facts.” A tell-­tale example: a­ fter asserting that “facts are facts,” thus implying the documentary nature of his play, Tretiakov added immediately: “I have seen an original demonstration of Chinese students—­they bore above the crowd, like a banner, bloodied comrades, who had been beaten to death [izbitykh] the day before by the police. . . .” 48 Judging from newspaper reports, the instigator of re­sis­tance to the foreigners appears to have been the guild of junkmen, as well as local (Chinese) officials. But Tretiakov added a student agitator to his cast of characters, one of many ways the play is syncretic and incorporates material from the revolutionary movement elsewhere in China. The student movement was of course particularly impor­tant for Tretiakov, who was acting as mentor to revolutionary students at the time. Roar, China! represents a creative appropriation of the information on the Wanxian incident available at the time, thrusting it into standard Bolshevik narratives of revolutionary uprisings—­a milder version of “invention” than was to be found in Loti. In the play an impor­tant role is played by a “stoker,” who is “dressed in the uniform of the Workers’ Militia in Canton [­today’s Guangzhou], blue trousers, a blue blouse with a turndown collar, and a red ribbon across his chest.” 49 A journalist on the scene calls him a “commissar,” a term from the Soviet Red Army and less appropriate in China. The stoker tells the dispirited crowd of locals that “­t here is such a country” (implicitly the Soviet Union) that “cuts the heads off [i.e., defeats] the En­glish.”50 L ­ ater, just as the En­glish captain of the gunboat is about to crush the Chinese protesters, the stoker gets an urgent wire, and he tells the crowds: “They [the imperialists] have to go. Their guns are wanted down the river. The aliens are collecting all their strength in Shanghai. In Shanghai ­t here is a revolution. Look, they are r­ unning.” He snatches a gun from a police officer and jumps on the wharf’s edge. As he brandishes it, he declares: “I swear by this gun you s­ hall not come back! Count your hours. Your end is near. China is

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roaring. . . . ​Shoot!” Then he adds, “I may fall but tens w ­ ill arise in my place,” using a common trope of Rus­sian revolutionary writing that goes back to Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s hero Rakhmetov of his novel What Is to Be Done? (Chto delat’?, 1863), a primer for generations of Rus­sian radicals, if not before, but this trope seems unlikely to have been used by an a­ ctual Chinese stoker.51 Then a student shouts, “Roar over the ­whole earth! Roar China in the ears of the world! Roar China the story of this crime,” and turning to the river cries out, presumably addressing the gunboat, “Out of China.” A monk who belongs to a nationalist sect is shot, and the crowd intones “Out! Out! Out!” as the curtain falls.52 Tretiakov followed his above claim that he “almost ­didn’t have to alter” the facts with the explanation that “the incident turned out to be paradigmatic [tipovym],” not acknowledging the contradiction between the paradigmatic and the singular event.53 In fact, in making something “paradigmatic” out of the raw facts of the Wanxian incident of 1924, Tretiakov was in effect allegorizing them. In his version the incident became an exemplary example of British imperial iniquities, another one to be added to the list given at Baku. His “almost not altered” deployment of the “facts” has been a “creative” one, ­because he has used the incident to pre­sent a more generalized, a more “tipovoi” account of con­temporary revolutionary movements in China and their confrontations with cap­i­tal­ists, foreigners, and armed power. He has followed the general contours of the events in that upper Yangtze, provincial town but re­oriented his narrative to fit not only the Baku injunction (roar!) but also the emerging standard narrative of proletarian revolutionary engagement tout court. Tretiakov has given a leading role to a “stoker,” in other words to a proletarian, as the junkmen r­ eally ­were not, though by the late 1920s coolies ­were beginning in Comintern circles to be categorized as proletarians.54 The stoker has come from the greater revolutionary world that at the time was particularly concentrated in Canton, where t­ here ­were major strikes by longshoremen, and at the end of the play the stoker tells the crowd of a revolutionary uprising in the other principal revolutionary center of the time, Shanghai.55 Tretiakov claimed in one of his statements on this play that Roar, China! “is an attempt to demonstrate by a l­ ittle fact, a common fact in China which it is easy to forget.”56 But by the time he wrote the play, in August 1924, the incident was already not a “­little fact,” not merely an incident in a minor town,

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but a big “fact,” a fact of ­great resonance in all of China and also internationally. The mea­sures taken by the imperialists in Wanxian did not just elicit a local response but quickly became an occasion for demonstrations throughout the country, including student demonstrations. The cause was taken up by the Chinese central government, which in its normally restrained organ, ­Peking Daily News, responded with a denunciatory article against ­England that concluded, “China should stand firm and energetically demand satisfaction from the En­glish government.”57 The Chinese government sent a tele­ gram to the En­glish parliament calling for a stop to Whitehorn’s demands and published a proclamation to all classes of the Chinese populace calling for the formation of an “all-­China ­union for the strug­gle to annul the unequal treaties of the Chinese with foreigners.”58 The meeting, held on July 13 in the central park of Beijing, led to the formation of a “Society for the Strug­gle against Imperialism.”59 Also, the incident has to be seen as occurring in tandem with other uprisings of the time, particularly in Shanghai, and a protracted strike in Canton (both alluded to in the play). Between late June, when the Wanxian incident occurred, and early August, when Tretiakov wrote the play, the events w ­ ere reported extensively in the central Chinese press, and in the New York Times, the Times of London, and Pravda, among many other sources. The Soviet and Chinese press, ­needless to say, presented differently slanted versions of what happened from ­t hose in Western accounts. En­glish reports decried the “barbaric” slaughter of Hawley and when the Chinese government appealed to the En­glish parliament, the parliamentarians in response let out a cheer for the actions of Lieutenant Whitehorn. The Chinese leftists, by contrast, w ­ ere outraged at the boatmen’s martyrdom; some wanted to fit the events into a Marxist framework by making the victims leaders of a “­union of boatmen” (soiuz lodochnikov), implying a workers’ organ­ization, which better fits into a narrative of proletarian revolt, while the English-­language reports called it a “guild of junkmen,” virtually a feudal organ­ization. It is not clear where Tretiakov got his information on the incident from, though he cites in some of his articles on China such English-­language periodicals as the North China Daily News, the Far Eastern Times, or the Peking and Tientsin Times.60 Most likely, it came from embassy sources, or from both Pravda and the foreign-­language press of Beijing. But he might also have been told of the incident by his Chinese students, by his friend Ivin (Aleksei

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Ivanov), who knew Chinese, or by M. Mikhailov, the main Pravda reporter in Beijing. In presenting the Wanxian incident as “paradigmatic,” Tretiakov was couching the revolutionary movement in China and its strug­gle with foreign capital in starkly binaristic terms. This approach was reflected in his stipulations for the staging, which was to take place on two counterposed spaces, the gunboat, locus of imperialist power, and the Yangtze shore, the locus of the Chinese masses and their indigenous authorities (during the Moscow staging, the masses w ­ ere played by “tens of Chinese students from KUTV”).61 This juxtaposition Tretiakov viewed as a version of the basic spatial divisions in the major cities of China: that in Beijing between the Chinese areas and the cordoned-­off diplomatic enclave, or in Shanghai, Tientsin, or Canton, that between the vari­ous foreign concessions and each city’s Chinese quarters.62 This par­tic­u­lar, ideologically inflected spatial binary could also be seen as derived from the conventions of the revolutionary mass spectacles of war communist Rus­sia, most of which ­were directed by members of Meyerhold’s theatrical coterie, to which Tretiakov belonged. In them action took place between one stage or place representing the Whites and another the Reds. An analogous spatial binary was used ­later in a film by another figure who emerged from the Meyerhold theatrical world, Eisenstein, in his Battleship Potemkin (1925), for which Tretiakov, having returned from China, wrote the (uncredited) intertitles together with his old avant-­gardist associate from the Rus­sian Far East, Nikolai Aseev. In both cases, the two ideologically contrasted spaces are the battleship itself (on which cannons are prominent) and the shore of the city (in Eisenstein’s film, Odessa), though in Roar, China! ­there is a reversal of the binaristic valorization of battleship and shore, in that in Eisenstein’s film the battleship is the center of revolutionary re­sis­tance and the shore the domain of the repressive tsarist regime. The title of Tretiakov’s play, Roar, China!, clearly derives from the Baku manifesto, where China was singled out as the paradigmatic victim of colonialism. But the call to expel the cap­i­tal­ist foreigners—­“Out! Out! Out!”—­ relates rather to the slogan “Hands off China!,” the rallying cry of a campaign of the Eu­ro­pean left, which was at its height during the climax of Chinese revolutionary fervor between 1925 and 1927. During ­these years the dramatic strikes and uprisings in China captured the attention of the Eu­ro­pean and Soviet communist press, especially Rote Fahne and Pravda, which featured

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articles on the latest confrontation virtually ­every day. The “Hands off China!” campaign itself was orchestrated by Profintern (Red International of ­Labor Unions) and Mezhrabpom (International Workers’ Aid; in German Internationale Arbeiter-­Hilfe [IAH]) in response to a resolution of the Comintern, whose Central Committee called on the world proletariat to start an international campaign of solidarity with the striking workers in China. Its publications insisted that “time w ­ on’t wait” and that the strug­g le of Chinese workers and peasants is our strug­g le, in that the Chinese workers ­rose up against the common e­ nemy of the proletariat—­imperialism—­and so its defeat would be our defeat. U ­ nder the slogan “Hands off China!” thousands of meetings and demonstrations w ­ ere held in the Soviet Union, Germany, France, Czecho­slo­va­k ia, Austria, Norway, Holland, and other countries of Eu­rope and in Amer­i­ca. Over a million participated, including many prominent intellectuals, and a special committee for aiding the Chinese, together with the Central Committee of Mezhrabpom, started to put out a bulletin, Für China, as well as propaganda materials in German, En­glish, Dutch, Norwegian, and other languages and placed material on China in numerous illustrated journals. The highest point of the Mezhrabpom “Hands off China!” campaign was August 16, 1925, in Berlin, where t­ here was a special congress conducted ­under that slogan. Eight hundred delegates came, mostly from Eu­ ro­pean countries, and also a big del­e­ga­tion of workers and intellectuals from China, together with Chinese students studying in Germany.63 The “Hands off China!” campaign represented the events in China as emblematic of the strug­gles of colonial and semicolonial ­peoples in general and began to expand its purview to encompass other nations. The organ­ization started to support the textile workers of India, especially when in October  1925, 150,000 of them went on strike. Then, in 1926, Mezhrabpom and Profintern launched a campaign of solidarity with the workers’ General Strike in ­England.64 Something like a pan-­Eurasian movement of solidarity comprising workers and anticolonialists was beginning to cohere, complicating any center-­ periphery model. Moscow was not the only metropole in the movement, nor was it just Berlin and Moscow. The left in France, however, was less involved in the “Hands off China!” campaign, and the French communist newspaper, L’Humanité, gave revolution in China less attention than its German and Soviet counter­parts. This paucity was somewhat compensated for by the

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impact of the writings on Asian revolution of Malraux, who was not at the time in the Soviet orbit and operated initially in French Indochina.

André Malraux Malraux had originally gone to French Indochina in 1923 inspired—­and ­here his profile bears comparison with that of Larisa Reisner in Afganistan—by some of the best-­k nown exoticist adventure lit­er­a­ture such as H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines and in par­tic­u­lar by Loti’s A Pilgrimage to Angkor (Un pèlerin d’Angkor, 1912), which had been so popu­lar in France that it had gone through forty-­two editions in one year.65 Another source of inspiration was the writings of T. E. Lawrence, whom Malraux regarded as a role model, the intellectual-­cum-­man of action and the romantic, Nietz­ schean hero who through force of ­w ill triumphs over the assaults of both a cataclysmic environment and hostile locals.66 Commentators on Malraux have suggested that his sudden decision to abandon the Surrealist literary scene in Paris for adventure in the Far East was prompted by a desire to emulate Lawrence, who began his c­ areer as an archaeologist in the Ottoman Empire excavating the ruins of the ancient city of Carchemish, in what is now modern Syria. In Indochina, following the example of Loti and Lawrence, Malraux trekked through the jungle to extract artifacts from ancient ­temples (this formed the basis of his ­later novel, La Voie royale [The Royal Way, 1930]). But he was arrested on a charge of looting sections of a bas-­relief at the ­temple of Banteay Srei, and stood trial in Saigon.67 A campaign of intellectuals in Paris led by Gide ultimately resulted in his being freed, but most scholars believe his experience with the French colonial authorities during the trial radicalized him and turned him into an anticolonialist. When Malraux returned to Indochina in 1925, some of the romance of the archeologist / explorer in the East was displaced onto another possibility for adventure, the cause of justice and greater autonomy for the indigenous. He became close to Annamite radicals and together with them founded in 1925 the Young Annam Party (Jeune Annam), its name modeled ­after the Young China Association, which sought to establish a national identity for a new China but was not communist. He had become convinced that the most effective way of prosecuting the cause of liberation would be to set up an opposition newspaper, and while back in France he had collected some funds

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for it and also contracted with the Paris weekly Candide, to which a number of impor­tant French writers contributed, to be able to publish some of their material in this ­f uture periodical. Once back in Saigon in 1925, he realized his aims with L’Indochine, a newspaper he founded together with the leftist ­lawyer Paul Monin. ­After the authorities closed it down he put together a successor, L’Indochine enchaînée (Indochina in chains), subtitled A Daily Journal for Franco-­Annamite Rapprochement (if you w ­ ill, for a small-­scale Eurasian sliianie). Both periodicals provided ­eager Annamite and French readers in Indochina with material on the latest cultural trends in Paris, but it was juxtaposed with articles, sometimes written by the Annamites themselves, that exposed corruption and malfeasance on the part of the colonial administration. About the same time as Tretiakov was writing Roar, China!, based on newspaper reports, Malraux was publishing in this journal reports of an incident with marked similarities to the events in Wanxian. In 1925 a group of Cambodian peasants from the village of Kraang Laev ­were charged with killing a French colonial resident (regional administrator), Felix Louis Bardez, and his assistants, who had come to the village to extract a new and steep rice tax, too steep for the struggling local peasants. Their party, on encountering re­sis­tance, had arrested three men as token hostages. The wife of one of them borrowed money and paid her husband’s tax dues, but Bardez refused to release anyone ­until all the taxes had been paid, and the infuriated villa­gers seized pickets from a nearby fence and began to beat the visitors u ­ ntil they died. As with the Wanxian incident, not only w ­ ere the hostages chosen arbitrarily, but the villa­gers beat the victim to death. Also, like Hawley, the victim in the Wanxian incident, Bardez, fearing trou­ble, had beforehand summoned colonialist forces, but they arrived too late to save him.68 When they did arrive, some of the alleged perpetrators ­were arrested, some executed, and some given long prison terms, while for the next ten years the villa­gers w ­ ere required to conduct expiatory Buddhist ceremonies on the anniversary of the killings. In l­ater years, the incident was inscribed into the Cambodian nationalist movement’s honor roll of milestones on the route to liberation.69 Malraux attended the trial of the peasants in Phnom Penh in December 1925, and when it was over he parodied the proceedings in the colonial court on the pages of L’Indochine enchaînée.70 Rather like Tretiakov, he treated this case not as a singular incident, but in more general terms as “the

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enactment of French colonialism in Indo-­China,” this though apparently the killings provided a rare example of rural Cambodians uniting in an anticolonial cause, and the only one that resulted in deaths of colonial officials.71 The trial dispelled the last shreds of any illusion Malraux might have had that colonial iniquities could be righted by the French Indochinese administration, and he proposed that a Supreme Court for Annam be set up in Paris, one that would be in­de­pen­dent of the colonial administration and of the Colonial Ministry. His proposal encountered stiff opposition in official quarters, and in December 1925 he left Saigon for Paris, vowing to fight ­t here for the Annamite cause so that such incidents would not recur.72 As with Roar, China!—­but also as with the “Hands off China!” campaign— the Bardez affair did not have only local or even national resonance. It was reported in a number of leftist newspapers in Paris, where it was suggested that the crime was part of a widespread “popu­lar movement” against the oppressive practices of the colonial government. ­These reports fed a rising anticolonialist tide among French intellectuals.73 Malraux, however, once back in France paid l­ ittle attention to the plight of the Annamites in French Indochina. Rather, he engaged a topic of greater international resonance, revolutionary China, the subject of his first novel, Les conquérants (The Conquerors, 1928). This novel, which in France propelled Malraux to prominence as a writer, also attracted a lot of attention in Germany and the Anglophone world, where it appeared in translation. Nothing remotely comparable about the dramatic events in China had so far appeared in German, despite the “Hands off China!” campaign. But the novel was not uncontroversial; in the Soviet Union it was banned, and Trotsky, now in exile, critiqued it in Nouvelle revue française, where it had been serialized in five successive issues.74 Malraux conceived his novel as anti-­exoticist. At the time ­t here was a marked reaction against the writings of Loti in French intellectual circles.75 Like Tretiakov, he decried what he called the “touristic propaganda” to be found in so many repre­sen­ta­tions of China (“pagodas, junks, geishas, opium, Buddhist ecstasy”) and wanted instead to represent revolution and modernity.76 Like many of Tretiakov’s works, the novel lays some claim to being documentary. It opens with the headline in large letters “a general strike has been called in canton,” and the rest of the text is punctuated with further capitalized headlines that inform the reader of the latest developments in the confrontation between an alliance of the communists and the

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Guomin­dang nationalists, on one side, and imperialist cap­i­tal­ists, on the other. The telegraphed bulletins in the novel ­were a se­lection of t­ hose received by the office of L’Indochine  /  L’Indochine enchaînée, allegedly the best informed on China of all the periodicals on the South East Asian peninsula.77 The consequent documentary nature of the novel is reinforced by the fact that many of the characters are ­actual historical personages, including Sun Yat-­sen, Chiang Kai-­shek, Gandhi, Mikhail Borodin, and General Galen (V. K. Bliukher), the Soviet military adviser to the Guomin­dang. The action in the novel takes place in a short span of time, from June 15 to August 18, 1925. The plot follows the tussle between the forces and economic might of the colonialists in China, on the one hand, and, on the other, variously the government of Sun Yat-­sen in Canton, the Guomin­dang, and the Chinese communists, who w ­ ere at the time allied with the Guomin­dang. Canton’s declaration of a general strike signals that the Chinese are resisting the colonial occupiers; the leftists seek to prevent cargo ships from coming to Hong Kong, hoping thereby to paralyze foreign economic activity and ruin the occupiers (above all the British). The anti-­imperialist camp is not unified, however, and the Guomin­dang equivocate. This encourages the Chinese troops that are opposed to Sun Yat-­sen’s government and they attack Canton. At the center of the novel are two counterposed Eu­ro­pean revolutionaries, Mikhail Borodin and Pierre Garine, who, though in theory are both fighting in the name of communist revolution, have an uneasy relationship b ­ ecause of their fundamentally opposed outlooks. Borodin, the Comintern’s envoy, exemplifies Stalinist Bolshevik virtue; he is highly disciplined, hardworking, effective, and open to compromise with the Guomin­dang nationalists (then Soviet Communist Party policy). The uncompromising Garine, who is in charge of the Propaganda Department, and the protagonist to whom Malraux devotes the most attention, however, is something of a paradoxical figure and a virtual antonym of the communist revolutionary as conventionally represented. He has base motives and comes across more as an antihero than a hero. He never wanted to join the Communist Party, knowing he could not tolerate the discipline and did not believe in any imminent revolution. Most controversially, revolutionary work is for him more about a quest for power than motivated by some abstract love of humanity or commitment to saving it. Yet Garine follows the form of the communist hero in one re­spect: his absolute commitment to the revolutionary cause trumps any concern for his

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own person, and he refuses to leave his post when he is seriously ill, rejecting medical advice u ­ ntil it is too late. Marxism-­Leninism is a highly teleological philosophy, but Garine privileges action over results, the pro­cess of revolution over its triumph. He is a gambler literally, but also figuratively, someone who thrives when the outcome is not predictable. The narrator recurrently emphasizes the ele­ment of contingency in revolution, that it does not proceed by a preordained plan or ­recipe. In one pointed example, when an orator sways the crowd, undermining the impact of the previous speaker, the narrator comments that this was not b ­ ecause his oratorical skill was superior or his argument strong—­a standard moment in leftist texts—­but ­because of a chance happening: when the speaker is suddenly heckled, this predisposes the crowd to him. Effectively, ­here Malraux is engaging in a polemic (­whether consciously or not) that divided communists and is to be seen most iconically in the exchanges between Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg over the need or not for a “vanguard” to control po­liti­cal action (as Lenin insisted) and the degree to which revolutions can occur by prearranged plans.78 Though in the 1930s Malraux, reacting to the rise of fascism, became a leading figure in the literary international, as we w ­ ill see in Chapter 7 he never abandoned his rejection of “­recipes” for revolutionary engagement. Like the other authors discussed in this chapter, Malraux implicitly lays claim to “facticity” for his novel. The punctuation of the text with news cables, augmented by putative documents, gives the novel an air of conveying actuality, which is reinforced by the fact that the narrator, who observes the action, is at the same time a participant. He pre­sents events in the pre­sent tense, minimizing the time gap between the events as they are unfolding and the time of the novel. But Malraux periodically undermines this claim, and even the status of ostensibly pure “fact.” The narrator is constantly pointing to a discrepancy between what is alleged in headlines, documents, and authoritative pronouncements and what ­really occurred. For example, when one of the revolutionaries, Ch’eng-­tai, dies and no one is quite certain w ­ hether he committed suicide or was executed, the revolutionaries put up posters imputing it to a savage murder by colonialist forces, a clear falsehood. Moreover, readers have to rely on a narrator for their sense of what “­really” happened. And, despite the implicit claim that Malraux is representing the ­actual Chinese revolution, The Conquerors at times seems less like a po­liti­cal novel,

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than an action or adventure novel. The revolutionary élan is conveyed by physical movement. The protagonists are constantly on the move—by car or by boat—­f rom ­house to ­house, headquarters to headquarters, or town to town, and events unroll at an accelerating pace, punctuated with ever more tele­grams, dates, and times. The book also has many of the trappings of a good detective novel, complete with trickery, spies, assassination, and even daggers and poison. The Asian revolutionary masses are never depicted, and we are never given the experience of revolution as mass action. Even the Asians among the revolutionary leaders are represented largely not in their own words but in dialogues between the Eu­ro­pean revolutionaries. To a considerable degree the protagonists’ encounters with each other, ostensibly in the cause of plotting strategy, function as motivations for philosophical speculations about life, death, po­liti­cal engagement, and the absurdity of existence. As the latter suggests, the text often seems more proto-­existentialist than Marxist, with a goodly mea­sure of Nietz­sche and Dostoevsky (especially his novel Besy [The Possessed]) thrown in. The majority of the characters speak Rus­sian and French, and it could be argued that it is primarily the Rus­ sian and French intellectual worlds that are represented. By comparing the cases of Tretiakov and Malraux and their texts, we see how the literary international evolved in a more complex manner than the binary metropole / far-­flung cultural dependencies model would allow. Unlike Tretiakov, Malraux does not see revolution as tethered to Moscow. In fact, the text deprecates “Moscow” as represented by Borodin. While Tretiakov in his writings operates with ideologically determined spatial binaries (Moscow / periphery), Malraux’s novel features multiple revolutionary centers, ethnicities, and languages—­revolutionary internationalism in practice. Marxism and Bolshevism are presented in fairly generic, vague, and superficial terms, and ­t here is no single metropole in this novel, which purveys a sense of revolution as a transnational event. His revolutionaries are linked with groups in Malaysia, Indochina, and ultimately “the ­whole of Asia.” 79 This picture accords with a widespread trend among the Annamite nationalists with whom Malraux associated to seek closer ties with other colonized ­peoples of East Asia.80 While in Indochina, Malraux had no affiliation with the Communist International or any other Moscow body organ­izing cultural internationalism,

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though he may have had some association with the Guomin­dang.81 He was a member of French and Annamite leftist circles, and, a­ fter the Bardez affair, on the pages of his journal Annamites, and Malraux himself, began to pose the question as to ­whether, given the evidently intractable oppression of the colonialist administrators, it was not time to mount a revolution—­a nd ­whether it could be successful. Marx, Lenin, and Moscow w ­ ere conspicuously absent from their speculations, though given the censorship conditions ­under which they ­were operating, one should be wary of drawing any conclusions from that.82 On February 20, 1926 (­after Malraux left, on December 30, 1925), the newspaper published a letter purporting to be from Canton urging readers to prepare the workers of Saigon for armed insurrection, claiming that General Borodin wanted combat cells formed t­ here similar to ­those in Shanghai. However, the same issue contained an item from Malraux’s coeditor, Paul Monin, calling this letter a fake. If so, why publish it? Was this a ruse to make it pos­si­ble to publish such seditious ideas?83 Malraux himself drew closer to Moscow only l­ ater, especially a­ fter the fascists came to power in Germany. An analogous case where a famous Eu­ro­pean writer is drawn to the left ­after he experiences the iniquities of colonialism firsthand, but not to the literary international ­until the 1930s, could be seen in the case of André Gide, who, from July 1926 to May 1927, undertook what he called in the title of his resulting book, written in diary form, “travels in the Congo” (Voyage au Congo, 1927). Gide was largely in French Equatorial Africa, but his account of the abuses and atrocities t­ here that the colonial and commercial administrators visited on the indigenous (including massacres, unjust imprisonment, and shortchanging for l­abor on rubber production) and of his own efforts to get justice for them bears comparison with Malraux’s experiences and role in Indochina.84 In seeking to place Malraux and Gide of the mid-1920s within the patterns we have been following in this book, one would prob­ably have to label them cosmopolitan leftists. In this re­spect, they have to be contrasted with Tretiakov and Qu Qiubai, both of whom, with their cult of Moscow as a revolutionary and cultural center, should more accurately be categorized as hegemonic cosmopolitans. But another figure who might likewise be classified as a cosmopolitan leftist is the other Soviet writer envoy of the mid-1920s sent to the Far East, Boris Pilniak.

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Boris Pilniak In 1926 Boris Pilniak was sent by VOKS to Japan, where he stayed from mid-­ March u ­ ntil late May, traveling extensively in a trip that covered eleven thousand kilo­meters in all. While ­there, he was also, at the behest of VOKS, trying to strengthen the faltering Japanese-­Russian Literary-­A rt Society (IaRLKhO), which had been founded in March 1925, soon a­ fter diplomatic relations ­were reestablished.85 ­After Japan, he spent several months in China, allegedly setting up a similar (China-­Soviet) cultural society in Shanghai, and also hanging out with the Shanghai film world ­there and waiting in vain for a ship to take him home. When none materialized, he returned to Moscow via an unplanned land route through Mongolia. The VOKS choice of Pilniak as a Soviet cultural envoy might seem surprising. He was far from a cookie-­cutter Bolshevik, more a maverick figure. His po­liti­cal rec­ord was already problematical; before the trip he had published Povest’ nepogashennoi luny (The Tale of the Unextinguished Moon, 1926), which implies that Mikhail Frunze, a heroic commander from the Civil War, had been coerced into undergoing an operation, during the course of which he was effectively murdered. But Pilniak was one of the most popu­lar writers in the Soviet Union and also on the governing board of the All-­Russian Union of Writers, then the largest in­de­pen­dent writers’ association—­and he was e­ ager to visit East Asia—­a ll f­ actors that prob­ably contributed to his trip being authorized. While in the Far East, Pilniak, like Qu, Tretiakov, and Malraux, wrote a lot of journalistic pieces on the countries he visited, especially in Japan, where he published his impressions of the country in the press of Tokyo and Osaka. Some of ­t hese articles came out subsequently in assorted Soviet papers and journals such as Izvestiia and Krasnaia nov’. A few appeared in a mass-­ circulation booklet, Rasskazy s Vostoka (Stories from the East, 1927), and then a larger se­lection was put together as Korni iaponskogo solntsa (Roots of the Japa­nese sun, 1927; also published that year in Japa­nese); ­after a l­ ater trip to Japan of 1932, he published Kamni i korni (Stones and roots, 1933).86 Pilniak also produced two novellas based on his experiences: Kitaiskaia povest’ (A Chinese tale, 1926), which actually follows closely the text of a diary he kept, and so is largely nonfictional, and Bol’shoe serdtse (A mighty heart, 1927), on Mongolia.87

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The case of Pilniak provides an example of an author with links to Soviet cultural institutions and the literary international, but whose work could not be contained by any “silo.” This can be sensed in a literary credo he published in Japan, “Con­temporary Soviet Lit­er­a­ture and Its Distinctive Features,” which appeared in the June issue of its socialist journal Kaidzo. In this ­article, Pilniak contends that the task of lit­er­a­ture is to convey not po­liti­cal messages but feelings, and he demarcates himself from proletarian or communist writers, declaring himself to be apo­liti­cal. He also claims that his writings are more documentary than anything e­ lse and deal with “real life,” so that they in a sense rival the accounts of Qu, Tretiakov, and Malraux, who made similar claims.88 Pilniak in this article identifies himself as a “fellow traveler,” or poputchik, using a category most classically defined in Leon Trotsky’s book Lit­er­a­ture and Revolution (Literatura i revoliutsiia, 1923), which was promoted in the Far East at the time by VOKS.89 In this text Trotsky defines “poputchiki” as ­those sympathetic to the Revolution but not engaged in its cause or affiliated with the Party. This aspect of Pilniak’s article was influential among leftist ­ orea, especially the Koreans who intellectuals of the mid-1920s in Japan and K saw in the concept the possibility of taking an in­de­pen­dent stance that was not confrontational vis-­à-­v is their country’s Japa­nese occupiers.90 The concept of the poputchik suggests a writer not fettered by Soviet ideological doctrine. In Pilniak’s case, his pronouncements ­were highly contradictory and controversial. Though an avowed internationalist, he was at the same time also distinctly Russo-­centric. In the Kaidzo article he identifies himself and the like-­minded in the Soviet literary community with the ­“ “muzhikovstvuiushchie.”91 This term, which is difficult to translate, means roughly “the peasantizers,” and in using it, Pilniak is identifying his position with autochthonous peasant rebellion (such as the one led by Stenka Razin that was a favorite of Khlebnikov; see Chapter 2), which is implicitly counterposed to the Bolshevik princi­ple for revolution that called for a highly or­ga­nized and disciplined uprising by a proletariat guided by the “vanguard.” Pilniak’s predilection for peasant revolt is most evident in A Mighty Heart, his novella about a revolutionary uprising in Mongolia and the only “fantastic” text of all the major works that came out of his East Asian trip. In the novella a small party of imperialist cap­i­tal­ists travel by train to Mongolia from

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their factories in China, intent on setting up ventures in its vast expanses. Their train, however, is ambushed by a party of local Mongols, and they are annihilated in an event that does double duty as an anti-­imperialist revenge and a Luddite revolt against the threat of modernization (a revolt of the muzhikovstvuiushchie). In the novella’s somewhat unmotivated culmination, a horde of militant Mongols gallop across the steppe in a revolutionary uprising. Pilniak represents this as a p ­ eoples’ uprising to regain the glory days of Tamerlane that brought “days of freedom and greatness for Mongolia.” The entire steppe is on h ­ orse­back,” he exults, with their leader “a h ­ orse­man who has fused with his h ­ orse” so that h ­ orse and rider are one. His bravery and determination are the meaning of the novella’s title.92 The galloping of the ­horse­men conveys an almost Dionysian revolutionary frenzy, but it is not framed or motivated by any Marxist-­Leninist or internationalist narrative. No Bolsheviks or proletarian activists lead or instigate the charge of the outraged masses, as they do in Tretiakov’s Roar, China!, and we do not know where the ­horse­men are headed. The wild h ­ orse­men of Asia have many pre­ce­dents from the Rus­sian literary tradition. Prominent among them are the urgent warnings of Vladimir Solovyov from the turn of the nineteenth ­century of the danger of “Pan-­ Mongolism,” a version of the yellow peril. He predicted an apocalyptic advance of militant Buddhists from East Asia who would pro­gress westward, overcoming each country in turn. The only salvation for the West could come if they banded together to form a Christian counterarmy.93 The values attached to the two poles that structure this standard binary—­menacing Asian ­horse­men  /  savior Eu­ro­pe­a ns (or Russians)—­were subsequently reversed in Rus­sian lit­er­a­ture. Starting around 1915, several Rus­sian intellectual groups of varying aesthetic orientations (avant-­gardists and tradition­ orse­men of the steppe. alists) developed a cult of the Scythians, the wild h Pilniak’s “muzhikovstvuiushchie” represent a version of this, though as they appear in his most famous novel, The Naked Year (Golyi god, 1922), his ­horse­men are not Scythians specifically but “sectarians,” who are depicted as wild and f­ ree, not tied down by materialist aspirations or social conventions.94 In Rus­sian the term muzhik does not only mean “peasant.” It also means “a real man,” someone who, though rough-­hewn, is virile, by contrast with the effete bourgeois or the educated intellectual. The revolutionary Far East

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as depicted in the works of Tretiakov and Malraux—­but also in A Mighty Heart—­is a world largely without ­women (in Malraux, other than the occasional reference to prostitutes or wives who are deceased, and hence con­ve­ niently offstage). But in a Loti novel, which I am taking as paradigmatic of colonialist exoticism, t­ here is often a pointed contrast between a passive, languid indigenous female love object and her Eu­ro­pean lover, a member of the military. Their coupling could be seen as allegorical repre­sen­ta­tions of po­ liti­cal realities: geopo­liti­cal miscegenation is played out in terms of biological miscegenation (sexual liaison). The feminine passivity of the non-­ European w ­ oman who is the love object of a Loti-­like male protagonist could be seen as standing for the subjugated position of colonial possessions. Geopolitics are displaced onto gender politics. The “roar” of the Baku manifesto could be seen as a reassertion of masculinity from an East overly feminized in the Eu­ro­pean imagination. Bolshevik criticism of Loti zeroed in on the erotic in his works as a camouflage for the economic and po­liti­cal realities of the colonies, as we saw in the Ogonëk article cited ­earlier. But by the 1920s, Loti’s ideologically freighted “colonialist” romances w ­ ere already somewhat shopworn and passé in Eu­ rope and ­were targets for savage critiques well before the Bolsheviks entered the ring. Symptomatically, the novel René Leys (written in 1913–1914, but first published posthumously in 1922) by Victor Segalen, an erstwhile Lotian exoticist and naval officer to boot, has at its heart a parody of Loti’s key moment in The Last Days of Peking. In a series of fantastic accounts Segalen’s eponymous protagonist claims to have access to the Forbidden City and to carry­ing on an affair with the dowager empress, implicitly a parody of the high point in Last Days where the narrator penetrates her private chambers. Pilniak in his East Asian texts also presented himself as a critic of Loti. In Kitaiskaia povest’, as if echoing Tretiakov, he repeatedly lays claim to conveying the real China, as opposed to the exoticized version to be found in Western accounts that feature “dragons, pagodas, hieroglyphs.”95 Yet, though he disassociates himself from Loti, he also draws on him unacknowledged; in many passages he seems to echo the tropes of Loti’s Last Days of Peking. I emphasize “seems” ­because one cannot assume that Pilniak read this text by Loti, one of the few by him that ­were not published in Rus­sian translation in book form, though sections from it appeared in Rus­sian periodicals in 1901, 1902, and 1904.96

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The Loti-­like passages in Pilniak’s account of China do not dominate the narrative, however. Using his characteristic collage method of composition, Pilniak combines in the text material from disparate sources in an ideological, thematic, and compositional mélange. Now he draws on Eu­ro­pe­ans’ accounts of China, including unacknowledged Loti, now he makes dramatic statements that could have been taken from Bolshevik or Comintern discourse, but he also veers off periodically to recycle passages he used to represent quin­tes­sen­tial Rus­sia in e­ arlier texts such as his novels The Naked Year and The Third Capital (Tret’ia stolitsa, 1923) and interpolates them somewhat incongruously to convey China, throwing in vaguely internationalist sentiments for good mea­sure. For example, in one passage, a­ fter outlining a by-­ then somewhat clichéd narrative about Rus­sia’s historic role as a victim of successive incursions from East and West that have robbed the country of its traditional culture, he goes on to say that the resulting hybridization “has given Rus­sia the right to be the first to go for constructing a supranational, world culture.”97 In the text the ­actual Chinese are rendered as an inchoate mass, crowds in the streets and on the sampans. ­There are no “pagodas” or other accoutrements of the exotic in this novella, it is true, but nor are t­ here any real Chinese. His parochialism (noted by Vel’tman in a review) also emerges in his periodic expressions of disgust at the Chinese cuisine and smells.98 Pilniak’s book about Japan, Roots of the Japa­nese Sun, however, pre­sents an entirely dif­fer­ent account of another Asian ­people, the Japa­nese, one more in keeping with the shifting image of Japan in Eu­ro­pean lit­er­a­ture. In the wake of Japan’s victory over the Rus­sians in the Russo-­Japanese War of 1904– 1905, its status as what we would call a “Third World,” Asiatic country became problematical. At the time, well before Dipesh Chakrabarty pointed to this in his seminal book of 2000, Provincializing Eu­rope: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Eu­ro­pean theorists had begun to question the myth of Eu­ro­pean superiority and invincibility that had been nurtured by colonialists and missionaries (Gandhi had been making this point as early as 1909). Leonard Woolf in his book Imperialism and Civilization (1928) wrote: “The Russian-­Japanese War was a turning-­point in the history of imperialism. Since 1905 it has become more and more evident that the conquest of the world by Eu­rope is now being followed by a world revolt against Eu­rope. . . . ​ By refusing to obey the demands of a ­Great Power—­Russia—in 1904, Japan struck a blow at this conception of world politics and against the ­whole im-

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perialist system.”99 This analy­sis was written at a time when Spengler was proclaiming “the decline of the West” and Baron von Ungern, an eccentric former officer in the imperial army, who for a time in 1921 conquered Mongolia and lived ­t here Asian-­style, saw the only hope for the world in the “light . . . ​coming from the East.”100 The Japa­nese victory in the Russo-­Japanese War also inspired Asians, like Gandhi, especially in Japan, which saw a rise in nationalism and imperialist ambitions, reflected, for example, in a popu­lar claim of the 1920s that Genghis Khan was actually Japa­nese and had set out from Japan to conquer so much of the Asian landmass. Such ambitions complicated any call for East Asian solidarity, such as had been made at the Congress of the Toilers of the Far East, where Japan and the other East Asian proletariats ­were urged to form an alliance. In the immediate aftermath of the Russo-­Japanese War, many leftists from other Asian countries became alienated from Japan when this rising power turned its back on fellow Asians in ­favor of joining the Euro-­ American club of imperialists.101 ­After the Rus­sian defeat in 1905, Eu­ro­pean writers revisited the romance of miscegenation in novels about Japan. An entire spate of novels involving Eu­ro­pe­ans and Japa­nese came out that effectively represent a mutation to the basic plot of the colonialist narrative as exemplified in Loti. Rather than the sultry non-­European who does not speak her Eu­ro­pean lover’s language, we find in this fiction a European-­educated Japa­nese w ­ oman who dresses like a Eu­ro­pean and seeks to liberate herself from Asian backwardness and the constricting role it assigns to ­women. She marries a Eu­ro­pean or highly Eu­ro­pe­ anized Japa­nese. Though, then, she is “liberated,” she is effectively in another subject position of subordination, ­here to Eu­ro­pean culture. Two such novels that Pilniak cites in Roots of the Japa­nese Sun had come out in Rus­sian translation around the time of his stay in Japan. The first is Kimono by John Paris, written between 1913 and 1919, when Paris worked in the British consular ser­vice in Japan; it was published in New York in 1922 and in Rus­sian translation in 1925, the year before Pilniak went to Japan.102 The second is a novel by Claude Farrère, The ­Battle (Bataille, 1909), which appeared in En­glish translation in 1912, and as Bitva in Rus­sian translation in both 1926 and 1927; the “­battle” of its title is a culminating ­battle of the Russo-­Japanese War in which several of Farrère’s protagonists take part or are witnesses.103

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Pilniak’s Roots of the Japa­nese Sun is a travelogue, however, not a novel, and is not structured by a romance of miscegenation. In it he draws away from the colonialist paradigm of a “sleepy Asia” that needs awakening. But his text does share the two main obsessions of ­t hese fictional romances that at the time encapsulated exotic Japan in the imagination of Eu­ro­pe­ans: hara-­k iri and Yoshiwara (the red-­light district of Tokyo), in other words the more dramatic and titillating aspects of death and love in Japa­nese culture. In his take on ­these subjects, Pilniak was particularly influenced by the Irish writer Lafcadio Hearn, who spent many years in Japan and produced several collections of Japa­nese folk stories, which he translated or reworked and which enjoyed considerable popularity in Rus­sian translation. Hearn was a devotee of Loti and declared, “No writer ever had such an effect on me.” Allegedly, he was the first to translate him into En­glish, and he made over twenty translations from Loti between 1880 and 1887, even before he went to Japan, including sections of Japoneries d’automne (1889).104 The book by Hearn that most influenced Pilniak, however, was not his translations of folk stories but his nonfictional Japan, an Attempt at Interpretation, which appeared in 1904, before the Russo-­Japanese War. Pilniak in his account of Japan dwells, like Hearn, on ancestor worship, which Pilniak sees as having been taken to such an extreme that he calls it a “land of corpses.”105 But he also draws on Hearn’s emphasis on the code of honor that underpins so much of Japa­nese history and everyday life. Hearn foregrounds its extreme expression in the practice of ritual suicide, hara-­k iri, which was expected of defeated military officers and often of their retainers.106 This, to a Eu­ro­pean, sensationalist method of suicide became a highlight of many Eu­ro­pean texts from early in the twentieth c­ entury, seen, for example, in Fritz Lang’s film Harakiri (1919), an adaptation of Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly (1904), which had itself been inspired by Loti’s novel about Japan, Madame Chrysanthemum. Pilniak discusses hara-­k iri in the context of the Russo-­Japanese War, focusing on the case of Marshal Nogi, a military hero, whose forces captured Port Arthur from the Rus­sians. Afterward, Nogi petitioned the emperor for permission to commit hara-­kiri, believing that honor required he do so ­because he had lost too many of his soldiers in the effort. The emperor Meiji refused permission, but ­after he died, on the day of his funeral, Nogi and his wife performed the ritual (Pilniak says on the eve of the funeral). This self-­sacrificing deed and Nogi’s example of feudal loyalty

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made him a national hero in Japan, and he was elevated to the divine. His action also revived the Japa­nese tradition of ritual suicide. Pilniak returns to this example several times in his text, emphasizing that before their deaths the marshal and his wife wrote tankas, giving an aesthetic dimension to this grizzly act.107 Hara-­kiri, embedded in a strict code of honor, is in Hearn just one example of the extreme discipline, self-­sacrifice, and asceticism that characterize the Japa­nese moral code. ­These values are also celebrated in Farrère’s ­Battle, where a naval commander in the Russo-­Japanese War does not flinch as he lies mortally wounded on his ship’s deck while his worthy antagonist and ideological opponent commits hara-­ k iri rather than witness the Eu­ ro­ pe­ anization he expects to occur ­after the Japa­nese victory, which had been aided by Eu­ro­pean military support.108 In Roots of the Japa­nese Sun, Pilniak takes up the theme of rigid asceticism, too, but in his elaboration it becomes close to his idealization in his e­ arlier novel The Naked Year of the members of a sect who scorn material possessions and ­ride over the steppes, wild and ­free. Pilniak emphasizes this quality in the Japa­nese by putting it in caps: “the japa­nese ­people have liberated themselves from ­things, liberated themselves from de­pen­dency on t ­ hings.”109 In other words, Pilniak is essentially projecting his ideals from ­earlier sources and attributing them to the Japa­nese. In this text, Japa­nese asceticism is also reflected in his claim that they are a singularly unemotional p ­ eople who, a point also made by Hearn, repress their passions.110 This downplaying of passion Pilniak sees even in ­Yoshiwara, that infamous den of iniquity where, in Paris’s and Farrère’s romances of miscegenation, even the worthiest of husbands succumb to the seductive drumbeats, the frenzied striptease, or opium; in Fritz Lang’s contemporaneous film Metropolis (1927), an intertitle labels a cabaret scene of wild and depraved orgy “Yoshiwara.”111 By contrast, and one assumes deliberate contrast, Pilniak represents Yoshiwara as a very ordinary Tokyo suburb that families happily frequent and where the sex drive is catered to in a most civilized and or­ga­nized way. In Pilniak’s account of Japan, passion and frenzy are not absent but have been displaced onto elemental forces such as violent storms, earthquakes, and volcanoes that buffet an inexplicably impassive populace. ­These elemental forces make Japan a “a terrifying country” (strashnaia zemlia), as he emphasizes with caps. L ­ ater in the same sentence, he elaborates: “This was a

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terrifying [strashnaia], menacing [or vengeful, zlobnaia], yellow country, yellow like the face of a dried up old Japa­nese.”112 Japan’s “terrifying” and “menacing” quality is in Pilniak’s text attributed to nature, and with some basis given the recent and spectacular Tokyo earthquake of 1923, which Pilniak covers and during which in his account the Japa­nese reacted with unbelievable passivity. But ­t hese adjectives could be seen as encapsulating the image of an aggressive Japan that became common in Rus­sian sources a­ fter Rus­sia’s defeat in 1905. The sense of a “menacing” Japan is reinforced by the incongruous addition to the initial two adjectives of “yellow,” a trifling detail (printed in lowercase, not uppercase like the o ­ thers), but one that calls to mind the rhe­toric of the yellow peril. Placed as it is together with “menacing,” it calls to mind Solovyov’s predictions of the aggressive Japa­nese Buddhists. The notion that Japan is “menacing” is also to be found in Loti’s Japoneries d’automne, which appeared in Rus­sian translation in 1904, where a verbal motif is “menaҫant,” but ­t here it is largely used for the Japa­nese statuary.113 Though Pilniak in his book on Japan rejects the Loti accounts, explic­itly, as he does for China in A Chinese Tale, he also draws on some of Loti’s works on Japan, especially Japoneries d’automne.114 That Loti is a pos­si­ble source of the epithet “menacing” seems particularly plausible in that a few sentences down Pilniak cites “a French writer”—­“I ­don’t remember who,” he says, perhaps disingenuously, ­because it is in fact the very Loti whose repre­sen­ta­tion of Japan he is meant to be countering with this text.115 Pilniak, then, is not, like Loti, projecting a languid, feminized East. His Japa­nese have traits conventionally seen as masculine; they are highly disciplined and focused. He gives some space to covering the modernization of Japan and its recent impressive feats of engineering, its ­giant new factories (thanks to the West), and even to the exploitation of the workers (in a brief, incongruous nod to the ideological position he is meant to be representing).116 Pilniak draws that familiar distinction of Rus­sian thought between the West’s superiority in “material culture” and the “snail’s pace” it has shown in developing “spiritual culture.”117 But he devotes more attention to variations on that tired “orientalist” theme of the inscrutability of the East. “­Great, unknowable, mysterious” is virtually a mantra of this book, and also of the letters Pilniak wrote from Japan; it is also a common sentiment of exoticist writing, and of Loti’s Japoneries d’automne in par­tic­u­lar.118

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One possibility Pilniak proposes for greater mutual intelligibility is the Japa­nese system of writing.119 As we saw in Chapter 1, many among the Euro-­ Russian creative intelligent­sia at this time (such as Pound, Fenollosa, and Khlebnikov) fastened on the Japanese-­cum-or Chinese writing system, which is not alphabetic and not tied to the phonetics of any language, as a pos­si­ble vehicle of transnational communication.120 And a­ fter a Japa­nese Kabuki theater visited Moscow in 1928, Eisenstein was moved to explicate his system of montage in film in terms of the Japa­nese writing system (he returned to promoting the kanji in 1935; this time his proselytizing was occasioned by the visit of Mei Langfan, the famous interpreter of female roles in the Peking opera).121 The Kabuki theater’s visit had been preceded by a special eve­ning of April 5, 1926, devoted to Japa­nese culture (presumably part of a series that included the eve­ning of Persian lit­er­a­ture, alluded to in Chapter 3), at which the Meyerhold Theater performed the classic Kabuki play Kagekiyo Victorious (Shusse Kagekiyo, 1685), by the master of Kabuki and Bunraku Chikamatsu Monzaemon (Pilniak was still in Japan at the time but cabled enthusiastic greetings to the event).122 A critical aspect of the Chinese and Japa­nese writing system’s appeal to cosmopolitan modernists was that it offered the possibility of an international literary culture accessible to all. But such an exchange would be pos­si­ble only in an abstract, written form; the languages in oral form would remain mutually incomprehensible. Among the modernists, the kanji’s intrinsic aesthetic value was also prized, and Pilniak foregrounded its aesthetic qualities, too: “Even in everyday life [in Japan] ­people who can write beautifully are prized”; “writing and art merge.”123 For Pilniak the aesthetic, the literary craft was paramount, not po­liti­cal or ideological considerations. “The main aim of my trip is not to inform Rus­ sians on Japan and Japa­nese on Rus­sians,” he declared, that is, not to impart “knowledge.” “[It is] writing [pisatel’stvo, the profession or act of writing], giving form to ­those emotions and images that came to me.”124 Pilniak largely saw himself in terms of an international fraternity of writers. One is reminded of his personal mission on his trip to London during the spring of 1923 to have Soviet writers incorporated in the PEN Club (which found­ered b ­ ecause of émigré objections). In the Kaidzo article and in Roots of the Japa­nese Sun, Pilniak professes his identity as an internationalist, but largely promotes an

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internationalism of an aesthetic rather than a po­liti­cal order, effectively a transnational u ­ nion of writers. In this vein he includes at the beginning of Roots of the Japa­nese Sun—­v irtually framing it—­a description of his visit to a Japa­nese writer whose ­father was killed in the Russo-­Japanese War. The writer had vowed to avenge his ­father’s death by killing the first Rus­sian he set his eyes on, but the call of the brotherhood of the pen trumped even the call of filial loyalty and he de­cided not to kill Pilniak.125 As in his account of China, Pilniak’s observations on Japan are hyperbolic and contradictory. At other points in the novel he fastens on precisely “knowledge” as the cement of a new internationalism (Zinoviev would have approved). He periodically pre­sents a decidedly utopian internationalist vision of a world without borders, ostensibly enabled by “knowledge that breaks down the fences and ‘­great walls’ of national culture.” Knowledge ­w ill even overcome racial differences, what he calls “the anthropology of the Eu­ro­pean, negro or Japa­nese.”126 But he admits that this vision is far from attainable as yet: “Humanity still has so much it must do so that a person in Moscow could understand a person in Tokyo and for the two of them to be able to understand someone from the Congo River.”127 In Pilniak’s account, somewhat improbably, “menacing” Japan comes closest to making pos­si­ble the Marxist-­Leninist scenario of international rapprochement and even “merging.” “Only in Japan,” he reports, “did I sense and understand fi­nally the ­great route, the new migration of ­peoples, truths and beliefs, . . . ​when the entire globe set out to merge [slivat’sia] in a commonality of knowledge and a commonality of cultures.”128 Though he emphasizes throughout the book how tradition-­bound the Japa­nese are, he maintains that they are most prepared for the ­great “merging [sliianie]” of cultures to which the world is impending. ­Here he frames his claim as a paradox: “Of all the countries I visited Japan most preserved its national features and of all the countries Japan was most prepared to go outside the fences [zabory] of its national culture onto the ­great highway of a culture that is not national, but of all humankind.”129 Essentially, Pilniak is revisiting h ­ ere Lenin’s model in “The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-­Determination” from 1916 (discussed in the Introduction), of a two-­stage progression for the incorporation of the colonial oppressed into a common sociopo­liti­cal and cultural space. In the

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first stage, oppressed p ­ eoples would wrest in­de­pen­dence and enjoy self-­ determination for their ethnic group or nation, so that the obosoblennost’—­t he distinctive features of their cultures—­would be restored. Lenin, however, considered so-­called cultural national autonomy “reactionary,” and so in the second phase a higher level would be reached when ­there would be a “sliianie,” a merging into the one ­whole, of the disparate p ­ eoples and nations.130 Pilniak’s flights of internationalist fantasy seem out of place amid his declarations of the fundamental and mutual unknowability of the Japa­nese and the Rus­sians or Eu­ro­pe­ans. In the closing pages of this text, Pilniak oscillates between extravagant declarations of internationalism and Russo-­ centrism, or alternatively seeing Japan in the exoticist tradition as unknowable, mysterious, and foreign, which would render “sliianie”—­cultural and ideological miscegenation—­impossible. This suggests the possibility that his expressions of internationalist fervor are a send-up, rather as in A Chinese Tale Pilniak produced a hagiographic biography of a Chinese revolutionary that parodies the clichés.131 Pilniak both intones and parodies Lenin’s scenario in his article on self-­determination of 1916 and also, by implication, the idea blazoned forth at the Congress of the Working P ­ eoples of the Far East of 1921 that, despite the linguistic and cultural differences, the barriers between the ­peoples of East Asia and the Eu­ro­pe­ans would break down w ­ ere they only given better information about each other, and about the Soviet Union. Even though much of Roots of the Japa­nese Sun is dedicated to providing information about the Japa­nese and their way of life, as if responding to the mandate of the congress, Pilniak does not hold back in asserting that their culture is essentially alien to a Eu­ro­pean. And so as, for instance, he watches a Japa­nese ­woman praying in a cemetery, he senses the “nesliiannost’ ”—­the “non-­confluence” or impossibility of merging—of the “souls of East and West.”132 Variants on “nesliiannost’ ”—­“ nesliianie,” “ nesliiat’sia”—­recur throughout the text. This obsession with the possibility or impossibility of “sliianie,” of some merging between the Japa­nese and the Rus­sians or Eu­ro­ pe­ans, could be seen as a preoccupation with “miscegenation” in a less biological and more ideological and cultural sense. With his improbable claims about Japa­nese internationalism, Pilniak might seem to be projecting his own paradoxical position as both a nationalist and an internationalist. In that, he was declaredly not inspired by Bolshevism, more a cosmopolitan leftist. He

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saw himself both as a Rus­sian embedded in that country’s intellectual trends and as a member of an international fraternity of writers and as part of world lit­er­a­ture, slotted into its networks. His literary modes w ­ ere cosmopolitan and eclectic; in this re­spect, he was less parochial than Tretiakov. He drew on prerevolutionary and Western sources rather than Bolshevik, but at the same time—­and self-­declaredly—­regarded himself as Soviet. He had no interest in emigrating, a point he made repeatedly both in his letters and in his l­ater petitions to Soviet authorities to lift their bans on his publications.133 No systematic thinker, he was, in other words, paradoxically both parochial (as Vel’tman saw him) and internationalist. He could not be contained by any intellectual silo but participated in a broader world not defined by the contours of Soviet communist or “proletarian” literary conventions. Tretiakov, by contrast, though no “proletarian” writer, was a hegemonic internationalist. His texts are explic­itly informed by the notion that both the Western proletariat and t­ hose Asians who are oppressed by colonialism should look to Moscow. This is most evident in another of his plays from this period (set in Germany), Do You Hear, Moscow? (Slyshish’, Moskva, 1923). Gide and Malraux, however, ­were in their treatments of the non-­European oppressed as yet largely operating in­de­pen­dently of any Moscow-­oriented networks or aesthetic models. In the examples discussed in this chapter we see the complexity of establishing a leftist cultural commons, given the simultaneity of multiple, disparate, yet partially overlapping, literary and ideological orientations. A common, transnational culture linking East and West was a utopian notion in ­these initial postrevolutionary years when the Moscow-­oriented left in Eurasia had ­little “common language,” not even in the extended sense of tropes, discourse, and narratives.134 While Qu Qiubai was in the thrall of “Moscow,” Malraux was in effect declaring his in­de­pen­dence. Tretiakov and Pilniak, responding to their mandate as Soviet envoys, connected with leftist cultural networks in Asia, and in their writings attempted to further the quest for a new narrative about the “East.” But ­there ­were limits to their ability to “merge” with the writers and texts of oppressed Asia. Pilniak, for example, though he frequently invokes Eu­ro­pean literary texts in his writings about Japan, does not cite any Asian texts; his sense of “world lit­er­a­ture” was decidedly Eurocentric.

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By the end of the 1920s, however, the international literary terrain was shifting. Though Asian writers never achieved parity with Rus­sians and Eu­ ro­pe­a ns, this imbalance was partly redressed in the years following the Shanghai debacle of 1927, especially a­ fter the conference of internationalist writers in Kharkov of 1930, a pivotal moment a­ fter which the movement for literary internationalism expanded dramatically, as we ­w ill see in Chapter 6.

6 From Shanghai to Berlin and Beyond

O

n or around” November 6, 1930, the literary international changed. The immediate occasion that brought the changes was an international writers’ conference that took place on November 6–15 in Kharkov, at the time the capital of Ukraine, where new policies and institutions w ­ ere established. But a series of other events in the ensuing years also had their impact on the literary international. By 1934– 1935 it had expanded exponentially and looked very dif­fer­ent than it had in the 1920s. I am taking the Kharkov conference as a dividing point in the history of the literary international, though the divide was far from absolute. Around this time, the romantic period of anticolonialist internationalism came largely to an end, the time when prerevolutionary exoticist images still inflected Soviet accounts of Asia. Also, leftist lit­er­a­ture throughout the world was now becoming more internationalist and more oriented around Moscow. ­There ­were many f­actors contributing to t­ hese developments, but they would include the Kharkov conference itself, which enabled committed writers from all over the world to meet. At Kharkov, the International Bureau of Revolutionary Writers (IBRL, 1925–1930) was reor­ga­nized into the International Union of Revolutionary Writers (IURW), henceforth to be referred to by its Rus­sian acronym MORP (Mezhdunarodnoe ob”edinenie revoliutsionnykh pisatelei). Parallel bodies formed in the theater (MORT) and art (MBRKh) as well, but h ­ ere we w ­ ill be concerned primarily with lit­er­a­ture.1 ­A fter the  founding of MORP the literary international gained orga­nizational

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momentum and became more truly international as national leftist literary bodies formed in a number of countries and opted to become affiliated, one of many examples where the “national” was not counterposed to the “international.” Paradoxically, an additional contributing ­factor to the convergence of leftist writers was a defeat, the Shanghai debacle of 1927, when communist forces w ­ ere routed by the Nationalists u ­ nder Chiang Kai-­shek. In the aftermath, Chinese communists ­were arrested or executed and hundreds of Rus­ sian advisers in the country w ­ ere forced to flee. The rout of communist forces in China had delivered something of a coup de grace to Soviet internationalist po­liti­cal ambitions ­because ­every attempt at fomenting revolution outside the country had now failed (with the pos­si­ble exception of Mongolia and Tuva). The Comintern became less focused on direct preparation for revolution abroad. Delegates to the Kharkov conference learned that it had abandoned the cause of revolution in Germany, its main aim in the 1920s.2 For the time being, “soft power” offered more promise for the revolutionary cause. The Comintern did not hold an international congress between 1928 and 1935, and the international literary movement began to fill the vacuum. Also, around 1929 the League against Imperialism ran out of steam, in part ­because the new policy of “class against class”; that is, rigid sectarianism and emphasis on the proletarian, alienated or disenfranchised the broader membership.3 Much of the internationalist and anticolonialist energy went into lit­er­a­ture, and into culture more generally, a development that paralleled the increasing importance of lit­er­a­ture within Soviet society.4 Before, the vari­ous bodies that attempted to form an international literary fraternity had suffered from a paucity of funding, but starting around 1930 the Comintern invested much more in lit­er­a­ture.5 In consequence, though VOKS continued to broker international cultural exchanges, its work in lit­er­a­ture was somewhat eclipsed by Comintern cultural bodies that since 1925 had been working on the international literary effort in tandem with the All-­Union Association of Proletarian Writers (VAPP), and especially its constituent body, RAPP (the Rus­sian Association). But it was not only the Comintern, together with VAPP / RAPP, that was pushing for the centralization of international leftist lit­er­a­ture and culture. At this time, in the shadow of the 1929 stock exchange crash and the ensuing depression, and in the face of the specter of rising fas-

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cism, much of the noncommitted literary world outside the Soviet Union was itself drawing closer to Moscow. Technically, the Kharkov conference was the second Comintern-­sponsored international writers’ conference ­because it followed an ­earlier Moscow meeting of writers in November 1927, but it was much bigger in size and in the geo­graph­i­cal range of the participants. And it was much more consequential. The first conference had largely been attended by Eu­ro­pean writers and was distinctly Russo-­centric, but by Kharkov the par­ameters of the movement had expanded; 150 delegates from twenty-­t hree countries attended.6 This world-­encompassing breadth was deceptive, however; most of the non-­ Soviet delegates ­were from Central Eu­rope, and t­ here was a distinct Euro-­ or rather transatlantic-­centrism in the speeches.7 The fact that the conference was located not in Moscow but in Kharkov (in Ukraine) was symptomatic of the westward incline of the Comintern literary effort. Soviet cultural authorities ­were hoping that the world would “listen to Moscow” (view its films, read its texts) and in this Kharkov moment stepped up the translation and distribution of Soviet and internationalist texts. One of MORP’s principal activities became the publication of literary periodicals. Before, in a journal founded in the wake of the first international writers’ conference, Vestnik inostrannoi literatury (Herald of foreign lit­er­at­ure), the ­Comintern literary body MBRL (International Bureau of Revolutionary Lit­ er­a­ture) had offered Soviet readers foreign lit­er­a­ture in translation, framed by politicized commentary. But a­ fter Kharkov it extended its geo­graph­i­cal reach beyond the Soviet Union and established a cluster of new semiparallel journals in some of the major international languages (Rus­sian, French, German, En­glish, and ­later Spanish and Chinese), each titled in their language’s version of International Lit­er­a­ture (called before 1933 Lit­er­a­ture of World Revolution).8 Collectively, then, ­these journals potentially provided models for the evolution of a leftist “world lit­er­a­ture,” mitigating to some extent the language prob­lem that plagued that cause. They gave members a sense of what Benedict Anderson has called an “­imagined community,” or at least potentially so.9 MORP also enlarged its reach by establishing affiliations with several foreign journals, such as the German Linkskurve (where leading leftist literary theoreticians published) or the French Commune, co-­edited by Louis Aragon, in the 1920s a leader of the Surrealists but now a member of MORP’s parent body in Moscow; o ­ thers w ­ ere semi-­aligned, such as Amer­i­ca’s

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New Masses. Additionally, outlets w ­ ere set up in Moscow and in major cities of the transatlantic world for printing Soviet literary texts in translation, and one for distributing films.10 Such developments facilitated the increasing coherence not just of the literary international but also of the leftist literary ecumene. Starting from circa the year of Kharkov, something closer to a “Litintern” began to emerge. The Kharkov conference was clearly intended to strengthen the literary international and to bind a broader geo­graph­i­cal range of leftist writers more closely to Moscow, but also to the new Soviet aesthetic norms for a “proletarian culture.” In the Soviet Union, the increasing demands in the late 1920s that all culture be “proletarian” rendered the situation of “fellow traveler” writers like Pilniak more precarious. Th ­ ose who presided over the conference sought to “proletarianize” international lit­er­a­ture as well. Bella Illesh, from the Hungarian communist diaspora now living in Soviet exile and at the congress the nominal president, reported in his official speech that, at the last international meeting in Moscow of 1927, the leading role both in IBRL and in revolutionary lit­er­a­ture generally had been played by “petty bourgeois writers,” but now petty bourgeois writers w ­ ere “auxiliaries” to the proletarian writers who led.11 Though the Kharkov conference declared that the IBRL was open not only to a­ ctual proletarian writers but also to sympathizers, the resolutions passed ­t here privileged Rus­sian lit­er­a­ture and the “realism” of the proletarian writers in RAPP, who insisted that lit­er­a­ture be both “proletarian” and “revolutionary.”12 All delegates w ­ ere enjoined to take their literary models from Soviet lit­er­a­ture and secondarily German “proletarian” lit­er­a­ture.13 As one of the British delegates, Harry Heslop, reported in his memoir, the RAPP leader Leopold Averbach was the “direct representative of the Kremlin” ­there, more power­ful than Illesh.14 Not all the delegates w ­ ere happy with this. One Hungarian delegate, Zoltan Lippai, complained in his speech (actually published in Literaturnaia gazeta!) that IBRL was functioning as if as “an ­appendage of RAPP.” This, he continued, “significantly hinders its orga­ nizational elasticity not only in cap­i­tal­ist countries but also in the USSR.” He argued that they should strive instead to “ensure for IBRL an in­de­pen­dent orga­nizational influence on all of world proletarian lit­er­a­ture,  .  .  . ​setting up links between writers of dif­fer­ent countries”—­facilitating a more demo­cratic literary international.15 As we w ­ ill see, this aim was in some instances at least partially realized.

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The Kharkov conference not only resulted in a web of Moscow-­centered literary organ­izations and periodicals that w ­ ere incorporated in MORP; it also facilitated transnational encounters between writers that ­were articulated horizontally as well as vertically (emanating from Moscow). The expansion ­after Kharkov in the membership and geo­graph­i­cal reach of the international movement facilitated greater convergence in lit­er­a­ture, but at the same time, given that writers established more international contacts ­t here, it led to greater variegation in the movement, so that the lines between the literary international itself and my putative ecumene became more blurred. The coming together in Kharkov of writers representing dif­fer­ent leftist lit­er­a­tures threw into focus the issue of what kind of lit­er­a­ture its supporters should produce and the extent to which they should follow models generated in the Soviet Union. As became clear in the ensuing years, this was not just a ­matter of thematics, of revolutionary or proletarian subject ­matter, or of insisting that lit­er­a­ture could only be written by “proletarian” writers. At stake was the possibility of a Comintern aesthetic, one that would be cosmopolitan in the sense that Sheldon Pollock uses the term in Language of the Gods in the World of Men (see the Introduction); that is, it would span dif­ fer­ent countries, ethnic groups, and languages. But it is one ­t hing for leftist writers to meet for a few days, quite another to converge around a single aesthetic or, minimally, a single store of rhetorical tropes and plot functions. As yet, no such single store or common aesthetic had emerged, though t­ here ­were some fierce debates on the subject, especially in Germany and Soviet Rus­sia. This chapter, however, w ­ ill focus on how the aim of a unified movement and common aesthetic was played out in the late 1920s and early 1930s, taking as a test case literary interactions between revolutionary China, Soviet Rus­sia, and Eu­rope.

China China was impor­tant for the international left in part b ­ ecause the Shanghai debacle of April 1927 had brought about a major crisis in Bolshevik thinking. The issue of China policy came to be at the center of the power strug­gle between Stalin and Trotsky, which culminated in the expulsion of Trotsky and his followers from the Party in 1927 and then Trotsky’s banishment to Almaty in January 1928, and his exile from the Soviet Union in February 1929.

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The first major response from the Bolshevik leadership to the debacle came from Trotsky, who blamed it on what he argued was a faulty Soviet China policy. In a series of statements and articles he contended that it had been a ­mistake to form an alliance with the “bourgeois nationalists” (that had for some time been the general Soviet policy for Asian countries); instead, the communists should have followed the path of true proletarian socialism. The task was now to support the establishment of workers’ soviets in China and push the pace of revolution. Stalin in response published during the winter of 1927–1928 a series of articles on the Chinese revolution u ­ nder his cosig16 nature in the central organ on policy, Bolshevik. ­These articles argue that pressing forward at a fast pace in China and forming workers’ soviets would ­ eople” to spread new legends to mean enabling the “enemies of the Chinese p the effect that what was taking place in China was not a national revolution, but an artificially transplanted “Moscow sovietization.” Stalin also favored rural rebellion over urban industrial action, “an agrarian revolution, which [would] strengthen and broaden the strug­gle against imperialism, against the gentry and the feudal landlords, against the militarists and Chiang Kai-­shek’s counterrevolutionary coup.”17 This new line was symptomatic of a general trend ­after 1927 to read revolutionary China in terms of Soviet history and so simplify a complex real­ity. In repre­sen­ta­tions of China any sense of foreignness was diminished in the interests of overcoming exoticism, but the resulting narratives became overly homogenized, the distinctions submerged. Followers of Stalin had begun to read revolutionary Chinese history in terms of the standard outline of Soviet revolutionary history as a progression from “war to revolution to foreign intervention,” a progression aligned with the official landmarks of twentieth-­ century Rus­sian revolutionary history between 1914 and the early 1920s. The implication was that the debacle of 1927 was an “intervention” brought about by foreigners but that, despite the setbacks, the Chinese revolution would eventually prevail as did Soviet Rus­sia ­after its foreign intervention.18 Efforts to foment revolution in China had not been curtailed completely. ­After the 1927 debacle, the Comintern directed Chinese Communist Party members in dif­fer­ent places to stage a “fourth uprising” as a hopefully victorious sequel to the three of 1923, 1925, and 1927 that had punctuated the years of Chinese “revolution.” But the successive attempts w ­ ere easily crushed by

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the Guomin­dang, and within a year Communist Party membership in China fell to a fifth of what it was before the debacle.19 In Soviet culture, however, failure in revolution could not be admitted, so official bodies promoted a series of works with compensatory narratives. They released, or rereleased, ­earlier cultural products about China that had been composed in a time of revolutionary optimism, such as Tretiakov’s Roar, China! The play, originally a cele­bration of the energized revolutionary movement in China, had premiered in Moscow in 1926, while expectations of Chinese revolution still ran high. But ­after the 1927 debacle in Shanghai and the ensuing defeats, this interpretation of the play had become anachronistic. The text remained the same, but its implicit framing did not. It was in effect reinflected to become not a composite rec­ord of a­ ctual events (as before) so much as a functionally compensatory allegory, a translation from a pre-1927 perspective to a post-1927 perspective. Now its import had widened, and it became a banner text for the international strug­gle against bourgeois and colonialist oppression. Roar, China! was potentially a unifying text for the international left in this difficult, post-­debacle moment. The Soviet Union, humiliated by the spectacular defeat in 1927, or­ga­nized the distribution of the text so that productions could be staged all over the world. The genuine enthusiasm for the play among the left was stoked by the combined efforts of the Comintern and VOKS, which promoted it as much as pos­si­ble, though their requests to stage the play ­were at times rebuffed by ­those to whom they had sent copies ­because they w ­ ere not translated into the relevant language.20 Often, productions abroad ­were banned or censored, which only heightened interest in the play as a cause célèbre. Enterprising intellectuals managed to outwit the censors and stage the play: in ­England, they strategically avoided the London stage and put it on in Manchester and Cambridge. In Japan, however, staging the play was easier b ­ ecause t­ here are no negative Japa­nese in it; one translation went through five editions in five weeks!, and it was put on in Tokyo in the theater of the proletarian literary organ­ization NAPF (All-­Japan Federation of Proletarian Arts) during the 1930–1931 season.21 Roar, China! was staged as well in India, Australia, and the United States.22 In China, knowledge of the play appears to have come from a Japa­nese translation, but it became so popu­lar that it ran through seven editions in Chinese between 1929 and 1943

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(1929, 1930, 1933, 1935, 1936, 1942, 1943).23 The play became a key text for leftists, so much so that the title “Roar, China!” became a common headline in their press and a rallying slogan for countering the Japa­nese incursions into Manchuria in 1931 and the assault on Shanghai of 1932.24 But the greatest number of per­for­mances was in Germany and Austria (it was staged in ­Vienna thirty times).25 A second text widely promoted both domestically and internationally was Vsevolod Pudovkin’s film Storm over Asia (Potomok Chingis khana, 1928), which is ostensibly about an uprising in Mongolia but in effect about revolution in China. In this film Soviet partisans are pitted against occupying British forces. This is not historically accurate: ­there w ­ ere no occupying British forces in Mongolia, but ­t here ­were in China. This inaccuracy enabled the film to pre­sent, obliquely, a replay of 1927. In it the British mistakenly believe that the central character, Bair, an ethnic Mongolian, is an heir to Genghis Khan and try to exploit this by using him as a puppet ruler, with them pulling the strings. But Bair feels alienated from the British and drawn instead to a group of Soviet partisans he encounters. He escapes the British and in a dramatic ending leads a horde of galloping ­horse­men bent on revolutionary vengeance, as if recycling the finale of Pilniak’s Mighty Heart.26 Storm over Asia, something of an action movie, was a smash hit in ­Eu­rope. In Paris, it had a long run from October 1929 ­until 1932. In Berlin, the film premiered at the Marmor Haus on January 8, 1928, and by January 26, 1929, the theater was celebrating its fiftieth sold-­out screening and two hundred Berlin cinemas w ­ ere said to be showing the film.27 It also screened in New York on September 5–7, 1930, and in China in 1931.28 Like most of the texts I am discussing, Storm over Asia when exported abroad suffered at the hands of censors and critics, particularly in ­England given the anti-­British-­ imperialist message, though in Japan, where the film was a success, a number of scenes w ­ ere cut and it was made more into a tale of Asians fighting the 29 West. A third China text promoted abroad was Shanghai Document (Shankhaiskii dokument, 1928), a film directed by Iakov Bliokh. Bliokh, who had worked as an assistant on Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, had been sent to China instead of Eisenstein and Tretiakov, whose grandiose plans for a series of six films on China ­were never authorized. In the fall of 1928 Shanghai Document

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was shown in Berlin to an ecstatic reception from leftists in the audience, who at one screening broke out into the “Internationale.”30 Then, on October 15, 1929, it was shown in New York and on November 10, 1930 in Paris.31 Among ­those on whom it had an impact was the Japa­nese director Fumio Kamei. When he watched Shanghai Document at a local film theater in Vladivostok in 1928, he was so impressed that he traveled across the Soviet Union to Leningrad and took classes at Leningrad Kinotekhnikum ­under directors such as Sergei Iutkevitch, Friedrikh Ermler, and Grigorii Kozintsev.32 He then returned to Japan and became a prominent left-­wing Japa­nese documentary and fiction filmmaker. This is, then, yet another case that illustrates the limits of unidirectional metropole / periphery models; “Moscow” distributed the film, but it was on Kamei’s own initiative that he pursued the lessons of Soviet cinema. Shanghai Document is set, as an intertitle proclaims, in “the biggest port and biggest industrial city” of then China. The film, like many documentaries on Asia from the late 1920s and early 1930s, has a distinct ethnographic ele­ment and shows street life in Shanghai—­t he artisans, the food stalls and market, street performers, and a funeral. In several scenes, the film draws a pointed contrast between the backbreaking toil of the workers, laboring in execrable conditions, and the idle languor of the fat-­cat foreign bourgeoisie (their Chinese counter­parts enjoy the good life, too, but are treated by the Eu­ro­pe­ans as second-­class citizens). But Shanghai Document goes beyond the ethnographic, anticolonialist film and shows scenes of revolution. It includes shots of an insurgency by the Chinese and the military preparations of the foreigners to c­ ounter it. Even more dramatically, the film includes footage that shows the ­actual executions of the revolutionaries by a Nationalist firing squad, and scenes of streets littered with the bodies and banners of the fallen workers (this footage was actually obtained from a foreign newsreel crew and had been shot two to three days ­after the April uprising in Shanghai was crushed in the “debacle”).33 Thus it depicts revolutionary failure quite graphically. And even though the film’s scenario was conceived the year before the debacle, and even though most of it shows Shanghai before it occurred in that it was put together ­after the uprising was put down, like the other texts I am discussing it represents a post-­ debacle version of events.

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Shanghai Document’s footage of the 1927 debacle notwithstanding, the film, as in other texts I am treating, shifts from scenes suggesting defeat to scenes of revolutionary fervor for its finale. It shows a group of determined metalworkers back at their factory jobs zealously pushing the pace of production. Instead of presenting this as a capitulation to the cap­i­tal­ists’ w ­ ill, the intertitles invite the audience to take the scene figuratively rather than literally as a repre­sen­ta­tion of how the workers are furiously fighting back: “The heroic proletariat of Shanghai . . . ​has preserved its iron w ­ ill for victory.” In the final shot a group of workers in a literal visualization of this “iron ­will” are striking a red-­hot ingot in a display of brute strength and coordination, while intertitles declare that they have “answered the treachery of the generals and the terror with mass strikes”—­perhaps an allusion to the quixotic attempt at strikes in Canton and Wuhan l­ ater that year, but other­wise wishful thinking. Foregrounding metalworkers in this way transplants to a Chinese situation the iconography of Soviet industrialization and Soviet power, including the standard image of Stalin as a “man of steel [stal’],” of indomitable ­w ill. Shanghai Document had its premiere on May Day, 1928, but its marking a revolutionary anniversary was not unique. Within the Soviet Union, plays and films about China e­ ither premiered or w ­ ere restaged for a major revolutionary anniversary (an exception was Roar, China!, which premiered on January 23, 1926). Storm over Asia opened on the November 7 anniversary in 1928, while another revival about rebellious China, the exoticist ballet Red Poppy, like Roar, China!, had been first performed e­ arlier, on June 14, 1927, but was staged again in cele­bration of the tenth anniversary of the revolution that November.34 The texts I am discussing that w ­ ere promoted internationally end with a version of the “roar” that in the Baku Congress manifesto of 1920 Asians w ­ ere enjoined to make. “Roar” is the first word of the title of Tretiakov’s play, and in its climax the agitator tells the downtrodden Chinese to “roar” in response to cap­i­tal­ist might. In the case of Storm over Asia, a s­ ilent film, a literal “roar” was impossible to produce, but instead the film ends with a wild r­ ide across the steppe by a horde of impassioned Asiatic revolutionaries that implies a deafening sound of the ­horses’ hoofs. In Shanghai Document, the “roar” is represented visually, absent sound, by the souped-up industrial machinery and the insistent hammering in the finale.

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Germany Though ­after the Shanghai debacle on the Soviet stage and screen works about revolutionary China became prominent, in lit­er­a­ture few major writers tackled that topic (exceptions would include Konstantin Erdberg’s Chinese Tales, which attracted attention at the time).35 Effectively, the center of internationalist cultural support for China shifted to Berlin, already a player ­because of the “Hands off China!” campaign. Among the German left, by contrast with their Soviet counter­parts, China became a favorite topic that attracted some of its leading writers, including Bertolt Brecht, Friedrich Wolf, and Anna Seghers. The year 1930, the year of Kharkov, marked a high point, but the preoccupation continued ­until the Nazi takeover. As we have seen, Roar, China! provided a narrative frame for many subsequent texts on China, both in Rus­sia and abroad. But nowhere was Tretiakov’s play as influential, or as widely performed as in Germany. The first foreign production of the play was in Frankfurt in November 1929, followed by per­for­mances in Leipzig, Münster, Remscheid, Hamburg, Halle, Karlsruhe, and Dortmund. In Cologne it premiered on May Day, 1930, in a stadium with seating for six thousand. Also, in the spring of 1930, Meyerhold brought his Moscow production, which was staged in Berlin, Breslau, and Cologne. The Troupe’s reception in Germany was mixed; some preferred the productions of Stanislavsky, who also toured Germany, and throughout Germany, especially in Berlin, productions came up against re­sis­tance by the Nazis.36 But among the left, the play became a focus of revolutionary fervor. In the wake of its success, Tretiakov was sent to Germany in 1930 as a cultural emissary, and everywhere he went he was billed as the author of Roar, China! Revolution in China was a cause, which was particularly close to the hearts of many intellectuals in the German left, though less to its Communist Party leaders. ­After the debacle, the “Hands off China!” campaign lost steam and the main communist newspaper, Rote Fahne, s­ topped covering China extensively. But, given that Soviet officials and intellectuals could no longer visit China, the Soviet government and Comintern began to send instead Eu­ro­ pe­a ns who could, and most often Germans. Examples include composer Hanns Eisler’s ­brother, Gerhart Eisler, a member of the German Communist Party Central Committee, and Egon Erwin Kisch, a reporteur whose visit to China in 1932 resulted in Secret China (China geheim), which was

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published in German, Rus­sian, French, and En­glish.37 The 1938 translation into Chinese, Mimi de Zhongguo, was to have a major influence on Chinese writers and journalists many of whom a­ dopted his reportage approach.38 Roar, China!, much more than the more popu­lar Storm over Asia, set a model for German leftists in representing revolutionary China, and by extension revolution in general. The special role the play assumed for them can be sensed in the fact that its first production in Germany, in Frankfurt, premiered on November 9, 1929, the tenth anniversary of the ill-­fated German revolution of 1919.39 From then on, major leftist writers began producing texts on revolutionary China that had at their climax some loud din implying mass worker involvement in an uprising, versions of the “roar” that ends Tretiakov’s play. A good example would be the play Tai Yang Awakens (Tai Yang erwacht, 1930) by communist author Friedrich Wolf. The play is set in post-­debacle Shanghai. In fact, it mentions the “treachery” of Chiang Kai-­shek and was also the first Western literary work to mention Mao Zedong (it alludes to Mao’s work rallying the southern peasants).40 The eponymous Tai Yang is a young textile worker who is employed, together with her younger s­ ister Ma, in a silk factory owned by a Chinese, Tschu Fus. A patriot, Tschu Fus is in princi­ple against the foreign cap­i­tal­ists, but, as in several texts of this period, accepts their support when his workers become restive. Tai “awakens” progressively during the course of the play, but the motivation for her final conversion to the cause of revolution comes mainly from the love plot. The end finds her leading her fellow silk workers in an uprising, represented by a deafening roar, as on ­every floor of the factory workers sing defiantly a revolutionary song. Tai Yang Awakens was a blue-­blooded German communist production in that it premiered in Berlin in 1930 at a new communist worker youth theater, Junge Volksbühne, and was directed by Erwin Piscator, with sets by John Heartfield. But in some re­spects it was a product of the Moscow-­Berlin axis; Piscator for his staging had been influenced by the Soviet agitation troupe the Blue Blouse (which toured Germany in 1927), and he screened onstage footage from Bliokh’s Shanghai Document. But Shanghai Document, itself was implicated in that axis; though shot by a Soviet team Bliokh took to China in 1927, it was a coproduction between Prometheus Film and the Moscow Mezhrabpom, parallel film companies that formed part of Willi Münzen-

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berg’s IAH (International Workers’ Aid) network. And it was in Berlin that the film was edited in 1928 (by the German Albrecht Viktor Blum). One should not hastily conclude that in their texts on China German leftists ­were simply following “Moscow” models. Their works on China almost all had subtexts related to current German po­liti­cal debates. The deliberate coincidence when the first staging of Tretiakov’s play in Germany was on the anniversary of a German revolutionary defeat is one of several indicators that German repre­sen­ta­tions of Chinese revolution ­were not just about China, but also about Germany. Writing about China gave leftist intellectuals a way of commenting on their own po­liti­cal situation without incurring the ire of the censors or the Nazi mobs, instances of that time-­honored practice of writing about foreign countries as a device for making sensitive po­liti­cal commentary about the author’s own, the most famous example being Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721). As Wolf put it, in commenting on Tai Yang Awakens, he wanted the play to be instructive for the German left in facing the threat of Nazism: Why did I write precisely this play in 1930 when 6 million Germans ­ ere out of work, in a Germany of menacing fascism? Two reasons. w Firstly at that time I had to say a lot “figuratively.” A play that warned of Hitler would have been banned or the per­for­mance would have been routed by the SS. But the second reason was more impor­tant. I wanted to show, using the example of China, how a ­people began t­ here to resist cap­i­tal­ist exploitation courageously and consequentially. And I was, like the heroine of the play, firmly convinced that this strug­gle w ­ ill end with the victory of the p ­ eople. That is why I wrote this play in 1930.41 Similarly, in the case of Brecht’s oratorio about revolution in China, The Mea­sures Taken (Die Massnahme), with ­music by Hanns Eisler, which premiered in Berlin the same year as Tai Yang (in December 1930), part of the context was the recent clandestine trip of Eisler’s b ­ rother, Gerhart, to China in November 1929, when he visited Shanghai and Mukden (Shenyang), one of the cities mentioned in the play.42 But the play also, like Tai Yang, engaged indirectly with German po­l iti­c al issues; in it Brecht effectively weighed in on the polemics surrounding the disastrous attempted uprising in Saxony of 1923.

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Another way in which ­t hese German texts about China do not merely follow Soviet thematics and literary conventions would be the multiple sources their authors drew on, which indicate the multinational purview in which they w ­ ere operating and its ideological polyphony. The German leftists (though not Brecht), in seeking to pre­sent an au­t hen­t ic account of working-­class life in Shanghai, used eyewitness accounts and material by noncommunist investigators from other countries that ­were published in Germany. Wolf for Tai Yang used principally two sources. One of t­ hese is New China: Report of an Investigation by Col. C. L’Estrange Malone, F.R.Ae.S. of 1926, which appeared in German translation in 1928 as Das neue China.43 It is by a member of the British In­de­pen­dent ­Labour Party (not to be confused with its l­abor Party), who traveled extensively in China in 1926. Wolf took some of his material from part 1 of this book, which discusses the po­liti­cal situation within China, but more from part 2, ­Labour Conditions and L ­ abour Organ­izations, which provides information on factory conditions among textile workers, and among silk workers in par­tic­u­lar, all of which we find in the play: the poor housing, lack of ventilation in the factories, the use of child ­labor and female workers bringing their infants to the factories in baskets, the low wages, the dank atmosphere from the steamed up factory shops, and leaking pipes, with tuberculosis rampant as a result.44 Another impor­tant source for Wolf in writing this play was the series of articles on the situation in Shanghai by American Agnes Smedley, then based ­there, which w ­ ere published in the left-­inclining Frank­furter Zeitung between November 1929 and November 1930 and also in several other Western and Indian periodicals (Smedley associated with communists but was prob­ably never a Party member, though she has often been accused of being a Comintern agent). Two par­tic­u­lar concerns of ­these articles are the situation of ­women in China and the execrable work conditions of the Chinese workers, both foregrounded in Wolf’s play.45 A further complicating ­factor in trying to write Brecht’s and Wolf’s China plays off as “Moscow-­oriented” is the absence of a Tretiakovian “look to Moscow” statement or a Soviet mentor figure. Wolf did include a non-­Chinese adviser among his revolutionaries in Tai Yang erwacht, Peer, but he is not Rus­ sian, more a generic West Eu­ro­pean leftist; his nationality is never identified, but some features suggest that he could be En­glish, French, German, or Dutch.

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This reluctance on the part of the German writers to give their Chinese revolutionaries a Soviet mentor could also be seen as evidence of their sense that Berlin (and Germany) represented a center of the left in its own right, one that attracted radicals from around the world, especially the anticolonialists. The German capital was a mecca for po­liti­cal exiles from many places, including India, Persia, and China. Two, rival Indian communist leaders M. N. Roy and Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, lived in Berlin for most of the 1920s. ­Until 1926, Smedley had lived with Chattopadhyaya ­there, devoting her energies to the cause of Indian in­de­pen­dence from that country’s colonialist masters. Like her, Chattopadhyaya had extensive internationalist contacts not only with diasporic Indians scattered around the globe but also with Chinese, Japa­nese, and Koreans. And Smedley’s writings and po­liti­cal concerns embraced Amer­i­ca, ­Great Britain, Germany, Soviet Rus­sia, India, and China. In short, both belonged to a developing international camaraderie of intellectuals, what David Featherstone has called a “geography of solidarity,” peopled by individuals and groups concerned with oppression in multiple countries, both Western and Asian, and who w ­ ere linked to, but not driven 46 by, Moscow bodies. Even before the Kharkov conference, interactions between Moscow and Berlin intellectuals had increased dramatically. In the late 1920s both VOKS and the Comintern began actively dispatching Soviet writers and filmmakers to Germany—­primarily to Berlin—­and several German leftist writers, musicians, artists, and filmmakers (such as Brecht, Heartfield, Hanns Eisler, Piscator, and Wolf) ­were in turn invited to the Soviet Union (principally to Moscow). Translations of Soviet texts w ­ ere published abroad nowhere more than ­there and often appeared in German translation shortly ­after they came out in Rus­sian. The shuttling back and forth became so intense ­after about 1929 that Berlin became a hub of activity for the literary international, and one could effectively talk of a Moscow-­Berlin axis in leftist culture. Shanghai, where Smedley was based ­after 1926, had become for its part the hub of Chinese literary internationalism. It also loomed large in its lit­er­a­ture. As by far the largest industrial city in China, a major port, and a center for banking and commerce with a huge foreign population, it was an obvious candidate for emblem of cap­i­tal­ist exploitation and imperialism. German leftists focused on Shanghai, too, and ­t here developed, in addition to the Berlin-­ Moscow axis, a Berlin-­Shanghai (or more broadly Germany-­China) axis.

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Rather than use the two-­dimensional “axis” as a figure for the exchange network, then, it might be more accurate to represent the exchange as a triangle, with cultural commerce g­ oing back and forth between all three of its points. Although one would prob­ably have to see the Moscow point as the triangle’s apex, still not all Berlin-­Shanghai cultural commerce went via, or was brokered by, Moscow. German leftist culture sometimes had its own impact in China, in­de­pen­dent of Moscow. For example, when in the mid-1930s a new vogue took hold among leftist artists for representing themes from ­ ere influenced Roar, China!, they chose as their medium woodcuts, and w in choosing this medium not by any Soviet artist, or by a Chinese tradition, but by the German Expressionist work of Käthe Kollwitz, which was promoted by Lu Xun (and also by Shanghai’s Japa­nese bookseller, Uchiyama Kanzō). Together with Smedley they published a book on her woodcuts (no doubt her German connections played a role in the choice).47 Given Smedley’s multiple points of orientation—­and in this she was not unique—­rather than use the meta­phor of some rigidly geometrical form such as a triangle, it might be more appropriate to speak of a multipolar web for this complex interrelationship among leftist internationalists who sought to represent China. Though Berlin, Moscow, and Shanghai w ­ ere in the late 1920s and early 1930s the most active centers for interchange, they ­were not exclusively so. Inter alia, Paris also has to be seen as a point in this web. When, for example, an antiwar and antifascist conference was held in Shanghai in early 1933, given that no Soviet citizen could attend, the Eu­ro­pean communists ­were represented by Paul Vaillant-­Couturier, the editor of the main French communist newspaper, L’Humanité.48 It should not be forgotten that the major Eu­ro­pean novel about Chinese revolution from this period was by a Frenchman, André Malraux’s fictional account of the Shanghai debacle in Man’s Fate (La condition humaine, 1933). The novel represents a significant shift in Malraux’s repre­sen­ta­tion of revolution in China as compared with The Conquerors (discussed in Chapter 5), and provides a more optimistic assessment of post-­debacle China. One character, Ferral, head of the French Chamber of Commerce, in discussing Borodin’s retreat in the aftermath of the Shanghai debacle, insists that while the communists may have been routed, communism has not and “new Communist waves are to be feared.” 49

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Man’s Fate was well received in Soviet criticism, though for that to be pos­ si­ble it singled out such passages rather than the more ambiguous sections, where Malraux draws a distinction between communism and its formal organ­ization, about which he had reservations. He had begun to move in the circles of the literary international, where a modicum of deviance was tolerated in exchange for loyalty. But the left ­were themselves divided on the question of the degree of control and programmatic planning to be desired in the movement. This question was at the heart of some major controversies among the German left. In fact, a complicating f­ actor in positing linear flows from Moscow to Berlin is that some German communists had a fraught relationship with Marxism-­Leninism, and with the Soviet platform in general. Not all ­were Leninists, let alone Stalinists. And many ideological and aesthetic issues of leftist culture ­were hotly debated among them. Germany had impor­tant non-­Leninist centers of Marxist inquiry, such as the Frankfurt School. The case of Karl Wittfogel, a member of that school, and from 1920 ­until 1939 a member of the German Communist Party, provides a good example of the extent to which intellectuals who held views that did not follow the main “Moscow” line w ­ ere often nevertheless h ­ oused within Moscow-­oriented international communism. Wittfogel, who periodically published in Rote Fahne articles about China, is best known for his theory of the Asiatic mode of production, worked out during his stay in the Frankfurt Institute from 1924 and outlined in his Awakening China (Das erwachende China, 1926), published in Rus­sian translation in 1927.50 The new, post-1927 Bolshevik and Comintern line on China, which emphasized peasant revolt and the formation of provincial communes, explic­itly rejected the theory of the Asiatic mode of production, partly b ­ ecause the central importance in the history of China it gave to a vast and centralized bureaucratic structure that managed its waterways and irrigation system created prob­lems for Stalinist theory by complicating the account of the class system. Marx, as was admitted, had himself proposed an account of China similar to Wittfogel’s, but at a major discussion about the Asiatic mode held in Leningrad in February 1931 and or­ga­nized by the Society of Marxist Orientalists and the Leningrad Eastern Institute, the official speaker, M. Godes, casuistically argued, “One must be able to differentiate between the letter and the essence of Marxism, between individual postulates and the method of Marxism,” as had

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Stalin in his debates with Trotsky.51 Wittfogel, however, was a leader of the League against Imperialism in Germany and remained a power­f ul figure in the communist movement.52 Another excellent example of the complexity of the interactions within the Moscow-­Berlin-­Shanghai triangle is the China texts of Anna Seghers, which ­were written between 1930 and 1932.53 Seghers, a Berlin communist, had been a delegate at Kharkov from the German leftist literary organ­ization Bund proletarisch-­revolutionärer Schriftsteller (BPRS), established in 1928. For her China writings, she used several of the same sources that Wolf did. And like Wolf and Brecht, she often conflated a repre­sen­ta­tion of revolution in China with disguised commentary on German politics. In “1 Mai Yanschuhpou” of 1932, for instance, she describes the rivalry between the red trade u ­ nions and the yellow trade u ­ nions, no longer very realistic in representing China in that Nationalist repression of the left in Shanghai had decimated their trade ­unions, but more reminiscent of the competition in Germany of the time between the Revolutionäre Gewerkschaftsopposition (RGO), which was formed by the German communists in 1929 within the Allgemeinen Deutschen Gerwerkschaftsbund (ADGB) and which fought with the Nationalsozialistische Betriebszellenorganisation (NSBO) formed in 1928 from the left wing of the national socialist German worker party, Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP).54 Unlike Brecht, Wolf, and other German writers who presented accounts of revolutionary China in t­ hese years, Seghers had studied Chinese. She drew for her China texts on conversations she had with a number of Chinese who had participated in uprisings but w ­ ere then in Berlin. The principal among them was Hu Lanxi (Lanqi, 1901–1994), a Chinese writer and military leader, who in 1926 was appointed to head the Ministry of ­Women’s Affairs of the Guomin­dang. ­After the Shanghai debacle, she had sided with sections of the left that held out against the Guomin­dang and, blacklisted by them, was sent to Eu­rope by the Communist Party, arriving in Berlin in 1929. In 1930, she joined the Circle for Chinese Language, effectively a Chinese communist party h ­ oused within the German, and in the eve­nings she studied at the Marxist Workers’ School, headed by Seghers’s husband, Laszlo Radvanyi. Additionally, she was very active in the anti-­imperialist league of Chinese in Germany, where she was president and led its campaign against Japa­nese incursions into China.55

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Seghers’s collaboration with Hu Lanxi on several of her shorter China texts was so close that she sometimes listed her as a coauthor. One example is the reportage piece “1 Mai Yanschuhpou,” where Hu is accredited u ­ nder the 56 pseudonym Schü-­Yin. This story, which appeared in Rote Fahne on May 1, 1932 (again a China text for a revolutionary holiday), details w ­ omen workers’ preparation for a strike and ends in a demonstration by Shanghai workers that, predictably, culminates in a mighty “roar” of defiance.57 Actually, the term Seghers uses h ­ ere is not “roar,” as in the German rendering of the title of Tretiakov’s play, Brülle, China!, but the verb “brummen,” which can be translated into En­glish as “rumble” and so conveys a somewhat weaker sound than a “roar.” This subtle deviation from the conventional ending, this less full-­throated “roar,” is symptomatic of the way Seghers conceived revolution a ­little differently than the standard Bolshevik account and also of her dif­ fer­ent compositional approach, two interrelated aspects of her writings. In terms of her ideological position, arguably Seghers’s was closer to that of the Berlin-­based communist leader Rosa Luxemburg (who had been assassinated by agents of the right in 1919) than to that of Lenin, with whom Luxemburg had recurrently engaged in polemics. Since her Orga­nizational Questions of Social Democracy of 1904 (also known as Leninism or Marxism?), Luxemburg had stressed the critical importance in revolutions of direct, in­ de­pen­dent action of the masses. She always argued that “lived” experience was the g­ reat educator and former of conscious revolutionaries rather than any po­liti­cal “­recipes.”58 The road to revolution “does not proceed in a beautiful straight line,” she maintained, and revolutionary movements and revolutions as they occur are bound to prove imperfect realizations of theory.59 In her controversial text The Rus­sian Revolution (published posthumously in 1922), she contends that ­there “is no key [to a correct course of action] in any socialist program or textbook. That is not a shortcoming but the very ­t hing that makes scientific socialism superior to the utopian va­ri­e­t ies,” adding, “Only experience is capable of correcting and opening new ways.”60 Luxemburg’s version of revolutionary Marxism was intended to apply in the area of politics, but it is potentially applicable in Marxist lit­er­a­ture as a ­counter to socialist realism’s highly teleological masterplot. Seghers, like Luxemburg, privileged “lived experience” over “­recipes,” and it was for her a guiding princi­ple in her repre­sen­ta­tion of the revolutionaries and their actions. In the name of “lived experience,” she not only drew on the oral

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accounts of ­those who had participated in the Chinese revolutionary movement; she also resisted subordinating events to an overarching narrative scheme. This re­sis­tance led to a disagreement on aesthetic princi­ples with her friend Georg Lukács, who, though a Hungarian communist, became one of the principal theorists of socialist realism and argued in par­tic­u­lar for the critical importance of subordinating all details to an integrated plotline. She said in a letter to Lukács of 1938 that the pro­cess of literary creation cannot “stop still,” alluding to the danger of aesthetic ossification if one followed literary “­recipes.”61 Seghers’s reluctance to have her narrative form a “straight line” is particularly evident in her major prose work of ­t hese years, the novel Die Gefährten (1932). The German title, sometimes rendered in En­glish as The Wayfarers (only one chapter has appeared in En­glish translation, though it came out in Rus­sian in 1934), can be translated literally as “companions, comrades or associates.”62 This novel, one of the few from this time to depict revolutionary internationalism in the form of transnational activism, follows an emerging transnational communist fellowship, whose members have a strong sense of belonging together in the name of the cause (she ignores the prob­lem that they speak dif­fer­ent languages). The narrative begins with the rout of the Hungarian communist revolution in 1919, and follows the fate of some of its exiles, interwoven with coverage of other activists, tracing their lives over time to end in the period of the First Five-­Year Plan in the Soviet Union, in other words around the time of the Kharkov conference. Her characters come from, and wander, all over Eu­rope (Hungary, Austria, Germany, the Carpathians, Poland, Italy, France, Belgium, Bulgaria), always on the move ( fahren) in a kaleidoscopic pattern whereby characters might coincide briefly in one town in one country and then perhaps a few years ­later in another. This constant movement that is a feature of the novel on a thematic level has its analog in Seghers’s compositional method. Rather than subordinate all the events to an overriding narrative trajectory, she used a montage technique of ongoing narrative strands that, as is often remarked, is reminiscent of the novels of John Dos Passos (at the time a leftist, and his works ­were popu­lar models among members of the ecumene), a technique she justified in correspondence with Lukács.63 Her separate narrative strands are broken off at arbitrary-­seeming moments as the narrative takes unmotivated, radical jumps to another strand (for which she was criticized).64 Again and again,

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Seghers emphasizes that events are “zufällig”—­contingent, chance. As in Dos Passos, also, rather than a monologic narrative, we are presented with the multiple perspectives of the characters, subjective narration, stream of consciousness, and ­free indirect discourse. Often the identity of a given speaker or narrator is not explicit, or the inner thoughts of characters run ­counter to the positions they take in a reported conversation. What is happening has to be inferred from the characters’ inner, subjective observations. The account of the transnational revolutionaries, then, is complex, nuanced, and somewhat open-­ended. The ending provides no crescendo, no cele­bration of pro­ gress, nor does the novel have the alternative conventional ending, the dramatic heroism of the fallen martyr who pronounces his last testament before ­dying while the faithful at his bier swear an oath to continue the strug­gle, assuring the ongoing movement to ultimate triumph. ­Here, I w ­ ill confine myself to the narrative strand in Die Gefährten where China is incorporated in what is other­w ise a pan-­European communist horizon. This strand concerns two Chinese ­brothers; the older ­brother, Liau ­Yen-­kai, who is studying at the Sun Yat-­sen University in Moscow, effectively acts, by means of a series of letters, as a po­liti­cal mentor to his younger b ­ rother, Liau Han-­tschi, who has been living in London. As the younger b ­ rother becomes progressively more po­liti­cally conscious, he moves to Berlin, where he is drawn closer to the cause by the example of local communists. Thus armed mentally, he returns to China a convinced revolutionary. En route, in Aden, he learns of the Shanghai debacle in newspaper reports from an En­glish paper that he happens to purchase (an example of Seghers’s characteristic indirection and her emphasis on contingency). When he reaches Canton, e­ ager to receive a Party assignment, he is instead arrested due to the treachery of a travel companion (a repre­sen­ta­tion in miniature of Chiang Kai-­shek’s 1927 betrayal of his communist allies in Shanghai). The older ­brother returns to China soon thereafter to join the revolutionary cause. He quickly realizes that his younger b ­ rother is prob­ably dead, and flees in order to avoid the same fate, managing to make his way to a remote village. ­There he is deeply moved to see a sign on a building declaring it the headquarters of a soviet (this remote village is presumably in the Jiangxi communist zone, where soviets ­were established starting in 1929). When he reads this sign, he gets “a jolt like the one he got when he first crossed the Soviet border. But this jolt was stronger.”65

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Liau Yen-­kai experienced a stronger “jolt” on reaching the Chinese communist Heimat than he did on reaching the Soviet Union, though the narrator’s description does imply an emotional attachment to Moscow as a communist mecca. In the novel, Moscow’s role as the center of international revolution is downplayed, as are t­ hose of the Communist Party and Comintern. Moreover, the soviets themselves w ­ ere a Chinese and not a Soviet initiative, and their ­f uture was then precarious, as the Eu­ro­pean revolutionary movements are also represented as being throughout this novel. As this “jolt” suggests, in the novel’s plot ­there are vestiges of established Soviet revolutionary topoi, but they are especially evident in the narrative strand treating the two Chinese ­brothers, which is more schematic—­its own ­little bit of orientalism. In the relationship between the two b ­ rothers, for example, we have a pattern of po­liti­cal mentor / mentee played out within a nuclear ­family, a plot function that originated in Maxim Gorky’s ­Mother (Mat’, 1906), soon to be designated a progenitor of socialist realism. Also, before leaving for China, the older ­brother deposited his baby in a ­children’s home, as did the protagonists in Fëdor Gladkov’s socialist realist classic Cement (Tsement, 1925); Seghers clearly knew about this pre­ce­dent; she refers to it in her 1927 review of the novel.66 Seghers had a second principal Chinese in­for­mant for t­ hese fictional works, Ėmi Xiao (discussed in Chapter 1 as Nâzim Hikmet’s close friend at KUTV). She met Xiao at the Kharkov conference, and then both joined the post-­ Kharkov trip to view the g­ reat Five-­Year-­Plan colossus of the Dneproges dam with its associated industrial complex, at the time a showcase of Soviet economic achievement.67 Their discussions on ­these occasions ­were particularly useful to Seghers in learning firsthand about revolutionary China, ­because Xiao had participated in the Shanghai uprising of 1927, as Hu Lanxi had not. The exchanges between Xiao and Seghers took place on the sidelines, so should we consider their connections as forged vertically or horizontally? And can ­t here be an absolute distinction of this sort in a movement of believers?

Left Lit­er­a­ture in China and Japan At Kharkov, Xiao was a minor player. Japa­nese writers w ­ ere more prominent in MORP’s pre­de­ces­sor, IBRL. A Japa­nese, but not a Chinese, was on the edi-

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torial board of its main literary journal where translations of foreign lit­er­a­ ture ­were published, Vestnik inostrannoi literatury, as mentioned, a pre­de­ ces­sor of Internatsional’naia literatura. And though both Xiao and a Japa­nese writer gave parallel reports to the Kharkov conference about the current situation in their respective countries, Soviet press coverage paid much more attention to the Japa­nese report.68 During the late 1920s, Japa­nese culture and Japa­nese leftists enjoyed greater prestige than the Chinese among Soviet intellectuals, and also in the ­ ere Comintern and abroad. In the summer of 1929 several Japa­nese films w shown in Moscow and Leningrad, and on May 15, 1930, Moscow welcomed the Japa­nese cinema director I. Fukuro.69 ­Earlier, in the summer of 1928, a Japa­nese Kabuki theater performed in Moscow and Petersburg, feeding a vogue for the traditional Japa­nese performing arts. Eisenstein, an enthusiastic audience member, in writing his seminal articles on film in the late 1920s drew on examples from Japa­nese hieroglyphs, art, poetry, and Kabuki, while Brecht used some conventions from Japa­nese Noh theater for his Lehrstücke. At that time within Japan itself, proletarian lit­er­a­ture, then the dominant literary approach in the Soviet Union thanks to a militant RAPP, was gathering strength.70 In 1928 the proletarian literary association NAPF was founded, and leading members sought to establish a theoretical foundation for an emerging proletarian lit­er­a­ture. Katagami Noburu, who had twice been to Rus­sia to study, wrote on his return several essays on the cause based on what he learned t­ here, notably “Prob­lems of Proletarian Lit­er­a­ture” (“Musan kaikyū bungaku sho mondai”).71 Significant proletarian novels also began to appear, the most famous being The Cannery Ship (Kanikōsen, 1929) by Kobayashi Takiji.72 The Cannery Ship is set on a boat fishing off the ­waters near Kamchatka, in other words near the Soviet Union. This contiguity enables Kobayashi to counterpose the treatment of “the proletariat” in Soviet Rus­sia and in Japan. One cannery boat is forced by weather conditions to take shelter in Soviet territory and discovers how differently workers are treated by the “kind Rus­sians.” The novel pre­sents a relentless and naturalistic cata­logue of drastic mistreatment by their “bosses” of Japa­nese workers in several fields. The sailors on the cannery ship, for instance, are ordered not to go to the rescue of a sinking ship in their fleet b ­ ecause that would interrupt the fish harvesting, and all the ship hands are so poorly fed that they suffer from beriberi (one

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even dies of it). The novel also pre­sents an exposé of the Japa­nese imperialist designs on Soviet Rus­sia. A torpedo boat cruises near the cannery ship, ostensibly to protect the cannery vessels but in fact to reconnoiter for intended ­future invasions of Kamchatka, Sakhalin, and the Kurile Islands. During the course of the novel, the workers and sailors grow in po­liti­cal consciousness, partly helped by students among them, but t­ here is l­ittle sign of po­liti­cal leaders as a surrogate vanguard, or of the Communist Party. Ultimately, facing the danger of death from their inhuman treatment, the sailors revolt, as the Rus­sians they encountered on Kamchatka had urged them to do. The first revolt is unsuccessful b ­ ecause the sailors succumb to patriotic feelings at the sight of a torpedo boat that has been summoned to put the revolt down. But worsening conditions in the revolt’s aftermath lead to a second one, this time successful.73 Kobayashi himself was arrested several times, starting in 1929, and brutally beaten. ­After his final arrest, in 1933, he died from the torture he underwent in prison and became a legendary martyr of the international left. Kobayashi’s fate was but one instance of the increasing repression of leftists writers and literary institutions in East Asia around the time of the Kharkov conference. Their situation in Japan and ­Korea became precarious in an increasingly nationalist and expansionist Japan, and MORP officials found it hard to maintain contact with what remained of their literary organ­ ization (NAPF).74 In China at this time, also, leftist writers w ­ ere frequently arrested by the Nationalists, the most dramatic case being of five prominent authors, including a gradu­ate of KUTV—­t he five “martyrs”—­who ­were ex­ ere recurrently ecuted on February 7, 1931.75 Leftist literary organ­izations w banned and their journals closed down, so that they had to operate largely clandestinely (Lu Xun often sought refuge at the home of his favorite bookseller, who was Japa­nese).76 And the leftist Shanghai film com­pany was raided by Nationalists, who destroyed its equipment, sending most of the filmmakers fleeing to the interior.77 In this time of “white terror,” many Chinese leftists recognized the need for greater unity if their lit­er­a­ture was to survive. Several factions and writers (including Lu Xun, even though he had been attacked by leftists in the preceding years) came together in Shanghai to found, on March 2, 1930, the League of Leftist Writers, which promptly joined MORP.78 Qu Qiubai played a major role in the League, though he was never formally a member.79 The

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League prospered especially a­ fter the Japa­nese established the Manchukuo regime in Manchuria in 1931. The Guomin­dang w ­ ere reluctant to confront the Japa­nese, but the League was aggressively spreading propaganda against “fascists” and “imperialists,” a category they now saw as including Japan, and so the League profited from a wave of outrage that swept the country and it became a focus of anti-­Japanese re­sis­tance. While the Guomin­dang ­were faring better po­liti­cally and militarily, the League, initially with a membership of only fifty, was expanding rapidly and formed branches in other cities of China, in the north, in the central regions, and even in Japan.80 Within a few years left-­wing lit­er­a­ture, not Guomindang-­oriented organ­izations or periodicals, became the dominant force in Chinese letters. In fact, the ensuing ten years are commonly known as the “Left League De­cade.81 The League and its associates fostered the increasing translation of Soviet material, particularly of Marxist literary and po­liti­cal theory, a trend that had been marked since around 1928, when Georgi Plekhanov, Anatoli Lunacharsky, and several Marxist thinkers w ­ ere translated. Among t­ hose translating and propagating them was Qu Qiubai, who a­ fter the Shanghai debacle served as head of the Chinese Communist Party for a while, but was ousted from the leadership b ­ ecause of his stance in policy disputes. He had spent 1928– 1930 as a party liaison in Moscow, but ­after being dismissed for his dissident views he returned to Shanghai and worked largely in lit­er­a­ture and education. During his second time in Moscow, the Soviet proletarian lit­er­a­ture movement was at its height, and Qu brought that aesthetic back to China with him, publishing in translation several major Soviet articles exemplifying this trend and also contributing his own views, though at times his theoretical articles ­were virtual summaries of recent Soviet publications.82

Ėmi Xiao, Cultural Intermediary Ėmi Xiao, who had crossed paths with Qu late in his second Moscow period, also became a critical figure for the League of Leftist Writers, though he operated at the time not in Shanghai but in Moscow. A ­ fter the debacle, Xiao had fled Shanghai, but he suffered an emotional breakdown and retreated to his (then) Rus­sian wife’s hometown of Vladivostok. Th ­ ere he incurred a severe head injury in an accident. He was summoned to Moscow by the Comintern to recuperate. He at first lived ­there fairly humbly as a translator and

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lecturer, still impaired by the lingering effects of his head injury. But then he was invited to Kharkov, and his fortunes changed.83 Xiao’s appearance at the conference was somewhat fortuitous. Since he was one of the few Chinese in Moscow who had contacts in its leftist writers, he was asked to invite Lu Xun to the event. When Lu Xun declined, the Comintern de­cided to send Xiao instead to represent China.84 His chance attendance proved crucial for his ­career, and ­after the congress he became the chief liaison between Chinese writers and Moscow publishers and also a player in the world of internationalist lit­er­a­ture. ­After the Japa­nese takeover in Manchuria in 1931 and their attacks on Shanghai of 1932, the Soviet Union reestablished diplomatic relations with the Chinese Republic, and in Soviet periodicals China and its writers became the preferred Asian cause. This shift effectively afforded Xiao a greater role in Comintern literary affairs. But Xiao’s ­career was also surely helped by his repeated declarations of fealty to the Soviet Union and calls for Chinese lit­er­a­ture to follow Soviet models, starting from his launch in the literary international with the speech he gave to the enlarged plenum of IBRL in October 1930, a warm-up to the Kharkov conference. In articles he published in China, he effectively argued that Chinese writers should become apprentices of the literary international.85 ­A fter Kharkov, Xiao not only served as the chief liaison between Soviet bodies and the League but also played a prominent role in the Comintern literary hierarchy. By late 1933 he had been elevated to the Secretariat of MORP, and become its leading Asian.86 He also became an impor­tant player in the Comintern’s set of semiparallel International Lit­er­a­ture journals, serving on the editorial board of the Rus­sian edition. In ­these publications, and in assorted aligned Eu­ro­pean journals, he placed many works by him and by other Chinese leftists in translation, often with accompanying prefatory remarks or articles by him. Virtually e­ very issue of Internatsional’naia literatura contained reports on the activities of the League of Leftist Writers, and to a lesser extent the semiparallel journals in other languages did so as well, and Xiao himself edited the Chinese edition of International Lit­er­a­ture (though only two issues appeared).87 Xiao was a cultural intermediary, but this gave him quite literally a dual identity. He was stationed in Moscow for most of the 1930s, during which he was a member of the Soviet Communist Party and of the Soviet Writers’ Union. To some extent he was incorporated into the Soviet literary world,

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where he hobnobbed with figures like Isaak Babel.88 But Xiao wrote primarily in Chinese and was closely linked to the League. In his Soviet incarnation he was functionally like the many members of the Writers’ Union who represented Soviet ethnic minorities. In his case, he was officially the representative to the Writers’ Union of the sizable group of Chinese writers living in the Soviet Far East, mostly around Vladivostok. Symptomatic of this dual identity, when at the First Writers’ Congress in 1934 Xiao gave his speech, he was introduced as a delegate from the (Soviet) Far East, but he opened by saying he would be talking about the literary situation in China.89 Given Xiao’s role as an intermediary between two very dif­fer­ent cultures, translation became an impor­tant aspect of his c­ areer. He himself translated on occasion; his translations include a cotranslation of the “Internationale” into Chinese (in 1923) and of a story by Lu Xun that he rendered in Rus­sian.90 But he also, as was standard for a non-­Russian writer whose works recurrently appeared in Rus­sian, had his own translator, Alexander Romm (1898–1943). Romm, who translated poetry written in other languages as well, knew no Chinese but worked from line translations. However, Xiao helped him. In the correspondence with Romm ­housed in the Rus­sian State Archive of Lit­er­a­ ture and Art (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva, RGALI) he often provides his own translation into Rus­sian of one of his poems to help Romm make his.91 In translation, Xiao’s poems often seem crudely agitational, but—an example of the limitations of translation, especially across very dif­fer­ent linguistic and culture systems—­t hey are more subtle and even lyrical in the original. Of course, it is difficult to convey in a Eu­ro­pean language all that is expressed in a tone-­based and hieroglyphic language system, but Xiao’s poems had other distinctively vernacular features. For example, in the interests of making his poetry more accessible to the masses he wrote in colloquial Chinese rather than any version of the literary language, at times adopting rhyme schemes from ancient Chinese lit­er­a­ture, at o ­ thers patterns that ­were widely used in ancient Chinese folk poems, aspects of his verse that do not come through in the translations.92 Most of the literary texts by other Chinese authors that Xiao published in Internatsional’naia literatura ­were short pieces, short stories or poems.93 By contrast, the Eu­ro­pean and American texts published t­ here in translation ­were much longer, primarily serialized novels, which suggests a hierarchy in lit­er­a­tures, with the Asian the lesser. Such novels on China as appeared, for

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instance, the American writer Pearl Buck’s Good Earth, w ­ ere written by non-­ Asians. Furthermore, the short stories ­were often published in clusters by assorted authors, so that the individual authors stood out less. That Xiao would f­avor the short, agitational text was consistent with his commitment to a mass lit­er­a­ture, a cause he shared with Qu and the Rus­sian old China hand A. Ivin. All three advocated shifting emphasis from high lit­er­ a­ture to popu­lar genres, which would be more accessible and would help counteract the popularity of the pulp illustrated books and American popu­lar culture.94 They campaigned against using the special elevated language of Chinese lit­er­at­ure, which the uneducated could not understand, recommending instead vernacular forms. Actually, a broad range of Chinese intellectuals contended at the time that the literary language should be vernacularized, but it became an issue as to ­whether ­t here should still be a single, standard literary language (as the Nationalists advocated) or works should appear in the variegated patois of the populace. Stalin, it ­w ill be recalled, in elaborating on his formula “socialist in content and national in form,” had insisted that lit­er­a­ture converge not around a single language but rather around the many. Xiao and Qu likewise advocated linguistic pluralism for Chinese lit­er­a­ture. Xiao, Qu, and Ivin argued that imposing a single, standardized Chinese on the entire country would amount to a kind of linguistic totalitarianism of the elite. Instead, Xiao argued—­and ­here he seems to have been following the Marr school of linguistics—­Chinese lit­er­a­ture should use the “living,” colloquial languages. A standardized literary language would exclude the workers from lit­er­a­ture, ­because they likely spoke a dialect.95 A stumbling block for realizing a lit­er­a­ture by or for the Chinese masses was that the overwhelming majority w ­ ere illiterate and so could not read literary texts, let alone write them. In consequence, communist activists, including Xiao and Qu, became involved in a movement to replace the hieroglyphic system of Chinese writing with a modified version of the Latin alphabet, which had been worked out among the Chinese and Orientalists in Vladivostok, and had been pioneered among its Chinese population.96 Unlike Modernists such as Pound, Fenollosa, and Khlebnikov, who idealized the Chinese hieroglyphic system, Xiao in his many polemical contributions to the debate on latinization contended that the system was a “huge impediment to raising the po­liti­cal and cultural level of China’s workers and peasants.” Moreover, he contended, the almost universal illiteracy among them

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makes it hard to form Party cadres, but the hieroglyphic system takes a lot of time to learn and the workers do not have the luxury of spare time for it.97 Latinization had been ­adopted in the late 1920s for many languages, including Turkish and the Turkic languages of Central Asia. But it was one ­thing to substitute one alphabet (the Latin) for another, but quite another to convert a pictographic, “hieroglyphic” system to an alphabetic one. In the case of Chinese, many of its monosyllabic words (logosyllabic) w ­ ere identical, distinguished only by the tones used in pronunciation. Additionally, since the writing system of glyphs had its visual dimension, only marginally pre­ sent in an alphabetical system, certain characters had over time acquired a penumbra of associations, derived from their visual characteristics, and that would be lost with alphabetization. Moreover, having a common set of characters overcame the prob­lem that t­ here ­were several Chinese languages and enabled Chinese who spoke dif­fer­ent languages to read the same text. Xiao dismissed such objections; his article “Latinization of Chinese Writing System” opens with the subheading “The Class Essence of the Hieroglyph,” and calls it no more than a “survival of the ancient feudal order, a weapon for enslaving the worker masses by the dominant class.”98

Mao Dun Though many Chinese communist writers of the time advocated writing fiction in the vernacular, not all endorsed what they called “slogan writing,” a kind of revolutionary writing one might associate with Xiao. One leading writer who campaigned against this was Mao Dun (pseudonym of V. Shen Yanbing), who mocked it as “steam whistle poetry.”99 Like Xiao, Mao Dun was a Communist Party functionary for most of the 1920s. He joined the Communist Party in 1921 and served largely as a po­liti­cal activist and Party propagandist but became primarily a writer ­after the debacle of 1927. Severely shaken and disillusioned by this experience, as had been Xiao, Mao Dun, like him, left the country, in his case for Japan, where he lived from 1928 to 1930, and began to work primarily in lit­er­a­ture. He produced two novels, Rainbow (Hong, 1929–1930) and, ­after his return, Midnight (Ziye, 1933), the latter his most famous.100 Both Rainbow and Midnight culminate in revolutionary uprisings, Rainbow in the May 30, 1925, uprising in Shanghai, Midnight in the Shanghai worker

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unrest of 1930 instigated in an effort to pull off a “fourth uprising.” So the two novels might seem to be candidates for pointing to Soviet influence on indigenous leftist lit­er­a­ture, but actually they point more to the difficulty of establishing such connections and the multiple sources that bore on leftist lit­er­a­ture in the interwar years. While t­ hese two novels, especially Midnight, use conventions that could be identified as Soviet, one has to be cautious in assuming this is their provenance ­because ­t hese conventions are sometimes deployed with reverse valorization from their import in Soviet texts (positive to negative). Moreover, they bear the mark of such nineteenth-­century French writers as Balzac and Zola who had a major influence in East Asia, especially in Japan.101 Rainbow is or­ga­nized around a version of the common French plot of the nineteenth c­ entury, particularly associated with Balzac, where a young man from the provinces tries to break into the social and economic elite of Paris. In this instance, it is a young Chinese ­woman, Mei, and she goes not to Paris, but to Shanghai (identified at one point as the “Paris of the East”), where she becomes infatuated with a revolutionary leader and in consequence participates in the uprising.102 In other words, like Tai Yang in Wolf ’s play, her participation is motivated more by the love plot than by growing po­liti­cal conviction, though the figure of Mei is said to have been based on Hu Lanxi, the feminist and communist activist who in Berlin exile of the early 1930s was used by Anna Seghers as an in­for­mant on the revolutionary movement in China.103 The major theme of Rainbow is ­women’s liberation rather than po­liti­cal awakening. The novel was meant to be the first part of a trilogy, and presumably Mei’s po­liti­cal awakening would have been chronicled in the two l­ater novels, which ­were never written. Mei is drawn to reject the subjugated role of a ­woman in traditional China through reading magazines of the “new” culture and Western lit­er­at­ ure (Ibsen, Japa­nese writers, Maupassant, Nietz­ sche, Edward Carpenter). Retrograde figures in the novel read traditional Chinese texts, such as The Awakened Lion, “written in the classical language and with old-­fashioned punctuation,” in other words using a language that Qu, Xiao, and many other leftists including Mao Dun himself wanted to replace with some version of the vernacular.104 Only at the end does Mei read po­liti­cal texts, on Marxism and Darwinism. She more or less stumbles on them when she finds them among her apartment mate’s possessions. ­These

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texts “opened a new universe for Mei.” Her love object, Liang Gangfu, however, remarks that reading alone is useless and one’s worldview “has to be based on revolutionary strug­gle in the real world.”105 The novel culminates in the uprising of 1925, but that event seems somewhat tacked on and Mei’s participation is poorly motivated. In Mao Dun’s next major novel, the highly popu­lar Midnight, which Leo Ou-­fan Lee has called “the first major long novel of modern Chinese fiction,” it is the discredited bourgeoisie who are reading Western texts.106 Midnight chronicles not the “awakening” of a young girl, but rather the unraveling of the world of a leading Shanghai “captain of industry,” Wu Sun-fu. Wu’s ­family, like Mei, came from the provinces, and some of them still live ­t here, a plot device that enables Mao Dun to depict both a capitalist-­dominated city—­ Shanghai—­and the increasingly “red” countryside. In fact, the novel pre­ sents a panoramic account of China during the turbulent time around 1930 and has a very complicated plot involving large numbers of characters, most of whom are linked e­ ither by f­ amily connections or by a common workplace, commercial connections, or erotic liaisons (mistresses, concubines). Three generations of Chinese are at the center of the novel. Wu Sun-­f u’s ­father, old Mr. Wu, stands for the old China that has been swept away in the turmoil of the 1910s and 1920s. He had been full of reformist zeal in his youth, but now clings to a primer that serves as a sort of bible for him, the Supreme Book of Rewards and Punishments. Fan Po-­wen, Wu Sun-­f u’s cousin and a poet, says, effectively invoking a cliché of Western accounts of China: “When he lived in the country he existed like a m ­ ummy.”107 In modern Shanghai he feels alienated and soon succumbs to a heart attack. Exit the old China. Old Wu was honorable and with a strict, if outdated, code of morality, but the new generation of industrial cap­i­tal­ists, by contrast, are discredited as dissolute and womanizers to boot, who specialize in orgies (­t here is even a case of incest).108 Chinese capitalism strug­gles. At the center of the story is a group of Chinese cap­i­tal­ists and financiers in Shanghai who are being buffeted by the ef­ reat Depression and the civil wars and are struggling to keep fects of the G afloat their Chinese enterprises, putting them on a more solid footing to avoid the erosion of local owner­ship in ­favor of foreign capital. In the end, they are unsuccessful, and one of them is forced to sell his match factory to the Japa­ nese, rationalizing that it needs “a transfusion of Japa­nese blood,” and ­after

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all “China and Japan are old friends with common linguistic and racial origins [a rationale to be found in the rhe­toric of Japa­nese expansionists], which means that a Japa­nese must be better than a beaky-­nosed Eu­ro­pe­an.”109 And so the owner becomes a lackey of the Japa­nese. That patriotic Chinese industrialists who resist foreign capital and fight for in­de­pen­dent Chinese industry are ultimately forced, for instance by strikes, to ally with foreign cap­i­tal­ists was a common theme of communist writing on China a­ fter 1927, to be found inter alia in Tai Yang erwacht. But in Midnight the theme is amplified with a wealth of detail that illuminates the machinations of the stock exchange during ­t hese turbulent years. Mao Dun’s cap­ i­tal­ist Chinese are embroiled in risky ventures involving selling short and selling long on the stock market. As many have remarked, in this re­spect the novel is clearly indebted to Zola’s novel Money (L’argent, 1891); both novels depict a dog-­eat-­dog world in the stock exchange where individual investors are seeking to outsmart and destroy each other.110 As also in Money, the, as it w ­ ere, cap­i­tal­ist plot runs parallel to a lesser plot, the erotic plot, as men use w ­ omen and w ­ omen use men for their own ends. Mao Dun explic­itly draws an equation between the feverish activity of the stock exchange and the sweaty, sex-­driven bodies of most of the “bourgeois” protagonists. The mistress of the two main cap­i­tal­ist rivals concludes that “being a w ­ oman, she realized that men and w ­ omen had dif­fer­ent ways of making money: men used money as capital, whereas w ­ omen used themselves as capital.”111 The text pre­sents erotic escapade a­ fter erotic escapade, circulating capital and bodies at an ever more frenzied pace, so that this “realist” novel verges on suspense fiction, no doubt a reason for Midnight’s popularity. In Zola’s Money the machinations of the protagonist center around investments in an imperialist proj­ect for development in the ­Middle East, but in Midnight the fortunes of the protagonists depend not only on the stock exchange but also on getting profits from their factories. Though in Money ­there are very occasional invocations of Marxism, in this novel class conflict is foregrounded as much as the vigilant censors might allow. As the Chinese industrialists’ factories fare poorly in the wake of a recession, their initial response to their desperate situation is, predictably, to try to recoup their losses by squeezing their exploited workers ever harder, reducing wages, dismissing employees, and adding extra hours for no more pay. The result is widespread

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strikes, and even a call for a general strike that would deliver a coup de grace to the Chinese ­owners’ teetering factories. Their man­ag­ers try to circumvent the strike movement through cunning, using spies to identify communists and arrest them, and also by persuasion. Impor­tant, too, in the depiction of the factory milieu is widespread dissatisfaction among the workers with the yellow trade ­unions, that is, Nationalist-­oriented trade ­unions, which Mao Dun represents as allies with the cap­i­tal­ists; the workers want to form their own trade ­union, and indeed, historically, the so-­called red (i.e., communist) trade u ­ nion was founded then. As in con­temporary German texts such as Friedrich Wolf’s Tai Yang erwacht and Anna Seghers’s “1 Mai Yanschuhpou,” however, the extent of Chinese mass involvement at this time in communist trade u ­ nions is grossly exaggerated. In the sections that cover the factory milieu the focus is, as in ­t hese texts by Wolf and Seghers, on organ­izing strikes among female factory workers in silk factories, and to a lesser extent in match factories. But Mao Dun pre­sents a more complex account of their organ­ization than do ­t hese two German writers. Though the cap­i­tal­ists are at each other’s throats, the communists— in contrast to Wolf’s and Seghers’s texts—do not pre­sent an image of unity and solidarity. In sections treating the strike movement, Mao Dun effectively represents the post-­debacle controversies over tactics that split both the Chinese and Soviet communist parties, and came to a head in 1930–1931. In par­tic­u­lar, the novel engages the debates about the correct action that should have been taken in the attempted “fourth uprising” of 1930. In the late 1920s the Chinese party ­under Li Li-­san ­adopted what became the highly controversial “wave” concept of revolutionary advance. According to this notion, the revolution would proceed in a series of alternating periods; “revolutionary waves,” times of intense activity when the revolution can proceed to the full, are followed by less propitious periods of lull when success is unlikely. Thus the defeats of 1927 w ­ ere explained as due to a “trough” ­between two revolutionary waves. Stalin also used the notion of revolutionary tides in his “Questions of Chinese Revolution” (“Voprosy kitaiskoi revoliutsii”), published in Pravda on April  21, 1927, where he argues that Trotsky’s program for post-­debacle China “demands the immediate formation of soviets of workers’, peasants’ and soldiers’ deputies in China . . . ​[but] they cannot be formed at any moment—­t hey are formed only in a period when the tide of revolution is r­ unning particularly high.”112

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Initially, the Soviet leadership and the Comintern had been in ­favor of continued insurrection for a “fourth revolution” and even spoke of the possibility of China “setting off a world-­wide class war.”113 Li Li-­san began to talk of “tens or hundreds of millions of the masses” being “ready to rise in revolt”; this kind of unrealistic assessment inflects the accounts of revolution in China in Seghers and in Wolf, despite their efforts at authenticity. Wolf, for example, in Tai Yang erwacht has his characters talk of “two hundred million [committed revolutionaries] to the north and two hundred million to the south.”114 In real­ity the numbers of communists had plunged radically ­after the 1927 debacle. Nevertheless, the Chinese Red Army forces ­were sent into action. They ­were initially encouraged by the Comintern and had some successes, but in time the Comintern became concerned about the dangers of defeat in pressing revolution further and banned urban insurrection. The situation came to a crisis point when Li Li-­san pushed for an uprising in Wuhan, even though ­t here w ­ ere only 200 Party members and 150 members of the red trade u ­ nion t­ here.115 As this military effort resulted in another debacle, the Executive Committee of the Comintern sent a letter to the Chinese Communist Party, and at an urgent meeting of its Central Committee of November 23–26, 1930, Li Li-­san was dismissed from his posts and summoned to Moscow to answer for his “errors.” It was not ­until late 1932 or so that the appalling mortality rate from the attempted uprisings in the cities, and the Nationalist crackdown eventually forced the Chinese Central Committee to move to the soviet areas.116 This critical debate between advocates of immediate, “spontaneous strug­gle” and ­t hose arguing for the need to wait u ­ ntil the conditions to ensure a victorious outcome are in place bears comparison with the clash in Brecht’s play The Mea­sures Taken of 1930 between the young agitator and his older colleagues; the young agitator advocates immediate action with disastrous results. In Midnight this controversy is played out in the more localized context of a disagreement about organ­izing a general strike among factory workers in Shanghai (a version in miniature of the “fourth uprising”). In the climactic strike meeting, a young female Party or­ga­nizer who has come to oversee it, Tsai Chen, is “dressed like one of the girls from the silk factory, but her sophisticated expression and manner proclaimed her an intellectual,” and therefore by the conventions of Soviet rhe­toric at the time, a Trotskyite.117 True to that form, she turns off some of her colleagues with her “formulas”

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and “jargon,” and she is further discredited by being from a wealthy background.118 Tsai is impatient for a general strike to break out immediately. She mouths the Li Li-­san line about the “tide” of revolution being high, thus ­demanding revolutionary action and reprimanding ­those who advocate greater caution and more preparation with “­You’re wrong! . . . ​­you’re disregarding the fighting spirit of the masses at a time when the tide of the revolution is in full flood. . . . ​­You’re taking a rightist view of ­t hings!”119 The “spontaneous strug­gle” of the workers has been kept up without a break in factories all over Shanghai, and e­ very “economic strug­g le” has a way of turning instantly into a “po­liti­cal strug­gle” (another commonplace of the discourse of the Li Li-­san line), with the result that “the revolution has now reached high tide.”120 In the debate scene in Midnight a more modest participant, Ma Chin, disagrees with Tsai Chen. She feels ­t here are flaws in Tsai’s “formula,” but with her scanty knowledge and experience she is unable to articulate the prob­lem in detail. “­You’re forgetting our general line,” she is, however, able to say.121 Tsai persists in demanding that a general strike be or­ga­nized immediately, requiring that the communists among the silk workers “make a ­great effort to mobilize as many girls as pos­si­ble to break into the factories again tomorrow! Backs to the wall this time! Even if we fail, it ­will be a glorious failure! . . .” A colleague in the Party objects that a general strike could never be set up in one night given that their organ­ization among workers has been “completely wrecked.” She asks for a day’s delay to or­ga­nize the strikers properly, but Tsai rejects that request, branding that position with Lenin’s negative term “tailism” (khvostizm), tagging along ­behind the masses, which Trotsky had used in his critique of Stalin’s post-­debacle policies.122 When Ma retorts that in a­ ctual practice “it just amounts to handing more comrades into the e­ nemy’s hands,” she is reprimanded by one of Tsai’s supporters, Ke: “No party member is allowed to disobey ­orders. What­ever the costs it must be done.”123 And then the Party officials such as Tsai who had come to address the workers hurry off to other meetings as if indifferent to the fact that they are prob­ably condemning the worker lambs to n ­ eedless slaughter. Mao Dun’s novel not only airs po­liti­cal issues and the topic of w ­ omen’s liberation but also contains several indirect commentaries on aesthetic questions that effectively mark out his position in controversies then raging among the Chinese left. He discredits, in characteristically oblique manner,

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both Romanticism and avant-­gardism (e.g., Tsai’s wealthy f­amily is said to own a big modernist ­house).124 Mao Dun was himself committed to a strictly fact-­based lit­er­a­ture, one of the reasons why he revered Zola. This preference inflects the po­liti­cal controversy among the silk workers. During the debate over when they should strike, Su Lun, one of the participants in the argument is sympathetic to the more cautious Ma, claiming: “While Tsai Chen deals in theories, . . . ​Ma Chin bases herself on facts. And facts are the one ­t hing we ­shouldn’t overlook.”125 When Midnight first appeared in 1933 socialist realism had already been declared in the Soviet Union the year before, but what that term meant was not formulated officially ­until the First Congress of the Writers’ Union in August 1934. In this novel, Mao Dun effectively deploys some of the clichés of the f­ uture tradition, such as the building of an electrical power station as a key program for societal advancement, a central theme in Fëdor Gladkov’s classic Soviet production novel Cement, which had appeared in Chinese translation in 1929 and hence one might assume Mao Dun had read it.126 But in Midnight such plans, which in China are more associated with the Nationalists’ policies for modernization by building extensive infrastructure, are discredited ­because they are suggested by a union-­busting Chinese factory overseer. Clichés from Soviet lit­er­a­ture for depicting the positive hero, such as “calm,” “unflinching,” resolute, and a man of few words, are also applied to him. Mao Dun’s account of his approach to writing this novel bears comparison with t­ hose taken in the literary debates of the period of the Soviet First Five-­Year Plan and cultural revolution, which Mao Dun may have heard about from his friend Qu Qiubai who reported on them in his many articles on Soviet literary practice. I have in mind, specifically, Mao Dun’s insistence on keeping to facts, on “realism” and on steadfastly depicting con­temporary historical actuality. In Rainbow, he based his account of the May  30, 1925, events in Shanghai on his own experiences of that uprising. But in Midnight, his fidelity to “facts” is even more apparent. To some extent, the novel represents the kind of fictionalized journalism, an expanded version of the kind of reportage, that had come into vogue in t­ hese years with figures like the Soviet writer Sergei Tretiakov and the German Egon Erwin Kisch. Mao Dun hoped his own work would go beyond a personal, and therefore partial, perspective on his epoch, and would provide a comprehensive account of con­

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temporary China, in effect as Zola had sought in his many novels about dif­ fer­ent aspects of French society.127 Despite Mao Dun’s professed desire for “impartial” depiction, in the novel he provides a very negative and at times satirical portrait of the Chinese ­cap­i­tal­ists. The trajectory of historical necessity that brings them to their financial demise decidedly ­favors the workers, peasant revolutionaries, and communists, even though they are, as mentioned, largely offstage in the novel and far from idealized. With the exception of scenes where workers and communist leaders plan and implement a strike, the communist movement is not represented directly. Mao Dun’s accounts of the communists come largely from rumors and press reports of upper-­class Chinese. He explained that it was impossible to portray the revolutionaries as the principal characters: “The reactionary government at the time submitted all to a severe censorship and if I had been completely frank I would never have gotten the book published.” All he could do was interpolate hints h ­ ere and t­ here.128 The “hints” largely came from the reported conversations of the bourgeois. In this oblique way, Mao Dun was able to pre­sent the revolutionary forces as more power­f ul, and their military victories as more consequential, than they ­were in real­ity. In the imagination of their opponents presented in this way, the communists, ­whether as workers or peasant organizers, or as forces of the Red Army, loom as a sort of dreaded phantom that haunts the lives of the bourgeoisie. Also, like the German writers discussed h ­ ere, Mao Dun stops short of showing the outcome of the communist-­led revolt—­whether as a triumph or as a debacle. The novel ends at “midnight,” at the last hour before an implied debacle for the Chinese cap­i­tal­ists and triumph for the resurgent workers and peasants. The title Midnight most prob­ably comes from a scene ­toward the end (“It was midnight”) where a deeply depressed Wu and some of his colleagues are at a bar contemplating their crash. “Nothing raises their spirits.”129 When one of ­t hose pre­sent tries to inject some optimism and predict that the communists ­w ill be defeated soon, Wu cautions, “You ­can’t make a clean sweep of them in one fell swoop. Th ­ ey’re like moths in a fur in the rainy season. . . . ​ Unfortunately, ­we’re just coming into a ‘rainy season’ now, and it’s g­ oing to be a long, long time—­nobody knows just how long.”130 At the end, Wu’s fortunes and t­ hose of his associates have been erased completely—­“even his own brother-­in-­law has stabbed him in the back.”131

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He decides to flee to Kuling in the countryside, knowing that even ­t here, where the Red Army threatens to take over, his survival—­economic and ­physical—is far from certain. E ­ arlier, the son of his brother-­in-­law, Tu Hsinto, who has studied in France, had said, “Oh, yes, Shanghai is safe for one or two days at least, perhaps for another week, another month, or two even. Apart from Shanghai, a few other large ports like Tientsin, Hankow, Canton, Macao and so on are also safe for a few months yet. And ­after that we have Japan, France and Amer­i­ca that are even safer. Yes, t­ here are still plenty of places in the world safe for our leisure and plea­sure. Why should we worry about it?” But Li Yu-­ting, a professor of economics, ­counters: “I can see the total collapse of the nation just around the corner. When the tsarists ­were removed from power, they could flee the country and live abroad, but when our turn comes, we shan’t be so lucky, I fear, ­because by that time revolutions ­w ill be breaking out throughout the world, and the propertied classes in ­every country. . . .” Li Yu-­ting breaks off at this point, “heart-­broken” ­because of divisions within his own “camp” due to squabbling.132 The total demise of the cap­i­tal­ists is not predicted by the narrator, the workers, or the communists, but again presaged from the mouths of entrepreneurs. The novel does not end with a version of the “fourth uprising,” as did Wolf’s Tai Yang erwacht, inter alia, but it does convey anticipation of imminent bouleversement of the social order. As “midnight” approaches with increasing pace, the cap­i­tal­ists make investment a­ fter investment, and impose repressive mea­sure ­after repressive mea­sure, in a frantic attempt to avert disaster. Midnight was begun before the summer of 1931 and finished in December 1932.133 Malraux’s Man’s Fate was written between late November  1931 and the end of 1932, and Seghers’s Die Gefährten was written at a similar time—­between 1931 and early 1932 (it was published at the end of that year).134 Thus all three w ­ ere largely composed immediately before a crucial moment in Soviet, and leftist internationalist, literary history, or at any rate likely before the authors knew about it—­before the establishment in April 1932 of the Union of Soviet Writers and the pronouncement a month ­later that the method of Soviet lit­er­a­ture would be socialist realism, the outlines of which w ­ ere worked out over the next two years and promulgated at the First Congress of the Writers’ Union of 1934. The main speech on foreign lit­er­a­ ture at the congress was delivered by Karl Radek, who largely only discussed

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the Eu­ro­pe­ans. His token coverage of Asian lit­er­a­ture amounts to a mere three paragraphs on Japan, where he unsurprisingly singles out Kobayashi Takiji for praise, and one on China, where he actually only discusses the “anticolonialist” authors Konstantin Erdberg and Agnes Smedley, both non-­Asian.135 The celebrity of the congress was André Malraux, one of the invited foreign guests, and particularly prized for Man’s Fate, about the Shanghai debacle; at the time, Eisenstein planned to make a film version of the novel, one of his many unrealized proj­ects (Ėmi Xiao and Hu Lanxi w ­ ere delegates also).136 Radek in his address praised Malraux, pointing to the fact that in the novel’s ending the wife of the martyred protagonist, Kyo, goes to the Soviet Union ­after the debacle and immerses herself in work for the communist cause. But he blithely ignores the fact that Kyo’s ­father goes to Japan and copes in an opium haze with the loss of his only son. In other words, Malraux’s “conclusion” is ambiguous po­liti­cally, a not unusual pattern among cosmopolitan leftists drawn to the literary international but not to the Communist Party, as we w ­ ill see in Chapter 7 in the case of British and Indian writers. ­These novels by Mao Dun, Malraux, and Seghers w ­ ere written in a “midnight” moment for internationalist lit­er­a­ture, between Kharkov and the Writers’ Union Congress, when ­t here ­were some intense debates among leftists about the appropriate method for committed writing.137 The Chinese word used in Mao Dun’s novel’s title (ziye), refers to a broader span of time around midnight (11:00 p.m.–1:00 a.m.), but Soviet commentators contended that it means the period between 11:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m. and consequently can be read as the time before the dawn; they gave their translation the title Before the Dawn (Pered rassvetom).138 If one takes Mao Dun’s title as a meta­ phor for this moment of interregnum in lit­er­a­ture, it could be said that t­ hese three novels ­were written in a “midnight” moment for the international literary left, before socialist realism was mandated. But Mao Dun’s title could also be interpreted as presaging a new “dawn” for international lit­er­a­ture, given the more ecumenical, post-­proletarian literary policies that ­were to emerge a­ fter 1932. Both interpretations have merit. In the texts analyzed in this chapter such as Seghers’s Die Gefährten, and also in Malraux’s Man’s Fate, one sees the emergence in fiction about Asia by non-­Soviet internationalists of a new, hybrid kind of writing that incorporates tropes from officially endorsed Soviet fiction but does not follow its

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characteristic, overriding plot. In Chapter 7 we w ­ ill see, looking at the specific example of fiction by the Indian writer Mulk Raj Anand, how this trend developed a­ fter socialist realism took its canonical shape following its institutionalization in 1932–1934, and how writers negotiated the new demands for lit­er­a­ture. The triumph of Nazism led to greater cohesion in the ecumene and the drawing of more and more of its writers into the orbit of the literary international, but it also had an impact on anticolonialist-­cum-­a nti-­ imperialist lit­er­a­ture, which had to find a place for itself ­under the umbrella of the antifascist campaign, as we ­will see.

7 Mulk Raj Anand and the London Literary Left

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he profile of the literary international as it emerged from the Kharkov conference of 1930 underwent some radical changes over the ensuing five years. Two events in par­tic­u­lar, or rather clusters of events, had an impact on both the composition of MORP (in terms of membership and leadership) and its aesthetic princi­ples. One such cluster, ostensibly of domestic import, began with the formation of the Soviet Writers’ Union in 1932 and a month l­ ater the promulgation of socialist realism as the “method” for Soviet lit­er­a­ture, and by extension for culture generally. The outlines of this new “ism” w ­ ere worked out over the next two years and promulgated at the First Congress of the Writers’ Union of 1934, in which canonical formulations of the new “method” ­were presented in the official speeches. With the decree establishing the Writers’ Union, a new platform emerged for Soviet lit­er­a­ture that brought the militantly proletarian orientation of the Kharkov conference to an abrupt end.1 In the Politburo decree of April 23, 1932, that established the Union of Soviet Writers, all in­de­pen­dent writers’ organ­izations ­were abolished, and RAPP, an or­ga­ nizer at Kharkov, explic­itly.2 Thereafter, though spokespersons still paid some lip ser­vice to “proletarian” lit­er­a­ture, it was often replaced in official speeches by “socialist.” MORP began to morph and become more inclusive. On August 5, 1932, Literaturnaia gazeta announced its “perestroika” aimed at bringing the organ­ization closer to the “fellow traveler” writers. The Secretariat was revamped; the RAPP-­ites that ran it ­were dismissed, and a leadership position

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was given to Sergei Tretiakov, who was much more ecumenical in his conception of MORP than his pre­de­ces­sors. Tretiakov promptly announced that in MORP t­ here should be individual “writer-­to-­w riter contacts” between writers of dif­fer­ent countries, in other words lateral connections, rather than vertical or top-­down, something he had already been ­doing himself in forging personal bonds with figures like Bertolt Brecht, Hanns Eisler, and John Heartfield during his time in Germany in 1930–1931 as a Soviet envoy.3 Not all aspects of Soviet and internationalist culture ­were liberalized in 1932–1934. The dramatic shift away from “proletarianization” was also ­toward greater centralization of Soviet lit­er­a­ture and the imposition of a standardized “method.” When the First Congress of the Writers’ Union was held in Moscow in August 1934, what the term for that method, “socialist realism” (coined in 1932), might mean was spelled out for the benefit of Soviet writers. But what it r­ eally entailed was largely established in practice. Given the absence of market forces as a ­factor, Soviet lit­er­a­ture evolved by copying officially endorsed models. With such repeated copying, socialist realism came to have at its core a number of literary conventions, particularly for depicting the “positive hero” or the class ­enemy. One might assume that, ­because the Soviet Union’s leaders and its cultural officialdom aspired to world symbolic hegemony, it was expected that leftists throughout the world would follow ­t hose models as well, but the par­tic­u­lar historical moment in which socialist realism was promoted as the method for Soviet lit­er­a­ture contrived to mute any calls for such aesthetic subordination by foreign writers. This historical moment was created by my second cluster of events, which dramatically altered the orientation of the literary international and helped create a more liberal approach to lit­er­a­ture. The shift was triggered by the coming to power of the Nazis in Germany in January–­March 1933. The Nazis soon began rounding up leftists of all stripes. The international left united in the antifascist cause, and writers flocked to join MORP-­a ffiliated bodies, which further blurred the distinction between the ecumene and the literary international. Thus the 1934 Writers’ Union Congress took place in the shadow of ­t hese events in Germany. Several major foreign writers participated, including André Malraux, who declared his bona fides to the congress by pointing out he had gone to Berlin on behalf of the imprisoned Georgi Dimitrov (the ­future head of the Comintern, who was one of t­ hose

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accused of starting the Reichstag fire). This statement was greeted by a standing and prolonged ovation from “the entire hall.” 4 The next year, 1935, was a high point for the literary international and the year of its broadest appeal. That year the antifascist Congress for the Defense of Culture was held in Paris on June 21–25. Malraux (together with Mikhail Koltsov) played a leading role in its conception and organ­ization, and delegates came from a broad range of countries and po­liti­cal persuasions (largely only the Trotskyites and some Surrealists ­were unwelcome); the list of t­ hose who attended includes Anna Seghers and Abolqasem Lahuti. At the congress, the International Association of Writers for the Defense of Culture (Association internationale des écrivains pour la défense de la culture) was founded as the successor to MORP. The association was formally based in Paris, though ­there was considerable Soviet direction of its operations. Within the Soviet Union, the business of r­ unning international lit­er­a­ture was transferred from Comintern bodies to the Foreign Commission of the Writers’ Union. The change was not as radical as it might seem in that the commission was headed by the same two who had been in charge of the MORP administration within the Comintern: Koltsov as head, with Tretiakov as his deputy. The next year, 1936, a smaller-­scale, interim conference of the association was held in London, followed by another congress in 1937, this time principally in embattled Republican Spain. Within the Comintern itself, 1935 saw an analogous shift to a more liberal platform. This had begun soon a­ fter the Nazi takeover in Germany but was promulgated at its Seventh Congress, held July 25–­August 31, in other words ­after the Paris writers’ congress. In response to the fascist threat, a less sectarian profile for the Comintern was announced at this congress, one that allowed greater po­liti­cal latitude among the membership and foresaw collaboration with virtually any group committed to opposing fascism, including Roman Catholics, for example. The two congresses of 1935, one in the literary field, the other in the po­liti­cal, ­were, then, interrelated, linked by a common concern with combatting fascism. For most of the 1930s, commitment to the antifascist cause became the glue that held together disparate writers in the one leftist literary movement. In practice, the broad composition of the MORP-­a ffiliated writers’ bodies meant that, or perhaps occurred ­because, they ­were given greater latitude in

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aesthetic m ­ atters. Nevertheless, a question hovered over its foreign members. ­Were they obliged to follow the precepts of socialist realism? At the First Congress of the Writers’ Union in 1934, Karl Radek, who delivered the official speech on foreign lit­er­a­ture, confronted them with a stark choice articulated in the heading of a subsection of his address: “James Joyce or Socialist Realism?” In other words, he called on them to choose between socialist realism and trends that ­today we would categorize as modernist. But actually, pace Radek, the mandated rejection of Joycean Modernism was not ­adopted by Eu­ro­pean leftist writers, and was even ignored by some Soviet officials; for a time, in 1935 and early 1936, Internatsional’naia literatura was publishing Joyce’s Ulysses in serial form, while some Western communists advocated following the literary models of Joyce as an exposer of cap­i­tal­ist iniquity.5 Foreign writers ­were generally expected to produce works that w ­ ere “social realist” rather than specifically socialist realist. They w ­ ere to provide critiques of capitalism or fascism (deemed an outgrowth of capitalism), but not necessarily to emulate the models of Soviet lit­er­a­ture. Some did, however. In Soviet sources the main criterion for a positive evaluation of a non-­ Soviet writer or work became the degree of their support for the antifascist cause or some affiliation with a body linked to the Moscow-­centered leftist literary network (the publication of Joyce’s Ulysses being an exception). In consequence, one finds some surprising inclusions in Internatsional’naia literatura. The most striking example would be the publication in 1935 of A ­ ldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), but as was stated explic­itly in an accompanying editorial comment, this was ­because he was “a participant in the Paris Congress for the Defense of Culture and had been elected a member of the Bureau of the International Association of Writers.”6 Most of the writers who belonged to organ­izations affiliated with the literary international proved reluctant to adopt ­wholeheartedly the rigid conventions of socialist realism and the demand of Radek and ­others that they diminish repre­sen­ta­tion of the individual psyche with a standardized, ritualized repre­sen­ta­tion of “heroes.” At the First Congress of the Writers’ Union, Malraux called for greater psychological realism and repre­sen­ta­tion of inner selfhood. He also came out against literary homogenization and literary “­recipes.” Alluding to the official, sloganistic definition of Soviet writers as “engineers of ­human souls,” he argued casuistically: “If writers are ­really en-

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gineers of ­human souls, then ­don’t forget that the highest function of an engineer is invention. Art is not subordination.”7 Even though Radek, in assessing foreign writers during his speech, awarded them merits and demerits on the basis of how implicated they ­were in the antifascist effort, at the same time he addressed aesthetic issues. But h ­ ere he oscillated between assuming that foreign lit­er­a­ture was in­de­pen­dent and needed only to show commitment to the antifascist and anti-­imperialist ­causes, and enjoining foreign writers to “imitate us.”8 His wavering on the issue illustrates some of the ambiguity that from the very beginning attended efforts to establish a literary international, and is embedded in Mikhail ­Pavlovich’s capsule formulation in his Baku speech that frames this book. In the speech, Pavlovich enjoined Eu­ro­pean leftists and the Asian downtrodden to “intermingle” in the ­great international ocean of poetry and knowledge. But the verb he used for intermingle, “perepletat’sia,” means literally “interweave.” ­Were the writers to merely “intermingle,” or w ­ ere they to “interweave,” as it w ­ ere, to create the one seamless cloth? How portable, anyway, was Soviet socialist realism beyond its borders? Clearly, the production novel, its mainstay, could not serve as a model for foreign leftist lit­er­a­ture, which was expected to expose capitalism, rather than chart its economic achievements. Th ­ ere was greater potential in the second most common subject ­matter of Soviet lit­er­a­ture, strug­gle and combat in the Civil War, but in Soviet treatment of this topic the strug­gle was conducted ­under the leadership of Party members, a theme that most foreign writers in the antifascist or anti-­imperialist movements w ­ ere loath to adopt in representing their strug­gle. ­There ­were limits to the applicability of Soviet socialist realist thematics, but Radek also identified specific aesthetic princi­ples that foreign writers ­were to “imitate.” “Realism,” Radek contended, entails not “random observations ­ hole.”9 from specific stretches of time” but “encompassing [okhvat] a gigantic w Fragmentariness and an emphasis on the contingent, common features of modernist lit­er­a­ture, ­were absolute anathemas, as they w ­ ere in the more thoroughly worked-­out “realist” aesthetic from the mid-1930s of Georg Lukács.10 Socialist realist novels w ­ ere to have a coherent narrative arc that, as I have argued elsewhere, was s­ haped by a de facto masterplot. The masterplot converted stories of feats in the area of production or in clashes with enemies into po­liti­cal allegories that recapitulated the basic historical progression as

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outlined in Marxist-­Leninist sources and si­mul­ta­neously affirmed that the Soviet Union was on a sure course to communism.11 This plot took the protagonist, the positive hero, from an initial state where his considerable ­potential was marred by a lack of self-­discipline and the correct po­liti­cal awareness through ever higher stages of po­liti­cal consciousness. But his po­ liti­cal maturation was guided by a mentor figure, who was ­either literally or meta­phor­ically a Party leader. The masterplot hung over foreign writers as a potential blueprint for organ­ izing their works. Many of them ignored it. ­Others deployed some of its conventions but fell short of bringing their plots to the standard resolution, the completion of the protagonist’s po­liti­cal Bildung. Elsewhere I have discussed examples of this from foreign lit­er­a­ture, such as Richard Wright’s ­Native Son (1940) and André Malraux’s novel about the Spanish Civil War, ­ ere published in Days of Hope (Espoir, 1938).12 In both cases, the novels w Internatsional’naia literatura, and are by writers who ­were in the 1930s or­ gan­i­za­tion­a lly implicated in Moscow’s literary international, but strug­gled to bring their plots to the expected resolution.13 What, then, of the Asian writers in the movement? How did they respond to the demand to prioritize the antifascist cause when the burning issue for them was how to gain in­de­pen­dence from the colonialist imperialists? The Paris Congress of 1935, attended largely by writers, called for forming an international antifascist ­people’s front and also an Anti-­Imperialist United Front, a two-­pronged effort. Though in the 1930s literary international bodies always included the strug­gle against colonialism in their platforms, however, overall the antifascist cause had priority. As we w ­ ill see in Chapter 8, Chinese leftist writers reconciled the competing ­causes by casuistically designating the invading Japa­nese “fascists.” For Indian writers, the subject of this chapter, t­ here was l­ ittle perceptible danger of a “fascist” takeover in their country. The prime concern of intellectuals was with wresting some form of national in­de­pen­dence from the British, the anticolonialist cause. Nevertheless, Indian writers w ­ ere also drawn to the growing, Moscow-­centered international literary movement, an inclination that was institutionalized precisely when its antifascist campaign was getting into high gear. This chapter ­w ill look at how the competing demands of the national and the trans-­or international played out in 1930s ­England and India among interconnected circles of writers.

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The year of the Paris Congress, 1935, is also when the Indian Progressive Writers’ Association (IPWA) was founded in London. Shortly thereafter IPWA voted to become affiliated with MORP’s successor, the International Association of Writers for the Defense of Culture. Somewhat counterintuitively, then, what became the leading Indian leftist literary organ­ization, dedicated to overcoming colonial rule, had been founded in London, the metropole of India’s hated colonial power, and was, at least in part as we ­shall see, godfathered by a number of En­glish leftists, who ­were mostly communists. ­There ­were historical reasons for this. In 1928, in the aftermath of the 1927 debacle in China, a big shake-up occurred in the Comintern, which extended to the Indian Communist Party. M. N. Roy, who opposed Stalin’s position on the debacle, was expelled from the Party and eventually returned to India. And in 1928, the Indian Communist Party was put u ­ nder the supervision of the Communist Party of G ­ reat Britain (CPGB). This meant that Indians in ­England, rather than, as before, Indians stationed in Berlin, Moscow, or Tashkent, became the key players in the literary international. ­After IPWA was founded, one of the leaders, Sajjad Zaheer (also rendered as Zahir) took the association’s manifesto back to India. In 1936 he launched IPWA as an Indian institution in Lucknow and visited other major cities, where he recruited for IPWA, attracting to its membership writers and intellectuals from all over India, who formed forty-­nine branches, so that it became the leading leftist intellectual organ­ization in the country.14 ­These cir­ ere cumstances of the IPWA’s founding did not mean that its members w ­doing the British communists’ bidding, and certainly not that they became subjects of any Soviet literary empire. This was not the case e­ ither for their British patrons. Christopher Hilliard maintains that among British Communist Party members of the interwar years “approaches to politics varied such that the idea of party members simply following ‘­orders from Moscow’ is un­ atters. tenable.”15 This qualification applies particularly to aesthetic m In presenting the complex dynamics of the literary world in ­England, where the Indian found­ers of IPWA w ­ ere initially based, my account w ­ ill further problematize the vertical and the horizontal models for the functioning of the literary international, by pointing to bi-­and multidirectional flows of ideas, texts, and literary models. This ­w ill buttress my argument that leftist writers oriented around Moscow’s literary international did not operate in an intellectual silo but overlapped and interacted with other, contiguous

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“thought zones.” As David Damrosch has argued, “A given writer or reader is likely both to inherit and to seek out a variety of networks of transmission and reception, engaging differently with works from each world.”16 Additionally, it w ­ ill consider the extent to which Indian leftist lit­er­a­ture of the 1930s was influenced by Soviet literary models, and by the masterplot of socialist realism in par­tic­u ­lar, and to what extent Indian writers scorned “James Joyce,” as Radek had stipulated. Despite the trajectory of IPWA from London to India, the story of its evolution and its aesthetic princi­ples is not about a pattern of exchange between a metropole (London) and a colonial outpost (India), nor is it one of the roles played by Soviet hegemonic narrative conventions in the development of anticolonial lit­er­a­ture. Nowhere is this complexity better demonstrated than in the ­career and writings of another founding member of IPWA, Mulk Raj Anand, an Indian writer who in the 1930s was at the same time a full-­fledged member of the British literary community of London. His works of the 1930s could not be categorized as socialist realist, yet in reviewing them we see a progression to greater realism and even the adoption of some stock conventions of socialist realism. Anand’s incorporation of Soviet conventions developed beyond using the odd plot function, which we saw in chapter 6 in the pre–­Writers’ Union Congress writings about China by Friedrich Wolf, Anna Seghers, and Mao Dun. He deployed key conventions of the masterplot more systematically than they had, and his plots came closer to following its narrative arc, though he still did not follow its contours fully. His novels are thematic and compositional hybrids. Some features are reminiscent of ­socialist realist conventions, but o ­ thers are more reminiscent of strategies deployed in their writings about China by authors such as Mao Dun, Seghers, and Wolf. This commonality suggests the emergence of non-­Soviet transnational narratives of colonialist oppression in Asia, which w ­ ere used by both Eu­ro­pean and Asian leftists, but ­were not the product of any coordinated effort.

Mulk Raj Anand and the British Literary Left Anand was the most celebrated of the writers in IPWA and in the 1930s enjoyed the reputation of being the best Indo-­Anglian writer of his generation.17 His two most famous novels, Untouchable (1935) and Coolie (1936), have been

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republished multiple times and by assorted presses throughout the world, including as Penguin classics, most recently in 2014 and 1994, respectively. Thus ­today, by David Damrosch’s criteria at any rate, he could be considered a figure of World Lit­er­a­ture: Damrosch contends that “a work only has an effective life as world lit­er­a­ture whenever, and wherever, it is actively pre­sent within a literary system beyond that of its original culture”—­though in Anand’s case it becomes problematical to identify any single “original culture.”18 But Anand’s biography and writings also illustrate the multiple allegiances of the found­ers of IPWA; he was implicated in the literary world of Britain as well as that of his native India, and also cultivated a relationship with Soviet cultural institutions. I should add that some accounts of IPWA stress the role not of Anand in its foundation and subsequent development but of Muslim writers. In par­tic­u ­lar, they emphasize the leadership of ­Zaheer, and sometimes date the association’s inception to the compilation of the anthology Angāre (Angaray, 1932), in which he was involved.19 But inasmuch as IPWA was at that time not yet formally constituted, and the Angāre group did not self-­identify as “progressive writers,” I consider this e­ arlier venture more a key part of IPWA’s prehistory. Anand, an impoverished Punjabi son of a minor official in the British army in India, arrived in London in 1924 as a student (University College London and then Cambridge for a doctorate in philosophy in 1929 with a dissertation on Bertrand Russell and the En­glish empiricists). So he was to some degree from the same world as leading British leftist writers, most of whom ­were Oxbridge products. He stayed in ­England for over two de­cades, returning to India permanently only in 1947.20 In London of the 1920s he became a darling of the Bloomsbury set and other Modernists, including ­Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, and E. M. Forster. He also began to write himself, at first short stories and essays, before attempting longer works. Anand’s early book Persian Painting of 1930, pre­sents a distinctly aestheticist position, alien to socialist realism. He attributes to Persian miniature artists a “joyous sense of freedom from the tyranny of real­ity,” adding that their work is “untainted by the brute real­ity of ugly facts” and that they had “acquired that secret power of impressing their thought on the symbol, which raises the static to the ecstatic.”21 Other themes in Persian Painting, however, underpinned much of Anand’s subsequent, more po­liti­c ally committed

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utterances. One of them is about Indian culture’s regaining its rightful high place in the world’s cultural hierarchy, a red thread r­ unning through many of Anand’s publications of the 1930s and also his interventions in the 1936 London writers’ conference. In this book he proposes that Asian art is capable of rivaling the Eu­ro­pe­an; experts concede that Persian art at its height was “better than anything Eu­ro­pean of that time,” and “oriental art was more highly developed.” It flourished ­under the Mughals, its highest point having been achieved in the work of Kamāl ud-­Dīn Behzād, whom Babur, the Mughal emperor of India, represents in his memoirs as “the most eminent of all paint­ers.”22 Anand’s positive evaluation of Mughal art is not only about Indian preeminence. Long an admirer of Muhammad Iqbal, who was to become the national poet of Pakistan, Anand points out that Persian art took off ­after the Mongol invaders brought with them examples of Chinese art, “a lucky day for Persia,” which brought about a cross-­fertilization resulting in a “Re­ nais­sance” of Persian art. In his overall narrative, then, we virtually have a pan-­Asian art movement, a dream of a vast transnational cultural space, but an Asian space, which was brought into being by vio­lence; he writes of the “horror” visited by Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, including “butcher[ing] 70,000 of a towns’ inhabitants.” Th ­ ese conquerors ushered in a cultural Re­ nais­sance, nevertheless, one that saw its apogee u ­ nder the Mughal emperor 23 Babur. Thus they ­were precursors in establishing a g­ reat transnational Asian cultural space, but not ­really a Eurasian one. The orientation of Anand’s Persian Painting is to the Mughal world, as distinct from the Sanskrit, another historical pre­ce­dent for a supranational Asian culture, as Sheldon Pollock has shown in The Language of the Gods in the World of Men (see the Introduction). But three years l­ater Anand published another book on Indian art, The Hindu View of Art, which provides a review history of its evolution, both the visual and the literary, ­going from the early Sanskrit texts forward in time. H ­ ere, Anand foregrounds the religious and spiritual as the prime mover and source of aesthetic criteria for Indian art, which is consequently “antirealist”; its “goal is the realization of the supreme ideal.” But he also, mustering a wealth of erudition, revisits the Aryanist thesis of Max Müller et al. (see Chapter 4), arguing that Hindu art represents a productive amalgamation of Aryan and Dravidian traditions.24 Anand concludes that, though the “lofty idealism” of Hindu art’s “original

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impulse” may have been polluted by superstition, “I believe that the truth conceived by the sages of ancient Indian thought and practiced by their followers through the ages is in the blood of India. It is an inheritance at birth from f­ather to son, and from son to son” and so “it ­w ill emerge intact one day—­one day when Indians search within their hearts for this truth, or lifting the veil of sensualism and materialism in which their pandering to alien ideals has enshrouded them.”25 The under­lying assumption of both books by Anand is the power of the aesthetic, which is also the principal assumption of Soviet cultural policy in the 1930s, though its formulators had ­little time for aestheticism. In Anand’s subsequent books, however, he dropped not only the aestheticism but also the antirealist and antimaterialist positions of ­these two books on art. He finished writing The Hindu View of Art in 1932, and his next major work, the novel Untouchable of 1935, chronicles a day in the life of a sweeper, in other words a latrine cleaner, a bouleversement in terms of subject ­matter from high to extremely low. Though in this book we still sense Anand’s commitment to the cause of India and refusal to accept colonialist condescension ­toward its culture, the informing mind-­set is in most other re­spects radically dif­ fer­ent. His ensuing novels are all about India and Indians, but they are presented in a quasi-­Marxist framework. At the same time, his plots are frequently inflected by an obsession of the Eu­ro­pean left of the time with fascism. Anand’s shift away from aestheticism could be attributed to many ­causes, including his increasing association with what might be described as the British cosmopolitan literary left. Though they never formed a coherent group, I am defining as a cosmopolitan literary left writers who may or may not have had some formal affiliation with MORP or its successor but who saw themselves as part of a greater world than was defined by Britain. In this re­ spect they bear comparison with the position of Boris Pilniak, discussed in Chapter 5. But, unlike him, they self-­identified as Eu­ro­pe­ans, a category especially prized at this time of fascist threat. Some w ­ ere members of the Communist Party, but most ­were not, though they toyed with Marxism and did not see communism or the Soviet Union as alien. The communist / noncommunist dividing line was at the time less rigid and consequential than it became ­later in the de­cade, and especially during the Cold War and beyond. Con­temporary Western historiography, still largely framed by Cold War

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assumptions, has tended to minimize their leftism and their relationship to the Soviet Union, as British writers who had participated in institutions of the literary international also tended to do in their postwar memoirs. The category leftist cosmopolitan applies particularly to a loose British literary group with which Anand associated in the 1930s, the Progressives.26 The British Progressives had a­ dopted this name in part to establish that they ­were not affiliated with any po­liti­cal party; “progressive” was a common term of the Popu­lar Front era for the left inclining (the Indian writers also labeled their literary organ­ization “progressive”). Disillusioned with the L ­ abor Party, the British Progressives, which included such well-­k nown intellectuals as W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day Lewis, Christopher Isherwood, and Edward Upward, ­were not a leftist bloc but an unaligned group that interacted with ­others in the mainstream of British lit­er­a­ture.27 They, however, rejected the esoteric and highly subjective art of the 1920s.28 The British leftist writers of the 1930s w ­ ere supported by a network of literary associations, publishers, and journals, which included the Left Book Club and the publishing h ­ ouses Victor Gollancz and Lawrence and Wishart.29 In February 1934 they established an organ­ization that gave their literary milieu some cohesion, the British Section of the Writers’ International (so named b ­ ecause the British conventionally referred to MORP as the International of Revolutionary Writers, or Writers’ International).30 The British Section had an outlet in Left Review, a highly influential journal that was launched in 1934 and was nominally its organ. The demarcation between Left Review and the British Communist Party was somewhat porous, though its contributors included, in addition to CPGB members, unaffiliated antifascists and leftists. It was Left Review that published the manifesto of IPWA in 1936.31 Anand, however, was more involved in another major periodical of the British literary left, New Writing, founded in 1936 and edited by John Lehmann. Lehmann, aesthete and gay (as ­were several core contributors to the journal), exemplifies the complex pattern of identity and aesthetic orientation that we have seen in the case of Anand. Though a convinced leftist, Lehmann was determined that his journal would redress what he viewed as Left Review’s overly partisan stance. He sought to chart an in­de­pen­dent course for the journal within British lit­er­a­ture. As he put it, “I wanted to avoid writing whose w ­ hole point was to prove a po­liti­cal moral, such as was already appearing in Left Review,” where “politics came, fatally first.”32 “I wanted a mag-

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azine in which lit­er­a­ture came first, with politics only as an undertone.”33 Though New Writing explic­itly did not want to have ties to any po­liti­cal party, it did have a po­liti­cal orientation to the antifascist movement. Lehmann also saw Left Review as too parochial and was determined that his journal would be “international.”34 Though periodically it published blocks of short works by En­glish “proletarian” writers, more strongly represented ­were nonproletarian authors from abroad—­France, Italy, Germany, Britain, Spain, Eastern Eu­rope, and the Soviet Union. The small group of writers who served as informal editorial advisers—­t he Progressives Isherwood and Auden, together with Ralph Fox—­were highly cosmopolitan and spent much of the 1930s living or traveling in dif­fer­ent places in continental Eu­rope (Berlin, Vienna, Paris, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, and Denmark). Lehmann was not just some dreamy-­eyed cosmopolitan. His journal had strong links with Moscow institutions, as the Rus­sian archives reveal, more so than Left Review, and he functioned as an intermediary between British leftist lit­er­a­ture and Soviet literary institutions.35 From at least 1935 u ­ ntil 1943, he ran a correspondence with Internatsional’naia literatura and with the Foreign Section of the Writers’ Union.36 He would forward to the journal poems and stories for pos­si­ble publication and published some of their material in his journal in return. Lehmann also published items in Internatsional’naia literatura on the activities of the Left Book Club, Left Review, and New Writing, and of their core writers. Yet Lehmann was no “agent of influence,” and ­t here was no Soviet money backing New Writing. In fact, the journal strug­gled to make ends meet and he to find publishers. Its main British contributors operated with a range of ­ ere gradu­ates of Oxford or Camvectors in the literary world. Most of them w bridge and had close connections with the writers of Bloomsbury. Lehmann himself worked with the Woolfs’ publishing venture, Hogarth Press, for much of the 1930s (in fact, New Writing appeared with Hogarth Press for a time), and he reports that he “worshiped [­Virginia] with burning devotion,” though his relationship with Leonard was fraught.37 ­Virginia and Leonard w ­ ere themselves difficult to categorize po­liti­cally, especially Leonard, who had worked in the British colonial ser­v ice in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), but had since written several books that critiqued colonialism. New Writing was also a supporter of the anticolonialist cause. The manifesto that opens its first issue proclaims, “new writing also hopes to represent the

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work of writers from colonial and foreign countries.”38 True to this assertion, the journal published items by several Asian authors, principally Chi­ ere about Asian nese and Indian, and many of the Soviet contributions w 39 rather than Rus­sian areas of the Soviet Union. New Writing, then, could be seen as presenting a sort of world lit­er­a­ture in miniature. But the writer most responsible for giving the journal an Asian dimension was Ralph Fox (1900– 1936), a communist. Fox was, however, also a cosmopolitan, like his fellows in New Writing, though the geo­graph­i­cal reach of his cosmopolitanism extended to Asia, as for the other advisers it essentially did not. A ­factor in Anand’s shift away from aestheticism was his meeting Fox. Fox, largely forgotten t­ oday, was an impor­tant figure of the left in 1920s and 1930s Britain, where he wore several hats. Besides playing a role in the editorial decisions of New Writing, he contributed to Left Review, which he cofounded.40 He was also a ­labor or­ga­nizer and journalist, who wrote on current events in the British l­abor movement for communist periodicals, and he was a CPGB functionary (he was both on its Central Committee and affiliated with the Comintern). In addition, he was a prolific author of texts on a huge range of subjects, literary, po­liti­cal, and ethnic. Fox had a close relationship with the Soviet Union, where he had three stints in residence in the 1920s, and also made a short visit in 1936. During each of his longer stays, though his Soviet affiliation was dif­fer­ent, he worked inter alia on or in Asia. In his first visit, 1922–1923, Fox was attached to the Friends Relief Mission in Samara helping with famine relief, but in the course of his duties spent five months living among the nomadic Kirghiz in Central Asia procuring ­horses for Rus­sian farmers in dire straits.41 He joined the Communist Party on his return, and for the second stint in Moscow of 1925 he was sent by the Central Committee of CPGB to work in the Comintern’s Colonial Department, as British sources call it (actually Vostochnyi otdel), concentrating on Indian affairs.42 And for his third stay, from 1929 to 1932, Fox was largely based in the En­glish subsection (Angliiskii kabinet) of the Marx-­Engels Institute (IMEL), where he researched materials for books he published a­ fter his return.43 At the time, one of IMEL’s tasks was to study and edit the Marx-­Engels Nachlass, including their statements on lit­er­a­ture, which appeared in early volumes of Literaturnoe nasledstvo (Literary Heritage).44 At the institute, Fox also wrote educational textbooks for the Lenin School and for the research division of the Soviet Party’s Central Committee on the

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history of the British ­labor movement and colonial policy of British imperialism. Additionally, he taught at KUTV from 1930, at the Lenin School from 1931, and from 1930 served in the bureau of the Party cell at IMEL.45 In other words, he was integrated into Soviet intellectual life as an expert on both Britain and the East. Unlike most of the British left of his time, Fox’s intellectual purview was Eurasia; during his stays in Moscow he worked and published on both Britain and Asia. In terms of Asia, while at IMEL, for example, he made a significant contribution to the debate over Marx’s Asiatic mode of production, debunked by Stalin (as discussed in Chapter 6) as part of his rethinking of policies on Asia a­ fter the 1927 China debacle, but espoused by Karl Wittfogel, who also visited Moscow while Fox was t­ here.46 At IMEL he also edited Marx’s letters on India that had been published in the New York Herald Tribune (and had appeared in Rus­sian in the institute’s journal Letopisi marksizma).47 And both in the 1920s and in the 1930s Fox published several books on Asia, some written while he was in Moscow: ­People of the Steppes (1925); the novel Storming Heaven (1928); The Colonial Policy of British Imperialism (1933), two versions of which appeared in Rus­sian, one of 1931 written while Fox was at the Marx-­Engels Institute in Moscow and an updated, fuller version of 1934; and Genghis Khan (1936), a book that emphasizes the conqueror’s role in opening up Eurasia (as did Viktor Shklovsky in his Marco Polo, published in the same year).48 ­Later, in 1936, Fox wanted to visit Mongolia to collect materials for a f­ uture book on that country, and already had British and American publishers lined up, but when he wrote to Comintern officials to get permission to go they refused him, citing infiltrators in the CPGB and the ominous intentions of the British government as regards Mongolia.49 Instead, he was sent to the Spanish Civil War. Th ­ ere he served as commissar to the British battalion, and ­there, soon ­after he arrived, in late December 1936, he was killed when making a quixotic dash through a hail of bullets. Fox’s acquiescing and g­ oing to Spain suggests that he was a dutiful member of the Comintern, and indeed many have commented that in the 1930s he seemed overly dogmatic, yet rec­ords show that the Soviet literary officials and the CPGB accorded him a leading role in its organ­ization somewhat u ­ nder 50 sufferance and looked at him and several of his publications askance. Perhaps the British communists tolerated him b ­ ecause he was associated with the Comintern, but part of the prob­lem was that his cognitive map, his

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intellectual purview, was broader than that of his superiors. Thus he provides an example of the many prominent but maverick figures in the literary international, a complicating ­factor for any attempt to posit smooth lines of transmission from center to periphery. Fox comes across as a somewhat idiosyncratic communist functionary who in many re­spects pursued his own passions and interests (in Mongolia, for example). His role in Anand’s ­career cannot be viewed as simply a case of top-­down influence from “Moscow” mediated by Fox. As to w ­ hether Fox inspired the shift in Anand’s writing, or w ­ hether Anand became more open to Fox’s influence ­after he made it, I could only speculate, but certainly the shift dates from around 1932, when Fox returned from his third spell in the Soviet Union (Anand finished The Hindu View of Art that year). In the crucial period of the mid-1930s when IPWA was formed, Fox acted as a mentor figure for its founding members in London, as they have all recalled in their memoirs.51 Their meetings ­were attended and occasionally addressed by, in addition to Fox, (Rupert) John Cornford and Christopher Caudwell; all three of them ­were highly educated En­glish writers and communist activists.52 The found­ers have somewhat whitewashed out of their memoirs what may have been a specifically communist affiliation for ­t hese meetings. The British Security Ser­vice archives contain an entry from Indian Po­liti­cal Intelligence, which suggests that “since the beginning of January 1934, meetings of the Indian Students’ Secret Communist Group have been held in London practically e­ very week. . . . ​On most occasions a lecture on advanced Marzian [sic] topics has been delivered by ralph fox (the well-­ known Communist author . . .).”53 Of course, t­ hose filing intelligence reports often found communist affiliation overly readily, especially “secret” affiliation, so one should not assume the group was necessarily specifically communist. Among the Indian writers, Anand was closest to Fox. Most of his novels of the 1930s appeared with the communist-­affiliated publisher Martin Lawrence and its successor Lawrence and Wishart, where Fox worked.54 Anand, more than the other cofound­ers of IPWA, was, though an intellectual committed to India and the strug­gle for in­de­pen­dence, at the same time incorporated in En­glish literary life and its leftist literary institutions. He acted as some sort of a broker between the British left and the Indian, serving, for example, as the point man in London when a group of Indians, including Subhas Chandra Bose, set up the Socialist Book Club of India,

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which would publish a number of texts that had appeared in Britain, principally ­those of the Left Book Club.55 But he did not travel to India shortly ­after IPWA was founded, as had Zaheer. Rather, he immersed himself in meetings and organ­izations that supported the antifascist cause, but also in the En­ glish literary scene. He published in several London literary journals besides New Writing and Left Review and was, from its very beginning, a member of the British Sector of the International Association of Writers for the Defense of Culture.56 Anand also went, as did Fox, an or­ga­nizer of the British contingent, as an observer from Britain to the Paris Congress for the Defense of Culture in 1935 and played an impor­tant role in the follow-up conference, held in 1936 in London (in fact, Lehmann in a letter to Anand of 1936 jokes that he was one of the rare assiduous attenders).57 But he also put out propaganda for the cause of Indian in­de­pen­dence. In other words, he was a transnational.

Mulk Raj Anand’s Trip to India in 1938 In 1938 Anand visited India, touring the country on behalf of IPWA. While ­there, he delivered the main address to its Second Congress that year, a locus classicus for the IPWA platform (the ­earlier, First Congress of May 1936 in Lucknow had been hastily called, and the speeches made to it are considered less canonical). At this congress, IPWA speakers confronted the task of defining what it might mean to be a “progressive” Indian writer in the second half of the 1930s. Was the IPWA a minor branch of the Eu­ro­pean antifascist movement in lit­er­a­ture, or was it dedicated to the strug­gle against Eu­ro­pean imperialism, in this specific case against the British occupation of India (and by extension British culture)? And, then, what might be the literary “method” or approach to be followed by Indian writers? ­Were they to adopt some form of socialist realism, or w ­ ere they to reject Eu­ro­pean literary norms in f­ avor of some revival of Indian traditions? Trying to find answers to such questions was further complicated by the fact that India did not have a single “Indian language” but had twenty-­two official languages (and many ­others besides), and many dif­fer­ent scripts. And ­t here ­were major differences in caste, ethnic group, and religious faith that divided even the “progressive” Indian writers. ­ ere Muslim and the overwhelming majority A sizeable number of them w did not write in En­glish.

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IPWA, as a part of the Popu­lar Front cultural movement, was expected to support the antifascist cause. In India, in 1937, about the same time as IPWA took root ­there, leading intellectuals established the Indian Committee of the League against Fascism in Calcutta, with Rabindranath Tagore as president, ­ thers and a series of manifestoes signed by Jawaharlal Nehru, Tagore, and o 58 ­were sent to the vari­ous antifascist congresses convened in Eu­rope. While, then, the members of IPWA ­were committed to ousting the British imperialists from India, while they ­were patriots, they w ­ ere also po­liti­cally aligned with ­those who dreamed of some postnational confederation (partly in reaction against the rabid nationalism and racism of the fascists). Nehru attended meetings of the Progressive Writers’ Association and Tagore continued to bless its activities, but Anand was in its early years a leading figure within it. Perhaps—­a colonialist cringe—­t he fact that he had been such a success in London gave him par­tic­u­lar authority. The speech he delivered to the Second Congress of IPWA, held in Calcutta in December 1938, is a curious document in that in it one can see how he tries to maneuver between the vari­ous pos­si­ble orientations of the association.59 In his speech he also strug­gles with the prob­lem of defining that elusive concept, “India.” In some sections of the speech, Anand addresses the prob­lem of how to nationalize the dif­fer­ent regional lit­er­a­tures by subsuming them u ­ nder a single, pan-­ Indian lit­er­a­ture. Another prob­lem in trying to establish a “progressive” All-­Indian lit­er­a­ture was the lack of a common script. One existing, partial solution promoted at the congress by Anand was the adoption of an alternative, Indo-­Roman script, though—­again the prob­lem of colonial authority—­ this script had been designed by two British scholars, Sir George Grieson or Mr. J. B. Firth. As we have seen, the latinization of the national script was a mea­sure that in the 1920s had been undertaken in Turkey, among Chinese leftists, and for many Soviet ethnic minorities (though ironically, at that very moment, the script of several Soviet minority ­peoples was being converted to a Cyrillic alphabet). Anand pointed to the Soviet pre­ce­dent, saying, “The development of minority cultures in Rus­sia ­w ill give an example to our regionalists of how extensively lit­er­a­ture can grow up in a very short time.”60 Standardizing a script might have proved an easier task than standardizing a lit­er­a­ture. ­There ­were fierce rivalries between the vari­ous lit­er­a­tures, and especially between the Hindi and Bengali traditions, not to mention that many prominent in IPWA wrote in Urdu (the IPWA had its greatest success

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among intellectuals of Northern India and was somewhat scantily represented in the South). Anand, the g­ reat internationalist, at times betrayed something of a hegemonic impulse, insisting that among the vari­ous lit­er­a­ tures of India “the preeminent contribution of Bengal must be recognized,” continuing, “Bengal has a longer tradition of creative activity in the arts and lit­er­a­ture,” and—­here invoking class to bolster his argument—­“unlike ­middle class writers of Northern India [read Hindi India] Bengali writers sell more” (he himself was a Punjabi).61 Then ­t here was the prob­lem of reconciling the movement in India and the Eu­ro­pean movements, with which it was aligned, while yet maintaining a focus on the strug­gle against the imperialists. One striking feature of Anand’s speech is the way he tries to maneuver between identifying the IPWA with the international antifascist effort and the Spanish Civil War, to which leftist internationalists w ­ ere then turning most of their attention (several Indian intellectuals fought for the Republican side), and the national, anticolonialist (and therefore potentially anti-­European) cause in India. Anand did so principally by identifying colonialist oppression with fascist oppression. He seized on the fact that the concentration camp had been in­ven­ted by the British during the Boer War in an effort to somehow link the Indians’ campaign against British rule with the Eu­ro­pe­ans’ cause of combatting fascism.62 When Anand turned his attention to India exclusively, he faulted the colonial era for bringing about a “breakdown of our old social values, literary codes and grammars,” effectively referring to the educational policies of Lord Macaulay and o ­ thers in the mid-­nineteenth c­ entury who had sought to repress vernacular languages and lit­er­a­tures, replacing them with what they saw as a higher culture, the En­glish. “The invisible war that has been waged upon our national existence for a ­century and a half” is “coming to a head,” Anand asserted, and “if we do not unite” “in a new united Cultural Front in this country,” “we are doomed to a more prolonged slavery through which we as a nation and our culture w ­ ill lapse and be forgotten forever.”63 However, Anand in this speech showed no enthusiasm for the cult of the ancient Sanskrit texts and the Indian religious traditions, which he now saw as a cause of the dangerous divisions within the country that threatened in­de­pen­dence. Also, though he opposed British policies in anglicizing education, forcing out Indian culture, he was in a strange position in that he himself wrote in En­ glish and was in effect integrated into the En­glish world of letters.

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Anand’s Novels of the Thirties This hybrid nature of Anand’s literary identity is reflected in his novels of the 1930s. For most of them, in depicting the conditions in which his characters live and work, he drew on empirical sources that are anti-­imperialist but are neither Soviet nor communist. Rather, they are similar to ­those used to depict working conditions in China by German and Chinese leftist authors, such as Friedrich Wolf and Mao Dun, so much so that one could talk of an emerging pan-­Eurasian, but not specifically communist, standard account of the oppressed Asian worker suffering ­under colonialist or semicolonialist, cap­i­tal­ist rule. At the same time, Anand in his interwar novels comes much closer than ­t hese other authors did to following the general contours of the masterplot, though he deftly shies away at his novels’ conclusions from bringing them to its standard plot resolutions. During the early years of the IPWA, Anand published his first four novels, Untouchable (1935), Coolie (1936), Two Leaves and a Bud (1937), and The Village (1939). All four, as two of their titles suggest, are about the lives of lower-­ class Indians. The year that IPWA was founded, 1935, Anand published Untouchable, an exposé of the treatment meted out to this lowly subcaste, told from the point of view of a young “sweeper” (latrine cleaner). This novel, which he began writing in the late 1920s, shows the least sign among them of specifically socialist realist influence, though he acknowledges its debt to Rus­sian leftist sources. In it, Anand takes the reader through a day in his sweeper’s life, touching on the repeated humiliations to which he is subject, his abject existence, and the details of how he cleans the latrines. Potentially, then, this novel was an example of precisely the sort of “social realism” (very approximately socialist realism without its Bolshevik perspective) adapted to Indian conditions and culture that Anand was to advocate for IPWA lit­er­a­ ture in his speech of 1938. But in fact the novel was written over a number of years, between 1928 and 1932, in other words beginning in the late 1920s when Anand began to hang out with leading Modernists in London. As he tells the story of the novel’s genesis, he was influenced by several of them but particularly by James Joyce’s two most famous novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses.64 The latter novel suggested the strategy Anand ­adopted of following his protagonist through a single day, but many critics insist that Joyce had a more fundamental impact on Anand’s novel, alleging

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that he used Joyce’s hallmark stream of consciousness technique (though this is also to be found in ­Virginia Woolf ’s writings).65 Jessica Berman, for example, in claiming Anand for Modernism declares that “in 1922, when he first read Joyce, devouring both Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses . . . ​Anand picked up the mantle of experimental modernism, re-­created it for the Indian context, and used it to elaborate a complex, rooted cosmopolitanism that would intervene directly in the prob­lem of Indian justice.”66 But actually some stories in Angāre also used such modernist techniques as stream of consciousness and nonlinear plot structure.67 In fact, I would argue that Berman’s conclusion applies largely only to Untouchable and that Anand’s writing evolved ­after that more ­under the influence of Fox and the “progressive movement” of the thirties, drawing farther away from the Modernists who had been his associates more in the 1920s, and acquiring something of an orientation t­ oward Soviet writing (though he never joined the Communist Party). Even in Untouchable, however, Anand’s projection of his sweeper Bakha’s inner thoughts does not r­ eally approach Joycean stream of consciousness in that his thoughts are not random and associative and they are presented without Joyce’s characteristic unmotivated jumps from one topic to another. In writing Untouchable, Anand was also influenced inter alia by Gorky, as he stated explic­itly. In 1922 in prison, he had read Gorky’s prerevolutionary novella Creatures That Once ­Were Men (Byvshie liudi) of 1897 (other versions have it that Fox gave it to him to read some time ­after Fox returned to ­England in 1932).68 This novella concerns down-­a nd-­outs in a doss-­house, most of them alcoholics. It chronicles their misery, their bouts of drinking, their spats, and how whenever one of their number manages to rise in the world, he generally succumbs to the ­bottle again or for some other reason sinks back into dire poverty. The residents bond together and conspire to force some money out of their landlord, who owns the neighboring factory, but the proj­ect misfires, and in the end, when the teacher among them dies, the narrator makes it clear that death, or a prison stint in Siberia, might be preferable to their miserable existence. In other words, though t­ here are some gestures t­ oward a condemnation of the exploiting classes, and ­toward class bonding, no way out is shown. The plot of Gorky’s novella does not match that of Untouchable entirely, in that alcoholism is not a f­actor in the lives of the Indian down-­ and-­out. But Anand’s depiction of the unremitting despair in the lowest reaches of society may indeed be indebted to Gorky. Additionally, Anand

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a­ dopted for the ending of Untouchable the strategy Gorky used in ending his play The Lower Depths (1902), that of providing three alternative pos­si­ble (though actually not feasible) routes out of his characters’ dire situation. ­ ere not only Euro-­Russian. In the case of Untouchable, the influences w Anand has recalled in several sources that he was so taken by Gandhi’s story about an Indian sweeper named Uka that he was inspired to return to India in early 1929 and visit Gandhi in his ashram at Sabarmati, where he showed Gandhi the manuscript of his novel. Gandhi responded in most scathing terms, advising Anand to cut out one hundred pages, “especially where he [the sweeper] thinks like a Bloomsbury intellectual.”69 Anand took Gandhi’s advice, simplifying and streamlining the text. Berman is skeptical that t­ here was any expunging of the Joycean passages, but as Anand himself has speculated in his reminisces, “Perhaps the depth came from Gandhi’s Ashram, ­because I learnt to clean latrines myself ­t here, ­after discarding my Bloomsbury corduroy suit, as Gandhi had said I ‘looked like a monkey.’ ”70 We might add another layer of complexity: Anand’s reverence for Gandhi was not shared by Fox, who, in his Colonial Policy of British Imperialism (first published in Rus­sian in 1931 as a product of his stay in IMEL and then in En­ glish in 1933), charged that in 1922 Gandhi had given in to the En­glish government and “betrayed” the Indian proletariat, becoming a “reactionary” and an “agent of En­glish imperialism.”71 Anand’s novel, though it describes just a single day in the life of a single, downtrodden boy, essentially uses this focus to air the general prob­lems of caste and poverty in India. At the end of Untouchable, in a somewhat contrived scene, Anand has his naïve young protagonist, Bakha, confronted in rapid succession by three alternative solutions to his intolerable situation. First, he stumbles across a mass gathering that is addressed by Gandhi, who pre­sents what is effectively a version of Gandhi’s story about Uka that he used in his speech to the 1921 Suppressed Classes Conference in Ahmadabad, in which he urged his audience to transcend caste and allow the untouchable some dignity.72 While Bakha is still pro­cessing Gandhi’s remarks, he overhears a second possibility in the commentary of a highly Westernized “fair-­complexioned Mussulman dressed in the most smartly-­cut En­glish suit he had ever seen.”73 Snehal Shingavi has unpacked the references in this section of the novel, and though the speaker is called R. N. Bashir, Shingavi points to the giveaway

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detail of the “monocle in his left eye” in speculating that Bashir stands for  Muhammad Ali Jinnah.74 The supercilious Bashir is dismissive of Gandhi—­“He is in the fourth ­century B.C. with his swadeshi and his spin­ ill ning wheel”; “the peasant who believes this world to be maya (illusion) w not work the machine.”75 Then the third possibility is presented by Bashir’s interlocutor, a “young man with a delicate feline face . . . ​dressed in flowing Indian robes like a poet’s.” His name, which has the improbable combination Iqbal Nath Sarshar (improbable ­because it combines names from dif­ fer­ent faiths), has been taken by Shingavi to indicate that he stands for a conflation of three writers: Muhammad Iqbal, Ratan Nath Sarshar, and Rabindranath Tagore.76 Anand uses “Sarshar” to critique Eu­ro­pean notions of Indian belief systems propagated by the Indo-­Europeanists and Theosophists: “We ­don’t believe in the other world as t­ hese Eu­ro­pe­ans would have you believe we do. . . . ​The Victorians misinterpreted us. It was as if, in order to give a philosophical background to their exploitation of India, they ingeniously concocted a nice l­ ittle fairy story.” At the same time, Sarshar makes a claim for Indian superiority over the Eu­ro­pean precisely ­because of their “six thou­ ecause the Indians are not like the Eu­ro­pe­ans, sand years of tradition,” and b who “­were barbarians and lost their heads in the worship of gold.” Though Sarshar does not like machines, he proposes that the machine may provide a way out of Indian backwardness and its oppressive caste system, particularly for the lowly Untouchable, whose lot as a sweeper could be obviated by the adoption of the flush toilet, a remedy that Shingavi identifies with Nehru’s advocacy of modernization as the solution to India’s prob­lems.”77 At this point in the narrative, however, the two interlocutors walk away, and though Bakha feels some exhilaration at the possibility of the flush toilet, essentially he is to resume his way of life, and t­here is no resolution provided to his, or India’s, prob­lems. Untouchable did not impress many of Anand’s Bloomsbury friends. Anand in fact, by his account, had been driven to write the novel when he overheard Edward Sackville-­West remark, “­There can be no tragic writing about the poor! They are only fit for comedy, as in Dickens! The canine ­can’t go into ­ irginia Woolf reproached him for bother­ing lit­er­a­ture.”78 ­After it appeared, V to write about such a low-­class, uneducated subject.79 It should be noted, perhaps, that Woolf had a ­family background in colonialism on her ­mother’s side, where several relatives had served as administrators in India. Also,

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Anand had a g­ reat deal of difficulty finding a publisher for Untouchable, and it was accepted only a­ fter E. M. Forster agreed to write a preface. Forster, like Fox, was close to Anand and an antifascist activist; he was the president of the newly founded National Council of Civil Liberties and chairman of the British del­e­ga­t ion to the 1935 Paris Congress.80 But Forster was neither a communist nor a communist sympathizer, and with his highly ironic style he could not be construed as inclining in the direction of socialist realism. Anand’s next novel, Coolie, was written in 1936 over a period of a mere three months and accepted by Lawrence and Wishart without hesitation.81 It shows how he was clearly developing his literary talents in another direction, away from High Modernism. Anand was not only moving to the left but also becoming specifically more Marxist. He had begun reading Marx before, starting around 1926, where in leftist study circles he was introduced inter alia to Capital, and to assorted Leninist texts such as Materialism and Empirio-­criticism, Imperialism as a Higher Stage of Capitalism, and The Infantile Disorder of Leftism.82 But the impact on him of Marx’s writings was greater in the 1930s. Around 1932 he read Marx’s “Letters on India” of 1853 (not coincidentally, perhaps, 1932 was the year Fox returned from a stint in Moscow, where he had worked on t­ hese letters). Anand was so impressed by the letters that he edited them for publication, along with other materials on colonialism from Marx and Engels.83 That Marxism was now more in Anand’s purview is reflected in Coolie. In fact, in his l­ ater reminiscences about Fox published in Internatsional’naia literatura, Anand wrote: “I can recall how on an eve­ning at his publishers he proposed that I write a novel about a young proletarian Indian, who managed through self-­education to reach an understanding of Marxism and on his return to India he is thrown into prison, where he is literally killed by starvation.”84 Coolie does not follow that plot outline exactly, but it does show a progression by the protagonist from villa­ger to proletarian and a corresponding progression in his po­liti­cal awareness. It also has a tragic ending. In this novel, the condemnation of the effects of the caste system Anand presented in Untouchable has been replaced by a critique of Indian society in terms of class. The novel demonstrates that t­ here is no necessary connection between caste and economic status; t­ hose of high caste can live in desperate poverty. Caste is no longer absolutely determining ­because t­ here are essen-

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tially two categories of p ­ eople, the exploiters and the exploited. The par­tic­ u­lar coolie who is the central character in this novel, Munoo, is in fact a Kshatriya (i.e., of the second-­highest caste, as was Anand himself), but is reduced to extreme poverty; one of his acquaintances who is but a lowly servant is of the highest, Brahmin, caste.85 In attempting to pinpoint the aesthetic princi­ples that guided Anand in writing Coolie and subsequent novels, one would do well to look at Fox’s The Novel and the ­People, published posthumously in 1937, but which Fox walked ­ eople provides a Anand through as he was writing it.86 The Novel and the P contrast with Forster’s Aspects of the Novel (1927), better known t­ oday while Fox’s book is virtually unknown, but in the late 1930s it was an impor­tant text for British leftists.87 The Novel and the ­People is, in most of its positions, close to t­ hose taken by Lukács in his articles of the 1930s that together formed a canonical account of the nature and evolution of realism and socialist realism. This closeness to Lukács could be accounted for by the fact that he and Fox overlapped at IMEL for a time. Perhaps for this reason, when a Rus­sian translation of Fox’s book was published in the Soviet Union in 1939, it was reviewed positively by Lukács. However, the positions in their two sets of writings on aesthetic questions differed in some crucial re­spects, as we ­shall see. Tellingly, Lukács in his review criticizes Fox on the few points he made that diverged from Lukács’ own.88 Coolie also has a dif­fer­ent plot type as compared with Untouchable. Rather than confine the action to the one place and a time span of a mere eigh­teen hours, as in the ­earlier novel, Coolie has its protagonist, Munoo, move around much of the country over an extended period of time. His peripatetic existence takes him from childhood in a minor, impoverished village, to working as a degraded servant of a lowly Indian bank clerk in a small provincial town, to working for a small factory in a larger provincial town, to working in a cotton mill in the g­ reat metropolis of Bombay; in other words, Munoo’s life course somewhat follows India’s own historical progression from a primarily rural country to one that has a pronounced urban and industrial sector, pointed to in Marx. “Coolie” is a term for an unskilled laborer, but the category ranges in its application from the agricultural laborer to the factory worker, so that it is applicable to Munoo in all ­t hese occupations. The recurrent use of the term in the novel and its highlighting in the title points to the fact that no m ­ atter how much Munoo might pro­g ress in terms of being

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incorporated into a modern world, he remains one of the downtrodden, expendable and oppressed. Coolie is more openly concerned with Indian politics than Untouchable, especially ­after Munoo moves to Bombay. He soon begins working at the mill as the result of a chance encounter with a fellow peasant, Hari, who has brought his ­family to the city to work ­t here. Hari and his ­family represent a benevolent version of the traditional Indian peasant, but once Munoo begins working at the mill he becomes friends with another worker, Ratan, who is po­liti­cally engaged and encourages Munoo to convert his frustrations with the oppressive conditions ­there into action. The situation of the mill workers reaches a crisis point when their hours are reduced (to avoid losses for the shareholders in the wake of the economic downturn with the recession—­ shades of Friedrich Wolf’s and Mao Dun’s accounts of the situation in Chinese factories covered in Chapter 6). This threatens to throw them over the economic precipice above which they have been teetering all along. In ­t hese sections the activism of the Red Flag Union, that is, the Indian trade ­union oriented ­toward Moscow, is contrasted with the passivity and accommodating stance of the All-­India Trade Union (­here again t­ here is an analogous pattern in Wolf’s Tai Yang erwacht). The strike is not destined to happen. The mill workers are not to be liberated from degradation and suffering. As they are about to vote for a strike, someone spreads the rumor (prob­ably at the instigation of the cap­i­tal­ists) that the Muslims are kidnapping Hindu ­children. An ugly riot breaks out in which Muslims and Hindus butcher each other. The next day the workers return to their factory, totally cowed. As for Munoo, by a fortuitous circumstance he is extracted from the melee by a benevolent Eurasian w ­ oman, who had inadvertently knocked him over with her car, and who takes him to Simla in the mountains to be her servant. ­There, however, it emerges that he has tuberculosis, and he wastes away. Munoo dies just as he has received a letter from Ratan inviting him to return to Bombay and take a minor position in the ­union. In other words, rather as in Untouchable, Anand gestures in the direction of pos­si­ble resolutions to the dire circumstances of India’s poor, in this case by communist activism, but shies away from taking his characters to all-­out commitment. In Coolie one also sees a shift in the composition and themes of the novel that bring it closer to the conventions of socialist realism than Untouchable.

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Most of Anand’s novels in this period follow the life of a young man of g­ reat potentiality. Munoo, for example, loved school and had some propensities that might have destined him to become an engineer ­were he not a victim of grinding poverty and a cruel social system. His c­ areer is constructed as a tale of Bildung in which his biological and social maturation parallels a maturation in po­liti­cal consciousness (Anand periodically takes time out of the narration to comment on the stage his hero has reached in this pro­cess).89 Munoo in the early sections is full of childish exuberance, leading him to take some ill-­considered steps, but as he gains in maturity he also becomes increasingly mature po­liti­cally; in this way the novel resembles a standard Soviet socialist realist novel with its road-­to-­consciousness plot.90 At the factory Ratan functions as a mentor, helping further Munoo’s po­liti­cal education to the point where, when the issue of ­whether to strike or not arises, Munoo is completely on the side of the Red Flag Union. In the standard socialist realist novel the narrative would end ­either in a triumph (a military victory or the completion of some economic proj­ect or construction) or in the tragic death of a comrade as a martyr to the cause. Munoo’s death was of course tragic ­because he was still only in his late teens, but his was not the death of a po­liti­cal martyr but rather the death of a victim of the rapaciousness of the cap­i­tal­ist entrepreneurs, who scrimp on providing hygienic, dry accommodation for their workers and on paying them enough to feed themselves properly. Another, and striking, way this novel deviates from the conventions of socialist realism is in the treatment of sex. Like many leftist writers in Britain and on the Continent, Anand effectively ignored one par­tic­u­lar stipulation in Andrei Zhdanov’s canonical account of socialist realism delivered at the First Congress of the Writers’ Union—­t hat sex scenes, which he euphemistically categorized as “physiologism,” be eliminated altogether from Soviet lit­ er­a­ture. Most British leftists, on the contrary, saw sexual prudery and censorship as a “bourgeois” trait and even ran under­ground distribution of some steamy banned books such as D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover.91 ­ eople emphasized the importance of deRalph Fox in The Novel and the P picting a novel’s protagonist as a “living man,” a man of flesh and blood, not some plaster-­cast saint or titanic hero.92 Anand effectively took a similar position. In Coolie, Ratan is far from the zealous ascetic of the Soviet novel: he drinks to excess and frequents the brothels. As for Munoo, Anand charts his

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po­liti­cal awakening in parallel to the boy’s sexual awakening. One should be wary of overassigning influence to Fox in the repre­sen­ta­tion of sex, however. The ­earlier collection Angāre by Urdu writers, many of whom w ­ ere ­later active in IPWA, caused an uproar ­because of its explicit depictions of sexuality, and it was banned in 1933.93 Also, Freud was a preoccupation of the Bloomsbury set, in which Anand had a minor presence; James Strachey (Lytton Strachey’s younger ­brother) was, together with his wife, Alix, Freud’s main En­glish translator. Sex and politics mix more overtly in Anand’s next novel, Two Leaves and a Bud, one rarely covered in Western commentary. ­Here the setting is a tea plantation in Assam run by an En­glish planter and his ­family, with an En­ glish overseer. The central plot concerns the fate of an Indian, Gangu, typically for Anand an impoverished Punjabi peasant, though in this case an ­el­derly one, who is recruited to work on the plantation by an agent who lures him with false promises. Once ­t here, Gangu soon learns that he is in effect an indentured laborer. He strug­gles to feed his f­amily, and his wife dies of malaria. A stark contrast is set up between the life of the coolies and that of the En­glish planter and his ­family, whose idle existence is largely confined to tennis, polo, cards, and the club. Though well-­meaning in their self-­image, they are thoroughly imbued with the racist mentality of the En­glish colonialist and cap­i­tal­ist exploiter. This book was by and large a failure, perhaps ­because the po­liti­cal message is presented in such a heavy-­handed way. Anand himself said in his preface to the second Indian edition: “[I] was biased in ­favor of my Indian characters and tended to caricature the En­glish men and En­glish ­women who play such a vital part.”94 In short, he had not learned from Fox and Engels. Among the novel’s characters, Reggie, the planter’s assistant and field man­ ag­er, is drawn with the darkest pen and is outright sadistic. He has delusions about being a Napoleon figure as he rides around the fields on his ­horse, cracking his whip, the revolver ever ready on his b ­ elt. In the end, Reggie tries to force his attentions on Gangu’s d ­ aughter Leila and comes to their h ­ ouse. When Gangu arrives on the scene, summoned by his son to save the ­daughter, Reggie shoots him dead, but a subsequent trial with an all-­European jury, save for two, acquits him. The plot of the novel, then, exposes the falsehood of the British imperialists’ claim to a “civilizing mission.” Exploitation, an interest in sheer profit, and racism trump any concern for amelioration of the

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plight of the indigenous workers, even the most sensible and least costly mea­ sures. And in the figure of Reggie, the British are shown to be more “barbaric” than the Indians. Not all the En­g lishmen in the novel are caricatures, however. ­There are positive En­glish characters in most of Anand’s novels of the thirties; in Coolie, for example, one of the Red Flag Union organizers is En­glish (in historical actuality ­there w ­ ere three). Analogously, in Two Leaves and a Bud an En­glish protagonist plays a positive role. This novel is the one exception to the rule that Anand’s novels feature protagonists who are young men shown in the pro­cess of developing a po­liti­cal consciousness. H ­ ere ­t here are two protagonists, and neither is shown to pro­gress to a significant degree. One of them is Gangu, who with his f­ amily essentially represents the old India, superstitious and with ­little consciousness. While at the plantation Gangu gains some degree of po­liti­cal awareness, largely during visits to his neighbor Narain, who gathers the coolies in his hut in the eve­nings to discuss re­sis­tance and ­unionization. Narain is, however, only a shadowy figure in the novel, unlike the second central character, the po­liti­cally engaged En­g lishman John Le Havre, who is a medical officer. It is he who persuades the coolies to riot, for which he is subsequently fired. Their revolt is suppressed in an overkill: military planes swoop down over the rioters and terrify them into subjection. This improbable scene, arguably, draws on the example of the terrifying German Condor Legion in the Spanish Civil War, whose pi­lots developed methods of strategic bombing, their most infamous operation being the bombing of Guernica. Le Havre is a positive character. He spends his time in a laboratory on the plantation and petitioning the government for funds to funnel clean w ­ ater from the hills to the coolies, an inexpensive way of eradicating the recurrent and deadly bouts of cholera. But to no avail. Thus in a sense he represents Marx’s notion that “Eu­ro­pean science,” the secular knowledge of what he identifies as a superior civilization, can cure the backwardness and the misery of India, another and less symbolic version of the flush toilet in Untouchable. Le Havre is a sort of Bolshevized Bazarov figure (the protagonist of Ivan Turgenev’s novel ­Father and Sons of 1862), a man of science who, like Bazarov, falls in love with a ­woman of higher station—in this case the planter’s ­daughter, Barbara—­but in the end she rejects him. Though, then, this relationship could be read as influenced by Rus­sian models, t­here are other

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dimensions to their relationship. For Le Havre’s encounters with Barbara, Anand inserts purple passages about his accesses of passion that seem lifted from another of Anand’s British associates, D. H. Lawrence, such as, “A wild wave surged over the dark chambers of his mind,” somewhat overdoing Fox’s call for a “living man.”95 Barbara demands that Le Havre decide ­whether he ­w ill ­favor the “revolution” or her; in the end she makes the decision for him, and sides with her world of the planter, so that he w ­ ill return alone to ­England—­and presumably revolutionary activity. ­These novels are, despite such highly fictional and even melodramatic aspects of their plots, heavi­ly fact-­based. In Two Leaves, for example, the Reggie drama in all its salient details actually recapitulates the well-­k nown Khoreal case, where an assistant man­ag­er of the Khoreal Tea Garden, Reginald William Leonard Reed, shot Gangadhar Goala, a coolie, on May 25, 1920. A ­ fter the killing, Reed went off unruffled as if nothing had happened and was acquitted by an all-­European jury. This case was reported in an article in the Modern Review, a trendy journal among Indian intellectuals, and possibly Anand’s source.96 In this novel, and in Coolie, Anand also drew on a number of published reports made by En­glish doctors and politicians sent to investigate conditions in colonial India. The three main sources he used, together with material from the Modern Review, are A. A. Purcell and J. Hallsworth’s Report on ­Labour Conditions in India (1928), V. H. Rutherford’s Modern India: Its Prob­ lems and Their Solution (1928), and the Whitley Report on conditions in India (1931). The Whitely Report was actually compiled by a Conservative, if a socially conscious one, and the other authors w ­ ere members of the ­Labour 97 Party. ­These publications, then, are not communist. Moreover, in them the authors praise the work of the All-­India Trade Union Congress, in Coolie a traitor to the cause, and simply omit mention of the Red Flag Union, idealized in the novel. Yet Fox, too, draws extensively on t­ hese sources in his Colonial Policy of British Imperialism (Anand also used this book by Fox, especially for his account of living conditions for workers and of how Hindu-­Muslim clashes undermine the ­labor movement).98 Though Fox’s book was inflected by Marxism, it also provided an impor­tant source on India for Soviet scholars, administrators, and politicians. We see h ­ ere, then, not just a unidirectional flow, but bi-­and multidirectional flows of ideas having an impact on members of the literary international.

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It is thanks to t­ hese British sources that, in writing about the world of the Bombay textile mills in Coolie, Anand was able to provide a g­ reat deal of specific detail—of the sort Wolf garnered from similar sources when writing Tai Yang erwacht. The reader learns about the methods of hiring, the underpayment of wages, and contracts that render the workers virtually indentured, and the crowded and unsanitary conditions in which the mill o ­ wners and their “jobbers” (foremen and l­abor recruiters) accommodate the mill workers, while nevertheless charging exorbitantly, as do the stores that provision the workers, leaving them on the edge of financial ruin for the duration of their employment. Anand’s account of the strike is partly based on the Meerut affair of 1929, which culminated in the arrests and trial of Indian po­liti­cal activists, and three Britons for an alleged conspiracy. Their fate exercised leftist internationalists throughout the world and “became a global passion among the committed” in a movement comparable with “Hands off China” campaign discussed in Chapter 6.99 In Britain, the Workers’ Theatre Movement toured the country in 1932 with Meerut, a play staged with the agitprop vogue of mass declamation, where the voice serves as the vehicle of solidarity (cf. Nâzim Hikmet’s readings discussed in Chapter 1).100 Anand is also said to have conflated details of the Meerut affair with ­those of the General Strike of 1926, the largest industrial dispute in Britain’s history, which particularly impressed him when he first arrived in Britain. In other words, in this novel readers are given a generic, transnational strike, even though the account is also based on a­ ctual facts specific to India. To some extent Anand’s distillation of ­t hese events follows Marx’s text about India of about eighty years ­earlier (and which Fox, who had worked on it in Moscow, likely recommended to him), including his analy­sis of the “revolution” brought about by the En­glish. The novel illustrates the general point that the Indians have produced their own exploiting class, who are no less rapacious and venal than the British and essentially support the British order. Mao Dun presented a similar analy­sis in his Midnight (see Chapter 6). In Coolie, the mill’s owner is an Indian, and ­t here are recurrent references to the situation at the Tata mill at Jamshedpur (the Tatas w ­ ere leading Indian entrepreneurs). The semi-­reportage nature of Anand’s novels of the 1930s is more apparent in Two Leaves and a Bud, his next book a­ fter Coolie. In a bizarre section of this book, a turning point in Barbara’s relationship with Le Havre comes when she discovers his diary and reads in it a succession of quotations that

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he has amassed from what are in fact the above published reports, at times identified. This is effectively a sort of laying bare of the strategy—or a symptom of haste and laziness—as the findings of ­t hese texts are largely plopped on the page, undigested, and not incorporated into the plot (other quotations from t­ hese sources are incorporated elsewhere in the text where they are presented as if the thoughts or utterings of Le Havre). In Two Leaves, despite Le Havre’s use of such po­liti­cally eclectic sources, ­t here are also hints that he has communist leanings. Barbara calls him a “Bolshie,” and he himself thinks in terms of Marx. By Anand’s next novel, The Village (1939), ­there is no such positive En­glish character. The En­glish would-be civilizer is parodied as ineffectual and hypocritical. This novel follows closely the Marxian view of the “idiocy” of village life (­here Indian). It also, as in Marx, shows how an alliance of the moneylenders and the landlords (not always distinct categories) results in the beggaring of the poor peasants. His central character, Lalu, is again from the Punjab, but this time a Sikh, and a­ fter cutting his hair (taboo in the faith) he is ostracized from the village. He has actually cut his hair ­because of his attraction for a moneylender’s ­daughter (and the attraction is mutual) but ­faces arrest b ­ ecause the conniving villa­gers want to prevent what they see as a misalliance of class and caste. He eludes his captors and joins the British army, only to be sent off as colonial cannon fodder to fight in the First World War, which breaks out soon ­after he enlists. The Village was the first of a new series of novels. The next, Across the Black ­Water (1939), showed Lalu fighting in the trenches of France, a depiction based on Anand’s own experiences in the trenches of Spain during the Civil War (again we see an anticolonialist theme refracted through material from the antifascist movement). In the final book, The Sword and the Sickle (1942), Lalu becomes a po­liti­cal activist. Most of this fiction was published in Internatsional’naia literatura, where the novels appeared in translation. Th ­ ere they w ­ ere given major billing and lauded in articles about British lit­er­a­ture.101 Assorted Moscow archives contain numerous letters from Anand to Soviet literary bureaucrats and publishers negotiating their publication.102 In his correspondence with the journal, one is struck by his repeated declarations of enthusiasm for the Soviet Union and expressions of an eagerness to visit.103 For example, when he returned to ­England ­after a year spent organ­izing the IPWA in India and pre-

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siding at its 1938 conference, he reported back to Timofei Rokotov, at the  time the editor of both Internatsional’naia literatura and International Lit­e r­a­ture: “Our writers look with ­g reat admiration to the workers’ ­fatherland [Anand’s emphasis], Soviet Rus­sia, and in a special resolution moved at the Calcutta Conference they asked me to convey their greetings to the Rus­sian writers, which I am very happy to communicate to you through this note.”104 Such declarations should be regarded with a degree of skepticism given that in such letters Anand would also press for more of his books to be published, and for royalties to be sent.105 To his Soviet correspondents, Anand pitched his writings in terms that made them seem tailored to a Soviet order. One sees this in his description in one letter of a cycle of novels he is working on (that more or less corresponds to the novels I have just discussed, though some of the titles are dif­fer­ent): I have myself finished a long novel, The Village, the first part of a trilogy which seeks to show the deterioration of the conditions of the peasant masses of India through the inroads of early capitalism. . . . ​[It concerns] a strug­gle which reflects the disintegration of feudalism and the glimmering of a new light from Rus­sia, the land of socialism. The drama w ­ ill be worked out in a second volume, Civilization, dealing with the last ­great war of 1914, which though it d ­ idn’t happen in India . . . ​changed the w ­ hole pattern of Indian society by bringing it into the network of Capitalism more completely. And a third volume, All Men Are Equal, traces the story of growing revolt of the agrarian masses which began to see or hear of October 1917. I ­shall keep you informed about t­ hese books as they appear. And I ­shall send you some of my shorter work for publication in International Lit­er­a­ture.106 Despite such outpourings of enthusiasm for the socialist “fatherland,” Anand was not destined to have all his novels published in the Soviet Union. Critics objected to the “naturalism” in Untouchable (principally the detail about how Bakha cleaned the latrines), and it was rejected, though a short excerpt, “Beneath the Heel of Capitalism,” appeared in Literaturnaia gazeta in 1941.107 Coolie, however, came out in Rus­sian translation the same year, with a generous print run of fifty thousand and a separate journal edition.108

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One should not assume, however, that Anand was becoming a communist. Like most of his protagonists, he never actually joined the Communist Party. During the Second World War, he was cajoled by George Orwell, one of his London friends, into broadcasting for the BBC’s India Ser­v ice as part of the effort to persuade Indians to join Britain’s strug­gle against the Nazi Germans. He agonized over the invitation, negotiating for himself the competing ­loyalties—to the cause of Indian in­de­pen­dence from Britain, in terms of which the BBC was an alien mouthpiece, and to the antifascist cause. But then he agreed to Orwell’s invitation and gave broadcasts between 1941 and 1943. By contrast, Subhas Chandra Bose, a leader of the in­de­pen­dence movement in India, who had collaborated with Anand on the Indian Socialist Book Club, escaped in 1941 from h ­ ouse arrest by the British and made his way first to Nazi Berlin and then, in 1943, to Tokyo, where he or­ga­nized a unit of Indian troops who attempted to unseat the British Raj, starting their operations from Burma. As for IPWA, Aijaz Ahmad has marveled at how, in its initial years, “the progressive movement helped release and bring together so many creative energies across so many languages and so many art forms,” but that phase was short-­lived.109 As E. M. S. Namboodiripad notes, “The po­liti­cal unity which embraced the communists and socialists at one end and the bulk of the left congressmen on the other, was broken in 3 years.” “The Fourth All-­India Progressive Writers’ Conference, which met in Bombay (1943) attempted to break this ‘literary stalemate.’ . . . ​Wishful thinking.”110 The IPWA failed to attract a substantial membership of Anglophone writers, and in time most of its London-­based founding members, such as Zaheer and Anand, drifted away from it.111 The 1947 partition of India proved to be its death knell.112 This tale of decline can be seen more generally in the literary international and the ecumene. Many leftists ­were drawing away from “Moscow” ’s conceptual net. A large number of writers who associated with the literary international in the mid-1930s became more wary of Soviet affiliation; some even denounced the movement. Between the Soviet purges of 1937–1939 and Soviet machinations during the Civil War in Spain, and then the Molotov-­ Ribbentrop pact of 1939, they w ­ ere becoming alienated from “Moscow.” Despite this drift, Anand did not abandon his literary leftism in the late 1930s— or during the Cold War (see the Epilogue)—­and continued his enthusiastic correspondence with Soviet literary officials.

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­ arlier, when the Sino-­Japanese War broke out in 1937, several leading anE tifascist intellectuals who had supported the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War went ­t here, inspired by a sense that the war in China was the Spanish war’s counterpart in Asia. But the war in China, a non-­European country, proved a test case and even a stumbling block for the solidity of the pan-­Eurasian ecumene. As we ­will see in Chapter 8, while Eu­ro­pean leftists strug­gled to give their texts on China cohesion, the Chinese left tried to negotiate a course for their culture that, while not abandoning Soviet influence completely, gave a leading role to vernacular traditions.

8 The Sino-­Japanese War, Mao’s Talks, and the Ecumene Unraveled

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he year 1935 had seen the height of literary internationalism. At that time, leftist writers from all over the world ­were relatively united in the common cause of defeating fascism. They congregated at the Paris Congress for the Defense of Culture, and many leftist literary organ­izations in dif­fer­ent countries joined the new Moscow-­ oriented organ­ization founded ­there, the International Association of Writers for the Defense of Culture (officially headquartered in Paris), that was the successor of MORP. Though the Soviet ­Great Purge, which began in 1936, alienated many foreign intellectuals, its impact was partly offset by the Spanish Civil War, which began in July 1936 and became the ­g reat cause within the ecumene, especially in the war’s more idealistic early phase. The list of t­ hose who went to Spain to support the Republicans became a virtual who’s who of the leftist intelligent­sia. As the Spanish war was in pro­gress, war broke out in China. The Japa­nese had occupied Manchuria in 1931 and in 1932 had taken over part of Shanghai, but in 1937 a full-­blown Sino-­Japanese War began. The Japa­nese started to conquer much of China, relentlessly subjecting its cities to devastating bombing raids and infamous atrocities. The Chinese suffered defeat a­ fter defeat with few successes. More and more of their territory was lost to the Japa­nese, u ­ ntil all the major cities along the seaboard w ­ ere captured. The Nationalists’ capital was moved from Nanjing to Hangchow and then, ­a fter that city fell, to Chungking, which itself strug­g led through bombing raids.

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­ ose sections of China not occupied by the Japa­nese w Th ­ ere divided into two main geopo­liti­cal units, two rival, though unevenly matched, centers of power. The larger of them, the Nationalist-­controlled areas, comprised most of the unoccupied territory, but ­there was also a rump entity in the far northwest u ­ nder communist control, the Shanxi-­Gansu-­Ningxia Border Region, henceforth to be known as the Border Region. Military and ideological rivalry between the two camps persisted, despite a Soviet-­mandated policy in 1936, according to which in December the communists had formed an alliance with the Nationalists. It was difficult to move between the two regions, and in the Nationalist-­controlled areas t­ here was increasing suppression of communist and even leftist culture by the censorship body. This had an impact particularly on the leftist film industry, which had to go under­ground.1 Chinese communists, like Soviet and Eu­ro­pean leftists, regarded the Sino-­ Japanese War not as a local or purely national conflict, but as part of the common strug­g le against “fascism.” The war in Spain against Francisco Franco’s forces and the war in China against Japan became closely identified in their rhe­toric. Ėmi Xiao in his poems of the period tended to include a line or two that set them up as parallel events (“In the flames / heat of the war of the Pyrenees / The dark clouds of war over China.” or “on the Huang He [Yellow River], by the Pyrenees”).2 He also called Ting Ling, a leading communist writer, the “La Passionaria” of China.3 Western leftists made this identification, too. Langston Hughes while in Spain responded on August 29, 1937, to the outbreak of war in China with the poem “Roar China” (which invokes the title of Tretiakov’s poem and play of the same name). It was published on September 6 in Madrid’s Volunteer for Liberty, the English-­language organ of the International Brigades.4 And Joris Ivens in his documentary film on this war, The Four Hundred Million (1939), concludes his prologue with the words: “Eu­rope and Asia have become the western and eastern front of the same assault on democracy.” The Iberian Peninsula and China thus w ­ ere seen as forming, as it ­were, bookends that marked the par­ameters of Eurasia, of continental Eurasia at any rate. The vast distance—­geographical, cultural and political—­between the two theaters of war was erased, and their specificity downplayed in ­t hese glib invocations that had a somewhat incantatory character. Such blithe pairings mask the real­ity that, though most on the left had a strong sense of solidarity with the embattled Chinese, during the late 1930s

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the ecumene had begun to unravel, rendering that more problematical. While some ­were drifting away from identification with any Moscow-­instituted bodies or their platforms, ­others continued steadfastly to further the cause of a (consequently reduced) literary international and a­ dopted narratives of engagement, that w ­ ere largely derived from Soviet sources. The Republican cause in Spain had united most of the internationalist left, but the war in China proved a litmus test that revealed a Eurocentrism among the Eu­ro­pe­ans in the ecumene. Their texts proclaimed the identification of “the Pyrenees” and “the Yellow River,” but in elaborating this point they strug­gled to adapt to China templates they had developed for “Spain.” The literary international was meant to bring Asians and Eu­ro­pe­ans together in a common cause and to generate common narratives, but the Spanish Civil War was a war between Eu­ro­pean forces, while the Sino-­Japanese War pitted Asian against Asian. Many Eu­ro­pean leftists saw themselves as cosmopolitans, but their self-­identification was with Eu­rope and did not ­really extend to all of Eurasia. The Chinese left w ­ ere for their part the most stalwart Asian members of the literary international, especially now that a wave of militant nationalism was sweeping Japan and repressions had drastically reduced the presence of the left in its intellectual life. But by the late 1930s, the Chinese left’s appetite for assimilating Soviet and Eu­ro­pean leftist culture into theirs was waning and they became more involved in generating their own. A huge question for this book has been how to reconcile the call of the national with that of the international. In Chinese leftist circles, discussions of this issue had for some time become focused around how much to follow Western or Soviet cultural models, and how much they should draw on vernacular traditions. The extreme situation of the war exacerbated the issue. The Chinese w ­ ere fighting a national war to throw out a foreign aggressor, but the Chinese communists ­were members of what was putatively a transnational movement. They had been drawn to Moscow by its anticolonialist and anti-­i mperialist stance, but in the mid-1930s that cause was, as we in Chapter 7, effectively subsumed u ­ nder the general rubric of the strug­g le against fascism that was most identified with the Eu­ro­pean theater of war. This chapter w ­ ill address the question of how the Euro-­Russian and Chinese leftists sought in t­ hese fraught times of war to generate common narratives. It w ­ ill do so by focusing on the prob­lem of translation, taken in a broad

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sense. The term “translation” is of course derived from the past participle of the Latin verb transferre, to bear across. Several forms of “translation” ­were crucial in the case of revolutionary China and its interactions with Soviet Union and Eu­ro­pean leftists, including the “bearing across” of texts, concepts, and of the “translators” themselves (cultural intermediaries). ­Here we ­w ill look at how witnesses to an embattled China sought to “bear across” to the outside world their impressions and the message that active intervention in the conflict and aid ­were urgently needed. It ­will also look at the role played in the formation of Chinese communist culture during the war years by a range of Soviet materials—­books, films, ideological and theoretical tracts—­ that ­were “born across” to revolutionary China. Despite all this internationalist effort and the facile identifications of the two conflicts, as in the ­Pyrenees / Yellow River, t­ here was no easy or transparent transferal. The cultural intermediaries who came to China from Eu­rope or the Soviet Union brought their own intellectual baggage with them and often read the country in their own terms. Also, the cultural models and discourse of the literary international derived from Eu­ro­pean traditions. How well, then, would they “translate” into Chinese culture, or more particularly into its revolutionary culture, and how prepared w ­ ere the Chinese to adopt them? As Edwin Gentzler and Maria Tymoczko write in their introduction to the book they edited, Translation and Power, “Translation thus is not simply an act of faithful reproduction but, rather, a deliberate and conscious act of se­ lection, assemblage, structuration, and fabrication—­and even, in some cases, of falsification, refusal of information, counterfeiting, and the creation of ­secret codes. In ­t hese ways translators, as much as creative writers and politicians, participate in the power­f ul acts that create knowledge and shape culture.”5 In attempting to “translate” ideologically freighted texts and practices into a dif­fer­ent culture system, dedicated intermediaries came up against what scholars like Emily Apter and Lydia Liu discuss: the non-­fit between the concepts and the tropological systems of dif­fer­ent languages that makes impossible “pure,” “direct” translation.6 But in attempting to represent embattled China, Euro-­Russian culture producers ­were also hampered by the extent to which their own m ­ ental sets and concepts did not map well onto the Chinese material.

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This chapter w ­ ill look at the pro­cess of “translation” as it played out in two phases and two zones where leftists operated during the Sino-­Japanese War of 1937–1945. It w ­ ill first analyze the responses of leftist Eu­ro­pean and Soviet writers and filmmakers, who went to China to bear witness to the Japa­ nese atrocities and the heroic efforts of the Chinese re­sis­tance in areas ­under Nationalist control. Then it w ­ ill look at the Chinese culture of the Border ­Region, focusing on the debates t­ here about how formative foreign—­and especially Soviet—­models should be for their communist culture. The accounts of Eu­ro­pean eyewitnesses to the war that it ­will treat mostly date from the early period of the conflict, 1937–1939, the Chinese debates from the more fraught ­later years of approximately 1939–1943. My coverage ­will culminate in Mao Zedong’s “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Lit­er­a­ture and Art,” delivered in 1942, and w ­ ill discuss the degree to which ­these Talks, in outlining the contours of a committed Chinese lit­er­a­ture, advocated using Western or Soviet models.

China 1937–1939 As the war in Spain began to fare badly for the Republicans, several intellectuals who supported their cause moved on to this second arena of war for, as they saw it, fighting fascism—by no means the numbers who went to Spain (China was much further away from their countries both geo­graph­i­cally and culturally). Several of ­t hose who went ­were quite famous, including ­t hose to be treated ­here: the En­glish writers W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, who came together; another group comprising the photographer Robert Capa and the filmmakers Joris Ivens and John Ferno; and the leading Soviet documentarian Roman Karmen. Asian groups in Spain w ­ ere drawn to the Chinese cause, too; among them was a contingent of Indian doctors sent by their Congress Party.7 A commonplace of virtually all the foreigners’ accounts of the Sino-­ Japanese War is the savage bombing and atrocities of the Japa­nese. The films in par­tic­u­lar provide graphic footage of burning and destroyed ­houses, citizens mourning lost ones or fleeing in terror to join the legions of refugees pressing into the interior.8 They set up a contrast between the “barbaric” nature of the Japa­nese invaders and China’s ­great cultural traditions, stretching back “4,000 years.” This point was in keeping with the mantra of the antifascist movement, “for the defense of culture” (the title of the Paris Congress of 1935).

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A particularly good example of a text that stresses Japa­nese atrocities would be The Four Hundred Million, a solidarity documentary shot by Ivens and Ferno with Capa as assistant cameraman. For it, Ivens used the same formula for presenting the war in China as he had in Spanish Earth (1937): peaceful scenes cruelly interrupted by savage bombing, chaos, and carnage, then a shift to the ­great cultural tradition of the country, followed by more scenes of horrific bombing interspersed with examples of determined re­sis­tance. As in Spanish Earth, Ivens also sought to personalize his coverage. Though the film periodically showed po­liti­cal and military commanders, he wanted to hang its narrative arc on the story of a common soldier, a committed leftist, as he had in that e­ arlier film. But vari­ous f­ actors frustrated Ivens’s plans, prominent among them the Nationalist government’s refusal to give his group permission to travel to the Border Region, the constant interference of censors, and the general chaos of war. He was only able to pre­sent a patently contrived and truncated version of the story of a common soldier, so much so that he regarded the film as botched.9 Ivens’s failure to create a coherent narrative out of his China footage was, then, largely for circumstantial reasons but also stemmed from his desire to identify the Spanish situation with the Chinese. Isherwood and Auden, who ­were in China at the same time and even intersected with Ivens, describe in their travelogue Journey to a War similar limitations and frustrations to ­those experienced by Ivens and Capa in trying to reach the Border Region, or even the front. The reasons for their failure w ­ ere not only circumstantial. In this book they interrogate the desirability of what are in fact (though they do not allude to this) two central tenets of socialist realism, and of the lit­er­at­ ure of the ecumene more generally: the coherent narrative and the larger-­than-­life hero. Ostensibly, Isherwood and Auden, though not communist, operated within the greater orbit of the ecumene. During the 1930s both had been close to the group that clustered around John Lehmann’s journal New Writing, of which Mulk Raj Anand was also a member (as is discussed in Chapter  7), ­Isherwood in par­tic­u­lar as Lehmann’s chief editorial adviser. The two w ­ ere also well regarded in Moscow cultural organs such as Internatsional’naia literatura, where Auden was touted as the leading left-­w ing poet of Britain.10 This appraisal is not surprising given that their writings prior to the trip included a number of antibourgeois, quasi-­Marxist plays that they wrote together in the 1930s. In one of them, On the Frontier, which appeared the year

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they went to China, 1938, a war breaks out in the course of the play, instigated by nationalistic and capitalistic forces, but the workers are blinded and cannot sense the under­lying class strug­gle. In an ­earlier version the masses are ultimately not deceived about the true nature of the war and seize power in a revolutionary uprising.11 Isherwood and Auden had been staunch supporters of the Republican effort in Spain. The year before they went to China, Auden had spent January to April t­ here, where he served in an ambulance unit and made several propagandistic radio broadcasts (but allegedly returned disillusioned). Isherwood had toyed with following his close friend to Spain, but could never ­ ater, official invitations w ­ ere sent to Auden and quite bring himself to do so. L Isherwood to attend the Spanish sequel of 1937 to the Paris Congress of 1935, but the British Foreign Office denied them visas for Spain and they did not pursue the ­matter. Their friend Stephen Spender did go, however; he was aided by André Malraux in getting ­there ­under an alias.12 This foot-­dragging notwithstanding, Isherwood and Auden retained the antifascist sensibility that was a common denominator of New Writing authors, and a repugnance for the fascists’ atrocities (­whether German, Italian, Spanish, or Japa­nese). Journey to a War comprises two main texts, Isherwood’s “Travel-­Diary” and Auden’s “In Time of War,” a cycle of twenty-­seven sonnets and a poetic coda (­later substantially revised and published as “Sonnets for China”), together with a se­lection of Auden’s photo­graphs. Th ­ ese texts challenge the vision of a leftist Eurasia united against fascism and evince self-­consciousness about their situation as Eu­ro­pe­ans attempting a sympathetic portrayal of the plight of the Chinese. ­These common themes in their other­w ise largely disparate coverage of China could be seen as symptomatic of the unraveling of the ecumene. In Isherwood’s “Travel-­Diary,” he and Auden often come across as accidental tourists from Oxbridge (Isherwood was educated at Cambridge and Auden at Oxford). They frequent such bastions of British imperialism as the residences of ambassadors and missionary enclaves, where they follow the code of dress and be­hav­ior that befits an En­glish gentleman. On a British gunboat the captain, who has a “cultivated Bertie Wooster drawl,” regales them with an “excellent” dinner, “caviar and French wines.”13 Upper-­class observers, remote from the grunt soldier, they rarely mention the ordinary Chinese, and when they do they refer to them as mere generic “coolies.”

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Isherwood’s narrative is peppered with examples of a wry Oxbridge humor, with irony, understatement, or paradoxical flourishes, a ploy to engage the reader no doubt, but arguably also to avoid predictable, conventional depiction of the horrors of war. For example, in remarking that ­t here ­were graves everywhere, Isherwood quips “a class strug­gle between the living and the dead.”14 Or he reports that when they ­were in Hangchow “the Japa­nese celebrated [the birthday of the emperor] in their usual manner, with a big air raid.” This jocular tone that flies in the face of the subject ­matter is arguably ­because Isherwood is resisting the clichés of the two genres represented in his text: the travelogue and war lit­er­a­ture. His Oxbridge wit was mustered in the ser­v ice of a critique of them, not for its own sake, but as a vehicle for challenging the glib po­liti­cal assumptions of this time. While not shirking showing the tragedies of war, he avoided standard repre­sen­ta­tions of it, such as ­were to be found in the documentary films of Karmen and Ivens. We sense this in a passage where he reports: “­After supper Fleming, Auden and I explained to A. W. Kao our views on Chinese propaganda. Atrocity stories, we told him, would make ­little impression on the West—­people had heard too many of them already.”15 Isherwood emphasizes the contingent as a hallmark of the experience of war, as compared with the tidy narrative. For example, in one section he describes how Kao explained military strategy: Every­t hing was lucid, and tidy and false—­t he flanks like l­ ittle cubes, the pincer movements working with mathematical precision, the reinforcements never failing to arrive punctual to the minute. But war, as Auden said ­later, is not like that. War is bombing an already disused arsenal, missing it, and killing a few old ­women. War is lying in a stable with a gangrenous leg. . . . ​War is a handful of lost and terrified men in the mountains, shooting at something moving in the undergrowth. War is waiting for days with nothing to do; shouting down a dead telephone; ­going without sleep, or sex, or a wash. War is untidy, inefficient, obscure, and largely a ­matter of chance.16 Isherwood seems to be deliberately challenging the need to idealize the embattled Chinese in po­liti­cally correct descriptions of their suffering. Together with his Oxbridge humor comes extremely naturalistic description, as in: “All trains, we had been told, ­stopped ­t here for 24 hours—­simply in

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order to give the passengers time to visit the drug-­dens and the brothels // ­Every third person in the crowd appeared to be suffering from trachoma, or goitre, or hereditary syphilis. And the foodstuffs they ­were buying and selling looked hateful beyond belief—­t he filthiest parts of the oldest and most diseased ­a nimals; stodgy excrement-­puddings; vile, stagnant soups and poisonous roots.”17 This is hardly the impassioned, propagandistic tract one might have ­expected, given Isherwood’s previous identity as an En­glish leftist close to communism. Isherwood’s stress on the prominence of contingency in war and his re­ sis­tance to standard narratives, then, is not just a critique of a worn genre but also has ideological implications that challenge the assumptions of the ecumene. He also acknowledges his inescapable Eurocentrism. In a passage that comes very early in the text and hangs over the rest of it, he reports that when he and Auden heard about Nazi Germany’s occupation of Austria their response was: “By this time the war ­will have broken out and ­here we are, eight thousand miles away. ­Shall we change our plans? ­Shall we go back? What does China ­matter to us in comparison to this? All the guns and bombs of the Japa­nese suddenly seem as harmless as gnats. If we are killed on the Yellow River front our deaths w ­ ill be as provincial and meaningless as a motor bus accident in Burton-on Trent.”18 To them as leftist cosmopolitans but rootedly Eu­ro­pe­ans, revolution by Asian masses are “provincial” events, clearly impor­tant but peripheral to their main concerns. Isherwood also emphasizes the limits of the Eu­ro­pe­a n’s ability to “see” China. He recurrently shows awareness of the ele­ment of mediation—­another aspect of translation—in his accounts of what he witnesses. Often he describes a scene as observed not close at hand but through a ship or train win­dow, a framing that provides a figure for the pair’s overall predicament. For example, he remarks about traveling to Shanghai on a riverboat: A cabin port-­hole is a picture frame. No sooner had we arrived on board than the brass-­encircled view became false. The brown river in the rain, the boatmen in their dark bat-­w ing capes, the tree-­crowned pagodas on the foreshore, the mountains carved in mist—­these ­were no longer features of the beautiful, prosaic country we had just left b ­ ehind us; they w ­ ere the scenery of the traveler’s dream; they w ­ ere the mysterious l‘Extrême Orient. Memory in the years to come would prefer this

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s­ imple theatrical picture to all the subtle and chaotic impressions of the past months. This, I thought—­despite all we have seen, heard, experienced—is how I s­ hall fi­nally remember China.19 This sense of preprogrammed narratives that are not “realistic” but prove more enduring than ­actual experience pre­sents implicitly a challenge to t­ hose like Tretiakov who glibly demand that writers go beyond their colonialist exoticist orientalist clichés to pre­sent the “au­t hen­tic” East. Auden’s approach in this book to representing China is radically dif­fer­ent from Isherwood’s. In his sonnet cycle, “In Time of War,” ­t here is no sign of the Oxbridge wit. Moreover, the cycle is clearly not based entirely on his specific experiences in China, as was Isherwood’s “War-­Diary,” but rather based on a generalized experience of war, as the title suggests. Most of the sonnets ­were composed before the war, some a­ fter, and allegedly only one—­his most poignant (sonnet 18) was actually written in China.20 In contrast to Isherwood’s relatively straightforward narration, Auden prefers indirection and rarely identifies a time or place. It is not r­ eally ­u ntil sonnet 13 that one finds reference to anything specifically Chinese, and even then it is only in a cryptic reference to the “eigh­teen provinces,” a term used by Western writers on the Manchu Qing dynasty to express a distinction between the core and frontier regions of China. Auden’s experiences of the Chinese war in ­t hese sonnets are subsumed into a panoramic overview of ­human history, presented in very general terms, and culminating in the multiple iniquities of fascist forces in Eu­rope and China. Though Auden rarely identifies his subject ­matter in terms of time and place, he, as was often customary, sometimes equates the two sites of strug­g le with “fascists” in such cryptic references as ­“Nanking. Dachau” (sonnet 16) or “When Austria died and China was ­forsaken, / Shanghai in flames and Teruel retaken” (sonnet 22). The reference to Austria d ­ ying is implicitly to the German occupation of Austria in March 1938, the event that was so devastating to Isherwood and Auden that, as reported in the passage quoted above, made China seem “provincial.” This calamity is again invoked cryptically in sonnet 23: “To­night in China let me think of one // Who through ten years of silence worked and waited, / ­Until in Muzot all his powers spoke, / And every­thing was given once for all.”21 The reference is to the Château de Muzot, a thirteenth-­century fortified manor ­house in Switzerland, where, during a few weeks in February  1922, the

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Bohemian-­Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, an invited guest, was fi­nally able to complete his Duino Elegies, ­after a long silence caused by severe depression exacerbated by the G ­ reat War, and to write the entire cycle Sonnets to Orpheus (both published in 1923). That Rilke (not named in Auden’s poem) could overcome his pessimism in Muzot could be seen as a figure for the possibility that poetry (and Auden the poet) can transcend the darkness of an encroaching “fascism,” but the reference is anachronistic and comes from the world of Eu­ro­pean culture, not China. Isherwood’s travel diary and Auden’s sonnets, though ­housed u ­ nder the one book cover, are normally considered separately by critics. Yet, beneath the superficial contrasts in genre and tone, several impor­tant common themes can be detected (not surprisingly since when Isherwood put together “Travel-­ Diary” he incorporated material from both their diaries). A mutual concern is how to break out of one’s predetermined m ­ ental set. Both express disdain for narratives that gloss over the imperfect. Auden in one of the crucial sonnets, number 27, wrote: We envy streams and ­houses that are sure,  But we are articled to error, we ­Were never nude or calm as a ­great door And never ­will be perfect like our fountains: We live in freedom by necessity.22 As with most of his poems in this cycle, Auden altered the wording of this sonnet (27) for the second edition of Journey to a War (­here I am citing only from the original edition of 1939). He even altered the sequence of the ­sonnets. But this pattern of transposition and alteration also marked the ­Chinese appropriation of Auden’s “In Time of War.” Auden was popu­lar in Chinese literary circles at the time, and the poems of this cycle had an afterlife as re­sis­tance propaganda in book reviews, translations, and imitations by Chinese intellectuals and poets throughout the eight years of the Sino-­ Japanese War (Isherwood’s text, by contrast, was largely ignored). Some Chinese even identified him as a modern-­day Byron, one of many incongruities in the way the cycle was interpreted in China. But none of the poems received as much attention, or w ­ ere as bowdlerized in Chinese translation, as Auden’s sonnet 18, which is about the lonely death of a ­humble soldier who

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is “abandoned by his general and his lice.”23 In the original sonnet and the story of its subsequent renderings in Chinese, one can see how, on the one hand, Auden brought his own cultural baggage with him in composing this, his most poignant poem and, on the other, how the Chinese translations dispensed with any regard for textual purity and adapted the poem for their own propagandistic purposes, giving it a dif­fer­ent tenor. Auden himself referred to this poem as his Sassoon poem, and, indeed, he could be seen as using Siegfried Sassoon’s strategy in several poems for representing the ­Great War and its innumerable sacrifices by focusing on the death of a lone soldier. Potential examples from Sassoon include his “The Death in Bed,” “The Hero,” and “The Dugout,” though Wilfred Owen ­adopted a similar strategy in his more famous poems such as “Dulce et Decorum Est” and “Anthem for a Doomed Youth.” A major difference with Auden’s sonnet would be that his Chinese lone soldier dies for a worthy cause, while in Sassoon and Owen the En­glish soldiers die senseless, horrible deaths thanks to the warmongers, who have sent them to war. ­There ­were more radical differences in comparing Auden’s sonnets with the Chinese translations. As Julia Chan has discussed in her dissertation, in appropriating Auden’s poem for Chinese propaganda purposes with his “translation,” Hong Shen, a renowned revolutionary dramatist, reframed it by giving it a title, “The Chinese Soldier.” Auden had not given any of the sonnets titles, an omission that served the very generalized nature of their contents. Moreover, in sonnet 18 t­ here is nothing to indicate that the grunt soldier was specifically Chinese. But, more egregiously, Hong Shen changed the poem’s import by interpolating into the m ­ iddle section the following ­appeal for aid from the West, which replaced that part of the Auden text (ll. 9–12): Professors from Eu­rope, noble ladies, citizens, / Reprieve this youth, though he was unknown to journalists; He became dust in China, so that your ­daughters / May live safely on.24 This exercise of translator’s license provides an extreme example of what Edwin Gentzler and Maria Tymoczko point to in the quotation from their edited book Translation and Power, cited ­earlier, translation as “a deliberate and conscious act of se­lection, assemblage, structuration, and fabrication— and even, in some cases, of falsification. . . .” Appropriation rather than imitation. In translation an inexact fit with the original is inevitable, but this interpolation particularly contravenes the spirit of “In Time of War” ­because

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in ­these poems Auden, like Isherwood in his “Travel-­Diary,” stoutly resisted programmatic formulations. Not all of the individuals Isherwood and Auden encountered in China ­were subjected to Isherwood’s searing wit. The culminating sections of Isherwood’s “Travel-­Diary” offer a potential positive hero, Rewi Alley, a New Zealand communist.25 Alley was an or­ga­nizer of the Chinese Industrial Cooperatives (Indusco), a communal, socialistic initiative that set up a vast network of small-­scale factories in villages and small towns throughout China in an effort to compensate for the huge losses of industry to the Japa­nese bombing and occupation, and to supply the military and the populace with essential goods. Alley is only a potential positive hero in Isherwood’s text, in that the account of him is marked by ambiguity and ambivalence. Much of the text provides concrete details about the organ­ization and functioning of Indusco that are reminiscent of the l­abor reports about India and China, which, as we saw in the preceding chapters, Mulk Raj Anand and Friedrich Wolf drew on in depicting an Asian proletariat. Quite possibly this material was lifted from Alley’s own writings about Indusco. Isherwood’s text goes back and forth from what appears to be taken from Alley to what appears to come from Isherwood himself, but the shift is not indicated, so that one cannot be sure who is speaking. In the end, in describing a scene where Alley conducts them around the Shanghai slums, the narrator acknowledges that, for all the misery, “Though we are genuinely shocked and indignant, we belong, inescapably, to the other world,” further admitting that “the well-­meaning tourist, the liberal and humanitarian intellectual, can only wring his hands over all this and exclaim: ‘Oh dear, t­ hings are so awful h ­ ere—so complicated. One d ­ oesn’t know where to start.’ ” In the text, this remark is followed by a space and it ends with “ ‘I know where I should start,’ says Mr. Alley, with a ferocious snort. ‘They ­were starting quite nicely in 1927.’ ”26 The “oh dear” and the reluctance to take a stand seem like a final act of self-­deprecation on Isherwood’s part, but does the “tourist” represent Isherwood? Is he a caricature of Isherwood, or perhaps a generalized version of the Eu­ro­pean intellectual’s ineffectual and tepid response to the atrocities in China? Alley’s invocation of 1927, by contrast, appears to be an expression of a firm conviction that what was lost in the Shanghai debacle of that year, when the communists’ revolutionary drive was summarily ­stopped by Chiang

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Kai-­shek’s Nationalist forces, can be revived. But the inclusion ­here of ­A lley’s retort could also be read as a quixotic, nostalgic expression of faith in a moment of hope and belief that is no longer v­ iable, at least as far as Isherwood and Auden are concerned. As such, it could be seen as a meta­phor for Isherwood’s and Auden’s own predicament as engaged in the antifascist cause, but mere “tourists” in China, whose faith in the internationalist dream was dimming. Rewi Alley, commendable though he was, represents a relic of their past. In the year a­ fter their trip to China, both migrated to the United States and subsequently Auden gravitated back ­toward Chris­tian­ity. But any interpretation of this brief dialogue seems deliberately elusive. In effect, the text ends with a question mark. In Isherwood’s and Auden’s contributions to “Travel-­Diary,” we see slippage between the potentially normative account and what actually occurs. The narrator makes no claim to heroics or dramatic self-­sacrifice. Isherwood ruefully describes several instances where, as they tried to make it to the front, they cannot cope with the mud and steep mountainsides they are meant to scale and succumb to being born along on a palanquin, like the colonial sahib (or more prob­ably memsahib). A painful contrast is drawn with their companion Peter Fleming, who “marched indefatigably ahead.” Fleming, the older ­brother of Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond books, was a famous adventurer and travel writer who had wandered around the jungles of Brazil before moving on to China, Tibet, and India. Isherwood writes, “The Fleming legend accompan[ied] us like a distorted shadow.”27 Before leaving for China, he and Auden had been very taken by Fleming’s travel notes on China in the London Times.28 In “Travel-­Diary” Isherwood ostensibly admires him and seeks to emulate him, reporting: “Auden and I recited passages from an imaginary travel-­book called ‘With Fleming to the Front.’ ”29 Fleming potentially offers Isherwood the possibility of converting his “Travel-­Diary” to another genre commonly used by sympathizing foreigners in their accounts of revolutionary China during the war, the adventure romance. Yet Isherwood and Auden, for all their self-­deprecation, do not ­really aspire to be a Fleming. The text about him they are composing in their minds emerges as tainted by the form of the colonialist, a dated role. Isherwood hints at this by interpolating a caricatured image: “[Fleming’s] dress . . . ​was almost absurdly correct he might have stepped from a London tailor’s win­dow, advertising Gent’s Tropical Exploration kit.”30

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Feats in nature are not only the preserve of the imperialist adventure romance, a genre Isherwood is implicitly debunking ­here, but ­were (inter alia) also stock images of revolutionary my­t hol­ogy. Isherwood and Auden w ­ ere resisting its tropes. In this re­spect they pre­sent a contrast with the rhe­toric of several foreign writers on war­time China who w ­ ere more identifiably leftist. One such writer was Edgar Snow, who was not a Marxist but close to the Chinese communists. In an article published in the Saturday Eve­ning Post on February 8, 1941, Snow likens the work of Rewi Alley in Indusco to the feats of Lawrence of Arabia. In drawing this analogy, he emphasizes that Alley was always on the move, often in or near b ­ attle areas, and that he covered an extraordinary number of miles in a relatively short time (this seven-­league boots image also bears comparison with the repre­sen­ta­tion of Peter Fleming in Isherwood’s “Travel-­Diary”). He concludes, “It may yet rank as one of the ­great ­human adventures of our time.”31 Was Snow (and ­others) in depicting such hyperbolically heroic figures drawing on the tropes of Soviet revolutionary my­thol­ogy? In ­these late 1930s years the Chinese communists had begun to create their own revolutionary genealogy, that was distinct from the Soviet. The Soviet genealogy was anchored in the Western revolutionary tradition in that it ran from the French Revolution through the Decembrist revolt of 1825 to the Rus­sian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, and beyond, but Chinese communist my­t hol­ogy now fastened on the recent Long March as the paradigmatic and originary moment. Foreign sympathizers, however, often represented the Long March in terms familiar to Eu­ro­pe­ans, but gave it hyperbolically heroic proportions. In his coverage of it in Red Star over China (1937), for example, Snow makes an even more grandiose comparison than he did for Alley, claiming that in the past three centuries t­ here had been nothing like it and “armed Hannibal over the alps looked like a holiday excursion beside it.”32 Foreign correspondents, in describing the war, often foregrounded their own bravery and tenacity as they ignored danger and performed feats in the natu­ral world in order to bear witness to it. Agnes Smedley, another American, who was close to the Comintern but never a Communist Party member (see Chapter 6), relates in her ­Battle Hymn of China how she undertook a months-­long expedition to a remote partisan stronghold, the sole white person in the group and a ­woman to boot. She treks fearlessly through dense

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bush and across treacherous rivers, all the while just managing to avoid being killed by hostile fire as she darts forward from one hiding place to another. She frames this with a warning, given as she is setting out and attributed to a General Yeh Ting, that her trek would be “like ­going through darkest Africa.”33 Roman Karmen’s documentaries from China abound in such scenes. Karmen spent a year filming ­t here, from September 1938 ­u ntil September 1939, sent by the Central Studio for Documentary Film, but also as an official representative of the Soviet government.34 While in China, he sent footage back to Moscow together with his text for the voice-­overs and instructions about how the material was to be edited, and they w ­ ere used for the documentary series Kitai v bor’be (China fights), which was screened to the Soviet public during 1938–1939. On his return, he made two films out of the footage, V Kitae (In China; also called Kitai v bor’be) and Kitai srazhaetsia (China fights), both released in 1941. While in China, Karmen served as well as a special correspondent for Izvestiia, where many of his dispatches appeared. ­Later, he published his memoir, God v Kitae (A year in China), and his mounting sheets and instructions sent from China to a Moscow studio are available in the archives, as is his China diary. In all ­these sources a very similar narrative emerges, though the articles and the diary entries provide the most extended versions of it. Karmen—­and h ­ ere he is typical for internationalist enthusiasts—is in his films and writings fording swift-­flowing rivers or slogging through deep mud with battered and bleeding feet, scaling steep mountains or crossing dangerous passes.35 This was no doubt realistic if somewhat self-­promoting, but at the same time the shadow of the Long March hung over ­these passages. He crafted his description of one par­tic­u­lar military campaign as a sort of mini–­Long March: “This long march of a thousand versts over mountainous roads, through several provinces, to get to the appointed place. . . . ​This march demonstrates the Chinese soldier’s incredible capacity of e­ ndurance. . . . ​The shot material shows the eighth day of the march. Th ­ ere are still about twenty days of tough ­going ahead. The soldiers are walking through mud and over stones in straw sandals, they are crossing mountain passes, and on the thirteenth day of such a march they, having rested for 24 hours, can go into b ­ attle and ­will fight like a fresh unit ready for ­battle.”36

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The Cult of the Chinese Leader In China texts of internationalist enthusiasts, the heroic repre­sen­ta­tion of the revolutionary self is eclipsed by some account of a leader figure. We see this especially in the films and writings of Karmen The cliché about Karmen is that he was the “Stalinist” documentary filmmaker, and the two films he made about China have the distinctive marks of the Stalinist mentality and Stalinist rhe­toric. For example, he uses the code term from the purge years, “besposhchadno” (ruthless or merciless), and he attributes some of the setbacks of the Chinese to “Trotskyite” treachery (as the voice-­over also did in his ­earlier film Spain [Ispaniia, 1939], finished by Esfir Shub). Karmen’s most characteristically Stalinist feature is his foregrounding the role of leaders in the war so that his repre­sen­ta­tion of the Chinese re­sis­tance became a tale of well-­organized troops led by commanding figures. Almost ­every shot showing soldiers features a commander addressing them. Tellingly, in the mounting lists he sent back to the documentary film studio from China, Karmen insists that, though for a par­tic­u­lar scene in the newsreel he had not managed to shoot the commander, only the troops, ­t hose editing his footage should—­a nd this was “compulsory” (obiazatel’no)—­“ insert” previously shot material of a general addressing troops elsewhere.37 In other scenes commanders ­were shown poring over a map or reading in their study, clichéd conventions for the leader figure in Soviet iconography.38 Soviet socialist realist texts w ­ ere built around a cele­bration of the Party hierarchy and Soviet authority figures. By contrast, Chinese leftist literary texts of ­these years tended to provide object lessons in re­sis­tance to the Japa­ nese carried out on a microcosmic level, often in the one village, where t­ here was rarely any sign of the Communist Party, just the partisans. The aspect of po­liti­cal hierarchy was so downplayed that even when the Party made an appearance, it was made up of peasant locals.39 Nevertheless, it was in this time that a cult of Mao emerged, as is reflected in both Chinese and Soviet sources, though their approaches ­were dif­fer­ent. A highlight of Karmen’s film In China is the scene where he visits Mao in his Yan’an cave apartment, which he shot during his stay ­t here from May to June 1939. Xiao, whom he had known in Moscow, served as his translator—­yet another example of the transnational connections that reinforced the literary international.40 Karmen’s account of Mao in his sketch “In Mao Zedong’s

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Home” (“U Mao Tsze-­dun), published in Izvestiia on July 8, 1939, and more briefly in his film In China, conforms to what by then had become the standard image of the leader figure, and of Lenin and Stalin in par­tic­u­lar.41 This is so much so that it is difficult to say to what extent in the film Karmen was presenting actuality, or ­whether he staged the scene to convey a correct image of Mao (or did Mao himself want to convey that image to his Soviet patrons?). One of Karmen’s standard lines in ­t hese texts is reminiscent of the rhe­toric of the Lenin cult: “The name of Mao Zedong is in China surrounded by an aura of stories about the courage of a fighter, with a strong Bolshevik ­w ill, and with the extreme simplicity of a leader of ­peoples who is close to the masses.” His demo­cratic nature is demonstrated in the fact that in Yan’an “his dugout is in no way dif­fer­ent from the thousands of dugouts in which the young ­people of the Border Region live.” 42 In the dugout scene Mao is shown at work at his desk, dictating to his wife, Jiang Qing, notes for his lecture “The Dialectics of War.” A sketch Karmen published in Izvestiia provides his fullest version of this event: Mao with a smile of greeting gets up from his desk to meet [Karmen]. ­ ere in this dugout he lives, works and thinks. A desk, a bed, shelving H for books made from rough-­hewn planks and a cane chair. On all this more than ­humble furnishing of Mao’s dwelling lies the stamp of cleanliness, neatness and order [very Stalinist values]. On the books that fill the shelf, are stuck precise labels. H ­ ere are collected the works of the ­g reat found­ers of materialist philosophy, translations of the works of ­great military strategists, many scientific books. A special place on the shelf is occupied by the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin. Stalin’s book, together with a pile of papers covered in writing lies open in the m ­ iddle of the desk.43 ­ ere Karmen omits the fact that the small se­lection of authoritative texts on H Mao’s bookshelf included the Confucian analects, a small detail, but one that points to the increasing sinification of Chinese communism that thwarted Soviet expectations of hegemony for their culture (see ­later). In Karmen’s film, Mao then walks out of the dugout with a book clearly identified as by Stalin and ­settles down in a chair to read it. Neither in the film nor in the newspaper sketch is its title evident, but, arguably, it was not

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essential to know precisely which book by Stalin Mao was reading or what was the content of the notes on his desk. In both sources the takeaway from this scene is Stalin’s textual authority for Mao. Mao is copying, and therefore could be construed as following, the words of Stalin. He stands in a line of ideological succession, if a branch line. His reading a text by Stalin implies that he is modeling himself on the Bolshevik model leader. As it ­were, a transmission b ­ elt ­going from Moscow to Yan’an drives the entire Chinese communist culture and ideology, and by extension the Chinese p ­ eople as a ­whole. A hegemonically articulated Eurasia—or Soviet Rus­sia and revolutionary China at any rate—is without borders. In actuality, as Gao Hua has suggested in his monumental account of Mao in Yan’an and the power strug­g les within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Mao was indeed at this time reading extensively Marxist theory and advocating that communists in Yan’an do the same. In par­tic­u­lar, he was very taken by The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Short Course (generally known as the Short Course), attributed to Stalin, which appeared in the Soviet Union in 1938 and thereafter functioned ­t here as essentially an equivalent of what Mao’s “­little red book” was to be l­ ater in the PRC. The text was translated into Chinese starting in late 1938, and several months l­ater when it became available, in other words around the time of Karmen’s visit, “Mao grasped it like a trea­sure and quickly issued an appeal to Yan’an cadres at all levels: Study the History and become students of Stalin!” But, Gao argues, this was no act of fealty on Mao’s part. Rather, “The History arbitrarily edited history in order to preserve Stalin’s image of infallibility and this served Mao’s po­liti­cal needs to rewrite the history of the CCP with himself at the center.” 44 Assessing Mao’s intentions ex post facto is a tricky business, but, as we ­shall see, Mao did frequently use—­appropriated—­ Soviet sources for his own ends. Translation not as subordination but as empowerment. Mao, however, at this time was curating his own biography for world consumption, one that gave no indication that he was a disciple of Stalin. He used not Soviet intermediaries for the purpose but two Americans who visited before Karmen, Edgar Snow (a correspondent for the Daily Herald), who was in Yan’an from June to October 1936, and Agnes Smedley (a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian and assorted American and Soviet periodicals), who was t­ here from early to mid-1937 ­until September. Both ­were given ex-

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tensive interviews with Mao that they wrote up and incorporated in books. Snow, who visited in a time of relative peace, before the Sino-­Japanese War broke out, was accorded the longest series of interviews, and his published version of what Mao recounted, Red Star over China (1937), became the first comprehensive source for information about the Chinese communist leader and was published all over the world.45 Snow’s book was originally rejected by Anglophone publishers, but ­after being taken up by the London communist publisher Victor Gollancz it appeared in 1937 and sold over one hundred thousand copies on both sides of the Atlantic. This translation was in turn taken up in India, where it became one of the first priorities for publication by the Socialist Book Club.46 And in Shanghai, a group of under­ground communist and left-­leaning intellectuals collectively translated the Gollancz edition, essentially founding a press called “Fu She” for its publication (in February 1938). The publication history of Snow’s biography features multiple examples of revisions, adaptation and framing, such as we have already seen in the case of Auden’s sonnet 18. For the Chinese version, for example, the title was changed from Red Star over China to Xixing Man ji (Random notes on a journey to the West) to avoid censorship and attracting attention from Nationalist authorities. Moreover, it differs from the Gollancz version in that it incorporates Snow’s own revisions for the book and a new preface Snow wrote specifically for it. Also, the Chinese version does not include the section “That Foreign Brain-­Trust” from part 11.47 In the Soviet Union, the section of Snow’s book providing biographical information on Mao was published in a predictably altered version in Rus­sian translation in Internatsional’naia literatura for November and December 1937, and then in book form.48 Karmen definitely read this, ­because in his mounting lists he refers to Snow’s account of the Lu Xun Acad­emy.49 Snow in t­ hese biographical sections essentially functioned as an afflatus for Mao, or more accurately the text was literally a product of translation. In introducing his biography, Snow outlines the laborious pro­cess of the back-­ and-­forth translation of Mao’s oral rendition of his life. Mao would reminisce and his words ­were translated for Snow by “a young Soviet functionary.” Snow copied this oral translation down, ­later handing ­these notes back to the young man. He in turn translated them into Chinese and submitted them to Mao, who corrected them. Th ­ ese corrected versions w ­ ere translated back into

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En­glish again, and that is the version of the autobiography that Snow incorporated into his text.50 In the late 1930s, Red Star became the prime text on revolutionary China of the international left, effectively supplanting Roar, China!, which, associated as it was with the debacle of 1927, was anachronistic in the changed circumstances of the Sino-­Japanese War, when class conflict was played down in communist culture. But Red Star’s accession to this status also signifies the shift from representing revolution as a mass event to placing stress on revolution’s commanders, and on Mao specifically. As the story of how Mao’s biography was produced demonstrates, the prob­lem of translation is not just about linguistic competence. Translation entails not only mediation but also control: who controls the text and its import. With this biography, so carefully curated by Mao, control of the Chinese revolutionary narrative was taken up by the Chinese rather than emanating from Moscow. The Soviet Union was not accorded authorship of Mao’s biography, as Karmen had claimed for it in his repre­sen­ta­tion of him. Soviet participation in the composition of the biography was reduced to a faithful scribe-­cum-­translator, small t. Though Snow does point out in multiple places in the book how much and how well Soviet culture was received at the time in China, he also notes some re­sis­tance to it. An increasing ambivalence about Soviet cultural models marked the ensuing years.

The Reception of Soviet Cultural Models The strug­gle in the unoccupied areas of China was not only about defeating the Japa­nese militarily but also about ideological and cultural hegemony. In this strug­gle Soviet authorities sought to prevail and invested a ­great deal in controlling the organ­ization of culture ­t here, as well as importing texts and films in the hope of establishing cultural preeminence. But in the chaos of war and given the presence of rival organ­izations and rival po­liti­cally inflected narratives, it was an uphill b ­ attle. Before the war even broke out, in 1935, given the more ecumenical orientation of the Comintern promulgated at its Seventh Congress of July–­ August 1935 and also the growing Japa­nese threat, Chinese communist literati w ­ ere instructed in missives from Moscow (one of them from Xiao) to disband the League of Leftist Writers and form a broader-­based literary

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society. ­There was opposition to this among leading Chinese writers and the league was dissolved quietly, without any proclamation. A new united front literary organ­ization, the Association of Chinese Writers and Artists (Zhongguo wenyijia xiehui) was formed in June 1936 ­under Zhou Yang, the first of a series of analogous organ­izations.51 In the chaotic time of war, many intellectuals w ­ ere condemned to a peripatetic existence and the new cultural organ­izations that formed all around the country often had brief lives, complicating any attempt to channel a uniform Chinese leftist culture. Communication from inside and outside China with the Border Region became problematical. Even though the two geopo­liti­cal units in theory had been allied since the end of 1936, military and ideological rivalry between them persisted, and the Nationalists semi-­cordoned off the Border Region. Most foreign repre­sen­ta­t ion in China, including the Soviet, was set up in Chungking, the war­time capital. Many of the leading Chinese leftist writers ­were based t­ here or in some other city in Nationalist China, and Yan’an-­based writers with ambition to be recognized as major authors sought to be published in the vari­ous literary magazines that came out of Chungking or even occupied Shanghai.52 ­There was more opportunity to import Soviet culture in the Nationalist areas, and even Japanese-­occupied Shanghai, than in the communist Border Region.53 VOKS zealously pursued the distribution of Rus­sian texts in the new capital, even using the diplomatic plane to get materials to Chungking.54 It was in Chungking that VOKS established its Chinese headquarters, and ­there that most of the art exhibitions, films, and so forth sent to China from the Soviet Union ­were presented. It was also ­there that the headquarters ­were located for a new Sino-­Soviet Cultural Society (its Rus­sian acronym KSKO), which had originally been set up in Nanjing in October 1935 by Sun Ke, the American-­educated son of Sun Yat-­sen.55 Soviet lit­er­a­ture was distributed in Nationalist China largely through KSKO, which also oversaw the publication of Kul’tura Kitaia i SSSR (The culture of China and the USSR), a magazine that circulated widely, including in the Border Zone, and was an impor­tant conduit of Soviet material.56 But Shanghai, even ­after it was occupied by the Japa­nese, remained an impor­tant center for publishing leftist lit­er­a­ture, albeit often under­ground. The Soviet government and its allied cultural institutions, such as VOKS, the Foreign Commission of the Writers’ Union, Internatsional’naia literatura,

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and Comintern bodies, sought, or at least hoped, to direct the narratives of Chinese communist culture thanks to the barrage of lit­er­a­ture and films it dispatched to the country. And actually during the high point of international solidarity and Soviet influence in China, approximately 1937–1939, ­there appears to have been a lot of enthusiasm ­t here for Soviet culture, including in the areas u ­ nder Nationalist control. At any rate, Karmen claims this in his memoir based on his visit in 1938–1939, A Year in China (God v Kitae, 1941). If we are to believe this text, millions of Chinese watched con­temporary Soviet films. So far, he boasts, only one positive copy of ­t hese films has been available to screen, yet the Chinese have kept showing them ­until they cannot be seen any more. In Guilin, when a Rus­sian film was shown, t­ here w ­ ere huge crowds at the cinema and all the tickets w ­ ere sold out. When Stalin came on the screen, t­ here was a tremendous and prolonged ovation. Despite the Soviet films’ poor quality, he alleges, the Chinese prefer them to American films, which have good sound but are, to him, empty of content. He claims g­ reat popularity for Soviet lit­er­a­ture too, both classical and con­temporary, especially for works by such favorites of Soviet officialdom as Mikhail Sholokhov, Aleksandr Serafimovich, Nikolai Ostrovsky, and Mayakovsky.57 Karmen may have exaggerated the popularity of Soviet culture, but t­ here was in any case always the prob­lem of the incommensurability between the understandings of the texts between the two cultures. He shows an awareness of this in an unpublished passage of his diary where he describes a visit from some young poets while he was in Yan’an. One of them reports to him, “We try to take in the militant essence of the poems of Mayakovsky,” but in his diary entry Karmen asks himself, “Could it r­ eally be that Mayakovsky sounds in Chinese just as in Rus­sian?”58 As we saw in Chapter 1, in the early, utopian phase of literary internationalism, Hikmet admired Mayakovsky, but did not understand him (and vice versa), as both plunged exuberantly into creating new solidarity verse that relied on sound and gesture to convey meaning, but now in China it was more critical to understand what Mayakovsky said. His verse, ever since Qu Qiubai first translated him, had served as a potential model for Chinese communist agitational verse, and was promoted by Xiao a­ fter his return to China.59 In an article of 1940, for example, he urged Chinese poets to “let their voices ring out,” like Mayakovsky.60 But as the Soviet scholar L. E. Cherkasskii discusses in some detail in his book Maiakovskii v Kitae (Mayakovsky in China, 1976), rendering Mayakovsky’s

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verse in Chinese was extremely fraught and often led to deformation in meanings, as we saw in the Chinese translation of Auden’s sonnet 18.61 How “translatable” ­were the concepts, genres, tropes, and so forth of Soviet lit­er­a­ture to the lit­er­a­tures of China, which had a dif­fer­ent culture system. Its literary backbone was not the novel, as it was in modern Western lit­er­a­ture and in socialist realism, but poetry and theatrical and oral genres. Admittedly, Chinese culture had already taken on the Eu­ro­pean novel form, especially favored by the May Fourth movement. And the leading Chinese communist writer of the 1920s and early 1930s, Mao Dun, in his two main novels of the period, Rainbow and Midnight (discussed in Chapter 6), had drawn extensively on the fiction of Balzac and Zola, respectively. During the period of the Sino-­Japanese War, Mao Dun resided in a series of cities in the Nationalist zone, where he produced another European-­style novel, Disintegration (Fushi, 1941), ostensibly a manuscript trouvé in diary form that tells a tragic tale of surveillance, entrapment, and betrayal in Nationalist-­controlled areas. At its center is an engagée young ­woman in love with a communist. In that re­spect, it is comparable with his e­ arlier novel Rainbow, but the plot trajectory is very dif­fer­ent. The protagonist is manipulated into working as a spy for the Nationalists. When, ultimately, she comes face-­to-­face with her ­great love, whom the Nationalists have arrested, she is powerless to save him. The logical end is suicide. Mao Dun’s novel, a psychological study of, as its title suggests, “disintegration,” represented as the fate of the turncoat, was about and for the educated classes. But at this time many communist literati w ­ ere advocating creating a lit­er­a­ture aimed at the masses and intended to inspire them to support the communist Chinese effort in the war. The question as to which w ­ ere the appropriate forms for such a lit­er­a­ture and culture became especially impor­ tant in the communist enclave of the Border Region, centered in Yan’an.

Yan’an The Yan’an period (1937–1947) is now generally recognized as one of the most crucial in the development of the Chinese Communist Party’s program for the transformation of China. Certainly, this was so in the arts. Cultural policies and practices in the struggling communist enclave t­ here proved consequential for the ­future development of Chinese culture, though consensus was

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elusive and it took the authority of Mao to provide firm guidelines. This did not happen u ­ ntil 1942. U ­ ntil then, and especially in the heroic early years, approximately 1937–1939, if we are to believe the memoirs, Yan’an was virtually a utopian community of ­t hose committed to the anti-­Japanese cause. The town of Yan’an itself, located on the remote barren hills and loess plains in the northwest, provided a relative haven from the Japa­nese, and ­later the Nationalists. But it was far from prepossessing. Most of the arrivals lived in cave apartments that w ­ ere dug into the hillside and riddled with rats, and for much of the period food and medi­cations ­were scarce.62 Nevertheless, ­after 1937, hundreds of intellectuals flocked to Yan’an from China’s coastal cities, undertaking a long and hazardous journey to get t­ here, ­because they wished to contribute to the movement that was genuinely resisting Japa­nese aggression.63 As anti-­imperialist, patriotic sentiment swept the nation, Yan’an quickly became the center for re­sis­tance culture and the city came to enjoy a mystique, pop­u ­lar­ized in the press by the enthusiastic reports of visiting journalists.64 Foreigners’ accounts of Yan’an in the early years pre­sent it as some sort of collectivist idyll (bar the hardships). ­Those who had come to support the cause ­were treated to dramatic per­for­mances in the eve­nings followed by communal singing or dancing or to mass poetry events.65 Yan’an in fact was swamped with poetry; poems not only appeared in magazines and on wall magazines but ­were daubed as slogans on the sides of buildings. Or­ga­nized groups often gave readings on the streets and squares, armed with booklets of popu­lar poems selected for per­for­mance. Mostly they spouted declamatory poetry in the style of Mayakovsky that was written in f­ ree verse rather than regulated poetry in the Chinese tradition.66 But ­t here w ­ ere also poetry eve­nings at which participants recited (and composed) poetry in the classical vein.67 On January 20, 1938, a big poetry event was held at the central conference hall of Yan’an and attracted over two hundred participants. One of ­those who participated—­and with gusto—­was Mao Zedong, who in Xiao’s account knew by heart hundreds of peasant songs and often drew on them in his public speeches.68 Many of the new arrivals to Yan’an joined one of its most legendary institutions, the Lu Xun Acad­emy of Art (Luyi), which was founded April 1938 about three miles from the city in an abandoned Catholic monastery. The monks’ cells had been turned into dormitories, and classes w ­ ere often con-

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ducted in an open-­air courtyard of the cloisters. The acad­emy’s primary purpose was to produce propagandists for work at the front and in the villages. Given the widespread illiteracy, early activities tended to focus on the visual and performing arts, and at first t­ here w ­ ere only three teaching departments: drama, m ­ usic and fine art. Conditions for creative work w ­ ere pretty primitive; the musicians, for example, made do with homemade violins and a worn piano.69 Lit­er­a­ture was added in August 1938 with the arrival of He Qifang, who served as head of the department (­there was also an Anti-­Japanese University that taught military strategy).70 The Lu Xun Acad­emy self-­consciously embraced world culture. Karmen, in his account of his visit t­ here in 1939, reports that the students study “world lit­er­a­ture and art, history of ­music and ancient Chinese art” and “on the wall hang Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt and Tchaikovsky”; also popu­lar are Chopin and Shostakovich.71 Within “world culture” the Rus­sian predominated, and even the Eu­ro­pean culture represented was most often what had already been integrated into the Soviet. Most of the plays staged and translated in Yan’an during ­these years, including some by West Eu­ro­pe­ans, had been put on in the mid-­to late 1930s in Moscow theaters.72 And the works of Tolstoy, popu­lar in Yan’an at that time, formed a prominent part of the literary curriculum at the acad­emy, allegedly so much so that “every­one was copying down Anna Karenina by the paragraph and by the chapter.”73 It was to the Lu Xun Acad­emy that Xiao was assigned ­after he returned to China in 1939 (his wife arrived in October–­November 1940 with personal permission from Mao). He left Moscow for Yan’an on February 5, 1939, traveling via Kazakhstan to the Chinese border.74 Scholarly speculation has it that he was drawn to China not only by a sense of patriotism but also wanted to get away from Moscow, where the purges had decimated the ranks of intellectuals, both Soviet and foreign.75 But Xiao had been agitating for some time to be allowed to return to China, whose predicament was very much on his mind. He had in recent years been engaged in a number of his own writing proj­ects about the communist movement in his homeland, including a script for a film about the Chinese Red Army and a big novel on Fang Zhimin, a veteran of the Shanghai uprising and the Soviets in Jiangxi, who had been executed by the Nationalists on August 6, 1935. He also wrote a biography of Zhu De, published ­after he left.76 According to Gao Hua, on December 28, 1937, the CCP (Communist Party of China) Central Committee sent a cable

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to the Comintern requesting that several writers, including Xiao specifically, be sent to work in the Chinese communist press.77 Prob­ably, the Comintern had fi­nally agreed to send Xiao, a friend of Mao from his youth, partly to counteract a drift away from Soviet models in lit­er­a­ture and ideology. The order for his return was signed by no less than Georgi Dimitrov, head of the Comintern, in a “highly secret” memo of December 29, 1938, stipulating that Xiao was to go to China and work at the disposal of the CCP Central Committee.78 In Yan’an Xiao continued to serve as a liaison between Soviet and Chinese lit­er­a­ture and a purveyor of Soviet culture. At the Lu Xun Acad­emy he headed the Translation Bureau, where he fostered translations of a large number of con­temporary Soviet works, often undertaking to do them himself.79 As the main representative for Soviet culture in the border region, he also frequently sent to VOKS reports on Chinese lit­er­a­ture and on what had been translated into Chinese from Soviet lit­er­a­ture. And he relayed to the Foreign Section of the Writers’ Union and to VOKS requests for Soviet texts, and received instructions from them. In Internatsional’naia literatura he published many items on Yan’an, and he brokered the publication of Chinese lit­er­a­ture in Soviet journals and books. But ­after serving for a year as the director of the Translation Bureau, Xiao by his account became sick of the many intrigues at the acad­emy, so he left. He began to periodically spend time at the front, where he wrote a number of sketches that he sent to the Soviet Union to publish in translation, but was never very confident that they got through. When not at the front but in Yan’an, he shifted his center of operations and became head of the Cultural Society and also the Central Culture Club, which put on lots of plays, mass poetry recitals, and song fests. In fact, Gao Hua credits him with initiating through the culture club the “ballroom dancing, dancing parties, Peking opera eve­nings, choruses” and play per­for­mances “which imparted a lively and cheerful atmosphere to the Spartan revolutionary conditions in the area.”80 He also edited the club’s journal, Lit­er­a­ ture for the Masses (Dazhong wenyi) and New Poetry (Xin shige Xin shige).81 Xiao tapped into the enthusiasm for poetry, and in late 1940 he or­ga­nized the Society for the New Poetry and became its president; he also published extensively on Mayakovsky in Chinese literary journals, and translated several major agitational poems by him, including “Left March” and “Conversation with Lenin.”82 Additionally, he headed the Society of International

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Information, which published multiple foreign works in translation.83 And he was a leading member of the Writers’ Union in Yan’an (renamed the All-­China Re­sis­tance Association of Writers and Artists, Yan’an Branch [Wenkang]). The Wenkang leaders w ­ ere at the time locked in disputes with prominent figures in the more power­f ul center, the Lu Xun Acad­emy. Zhou Yang, the acad­emy’s director, wrote in his l­ater recollection of Yan’an, that at the time the Wenkang writers largely supported the position of the writer Ding Ling, who advocated that the darker sides of real­ity be represented in Chinese communist lit­er­a­ture, while his group, centered in the acad­emy, advocated “cele­bration of the light.”84 This conflict was to have been resolved in Mao’s Talks to the Yan’an Forum (see l­ ater). In addition to all t­ hese activities, Xiao devoted his attention while in Yan’an to two par­tic­u­lar ­causes. The first of ­these was latinization of Chinese, which he saw as essential for helping the illiterate military recruits gain literacy.85 A second preoccupation was the intense debates then in full swing among the literati of Yan’an about what would be the appropriate models for Chinese revolutionary culture.86 Xiao participated in ­t hese debates, but took a minority position. He advocated that Chinese lit­er­a­ture use “old forms,” by which he did not mean the Chinese classics as much as a se­lection of genres from the repertoire of traditional mass lit­er­a­ture and culture, such as chapbooks, ballads with drum accompaniment, folk songs accompanied by bamboo pipes, and lanci (storytelling), all of them characteristically written by “anonymous ‘poets’ and ‘singers’ ” and, he contended, “what the common ­people ­were pleased to hear and delighted to see.”87 It might seems counterintuitive that Moscow’s intermediary in Yan’an was advocating old-­style Chinese vernacular forms. But much of his attachment to them could be attributed to the turn in Soviet cultural policies in the 1930s to folk forms (as we saw in the discussion of Hikmet during the 1930s in Chapter 1). This could be seen as a reinflection of the official Soviet position of the late 1920s and early 1930s, that had a major and lasting impact on the thinking of Xiao and Qu Qiubai (who ­were ­there then), that communist culture should be a mass culture, not one derived from high culture. In the late 1930s, the Japa­nese propaganda machine was churning out attractive fare for the masses that drew on Chinese popu­lar cultural conventions. And a German-­Japanese film directed jointly by Arnold Fanck and Mansaku Itami, The New Land (1937), a racist melodrama that culminated

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in its two Japa­nese protagonists farming in newly conquered Manchuria, was, to the consternation of leftists, popu­lar among Shanghai audiences.88 Such fare had to be countered. A communist version of popu­lar mass lit­er­a­ture was an obvious recourse, and Xiao was a passionate advocate of it. But in this he was particularly at cross-­purposes with the power­ful Zhou Yang, his nemesis in Yan’an, who advocated that Chinese writers learn from Euro-­Russian lit­er­a­ture rather than indigenous models, on the grounds that it was superior both in ideological ­ nder Zhou Yang’s content and aesthetically.89 It is perhaps no accident that u directorship Xiao was replaced as head of the Translation Bureau at the acad­emy by a figure more oriented t­ oward Eu­ro­pean culture, the novelist Zhou Libo, a translator of Rus­sian and Eu­ro­pean lit­er­a­ture (Gorky, Fadeev, Lermontov, Gogol, Tolstoy, Goethe, Balzac, Stendhal, Maupassant, Mérimée). Zhou Libo arrived in December 1939 and from 1940 to 1942 ran a lecture series in the acad­emy titled “Select Readings of Literary Masters in Western Lit­er­a­ture.”90 The leading writers and critics in Yan’an, then, ­were divided on the issue of ­whether to model the new communist lit­er­a­ture on national and peasant culture, as Mao largely advocated, or on a more cosmopolitan culture of the educated. In 1940, Mao in his address “On New Democracy” had called for a mass culture based on “elevated [more sophisticated] peasant culture,” but this injunction had not been followed by any broad movement for the popularization of lit­er­a­ture. Even in 1941, few writers and artists in Yan’an ­were actively providing simplified, folkish culture geared for the broad masses. This was to change ­after Mao delivered his Yan’an Talks in 1942.

Mao Yan’an Talks on Lit­er­a­ture and the Arts The international situation deteriorated in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and this had an impact of the cultural world of Yan’an. The Spanish cause was lost by the Republicans in March 1939, and in August of that year the Soviet Union signed the Molotov-­R ibbentrop pact with the Nazis and invaded western Ukraine, Bessarabia, the Baltic states, and Finland. While the Allies ­were aghast, this does not appear to have perturbed Mao; Edgar Snow reports in his memoir that he casuistically endorsed the pact, arguing that the ­Soviet Union does not have any business in a war between imperialists. In

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June 1941, however, the Soviet Union was invaded, so that it was no longer in a position to provide as much aid to the embattled communist enclave. A further prob­lem for the Border Region was that the United Front between the Chinese Nationalists and communists had by then become shaky. In 1939 the Guomin­d ang imposed a blockade on the Border Region and to make m ­ atters worse cut off subsidies. The subsequent economic crisis hit Yan’an hard. Food became scarce, though a campaign to achieve self-­ sufficiency had some success. To add to the misery, the Japa­nese stepped up their military activity aimed at the enclave.91 In Yan’an t­ here was a dearth of books of catastrophic proportions, as it became increasingly hard both to send and to receive literary materials. The Rus­sian archives are full of exchanges between Chinese intellectuals and VOKS or the Writers’ Union about letters and packages not getting through.92 It was not u ­ ntil 1945 that the Sino-­Japanese War ended. As it dragged on, the military and the po­liti­cal landscape altered, both in China and across Eu­ rope. In Yan’an, the hard times and drying up of aid from outside led to an increasingly xenophobic climate. If we are to believe the memoir of P. P. Vladimirov, a Comintern, an envoy from both the military and from TASS (the Soviet news agency) assigned to the Border Region, Soviet personnel t­ here ­were ostracized and treated with suspicion; by December 1941, attitudes to them deteriorated to the point where Chinese officials refused to acknowledge any Rus­sians they saw on the street. Mao on pretext of being busy did not receive any Rus­sian journalists, and the security forces set up surveillance of them.93 Xiao and his German Jewish wife, Eva, came u ­ nder such a cloud ­because she was a foreigner that they separated and she returned to the Soviet Union with the c­ hildren.94 Almost a year a­ fter the Nazi invasion of Rus­sia, in the spring of 1942, Chairman Mao delivered his “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Lit­er­a­ture and Art,” convened by the Central Propaganda Department of the Communist Party and held at its Yan’an headquarters with more than one hundred participants. Mao’s two speeches to the forum, his Talks as they are generally referred to in En­glish, w ­ ere to become the canonical account of Chinese communist lit­er­a­ture, functionally the equivalent of Gorky’s and Zhdanov’s addresses to the First Writers’ Congress in 1934 (­t here are two main versions of Mao’s Talks, the original version published in 1943–1944, and a slightly revised version of 1953 / 1966; I am using ­here the original version).95 They

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remained canonical ­until Xi Jinping delivered an address at the Beijing Forum on Lit­er­a­ture and Art of October 2014 that was intended to supersede them, though they still carry a lot of weight; recently, some writers have volunteered, or been required, to transcribe them for themselves. The consensus of Western historiography is that the Talks ­were part of the so-­called Rectification campaign. They reflect a new orientation ­toward the sinification and democ­ratization of Chinese communist lit­er­at­ ure that accords with an increasing assertion of the national in Mao’s public statements of the late 1930s. As early as October 1938, in a landmark speech, “The Role of the Chinese Communist Party in the National War,” delivered to the Sixth Plenary Session of the CCP Central Committee, he had produced the formula “In wars of national liberation patriotism is applied internationalism,” a casuistic way for Mao as a communist, and hence in theory an “internationalist,” to promote the national, exploiting the fact that the distinction between the two is not absolute. In his speeches he argued that to pursue the national cause, and, for instance, drive out the imperialist Japa­nese, is also to further the international cause, making more pos­si­ble revolutions in other countries. He also sought to sinicize Marxism itself, recommending that Party members study national history as well as “Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin,” adding, “Being Marxists, Communists are internationalists, but we can put Marxism into practice only when it is integrated with the specific characteristics of our country and acquires definite national form. . . . ​For Chinese Communists who are part of the ­great Chinese nation, flesh of its flesh and blood of its blood, any talk about Marxism in isolation from its characteristics is merely Marxism in the abstract, Marxism in a vacuum.” He added, as if addressing Stalin’s 1930 formulation about “socialist in content and national in form,” “To separate internationalist content from national form is the practice of ­t hose who do not understand the first t­ hing about internationalism.”96 Western commentary on Mao’s Yan’an Talks has largely focused on the extent to which he was, as Ban Wang put it in his essay on the Talks that appeared in A New Literary History of Modern China (2017), advocating a course away from Western Eu­ro­pean influence (amazingly, Wang does not mention Soviet influence).97 And, indeed, in several speeches, including the one from 1938 discussed in the preceding paragraph, Mao asserted that “foreign ste­ reo­t ypes must be abolished” and “replaced by the fresh, lively, Chinese style and spirit which the common p ­ eople of China love.”98 In calling for indige-

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nous Chinese forms, he also repeatedly stressed that culture should be generated primarily for the mass of peasants who constituted the vast majority of the Chinese population, rather than for the “petty-­bourgeois” (intellectuals). And so in the Talks, for example, Mao, while expressing ­great reverence for Lu Xun, the official, if by this point late, elder statesman of Chinese revolutionary lit­er­at­ ure, also called on writers not to imitate him: Lu Xun’s subtle prose and gentle use of irony would be less effective among the masses for war propaganda. In “the Shanxi-­Gansu-­Ningxia Border Areas and elsewhere ­behind the ­enemy lines,” he contended, “[lit­er­a­ture] can shout at the top of its voice, but it s­ houldn’t be obscure”; t­ here is no need for “veiled and roundabout expressions.” Works should proj­ect a Manichaean world, especially in depicting Chinese traitors.99 Mao himself preferred the vernacular tradition to foreign models, arguing that drawing on its conventions would produce more effective tools for agitation. Xiao promoted folk culture, too, but emphasized “popularization” to such a radical degree that it put him to the left of Mao and ­others promoting folk forms. In his early time in Yan ‘an, he often spent his eve­nings drinking and reminiscing with his old friend Mao, but their relationship became more formal l­ ater and this personal connection does not appear to have done much to stop the drift ­toward “sinification.” Perhaps ­because of his extreme position on “popularization,” or perhaps b ­ ecause he was too closely identified with Moscow, he was heckled when he spoke at the Yan’an Forum.100 To recoup, perhaps, he expressed enthusiasm for the Talks in an essay, “A Pleasant Turn” (Ke xi de zhuan bian), that he published in Liberation Daily on April 11, 1943.101 By 1945, Xiao was sufficiently a mouthpiece of official policies for Mao to write to him on February 22 applauding an essay Xiao had published in Liberation Daily that day: “Your attitude is greatly dif­fer­ent from the initial years when you had just come to Yan’an—­t his essay is ­really honest, sincere, vivid and power­ful.”102 Mao, like Xiao, also dutifully and assiduously promoted Soviet culture. In fact, David Holm has argued that the Yan’an Talks, though presented as Mao’s original doctrine, ­were in real­ity a combination of the Soviet theory of socialist realism and Qu Qiubai’s and Zhou Yang’s (disparate) views on what constituted national forms.103 In the first half of the 1930s, both Qu and Zhou Yang published many articles that drew on recent Soviet literary theory.104 Qu, who had been in the Soviet Union immediately before, in 1928–1930,

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functioned in the early 1930s as a direct conduit of Soviet literary theory and policies, though he did not undertake the Long March to Yan’an, and had been executed in a Nationalist prison in 1935. But Zhou Yang, known to have been one of Mao’s advisers and a power­f ul figure in Yan’an, had edited a collection of articles by Marx, Engels, and Lenin on art (to which Xiao contributed). It appeared in the acad­emy press in 1940, so one can assume that this collection was a source for some of the stipulations in Mao’s Talks.105 In the Talks, the wily Mao essentially promoted a hybrid literary platform that amalgamated authoritative Soviet positions and vernacular Chinese models. For example, he at several points invoked, sometimes explic­itly at ­others implicitly, Lenin’s canonical formulation (available in Zhou Yang’s edited volume) of lit­er­a­ture’s role as a cog and screw in the Party, which he outlined in his “Party Organ­ization and Party Lit­er­a­ture” of 1905. This text was written for the crisis situation of the 1905 revolution, and Mao’s Talks ­were delivered in a comparable moment of peril for the communist movement (in China). In his case, the prime concern was what would most effectively serve the anti-­Japanese effort. However, in both cases—­Lenin’s article of 1905 and Mao’s Talks of 1942—­the communist leaders’ stipulations for literary policy, though made for dire situations, remained canonical through ­later, more peaceful times.106 And yet the fit between the two revolutionary lit­er­a­tures could not be seamless. In order to demonstrate the prob­lems of any attempt to posit Soviet influence on the Talks, I w ­ ill look at one par­tic­u­lar model Mao advanced in them. When it came to advocating specific literary works, he strikingly did not provide any examples from con­temporary Chinese lit­er­a­ture to be emulated, but he did cite one Soviet work, Alexander Fadeev’s The Rout (Razgrom, 1927; in some translations of the Talks it is referred to as Debacle or by its title in the first En­glish translation, The Nineteen). A Chinese version had appeared in September 1931, translated in 1930 by the revered Lu Xun, and so was particularly authoritative for the Chinese left. One might assume that Mao cited The Rout only out of considerations of Realpolitik. Fadeev was from 1938 to 1944 chairman of the Union of Soviet Writers (and again from 1946 to 1954). Also, The Rout, well-­k nown internationally, has been sporadically, though not consistently, cited as a model of socialist realism.107 Though a novel might not seem to be the best genre for mass culture in a nation with a high rate of illiteracy, The Rout already had

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some mass readership in China. Together with another Soviet novel about the Civil War and Intervention, Aleksandr Serafimovich’s Iron Flood, it was often read in chapbook versions generated by the League of Leftist Writers and similar organ­izations.108 Both works had already had an influence on Chinese leftist lit­er­a­ture, the most famous example of this being Xiao Jun’s Village in August (1934).109 In the Soviet Union The Rout had received its greatest critical attention and praise during the late 1920s, while Qu Qiubai was t­ here. Qu subsequently served as the head of culture when the communists ­were based in the soviets in Jianxi, prior to the Long March. So the citation of this novel, together with other aesthetic princi­ples that could be identified with the martyred Qu, could be seen as an example of the diffusion from Moscow of literary doctrine via an intermediary. In the Soviet Union, however, by the mid-1930s, The Rout had been supplanted as the leading Soviet novel about its Civil War by Nikolai Ostrovsky’s How the Steel Was Tempered (Kak zakalialas’ stal’, 1932–1934), which became one of the two most canonical models of socialist realism, the other being Fëdor Gladkov’s Cement (Tsement, 1925). Thus The Rout’s status in the Talks was one of many anachronisms, but explicable ­because Ostrovsky’s novel had not yet appeared in Chinese translation (the first translation—­made from the English—­appeared in 1942, but ­a fter the Talks). Fadeev’s autobiographically based Rout might seem an appropriate text to cite during the time of the Sino-­Japanese War, in that it treats an incident during the Soviet Civil War when a red detachment of partisans in the Far East engages both the Japa­nese and the counterrevolutionary army of Admiral A. V. Kolchak (read the Nationalists u ­ nder Chiang Kai-­shek). Qu had in his review of the Chinese translation in 1932, Manchuria’s Destruction, drawn attention to this felicitous parallel with the situation of the Chinese communists, but the similarities applied even more in 1942 when the Japa­ nese had conquered so much of China.110 In the novel, the detachment fights heroically, but in a surprise attack at the end they are drastically outnumbered and most of them are killed. Levinson, its commander and the novel’s positive hero, is deeply depressed by t­ hese losses u ­ ntil he catches sight of a group of peasants working on the threshing floor and thinks to himself that soon he must make partisans out of them; in other words, he must turn to the peasantry as Mao had done ­after the 1927 debacle. At this thought, Levinson’s

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despair evaporates, and he presses on with a renewed sense of revolutionary commitment. Though Mao may not have read Fadeev’s novel himself, t­ here are aspects of it, other than the chance it provided of giving a nod to Soviet lit­er­a­ture and Soviet institutions, that might have had appeal for him, or at any rate for the Chinese advisers who helped him formulate his ideas for the Talks. Lu Xun wrote in his afterword to the translation that Fadeev personally ­experienced guerrilla warfare, and so the story tells us that ­great writers do not sit at home, a sentiment that fit well with Mao’s deprecation in the Talks of bourgeois intellectuals. At the center of the novel is a rivalry between two members of the detachment, Morozka, with an exemplary proletarian pedigree—­a second-­generation miner with a peasant grand­father—­a nd Mechik, an educated bourgeois, in that he has completed gymnasium education. Mechik is depicted with what had become a clichéd caricature of intellectuals in Soviet proletarian fiction: he proves inept at ­handling guns and cowardly when the detachment sees action. This cliché has to have had appeal for t­hose Chinese activists seeking to privilege the uneducated masses over the urban intellectuals, as Mao was proposing in his Yan’an Talks. In The Rout, the lower-­class soldiers in the detachment tease Mechik for his overly correct Rus­sian; their own speech is pithy and highly colloquial. They are, Fadeev comments, “not modeled on books [knizhnye] but real living ­people.”111 ­Here the novel potentially becomes a focus of the ongoing disputes in China about which level or version of the Chinese language should be used for its communist lit­er­a­ture. The text of Rout is highly oral. Much of it consists of dialogue or scenes conveyed in the words of one or other member of the detachment. This proclivity for using substandard language and dialect and the pithiness bears comparison with the yangge, the popu­lar, folkish literary form that Chinese communist cultural officials, including Mao, had begun to promote as a replacement for high lit­er­a­ture. The yangge had been adapted as a form of popu­lar agitational drama that had been a central feature of the culture of the Jianxi Soviets and on the Long March, too. They ­were not strictly speaking peasant art, but rather art for the peasants; they drew on or (largely) imitated traditional peasant folk tales and dramatic forms, adapting their genre conventions and plot functions for agitational purposes and infusing them with con­temporary, and often highly local, content. The yangge ­were mostly short, ribald comedies, rollicking and

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energetic—­fast-­moving, full of action, and sprinkled with humor and the local idiom. And they often included pornography.112 Thus they fit well Mao’s stipulation in the Talks that lit­er­a­ture and art, in drawing on the masses for material, would be “crude and also extremely rich and fundamental” and “make all pro­cessed forms of art pale in comparison.”113 Mao during the Yan’an period also frequently advocated classics of written lit­er­at­ ure, such as The Dream of the Red Chamber and Outlaws of the Marsh (also known as The ­Water Margin, a swashbuckling tale of Robin Hood–­like brigands), favorites of his (at the time, Soviet Sinologists lamented that they had not been translated into Rus­sian, one of many indicators of the lopsided nature of the Soviet-­Chinese literary exchange).114 Though t­ hese texts w ­ ere written or compiled by sons of gentry, they had been adapted in oral, vernacular versions and printed in chapbooks that ­were popu­lar with the illiterate masses; Monkey Tale, also promoted by Mao, was actually written in the vernacular. My description of the yangge and its parallels in The Rout, however, foregrounds aspects of Fadeev’s novel, which in the Soviet Union had already, well before 1942, become nonaspects. When The Rout appeared, in Leningrad, the chief of the national censorship body Glavlit, P. I. Lebedev-­Poliansky, criticized its Leningrad regional branch for allowing publication of a work with many “inadmissible words and expressions,” and in subsequent Soviet editions the obscenities ­were omitted.115 But the Japa­nese translation of The Rout that Lu Xun used had to have been from the 1927 edition or the second edition of 1929, both of which had not been bowdlerized.116 ­Later, thanks to the very public interventions in the early 1930s of Gorky, the most revered Soviet writer among the Chinese left, who paired him with Lu Xun, substandard and obscene language and dialecticisms ­were banned from Soviet lit­er­ a­ture, a position emphasized by Zhdanov in his canonical speech to the First Writers’ Congress in 1934. The puritanical stipulations for socialist realism made at the Writers’ Union Congress w ­ ere not yet in force when The Rout was written. In it the Red partisans sit around the campfire in the eve­ning and tell each other bawdy stories. Levinson chuckles at them and adds some of his own. By contrast, in Ostrovsky’s ­later Civil War novel, How the Steel Was Tempered, as the Red Army lads sit around the campfire at night, their commander reads to them his favorite inspirational text, the En­glish writer Ethel Voynich’s novel The Gadfly (1897; in Rus­sian Ovod), about heroic sacrifice and the Risorgimento.

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Both Mao in his Talks and the official Soviet literary platform, then. ­were promoting the same canonical text, but for dif­fer­ent purposes and in dif­ fer­ent renditions. This nonfit was compounded by the fact that the Chinese version of The Rout was a translation, or more accurately a translation based on translations—­a second-­order translation. In working on The Rout, Lu Xun had used a translation into Japa­nese but had both the En­glish and German versions at hand to compare with the Japa­nese in the hope of getting as close to the original Rus­sian as pos­si­ble. He knew En­glish only slightly, but Japa­nese and German well.117 I am not g­ oing to weigh Mao’s stipulations in the Talks on the scales and try to establish what percentage ­were Soviet-­derived and what percentage show an assertion of in­de­pen­dence and promotion of indigenous models. ­After two de­cades of close association, the discourses of the two communist movements had become so imbricated with each other that it is impossible to disaggregate them entirely. But what we see in the case of The Rout, the mediation of a Soviet classic on its route to China via its translation into Japa­ nese, provides a specific instance of a general phenomenon that has to be taken into account in assessing the role of Soviet lit­er­a­ture and its literary platform in Chinese communist culture, and in t­ hese talks specifically. Mao’s promotion of The Rout in his Talks throws into relief the general phenomenon Emily Apter emphasizes in her account of the role of translation in world lit­er­a­ture, what she calls “incommensurability.”118 The Talks provide case studies in the prob­lem of how “commensurable” ­were what, seemingly, ­were key terms from Soviet discourse Mao deployed, such as “massification.” The terminology Mao used in his Talks and other authoritative sources of the time did not map entirely onto corresponding key terms from the Soviet literary platform. Even when Chinese terms or concepts appear to correspond directly to Soviet ones, they had actually under­gone some inflection and adaptation—­both conscious and unconscious. ­There ­were two main sources of the discourse that w ­ ere related but not the same. A major influence on Chinese leftist lit­er­at­ ure was the Japa­nese proletarian literary movement; many leading Chinese communist writers such as Lu Xun, Mao Dun, and Zhou Yang had spent time in Japan, but not in the Soviet Union, and Japan was a major source of Soviet lit­er­a­ture and literary theory in translation. For most of the discourse, the Chinese corresponding terms w ­ ere originally derived from the character-­based terminology of Japa­nese leftist writings.119 In other

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words, some of the key terms Mao used in his stipulations for lit­er­a­ture of this period, and that o ­ thers used in the attending debates, w ­ ere, as with the Chinese translation of The Rout, second-­order translations (via Japan), though originally largely derived from Soviet literary discourse.120 They can also be traced to literary debates among the Chinese left of the late 1920s and early 1930s, much of them derived from Soviet texts and terminology and translated or summarized directly from Rus­sian, though sinicized. But t­ hese terms ­were further modified during the Yan’an period when they became tinged with nationalist sentiment and some new slogans emerged to prominence. The main slogans Mao used in his Yan’an Talks are “massification,” “nationality,” “popularization,” and “elevation.” Of them the two most critical in the heated debates formed the dialectical pairing of “puji,” which translates approximately as “accessibility” or “popularization,” and “tigao,” variously rendered as “refinement,” “raising standards,” or “elevation,” a term for which ­t here is no direct counterpart. Mao emphasized the importance of “popularization,” citing the ­limited education of the masses. But he saw the two as linked in a pro­cess whereby, as the masses became attuned to lit­er­a­ ture in a “pop­u­lar­ized” form, it could become more sophisticated, allowing also that some “elevation” was already necessary for works directed at cadres and students. However, some in the communist literary and artistic camp in Yan’an, including Zhou Yang and o ­ thers at the Lu Xun Acad­emy, saw “popularization” as threatening the literary and artistic intelligent­sia’s cultural investment in “internationalism” and “­great lit­er­a­ture and art,” and threatening to lower aesthetic standards and values of the classic Eu­ro­pean and Rus­sian traditions of “­g reat” culture. If implemented, they contended, it would drag the artistic, intellectual, and moral qualities of revolutionary culture into the dregs of Chinese “feudal” rural ignorance and tradition. And so they came up with vari­ous ways of qualifying or countering the call for “popularization,” emphasizing particularly the importance of “elevation,” a position Mao condemned as “closed-­door elevationism.” 121 “Popularization” would appear to map onto the Soviet key slogan of the late 1930s and 1940s, “narodnost’ ” (of the folk, masses, or nation). But “popularization” in the sense Mao used it in his Talks, together with “national forms,” envisioned a very dif­fer­ent kind of “narodnost’ ” from what was advocated in Soviet cultural discourse of the 1930s when it was a slogan used to beat the cosmopolitan sophisticates over the head, as it was in Yan’an.

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Where China was advocating the yangge and other spirited, highly colloquial and even bawdy folk forms, in the Stalinist late 1930s the purportedly “folk” compositions generated ­were largely high-­style epics and odes on con­ temporary themes (many of them celebrating production achievements or serving the cult of personality for Stalin or some other leader) that ­were disguised as folk ballads. All bawdiness, dialecticisms, or substandard locutions typical of folk forms ­were eradicated other than, for example, decorating the text with occasional folksy diminutives. The Soviet literary world was, however, even during ­t hose purge years of the late 1930s, full of controversies, though the opposed positions ­were often of necessity expressed obliquely. Even the official platform h ­ oused dif­fer­ent injunctions. Some authoritative sources advocated that writers draw on models not from high lit­er­a­ture rather than folk, a position closer to the call of Zhou Yang and some other Yan’an intellectuals for “elevation.” A Literaturnaia gazeta editorial of September 15, 1940 (published in translation by Xiao in the Chinese journal Lit­er­a­ture of the Masses and, he claims, enthusiastically received), called for an end to the isolation and exclusivity (“zamknutost’ ”) of writers, and concluded that “their habits of centuries must be ­ ere broken.”122 It might seem that this article was attacking what the Chinese w calling “elevation,” but it went on to assert that writers must be educated to operate “in the spirit of Bolshevik printsipial’nost’ (adhering to Bolshevik princi­ples),” and when t­ hese princi­ples ­were clarified in the succeeding editorial, it emerged that writers w ­ ere enjoined to learn from Rus­sian and Eu­ ro­pean classics (Shakespeare, Gogol, Griboedov, Flaubert, Balzac, Chekhov, Gorky, Swift, Goethe).123 This second article was not publicized by Xiao, doubtless ­because of his preference for mass lit­er­a­ture, but this fact also points to the ele­ment of selectivity as Chinese writers a­ dopted Soviet or Western models and strictures. Countervailing understandings of the desirable contours of revolutionary lit­er­a­ture, then, jostled in the literary worlds of both the Soviet Union and Yan’an throughout the late 1930s and early 1940s. As is clear from archival sources, it is not true that when, ­after the Talks ­were delivered in 1942, ­t here was exclusive emphasis in Yan’an on using folksy vernacular forms, or that this meant that interest in Soviet lit­er­a­ture dis­appeared and it was no longer translated, or that Xiao no longer played a role in its cultural life.124

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­ fter the Talks, Soviet cultural influence and models ­were particularly noA ticeable in the sphere of drama, even though by many recent accounts the yangge and other such “folk” forms ­were the preferred dramatic genres. In 1942 and 1944, productions of Soviet plays w ­ ere actually promoted by Mao, who urged ­those in Yan’an to go to see them and learn from them.125 But the par­tic­u­lar Soviet plays staged, and also the par­tic­u­lar theoretical approaches to theater and film propagated at this time, w ­ ere symptomatic of the times. The two most prominent Soviet plays put on ­were Nikolai Pogodin’s Man with a Gun (Chelovek s ruzh’ëm) of 1937 and Aleksandr Korneichuk’s Front of 1942. Both purvey a Stalinist message about the need to denounce “enemies ­ eople” and apply absolute vigilance and “ruthlessness” t­ oward them, of the p a message that fit with the stepped-up surveillance and paranoia that characterized the l­ ater years in Yan’an. Another set of Soviet theatrical texts that caught on was the writings of Konstantin Stanislavsky, such as his An Actor Prepares, which more or less corresponds to Rabota aktëra nad soboi, which had first appeared posthumously in 1938. I have discussed elsewhere how the injunctions in this book and related writings, which recommend that when an actor prepares a role they plumb their innermost psyche, dovetailed well with the culture of the Soviet purge years when t­ hese ­were published, and Stanislavsky was elevated to the de facto status of supreme arbiter when it came to questions of acting.126 His signature princi­ple (that the actor should plumb their innermost psyche) can be related to the Soviet practice, most promoted during the purge, of ­ eople to reveal the ill intent con“tearing off the masks” of enemies of the p cealed deep beneath their outer selves. So it is not surprising that Stanislavsky had a presence in the Chinese theater world of this time, too, when a demand for self-­confession was at its height. In the story of how Stanislavky’s theories became influential in China of the late 1930s and early 1940s, we see yet another example of the complexity and circuity in the diffusion of Soviet ideas. Interest in Stanislavsky actually first emerged in the Nationalist zone. Starting in 1938, sections of this text came out in the Shanghai journal New Theater, but from ­t here they made their way to the Border Region. In September 1940, the Stanislavsky method was officially a­ dopted as the main method for actor training in Yan’an, though the chief textbook used was Course of Study on Acting, which comprised two

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long essays on the Stanislavsky method that had been selected from Theater Workshop, the official publication of the American left-­leaning New Theater League. Stanislavsky’s methods of staging plays w ­ ere also followed assiduously in Lu Xun Acad­emy productions, and by 1940 versions of both his An Actor Prepares (Rabota aktëra nad soboi) and My Life in Art (Moia zhizn’ v iskusstve, 1924, 1926) had been published in translation.127 ­After Mao’s Yan’an Talks ­were delivered in 1942, ­t here w ­ ere some calls for actors and directors not to “dogmatically borrow” the Stanislavsky system, but essentially his theories remained highly authoritative.128 In Yan’an, the first full translation of Rabota aktëra nad soboi was published in 1943.129 The writings of Eisenstein and Pudovkin w ­ ere also available in translation and had an impact on Chinese leftist film ­after the Talks.130 ­After the PRC was established in 1949, Soviet literary models had a greater impact in China than they had had in Yan’an, due to some degree to the fledgling country’s dependence on the Soviet Union for material and technical assistance. Though versions of popu­lar folk forms continued to play a significant role in PRC culture (consider the Peking opera), the novel returned to prominence, and in par­tic­u­lar the production novel, mainstay of socialist realism. Understandably, given the preoccupation with combatting enemies militarily, it had not been a feature of Chinese communist lit­er­a­ture during the war years, but was very ser­v iceable during the period of postwar recovery. Gladkov’s ­Cement, its prototype, was first translated into Chinese in 1929, but it was not ­until the PRC was founded that it became a model for Chinese communist lit­er­a­ture.131 Ironically, however, this new, PRC lit­er­a­ture was more puritanical than its pre­de­ces­sors of the 1930s and early 1940s had been, and readers often resorted to reading the Soviet classics for more engaging love plots. ­These developments could be categorized as a reinflection in the evolution of PRC lit­er­a­ture, one not provided for in Mao’s Talks. But with some casuistry, the successive changes w ­ ere accommodated within the provisions of the Talks, whose stipulations ­were subject to reinterpretation and reemphasis to accord with societal and policy changes. De facto modifications over the years provide yet another version of translation, of bearing across, translation not across national or cultural borders, but through time. But Soviet lit­er­a­ture, similarly, though ostensibly of a piece, went through successive shifts over time in its theoretical under­pinnings and practices—­“translations”—so that ­until the Sino-­Soviet split, authority figures in Chinese communist lit­er­a­

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ture could to a degree cherry-­pick among the vari­ous options available in authoritative Soviet sources in finding pre­ce­dents for the positions they ­were advocating. Though Mao’s Talks in no way meant an end to Soviet cultural influence, just according a greater share in Chinese revolutionary culture to the vernacular and popu­lar, they w ­ ere nevertheless largely ignored in the Soviet press. P. P. Vladimirov in his memoir reports reading the Talks and working on them, but supplies no details of their content and does not mention his reaction to them or that he reported them to Moscow, which makes one suspect that in his account of Yan’an responses to the Talks ­were censored out.132 Admittedly, the Soviet Union was more preoccupied with war at the time the Talks w ­ ere given, but the earliest discussion of them I have found was in a 1949 article in Znamia by N. Fedorenko, “On New Chinese Lit­er­a­ture.” Fedorenko largely looks at the literary situation in the newly founded PRC, but in a brief discussion of the Yan’an period cites Mao’s declaration in the Talks (following Lenin) that lit­er­a­ture should be an “integral part of the revolutionary machine.”133 More detail on the Talks was provided in a book that came out a year ­later but was by a foreigner: Frits Jensen’s memoir on his time in Yan’an, China Siegt, which appeared in German in 1950, was also published that year in Rus­sian translation as Kitai pobezhdaet. Jensen, like Auden, Ivens, Capa, and Karmen, had come to Yan’an in 1939 from a stint helping the Republicans in Spain (in his case, with two other Austrian doctors). His China Siegt contains a section on Yan’an culture in which for several pages Jensen covers the Talks, providing extensive quotation, but one doubts this book was read extensively in the Soviet Union.134 Lit­er­a­ture was nevertheless impor­tant in the relationship between the Soviet Union and the Chinese communists. A mark of this, when the communist victory was celebrated on Tian­anmen Square in 1949, at that early and somewhat delicate time internationally Stalin de­cided not to send a del­e­ga­ tion of leaders or diplomats (the Soviet diplomats ­were still with Chiang Kai-­ shek in the South). Instead, two Soviet writers stood on the podium in Tian­ anmen Square, Aleksandr Fadeev and Konstantin Simonov. Xiao, who accompanied the two for their stay in China, stood with them to interpret during the ceremony.135 It was de rigueur in Soviet sources on Chinese leftist lit­er­a­ture to emphasize its indebtedness to Soviet theories and models (something Fedorenko,

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predictably, did in his article). But as this chapter has demonstrated, the patterns of exchange and the filiations ­were not straightforward. Soviet models ­were sometimes consciously followed by Chinese leftists, and sometimes rejected, but any “translation” from Soviet, or Eu­ro­pean leftist, lit­er­a­ture to Chinese communist lit­er­a­ture was inevitably inexact. The varied patterns of “diffusion” this chapter has charted bear comparison with a dynamic in the British Empire that Antoinette Burton and Isabel Hofmeyr have commented on in their introduction to the edited collection Ten Books That S­ haped the British Empire: Creating an Imperial Commons. By “imperial commons,” they mean a group of texts that have had an impact on readers in the far-­flung empire. In the Chinese communist case, this “commons” would comprise the model novels of socialist realism, such as The Rout and Cement, and also some canonical theoretical texts by Marx, Lenin, and so on. But as Burton and Hofmeyr point out, “the commons” was “both integrated intellectually and perpetually disintegrated by the myriad subjects and agents who constructed, lived inside, and sought to exceed its territorial and epistemological frames.”136 This dynamic has been a theme of this book, which explores in multiple ways the dialectic of integration and disintegration in the movement for an internationalist left lit­er­a­ture that would span all of Eurasia.

Epilogue

M

ao’s Talks w ­ ere first published in Chinese in 1943, one of the reasons why that year marks the end point of my study. That was also the year the Comintern was abolished. ­These events might be seen as a logical conclusion to Chapter 8’s tale of the relative weakening and disintegration of the literary international in the late 1930s and early 1940s. But, despite this, and despite the demise in the purges of many of its principal Soviet organizers (Mikhail Koltsov, Sergei Tretiakov, heads of VOKS), the postwar years would see, a­ fter a hiatus, the emergence of what could be viewed as a new version of the literary international. This version was to embrace not just Eurasia and the Amer­i­cas, but Africa as well. Between 1943, when the Comintern was disbanded, and the mid-1950s, the Soviet Union had shown ­little interest in cultivating links with writers from “the East,” with the partial exception of Chinese and Korean writers. Their works frequently appeared in translation in Soviet literary journals (the ­ ere establishment of the PRC in 1949 and the Korean War from 1950 to 1953 w ­factors in this). To some extent also, the Soviet-­sponsored World Congresses of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace (Wroclaw in 1947, Paris / Prague in 1949, and Sheffield / Warsaw in 1950) served the cause of internationalism in the interim, and with it literary internationalism. ­A fter Stalin’s death in 1953, however, the Soviet Union began to take a greater interest in internationalism. At the time, many former colonies w ­ ere gaining in­de­pen­dence from their colonial masters, starting with India in 1947, but continuing through the 1950s and 1960s when a series of African

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countries w ­ ere granted statehood. This shifted the landscape of the anticolonialist-­cum-­a nti-­i mperialist movement as intellectuals from t­ hese countries began to form transnational alliances. A landmark moment in this trend was the Asian–­A frican Conference, which met in April  1955  in Bandung, Indonesia. At this conference, twenty-­nine mostly newly in­de­pen­ dent African and Asian countries initiated what became known as the ­Non-­A ligned Movement, a Third World bloc dedicated to promoting self-­ determination, and world peace, together with re­sis­tance to imperialism and racism. Somewhat in parallel, Third World writers began to or­ga­nize. Two impor­tant writers’ conferences w ­ ere held in Delhi, the first in 1955, where it was resolved to expand and to change their title to Afro-­Asian. At the second, held in December 1956, Mulk Raj Anand played a prominent role, being one of the founding figures of the Indian Progressive Writers’ Association (IPWA). Then, at a meeting in Cairo on December 26, 1957–­January 1, 1958, the Afro-­Asian ­People’s Solidarity Organ­ization (AAPSO) was established, with a permanent secretariat in the Egyptian capital; many Third World writers became members. ­Earlier, at the second Delhi Writers’ Conference, another critical body in this movement, the Afro-­Asian Writers’ Bureau (AAWB), was set up and, initially, headquartered in Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). The Soviet Union was not an initiator of this new movement. However, surprised by the emergence of a power­f ul Afro-­Asian bloc, the Soviet state began to invest heavi­ly in po­liti­cal, economic, and cultural connections with the newly decolonized states. It sent small del­e­ga­tions of writers to the two Delhi Conferences, and ­toward the end of the second the del­e­ga­t ion telegraphed the International Section of the Central Committee in Moscow (which oversaw all Soviet involvement in the Afro-­Asian movement), asking permission to issue an invitation to the writers gathered in Delhi to another meeting. The International Section telegraphed its approval, and the proposed meeting became the Tashkent Conference of 1958. In October 1958, over two hundred writers from Asia and the emerging African nations descended on Tashkent, the capital of the Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan. At this meeting, the Afro-­Asian Writers’ Association (AAWA) was formed. Its bureau or­ga­nized a series of Afro-­Asian Writers’ Conferences that took place over two de­cades: in Cairo (1962), Beirut (1967), New Delhi (1970), Almaty (Kazakhstan, 1973), Luanda (Angola, 1979), Tashkent (1983),

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and Tunis (1988). Th ­ ese conferences punctuated and fostered the Afro-­Asian literary movement, though not single-­handedly. ­There are some clear parallels between the orga­nizational aspects of AAWA and the interwar literary international. They include the holding of international writers’ conferences and the de facto Soviet financial backing of many publication ventures (augmented in the AAWA years by an exponential increase in the number of non-­European texts put out by Pro­gress Publishers in Moscow). Perhaps the most consequential feature in common was the Soviet subsidizing of several of AAWA’s literary journals. Its flagship, Lotus (initially called Afro-­Asian Writing), which appeared between 1968 and 1991, was in some re­spects comparable to the interwar International Lit­er­a­ture journals, in that it was intended to break down the national, linguistic, and cultural borders between writers of dif­fer­ent countries and was multilingual (it appeared in Arabic, En­glish, and French). Like the International Lit­er­a­ ture cluster, it provided translations of con­temporary works and fostered transnational literary networks, facilitating the emergence of a distinctive anticolonialist lit­er­a­ture and greater cohesion among African and Asian leftist writers. But the scale of this AAWA journal was very reduced as compared with the interwar International Lit­er­a­ture journals. ­There ­were not separate, semi-­parallel journals for each of the main relevant languages as t­ here had been for that ­earlier network, though—an innovation—­AAWA or­ga­nized an annual international literary prize, the Lotus Prize for lit­er­a­ture, which it awarded starting in 1967. It was intended to rival the Nobel Prize. Among the participants in the Tashkent Conference ­were several of the writers who w ­ ere prominent in the interwar literary international. From the subcontinent came Mulk Raj Anand and Sajjad Zaheer, the two main found­ers of the Indian Progressive Writers’ Association; from Turkey, Nâzim Hikmet; and from the PRC, Ėmi Xiao, Mao Dun (who was from 1949 to 1965 its minister of culture), and Zhou Yang, a founding member of the League of Leftist Writers and now one of the main literary theorists in the PRC. Also in attendance ­were some leading Soviet writers from Central Asia and the Caucasus, as well as Writers’ Union officials, the formal hosts of the event. The Soviet pivot to an involvement in Third World lit­er­a­ture also resulted in giving greater prominence, both domestically and in the world arena, to Soviet writers from the Caucasus and Central Asia, and using them as cultural intermediaries.

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Among the stalwarts of the interwar literary international, Anand and Hikmet ­were to be the most active in this new movement. Anand, now one of its elder statesmen, visited the Soviet Union several times during the postwar years (starting in 1947) and was a semiregular at the association’s conferences. Hikmet, who had fled from Turkey to the Soviet Union in 1950 and lived ­there in exile ­until his death in 1963, also took part in several Afro-­ Asian literary conferences and served as a founding member of AAWB. He is generally considered one of the three main poets of decolonization (along with the Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén and the Chilean Pablo Neruda) and traveled widely in the Third World during ­these years, attending, for example, AAPSO meetings, in Tashkent, Cairo, Havana, and Dar es Salaam. ­There was also some continuity between his interwar anticolonialist verse and his literary contributions to the Afro-­Asian movement, which feature many of the same compositional strategies and imagery as before. Though, then, in AAWA t­ here was a good showing of veterans from the interwar literary international, by no means all who w ­ ere prominent in the Afro-­Asian literary movement ­were from that background. Among the well-­ known delegates to the Tashkent Conference w ­ ere W. E. B. Du Bois and the Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz. Also, t­ here was attrition in the old guard as age took its toll. Other events took a greater toll, such as the Sino-­Soviet split of 1960, which resulted in two parallel and competing associations: one dominated by China, which withered during the Cultural Revolution, and another, Soviet-­a ligned one, headquartered u ­ ntil 1978 in Cairo and then in Beirut. AAWA’s bureau, initially located in Colombo, was taken over by Maoists, and several African and Asian writers in the movement, such as Pramoedya Toer of Indonesia, began to identify more with Chinese communism than with Rus­sian. The split also hurt Xiao, though his initial prominence in the PRC’s cultural administration was already diminished. A ­ fter the PRC was founded, Xiao had been given high posts as deputy head of the Propaganda Department of the Chinese Central Committee and head of the Organ­ization Department of the Komsomol, but had lost them as fallout when he remarried his German Jewish wife, Eva. His position worsened ­after the split, when he was seen as tainted by his association with the Soviet Union. Xiao was labeled a “spy of Soviet revisionism” and put on a blacklist. ­Later, during the Cultural Revolution, he plummeted further from grace. In

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1967 he and Eva w ­ ere arrested and spent more than seven years in prison before being released in 1974. AAWA, however, was run not just by veterans of interwar literary internationalism. At Tashkent, and especially at subsequent meetings, a new ­cohort of younger delegates participated who would go on to become canonical figures in postcolonial lit­er­a­ture. Among them ­were the Senegalese novelist-­cum-­fi lmmaker Ousmane Sembène and the ­Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o. This new generation of writers, like some of the Asian writers in the interwar literary international, often had studied in Soviet institutions. KUTV had been closed in 1937, but several leading members of AAWA had attended other Soviet tertiary bodies, such as the All-­Union State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK), where Sembène was enrolled in the early 1960s (he l­ater worked in the Gorky Studio before returning to Senegal to make films); the Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow; and the Lumumba Friendship University (founded in 1960). Ngugi never enrolled in a Soviet institution, though he spent some time ­t here. But he had been immersed in the canon of literary internationalism while studying for a master’s degree in En­ glish (never completed) at Leeds University. Th ­ ere the noted Marxist literary theoretician Arnold ­Kettle loomed large in the En­glish Department and introduced his students to writers such as Brecht and Neruda, the latter for many years, like Hikmet, an inspiration for anticolonialist writers in Africa and the M ­ iddle East. Given the many similarities and connections between the interwar and postwar literary movements, one is tempted to ask: Did the Afro-­Asian literary movement represent a revival of the interwar literary international, now attracting the younger generation and expanded in its purview to encompass Africa as well? One should be wary of overinvesting in a narrative of continuity. Much had changed in the interim. Most conspicuously, the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II had essentially brought an end to the antifascist movement that had so united the transnational left in the 1930s. Also, as many former colonies gained in­de­pen­dence, the terms of the anti-­ imperialist strug­g le that ­were characteristic of the interwar years w ­ ere ­reformulated in writings that responded to the new historical moment. But perhaps the greatest prob­lem for positing such a neat progression is the almost complete absence of Eu­ro­pe­ans, and of West Eu­ro­pe­ans particularly, in the

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new-­cum-­renewed anti-­imperialist literary movement, now more often called anticolonialist than anti-­imperialist. Even Rus­sian writers played a strikingly diminished role. The Soviet participants ­were almost all from non-­Russian minorities, the main exceptions being somewhat odious Russian-­Soviet literary functionaries in the movement. Among them was Anatoly Sofronov, a member of AAWA’s permanent bureau, who during the late 1940s had been one of the most feared literary operatives and a leader of an anti-­Semitic campaign, a far cry from the more sophisticated and cosmopolitan Mikhail Koltsov and Sergei Tretiakov, who in the interwar years (at any rate before they w ­ ere purged) had headed the Comintern-­cum-­Writers’ Union bodies that ran international lit­er­a­ture from the Soviet side. Also, while some East Eu­ro­pean writers forged links with counter­parts and lit­er­a­tures in Asia, this was dramatically less true of West Eu­ro­pean and American writers. But even the East Eu­ro­pean participation was ­limited. The German writers, who had played a major role during the interwar years in forging links with Asian lit­ er­a­ture, ­were almost completely absent. Tellingly, Lotus was not published in German, such an impor­tant language for the interwar ecumene. Many of the German writers who had been involved in the literary international had opted to live in East Germany a­ fter the war, such as Brecht and Friedrich Wolf, but they had died in the 1950s, while Anna Seghers, who died ­later, in 1983, had long since s­ topped writing about Asia, though she was active in international peace and antinuclear organ­izations. The most striking absence in the movement, however, was Rus­sian writers. Moreover, Lotus did not come out in Rus­sian, and t­here was no Russian-­language m ­ other ship for its versions in dif­fer­ent languages, as Internatsional’naia literatura had been in the interwar years. Starting in 1955 the Soviet Union did have a journal for foreign lit­er­a­ture, Inostrannaia literatura (Foreign lit­er­a­ture), but it was intended for domestic consumption and was not linked with Lotus. Also, its center of gravity was decidedly Eurocentric; works by non-­European writers tended to appear in a dif­fer­ent Soviet journal, Druzhba narodov (Friendship of ­peoples). As this apartheid suggests, the Afro-­ Asian literary movement centered around AAWA, though Soviet sponsored, was less integrated into Soviet transnational networks than MORP had been. And Moscow was no metropole for the Afro-­Asian movement, as it had been for the anti-­imperialist writers of the interwar years.

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The almost complete absence of West Eu­ro­pean leftists in this new movement was due in part to the fact that the AAWA was an institution of the Cold War, when lit­er­a­ture was used as a proxy for the ideological ­battles of the Soviet and Western camps and the First World / Second World divide intensified. Many intellectuals, who had been in the interwar ecumene, had by the late 1930s been alienated by the Soviet purges and the Molotov-­Ribbentrop nonaggression pact. Something of a coup de grace was delivered to large-­scale participation by Western leftists in any Moscow-­based movement by such events as the Soviet intervention in Hungary in 1956 and the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968, not to mention the Soviet persecution of such writers as Boris Pasternak, Andrei Sinyavsky, Joseph Brodsky, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. They became darlings of Western intellectuals, but not of the Afro-­ Asian writers who w ­ ere not caught up in the cult of Soviet dissidents. For West Eu­ro­pean and American leftists, a new organ­ization was ­attracting members and functioned for them as in effect a substitute for the literary international, though it was a radically dif­fer­ent organ­ization po­liti­ cally. Many prominent Western intellectuals who in the 1930s had participated in bodies of the literary international joined the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), which was inaugurated at a meeting in Frankfurt on June 25, 1950. CCF was purportedly left-­leaning but anticommunist. Prominent among its members ­were such writers covered in this book as André Malraux, who sat on its international committee. Also, Stephen Spender, who in the 1930s had been a close associate of W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and the New Writing clique and was a darling of Internatsional’naia literatura, became the coeditor (together with Irving Kristol) of Encounter, the most prestigious among the several journals the CCF put out. Encounter attracted contributions from several other prominent writers from the interwar ecumene, such as Auden. It played a prominent role in the cultural ­ ntil the revelife of the West, especially among Anglophone intellectuals, u lations in 1966 that the Central Intelligence Agency had been secretly funding the CCF and its associated journals, which brought about a crisis among Western intellectuals, Even before the Afro-­Asian literary movement took off, the CCF had extended its reach to Asia and Africa. Starting in the early fifties it or­ga­nized several conferences comparable to AAWA’s l­ ater ones, such as its Second Congress for Cultural Freedom in Bombay (1951) and the Makerere African

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Writers’ Conference (1962), which set up several Asian and African literary journals. In fact, Lotus had been founded to c­ ounter the influence of Encounter. The idea that the Soviet Union should fund a journal for Afro-­Asian writers had been suggested to its Writers’ Union in 1963 by the Pakistani writer Faiz Ahmad Faiz, who in his proposal pointed out that Encounter had increasingly turned its sights to the writers of the anticolonialist movement. The divide between the Soviet-­oriented Afro-­Asian institutions and t­ hose sponsored by the CCF was not just orga­nizational and ideological. It was also to a significant degree an aesthetic divide. Karl Radek, it ­will be recalled, had in his keynote address to the First Congress of the Writers’ Union in 1934 confronted foreign writers with a choice encapsulated in its subheading, “James Joyce or Socialist Realism?” As we have seen, in the mid-1930s Radek’s rejection of what he encapsulated as “Joyce” was e­ ither ignored or actively opposed by many members of the literary international, including by some Soviet literary officials such as Sergei Tretiakov. But during the Cold War this binary defined to a significant degree the counterposed aesthetic positions of the Soviet and Western camps. Western intellectuals now typically championed “modernism” and deprecated “realism,” the “ism” that was assiduously promoted in the Soviet bloc. A milestone was Clement Greenberg’s seminal essay “Modernist Painting,” originally given as a radio broadcast in 1961 for the Voice of Amer­i­ca’s “Forum Lectures” and then republished many times. In this canonical essay, Greenberg contends that a work of art must be analyzed in terms of its inherent properties without reference to any external criteria, and of course to po­liti­cal considerations a fortiori. Modernist art he praised for abandoning the princi­ple of repre­sen­ta­tion. Subject ­matter, content, figuration, and narrative w ­ ere allegedly autonomous, in­de­pen­dent of extratextual ­factors, and in theory apo­liti­cal. But inasmuch as this aesthetic position was implicitly or explic­itly contrasted with “realism,” championed by Soviet theoreticians, the vogue at the time for producing and promoting “abstract” art was effectively po­liti­cal. The postwar Afro-­Asian literary movement, however, was overtly invested in po­liti­cal ­causes. So the question arises, does it represent a link between the interwar literary international and postcolonial lit­er­a­ture as we know it ­today? In other words, can one posit a tripartite literary evolution that began with the interwar, Soviet-­sponsored anti-­imperialist movement in lit­er­a­ture,

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was revived in the Afro-­Asian literary movement, and reached fruition in postcolonial lit­er­a­ture? A ­ fter all, in its heyday the postwar Afro-­Asian literary movement attracted to its congresses and journals such canonical postcolonial writers as Mao Dun, Guo Moruo, Mulk Raj Anand, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Sembène Ousmane, Alex La Guma, Chingiz Aitmatov, Chinua Achebe, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, and Mahmoud Darwish. Many of them won Lotus Prizes, and in most instances the movement was instrumental in advancing their ­careers, though their participation in postwar Soviet-­a ligned networks has been largely forgotten. One danger in positing this tri-­partite progression to postcolonial lit­er­a­ ture, with the interwar literary international as the originary moment, is that originary moments are hard to pinpoint with any precision. ­After all, many critics like to date the beginnings of postcolonial lit­er­a­ture with such texts as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness of 1899, in effect to identify a trajectory that avoids implicating the prehistory of postcolonial lit­er­a­ture in the literary international. It is also impor­tant to remember that the canonical postcolonialist authors named above also, and increasingly, published in Western cap­ i­tal­ist outlets, including in CCF journals. The breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the rise of nationalist fervor in Rus­sia accelerated their drift to using Western publishers. But even e­ arlier, in 1979, when the AAWA held a conference in Luanda its leading names largely attended another writers’ conference in West Berlin. Since then, ironically, the Western acad­emy has ­adopted much of the discourse characteristic of AAWA theorists and texts and has become the standard b ­ earer of the postcolonial movement. And yet one cannot dismiss the idea that the “Moscow”-­oriented interwar internationalist, anti-­imperialist movement in lit­er­a­ture can be seen as a pre­ de­ces­sor of the postcolonialist. One could even go so far as to claim that, given that texts of the postcolonial movement are published in both Western and Afro-­Asian literary capitals, Mikhail Pavlovich’s dream of realizing a “single common international ocean of poetry and knowledge” has been fi­ nally realized in a globalized literary system—­a “world lit­er­a­ture”—­where texts from all over the world “intermingle” in an expanded version of the “ocean” that encompasses not just Eu­rope and Asia, but Africa and the Amer­ i­cas as well. To a Pavlovich, however, the forms this realization has taken would have been anathema. In a reweighting, “world revolution” has all but

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dis­appeared from postcolonial texts, where race has largely supplanted class as the identified cause of “oppression.” Texts like Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961) became early bibles of the new moment, to be followed by ­others, such as Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978). They have crowded out, though not refuted, the writings of Marx and Lenin.

A B B R E V I AT I O N S NOTES ACKNOWLED GMENTS INDEX

Abbreviations

GARF

Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv rossiiskoi federatsii (State Archive of the Rus­sian Federation)



Institut mirovoi literatury imeni Gor’kogo (Institute of World Lit­er­a­ture Named for Gorky)

IMLI

RGALI

Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva (Rus­sian State Archive of Lit­er­a­ture and Art)

RGASPI

Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sovremennoi politicheskoi istorii (Rus­sian State Archive of Con­temporary Po­liti­cal History)

Notes

Introduction



1. Grigorii Zinoviev, in S”ezd narodov Vostoka, Baku, 1–8 sentiabria 1920 g. Stenograficheskie otchëty (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Kommunisticheskogo internatsionala, 1920), 13. 2. Béla Kun, in S”ezd narodov Vostoka, Baku, 1–8 sentiabria 1920 g., 18. 3. Actually, for the founding conference of the Comintern in 1919 it was de­ cided that the principal language would be German, but by 1920 Rus­sian had replaced German as the official language. Brigid O’Keeffe, Esperanto and Languages of Internationalism in Revolutionary Rus­sia (London:: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021). 4. E.g., S”ezd narodov Vostoka, Baku, 1–8 sentiabria 1920 g., 76, 78. 5. Ibid., 99–100. 6. Karl Radek, in S”ezd narodov Vostoka, Baku, 1–8 sentiabria 1920 g., 72. 7. Pavlovich’s real name was Mikhail Lazarovich Vel’tman, and he switched openly to Bolshevism in 1918. 8. Mikhail Pavlovich, in S”ezd narodov Vostoka, Baku, 1–8 sentiabria 1920 g., 135–136. 9. Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press, 2003), 175, 177. 10. V.  I. Lenin, “Sotsialisticheskaia revoliutsiia i pravo natsii na samoopredelenie,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5th  ed. (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1969), 27:255, 256. 11. V. I. Lenin, “Address to the Second All-­Russian Congress of Communist Organ­izations of the ­Peoples of the East,” November 22, 1919, V. I. Lenin

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Internet Archive, https://­w ww​.m ­ arxists​.­org​/­a rchive​/­lenin​/­works​/1­ 919​/­nov​ /­22​.­htm, accessed February 27, 2019. 12. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993). 13. Pascale Casanova, La république mondiale des lettres (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1999), xi, 50. 14. Rossen Djagalov, From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Lit­er­a­ture and Cinema between the Second and Third Worlds (Montreal: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 2020). 15. Aamir R. Mufti, Forget En­glish! Orientalisms and World Lit­er­a­tures (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2016), 101–103; Daniel Purdy, “Goethe, Rémusat, and the Chinese Novel: Translation and the Circulation of World Lit­er­a­ture,” in German Lit­er­a­ture as World Lit­er­a­ture, ed. Thomas Oliver Beebee (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 43–60. 16. Martin Puchner, The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape ­People, History, Civilization (New York: Random House, 2017), 335–336. 17. David Damrosch, What Is World Lit­er­a­ture? (Prince­ton, N.J.: Prince­ton University Press, 2003), 12. 18. Ibid., 15. 19. Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. by Malcolm B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 10–11; Siraj Ahmed, Archaeology of Babel: The Colonial Foundation of the Humanities (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2018), 52–54; Puchner, The Written World, 237–238. 20. Pheng Cheah, Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Lit­er­a­tures of Liberation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 132. 21. Amanda Anderson, “Cosmopolitanism, Universalism, and the Divided Legacies of Modernity,” in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the ­Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 266. 22. Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 15, 9, 14. 23. Audrey Truschke, Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court, South Asia across the Disciplines (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). 24. Antoinette Burton and Isabel Hofmeyr, “Introduction: The Spine of Empire? Books and the Making of an Imperial Commons,” in Ten Books That ­Shaped the British Empire: Creating an Imperial Commons, ed. Antoinette Burton and Isabel Hofmeyr (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014), 2. 25. Radek, in S”ezd narodov Vostoka, Baku, 1–8 sentiabria 1920 g., 72.

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26. Rudolf Abich (see Chapter 2), a former associate, characterized Radek as a “red imperialist.” Rudol’f Abikh, “ ‘Krasnyi imperialist’ (Materialy iz biografii),” in Pamiati M. P. Pavlovicha. Sbornik stat’ei (Moscow: Nauchnaia assotsiatsiia vostokovedov pri TsIK, SSSR, 1928), 99–105. 27. Abikh, “ ‘Krasnyi imperialist,’ ” 99–104; Michael Kemper, “Red Orientalism: Mikhail Pavlovich and Marxist Oriental Studies in Early Soviet Rus­sia,” Die Welt des Islams 50, no. 3–4 (2010): 451. Kemper’s source is John Riddell, ed., To See the Dawn: Baku, 1920—­First Congress of the ­Peoples of the East (New York: Pathfinder, 1993), 144, 158. 28. Mikhail Pavlovich, The Foundations of Imperialist Policy (London: ­Labour Publishing Co., 1922), 157; Mikhail Pavlovich, Osnovy imperialisticheskoi politiki (Lektsii, chitannye v Akademii General’nogo shtaba v 1918–1919 gg.) (Moscow: Gos. izd., 1921). 29. Casanova, La république mondiale des lettres, xi, 50. 30. Ali Raza, Franziska Roy, and Benjamin Zachariah, “Introduction: The Internationalism of the Moment—­South Asia and the Contours of the Interwar World,” in The Internationalist Moment: South Asia, Worlds, and World Views, 1917–39, ed. Ali Raza, Franziska Roy, and Benjamin Zachariah (New Delhi: Sage Publications India, 2015), xvii, xiii. 31. I. V. Stalin, Voprosy leninizma, 6th ed. (Moscow-­L eningrad: Giz, 1929), ­200–201, 203. 32. S. Frederick Starr, Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia’s Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane (Prince­ton, N.J.: Prince­ton University Press, 2013), esp.16–17. 33. Benedict Anderson, ­Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. and extended ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 15, 18, 40. 34. Ibid., 18, 19. 35. Alexander Beecroft, An Ecol­ogy of World Lit­er­a­ture: From Antiquity to the Pre­sent Day (London: Verso, 2015), 110, 113. 36. Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Lit­er­a­ture,” New Left Review 1 (January–­February 2000): 64. 37. T. S. Eliot, What Is a Classic? An Address Delivered before the Virgil Society on the 16th of October, 1944 (London: Faber and Faber, 1945), 31. 38. A. Ivin [pseudonym of Aleksei A. Ivanov], “Kitaiskii iazyk i kitaiskaia literatura,” Novyi Vostok, no. 16–17 (1926): 216–217. 39. Vsevolod Ivanov, Golubye peski. Roman (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo “Krug,” 1923), 28, 29, 30, 77. 40. Armand Mattelart, Networking the World, 1794–2000, trans. Liz Carey-­ Libbrecht and James A. Cohen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 3.

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41. Anna Lawton and Herbert Ea­gle, eds. and trans., Rus­sian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, 1912–1928 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988), 1–3. 42. Alain Touraine, “The Idea of Revolution,” in Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity; A Theory, Culture and Society Special Issue, ed. Mike Featherstone (London: Sage Publications, 1990), 122. 43. Timothy Brennan, “The National Longing for Form,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), 12. 44. “Sostav s”ezda po narodnostiam,” in S”ezd narodov Vostoka, Baku, 1–8 sentiabria 1920 g. Stenograficheskie otchëty (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Kommunisticheskogo internatsionala, 1920), 5. 45. Narbutabekov, in S”ezd narodov Vostoka, Baku, 1–8 sentiabria 1920 g., 87, 91. 46. Karkmasov, in S”ezd narodov Vostoka, Baku, 1–8 sentiabria 1920 g., 94, 93. 47. Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, 4. 48. Anderson, ­Imagined Communities, 41. 49. GARF, f. 5402, op. 1, d. 57, “Zapiska Pavlovicha M. N. Stalinu ob ispol’zovanii professorov orientalistov, 10 noiabria 1921. Vypiski iz protokolov no. 64. Zasedaniia Politbiuro TsK RKP ot 3 / X–21 g.,” ll. 1–2. 50. Damrosch, What Is World Lit­er­a­ture?, 292. 51. Emily Apter, Against World Lit­er­a­ture: On the Politics of Untranslatability (New York: Verso, 2013), 3, 57; Christopher Prendergast, “The World Republic of Letters,” in Debating World Lit­er­a­ture, ed. Christopher Prendergast (New York: Verso, 2004), 6. 52. Pavlovich, in S”ezd narodov Vostoka, Baku, 1–8 sentiabria 1920 g., 135–136. 53. I. Stalin, “Politicheskie zadachi universiteta narodov Vostoka,” Pravda, no. 115 (May 22, 1925). Stalin’s ­earlier tract Marxism and the National Question (1913) provided the basic framework for nationality policy in the Soviet Union. 54. Pavlovich, S”ezd narodov Vostoka, Baku, 1–8 sentiabria 1920 g., 135. 55. Kris Manjapra, “Communist Internationalism and Transcolonial Recognition,” in Cosmopolitan Thought Zones: South Asia and the Global Circulation of Ideas, ed. Sugata Bose and Kris Manjapra (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 172, 159. 56. David Featherstone, Solidarity: Hidden Histories and Geographies of Internationalism (London: Zed Books, 2012), 4. 57. Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800 / 1900, trans. Michael Metteer, with Chris Cullens (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), 16. 58. Mike Featherstone, “Global Culture: An Introduction,” in Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity; A Theory, Culture and Society Special Issue, ed. Mike Featherstone (London: Sage Publications, 1990), 2. 59. Nicolai Volland, in his study of communist Chinese lit­er­a­ture of the 1950s and 1960s, uses the term “socialist cosmopolitan” but applies to a very dif­

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fer­ent category of writer operating in a very dif­fer­ent period. See Nicolai Volland, Socialist Cosmopolitanism: The Chinese Literary Universe, 1945–1965 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). 60. Katerina Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), 4–5. 61. Priyamvada Gopal, Insurgent Empires: Anticolonial Re­sis­tance and British Dissent (London: Verso, 2019), 253. 62. Burton and Hofmeyr, “Introduction: The Spine of Empire?,” 10; see also Dane Kennedy, “The ­Great Arch of Empire,” in The Victorian World, ed. Martin Hewitt (London: Routledge, 2012), 57–72. 63. See Katerina Clark, “The Soviet Proj­ect of the 1930s to Found a ‘World Lit­ er­a­ture’ and British Literary Internationalism,” in “Literary History ­after the Nation?,” ed. Peter Kalliney, special issue, Modern Language Quarterly 80, no. 4 (December 2019): 403–425. 64. The term “fraternity” is used by Manjapra in his discussion of the ecumene in “Communist Internationalism and Transcolonial Recognition”; see esp. 159, 172. 65. For the avant-­garde, see Vsevolod Evgen’evich Bagno, Dzhon Ė. Malmstad, and Mariia Ėmmanuilovna Malikova, “Khlebnikov i neosushchestvlennyi zhurnal ‘Internatsional iskusstva’ (1919),” in Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii. Sbornik v chest’ 60-­letiia Aleksandra Vasilievicha Lavrova (Moscow: NLO, 2009), 530–557. For the Prolecult, see Lynn Mally, Culture of the ­Future: The Proletkult Movement in Revolutionary Rus­sia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 200–228; “Mezhdunarodnoe biuro Proletkul’ta,” Izvestiia TsIK, no. 15-16 (August 14, 1920), 3–6; “Mezhdunarodnoe biuro Proletkul’ta,” Proletarskai kul’tura no. 17–19 (August–­December 1920): 2–5. 66. Anatolii Lunacharskii, “O mezhdunarodnom biuro proletarskoi kul’tury,” RGALI, f. 1968, op. 1, e / kh 882, ll. 2–11; “Mezhdunarodnoe biuro Proletkul’ta,” Izvestiia TsIK, August 14, 1920; Iz istorii Mezhdunarodnogo ob”edineniia revoliutsionnykh pisatelei (MORP), Literaturnoe nasledstvo, no. 81 (Moscow: Nauka, 1969),12, 31, 44. 67. From 1928 to 1930 this periodical was known as Vestnik inostrannoi literatury, from 1930 to 1932 as Literatura mirovoi revoliutsii, and then as Internatsional’naia literatura. 68. Fredric Jameson, “Third-­World Lit­er­a­ture in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text, no. 15 (Autumn 1986): 75. 69. Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 23–29. 70. Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), 8:720.

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71. Margaret Lavinia Anderson, “ ‘Down in Turkey, Far Away’: ­Human Rights, the Armenian Massacres, and Orientalism in Wilhelmine Germany,” Journal of Modern History 79, no. 1 (March 2007): 110. 72. See Sergei Glebov, From Empire to Eurasia: Politics, Scholarship, and Ideology in Rus­sian Eurasianism, 1920s–1930s (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2017), esp. “Introduction: Eurasia’s Many Meanings” (1–8); I. R. [Nikolai S. Trubetskoi], Nasledie Chingiskhana. Vzgliad na Russkuiu istoriiu ne s Zapada a s Vostoka (Berlin: Evraziiskoe knigoizdatel’stvo, 1925), 22, 26, 33, 55; Kn. Nikolai S. Trubetskoi, “Ob istinnom i lozhnom natsionalizma,” in Iskhod k Vostoku. Predchuvstviia i sversheniia. Utverzhdenie evraziitsev. Stat’i Petra Savitskogo, G. Suvchinskogo, kn. N. S. Trubetskogo i Georgiia Florovskogo (Sofia: Russko-­bolgarskoe knigoizdatel’stvo, 1921), 94–97, 102. 73. [Unsigned], “Komintern i rabota na Vostoke,” Zhizn’ natsional’nostei, no. 40 (96) (December 1, 1920): 15. 74. On Ho Chi Minh in Moscow, see Niuėn Ai-­Kak, “V gostiakh u kominternshchika,” Ogonëk, no. 39 (December 23, 1923): 10; on his proposal, see Sophie Quinn-­Judge, Ho Chi Minh: The Missing Years, 1919–1941 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 53. 75. RGASPI, f. 532, op. 8 (KUTV), d. 2, l. 66. 76. Riddell, To See the Dawn, 164. Zinoviev was prob­ably referring to Lermontov’s poem “Spor” of 1841. 77. Johann Gottfried Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, trans. from the German Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit by T. Churchill (London, 1800; New York: Bergman Publishers, [1966]), 296, 298; Johann Gottfried Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 1965), 2:17, 20. 78. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, “The Oriental World,” part 1 in The Philosophy of History, trans. John Sibree (New York: Dover Publications, 1956), 116, 124, 131–132, 138. 79. Karl Marx, “Chinese Affairs,” Die Presse, July 7, 1862. 80. Riddell, To See the Dawn, 70. 81. Karl Marx, “Revolution in China and in Eu­rope,” New York Daily Tribune, June 14, 1853. 82. V. I. Lenin, “Obnovlënnyi Kitai,” Pravda, November 8, 1912. 83. V. I. Lenin, “Probuzhdenie Azii,” Pravda, May 7, 1913. 84. V. I. Lenin, “Doklad na 2-om vserossiiskom s”ezde kommunisticheskikh organizatsii narodov Vostoka,” November 22, 1919, reprinted in V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 39, Iiun’–­dek. 1919 g. (Moscow: Politizdat, 1970), 329. 85. [Unsigned], “Ne zabyvaite Vostoka,” Zhizn’ natsional’nostei, no.  3 (November 24, 1918): 1.

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86. Kemper, “Red Orientalism,” 476. 87. [Unsigned], “Dve kul’tury,” Zhizn’ natsional’nostei, no. 11 (109) (May 28, 1921): 1.

1. Nâzim Hikmet, Turkish Poet of the New Millennium









1. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971), xiii. 2. [Natskom], “Iz revoliutsionnoi Germanii,” Zhizn’ natsional’nostei, no. 2 (10) (January 19, 1919). 3. Mass declamation became a hallmark of anticolonialist agitational effort throughout the world. See, e.g., Priyamvada Gopal, Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Re­sis­tance and British Dissent (London: Verso, 2019), 254. 4. The commission also included the prominent prerevolutionary symbolist writers Andrei Belyi and Viacheslav Ivanov. Vsevolod Evgen’evich Bagno, Dzhon Ė. Malmstad, and Mariia Ėmmanuilovna Malikova, “Khlebnikov i neosushchestvlennyi zhurnal ‘Internatsional iskusstva’ (1919),” in Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii. Sbornik v chest’ 60-­letiia Aleksandra Vasilievicha Lavrova (Moscow: NLO, 2009), 530–557. 5. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 78, 82. 6. Dziga Vertov, in commenting on his film Lullaby (Kolybel’naia, 1937), said he incorporated some songs of the East as pure sound material so that the audience did not need to understand their words. See Nariman Skakov, “Socialist Sound: Dziga Vertov,” in “Re­orientalism: From Avant-­Garde to National Form” (unpublished manuscript), 127–128. 7. Velimir Khlebnikov, “Artists of the World!” (Khudozhniki mira!), in Collected Works of Velimir Khlebnikov, vol. 1, trans. Paul Schmidt, ed. Charlotte Douglas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 364–369; Ernest Fenellosa, “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry— an Ars Poetica,” with a forward and notes by Ezra Pound, published in ­Little Review, September–­December, 1919. 8. Alexander Parnis, “Khlebnikov i neosushchestvlënnyi zhurnal ‘Internatsional iskussstva’. Novye materialy,” in Vsevolod Bagno, Dzhon Malmstad and Mariia Malikova, compilers, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii. Sbornik v chest’ 60-­letiiu Aleksandra Vasil’evicha Lavrova (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2009), 535. 9. V. Kerzhentsev [a pseudonym for Platon Kerzhentsev, which was itself a pseudonym for P. M. Lebedev], “Mezhdunarodnyi iazyk,” Izvestiia, no. 8 (560) (January 14, 1919): 1. Note the paper says that the article is “of an order for discussion.” See also three articles published in Izvestiia in 1919 by the

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head of the Esperanto movement: “Mezhdunarodnyi iazyk i proletariat,” no. 4 (556) (January 5, 1919); “Internatsional i mezhdunarodnyi iazyk,” Khronika, no. 6 (1919): 4; and “Intelligent­sia i mezhdunarodnyi iazyk,” no. 6 (1919). 10. Ė.D., “Dvizhenie za mezhdunarodnyi iazyk v SSSR (spetsial’nyi ocherk dlia biulletenia),” VOKS. Informatsionnyi biulleten’, no. 28–29 (July 22, 1927): 16–18; VOKS. Informatsionnyi biulleten’, no. 27 (July 9, 1926): 12. 11. A.  A. Babaev, Nazym Khikmet. Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo (Moscow: “Nauka,” Glavnaia redaktsiia vostochnoi literatury, 1975), 100. 12. “Po teatram,” Pravda, no. 8 (January 14, 1923): 5; Babaev, Nazym Khikmet. Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo, 100; A. V. Fevral’skii, “Nazym Hikmet v Moskve dvadtsatykh godov,” RGALI, f. 2931, op. 1, d. 1196, ll. 6–8. 13. Saime Göksu and Edward Timms, Romantic Communist: The Life and Work of Nazim Hikmet (London: Hurst, 1999), 17, 26–31; James  H. Meyer, “­Children of Trans-­Empire: Nâzim Hikmet and the First Generation of Turkish Students at Moscow’s Communist University of the East,” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 5, no. 2 (2018): 200, 201. 14. See George S. Harris, The Communists and the Kadro Movement: Shaping Ideology in Atatürk’s Turkey (Istanbul: Isis Press, 2002), esp. 37, 65, 66, 74, 82, 83–86, 95, 143–145, 151. 15. RGASPI, f. 495, op. 266, d. 47, l. 147. 16. “Internatsional’nyi literaturnyi miting,” Pravda, no. 55 (March 11, 1923): 5. 17. A. A. Babaev, “Nazym Khikmet,” in Izbrannoe, by Nazym Khikmet (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo inostrannoi literatury, 1951), 8 (Babaev cites Vestnik Akademii nauk SSSR, no. 8 [1950]: 114). 18. “Internatsional’nyi literaturnyi miting,” 5; A. V. Fevral’skii, “Nazym Hikmet v Moskve dvadtsatykh godov,” RGALI, f. 2931, op. 1, d. 1196, l. 9; Babaev, Nazym Khikmet. Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo, 101. 19. Radii Fish, Nazym Khikmet: Ėtiudy zhizni i tvorchestva (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1984), 69. 20. Babaev, Nazym Khikmet. Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo, 115. 21. Nazym Khikmet, Izbrannye sochineniia v dvukh tomakh, vol. 1, Stikhi i poėmy, comp. A. A. Babaev (Moscow: Gos. Izd. khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1957), 15–16. 22. Vl. Maiakovskii, Kak delat’ stikhi, Biblioteka “Ogonëk,” no. 273 (Moscow: “Ogonëk,” 1927), 30. 23. See also Mayakovsky’s “Drum Song” (“Barabannaia pesnia”), published in Izvestiia at about this time. Izvestiia, no. 41 (February 23, 1923): 4. 24. Cited in Wiktor Woroszylski, The Life of Mayakovsky, trans. by Boleslaw Taborski (New York: Orion Press, 1970), 254. 25. A. V. Fevral’skii, “Nazym Hikmet v Moskve dvadtsatykh godov,” RGALI, f. 2931, op. 1, d. 1196, l. 7.

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26. “Internatsional’nyi literaturnyi miting,” 5. 27. Babaev, Nazym Khikmet. Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo, 93. 28. Robert Leach, Vsevolod Meyerhold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 52. 29. Cited in Saime Göksu and Edward Timms, “Nâzim Hikmet: Poetry and Politics in Kemalist Turkey,” in Visions and Blueprints: Avant-­garde Culture and Radical Politics in Early Twentieth-­Century Eu­rope, ed. Edward Timms and Peter Collier (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 182. 30. Nazym Khikmet, Stikhi (Moscow: “Federatsiia,” 1932), 44, 47. I am grateful to Rossen Djagalov and Samuel Hodgkin for help with the Turkish. 31. Babaev, “Nazym Hikmet,” 5. 32. “Internatsional’nyi literaturnyi miting,” 5. 33. Babaev, Nazym Khikmet. Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo, 91, 92, 95, 96. 34. Ibid., 93. 35. See chapter 3 of Katerina Clark, Petersburg, Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995). 36. Fish, Nazym Khikmet: Ėtiudy zhizni i tvorchestva, 86–87. 37. Talat S. Halman, Rapture and Revolution: Essays on Turkish Lit­er­a­ture (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2007), 79. 38. V. V. Maiakovskii, Sobranie sochinenii v vos’mi tomakh (Moscow: Biblioteka “Ogonëk,” 1968), 3:16. 39. See Clark, Petersburg, Crucible of Cultural Revolution, chapter 1. 40. Babaev, Nazym Khikmet. Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo, 114. 41. Ibid., 104. 42. A. A. Babaev, Nazym Khikmet. Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo (Moscow: Nauka, glavnaia redaktsiia vostochnoi literatury, 1975), 106. 43. As Samuel Hodgkin pointed out in a personal communication of September 7, 2019, in Turkish Hikmet actually uses the Italian word for machine in the poem’s title-­cum-­refrain: “makinalaşmak istiyorum.” 44. Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the ­Middle Ages, rev. and expanded ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 15. 45. RGALI, f. 2931, op. 1, d. 1196, Redaktsiia zhurnala “Moskva,” A. V. Fevral’skii, “Nazym Hikmet v Moskve dvadtsatykh godov,” l. 9. 46. A high point was the cele­brations for the tenth anniversary of the Turkish republic in 1933 when Soviet delegates w ­ ere accorded privileged positions on the podium and two Soviet films about Turkey (officially coproductions) ­were made to mark the occasion. See Samuel J. Hirst, “Soviet Orientalism across Borders: Documentary Film for the Turkish Republic,” Kritika: Explorations in Rus­sian and Eurasian History 18, no. 1 (Winter 2017): 35–61; and Katerina Clark, “Eu­ro­pean and Rus­sian Cultural Interactions with

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Turkey: 1910s–1930s,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the ­Middle East 33, no. 2 (2013): 201–213. 47. “Doklad delegata Torgopromyshlennikov Turtsii, direktora kommercheskogo Instituta v Angore [Akhmet-­Münir; Raşit-­Bey], na vechere 6 / II-1926 g. organizovannom Vsesoiuznym obshchestvom kul’turnoi sviazi s zagranitsei, sovmestno s Assotsiatsiei vostokovedeniia,” GARF, f. 5283, op. 4, d. 7, l. 70. 48. Azade Seyhan, Tales of Crossed Destinies: The Modern Turkish Novel in a Comparative Context (New York: Modern Language Association of Amer­ i­ca, 2008), 38, 18, 19. 49. E.g., GARF, f. 5283, op. 4, d. 112, ll. 24–25. 50. On the censorship of journals, see, e.g., GARF, f. 5283, op. 4, d. 112, ll. ­24–25. On the banning on the Party, see Harris, The Communists and the Kadro Movement, 9. 51. See, e.g., GARF, f. 5283, op. 4, d. 28, “Turtsiia 20 fevralia 1928–8 oktiabria 1928,” l. 1; f. 5283, op. 4, d. 44, “Turtsiia. 16 noiabria 1928–16 iiulia 1929,” ll. 4, 12, 13–16, 19, 25–38, 57–58; GARF, f. 5283, op. 4, d. 53, “Otchët referenta po Blizhnemu Vostoku s iiunia po ianvar’ 1930 g.,” l. 8; GARF, f. 5283, op. 4, d. 54, “Perepiska upolnomomochennogo VOKSa v Turtsii po povodu literatury o sovetskom piatiletnom plane 2 ianvaria 1930–10 noiabria 1930,” ll. 5, 15. 52. GARF, f. 5283, op. 4, d. 3, l. 14; f. 5283, op. 4, d. 7, l. 61. 53. “Otchët referenta po Blizhnemu Vostoku s iiunia po ianvar’ 1930 g.,” GARF, f. 5283, op. 4, d. 53, l. 8. 54. N. Ravich, Kino na Vostoke (Tea-­k ino-­pechat’, 1929), 17–22. 55. Ven. V., Kino, no. 8 (February 21, 1928): 7; Ven V., Kino, no. 26 (April 26, 1928): 1; RGALI, f. 2489, op. 1, d. l, l. 605. 56. T. D. Melikov, Nazym Khikmet i novaia poėziia Turtsii (Moscow: Glavnaia redaktsiia vostochnoi literatury, “Nauka,” 1987), 18–20. 57. RGASPI, f. 495, op. 266, d. 47, l. 151. 58. L. Lianov, “Na prazdnike narodov Vostoka,” Zhizn’ natsional’nostei, no. 5 (11) (1922): 13. 59. O. V. Egorov, “Mezhdunarodnye organizatsii revoliutsionnykh pisatelei,” in Iz istorii Mezhdunarodnogo ob”edineniia revoliutsionnykh pisatelei (MORP), Literaturnoe nasledstvo, no. 81 (Moscow: “Nauka,” 1969), 14–15. 60. Lana Ravandi-­Fadai, “ ‘Red Mecca’—­the Communist University for Laborers of the East (KUTV): Ira­nian Scholars and Students in Moscow in the 1920s and 1930s,” Ira­nian Studies 48, no. 5 (September 2015): 714; M. N. Roy, “Ho Chi-­Minh,” M. N. Roy Papers, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, box 5, file 78, page 1. Th ­ ere is no formal rec­ord of Ho having studied at KUTV. 61. Paul G. Pickowicz, “Ch’ü Ch’iu-­pai and the Origins of Marxist Literary Criticism in China” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 1973; Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms International, 1975), 84.

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62. Melikov, Nazym Khikmet i novaia poėziia Turtsii, 36. 63. G. Broido, “Programma po natsional’nomu i kolonial’nomu voprosu (dlia osnovnogo otd.),” Izvestiia Kommunisticheskogo universiteta trudiashchikhsia Vostoka, no. 1 (1921): 59–60. 64. G. Broido, Natsional’nyi i kolonial’nyi vopros (Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1924), respectively 52–53, 79; 11; 26; 11, 14, 17; 10; 10–11; 47. 65. Babaev, Nazym Khikmet. Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo, 79. 66. “Otchët KUTV, 1922–1923,” RGASPI, f. 532, op. 1, d. 5; f. 532, op. 1, d. 5, ll. 5–8; see also for 1921 a similar program—­“Rabota uchebnoi chasti,” Izvestiia Kommunisticheskogo universiteta trudiashchikhsia Vostoka, no. 1 (1921): 9–25. 67. Lianov, “Na prazdnike narodov Vostoka,” 13. 68. RGASPI, f. 532, op. 8, d. 2, l. 23. 69. RGASPI, f. 532, op. 1, d. 5, l. 10; RGASPI, f. 532, op. 1, d. 4, ll. 30, 32, 34; Lianov, “Na prazdnike narodov Vostoka,” 13. 70. “Godovoi otchët o lektorskoi gruppy KUTV,” RGASPI, f. 532, op. 8, d. 2, l. 101. 71. RGASPI, f. 532, op. 1, d. 25, l. 5. 72. Meyer, “­Children of Trans-­Empire,” 210. 73. RGASPI, f. 532, op. 1, d. 25, l. 5: in the French sector ­t here was 1 Chinese and 4 Turks, and in the Rus­sian sector 3 Persians, 7 Chinese, and 4 Turks; see also reports on the En­glish, French, and Rus­sian sectors in RGASPI, f. 532, op. 1, d. 2, l. 53 f. 532, op. 1, d. 2, “Inostrannoe otdelenie. Svodka po sotsial’nomu polozheniiu i natsional’nosti na 15 / X-1922 goda,” l. 49; RGASPI, f. 532, op. 1, d. 5, l. 30, “Inostrannaia sektsiia.” When KUTV was or­ga­nized in late October 1922, five sectors ­were formed with altogether 69 students: a Rus­sian sector of 26, a French of 13, an En­glish of 10, a Chinese of 9, and a Korean of 11. 74. Nazym Khikmet, Zhizn’ prekrasna, bratets moi (St. Petersburg: Limbus Press, 2013); see, e.g., 44–58, 121–122. 75. Salim Tamari, “Najati Sidqi (1905–79): The Enigmatic Jerusalem Bolshevik,” Journal of Palestinian Studies 32, no. 2 (Winter 2003): 87–89. Tamari’s review essay includes relevant sections of his work Mudhakkarat Najati Sidqi (The Memoirs of Najati Sidqi). 76. Fish, Nazym Khikmet: Ėtiudy zhizni i tvorchestva, 135. ­There ­were several Banerjees studying at KUTV at the time, and it is difficult to pinpoint which one was Hikmet’s friend, but he could have been Suresh Chandra Banerjee, who is listed in the class rec­ords for Hikmet’s cohort (RGASPI, f. 495, op. 68, d. 41; “Svedeniia ob indiitsakh-­studentakh KUTV,” April  7, 1924, RGASPI, f. 532, op. 1, d. 375; ­there is material on Suresh Chandra Bannerdzhi in RGASPI, f. 495, op. 213, d. 372, ll. 47–53). See also John P. Haithcox, Communism and Nationalism in India (Prince­ton, N.J.: Prince­ton University

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Press, 1971), 20–25; Moisei A. Persits, Revolutionaries of India in Soviet Rus­sia (Moscow: Pro­gress Publishers, 1983), 17–96. 77. RGASPI, f. 532, op. 1, d. 4, “Rektoru Kommunisticheskogo universiteta tov. Broido, G. I.,” June 1, 1923, 10. 78. RGASPI, f. 532 (KUTV), op. 8, d. 2, l. 66. 79. RGASPI, f. 532, op. 1, d. 17, “Soveshchanie s tovarishchami po KUTV (10 oktiabria 1925 g.), tt. Vasiliev, Rafes, Broido, Kuchumov” (Broido on l. 3). 80. Broido, Natsional’nyi i kolonial’nyi vopros, 83. 81. Nazym Khikmet, “Strela vypushchennaia iz luka,” in Izbrannoe (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo inostrannoi literatury, 1951), 42. 82. The translation is by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk from Göksu and Timms, Romantic Communist, 90. 83. The citations in this section from “Gioconda and Si-­Ya-­U” are from Nâzim Hikmet, Poems of Nazim Hikmet, trans. from the Turkish by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk, rev. and expanded ed. (New York: Persea Books, 2002), 6–31. 84. V. V. Maiakovskii, “Parizh (razgovorchiki s Eifelevoi bashnei),” in V. V. Maiakovskii, Sobranie sochinenii v vos’mi tomakh, vol. 3 (Moscow: Ogonëk, 1968), 158. 85. Göksu and Timms, Romantic Communist, 17, 26–31; Babaev, Nazym ­K hikmet. Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo, 63. 86. N. V. Ėkk, “Zapisi o KUTVe,” RGALI, f. 2653, op. 1, d. 3, l. 4; Lianov, “Na prazdnike narodov Vostoka,” 13. 87. Babaev, Nazym Khikmet. Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo, 291; “V Masterskoi Vs. Meierkhol’da,” Pravda, no. 22 (February 13, 1923): 5. 88. RGALI, f. 2437, op. 3, d. 1081: Fevral’skii, Aleksandr Vil’iamovich, l. 5. 89. Babaev, Nazym Khikmet. Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo, 288–293. 90. Radii Fish, Nazym Khikmet, Zhizn’ zamechatel’nykh liudei (Moscow: Molodiia gvardiia, 1968), 103. 91. A good example of Hikmet’s internationalist plays would be ­There Science and Culture Perish. RGALI, f. 2653, op. 1, d. 3, “Ianushkevich, Regina Vikent’evich,” R. V. Ianushkevich, N. V. Ėkk, “Tam gibnet nauka i kul’tura,” Literaturnyi stsenarii libretto (po siuzhetu Nazyma Khikmeta), ll. 1–22. The file is titled Ianushkevich, Regina Vikent’evich and the par­tic­u ­lar item in it is “. . . .’Tam gibnet. . . .” For coverage of his dramas, see also Babaev, Nazym Khikmet. Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo, 291, 300, 324, 325. 92. Nergis Ertürk, “Modernism Disfigured: Turkish Lit­er­a­ture and the ‘Other West,’ ” in The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, ed. Mark Wollaeger and Matt Eatough (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 534. 93. Nom de plume of Louis-­Marie-­Julien Viaud. The pseudonym was derived from an Indian flower that loves to blush unseen.

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94. The twelve-­volume edition of Loti’s work was published by V. M. Sablin in Rus­sian translation in 1911. 95. Claude Farrère, “Turquie ressucitée” (1922), Les oeuvres libres (Arthème, Paris), no. 12 (1922): 6. 96. I have discussed Farrère’s Istanbul fiction in Clark, “Cultural Interactions with Turkey.” 97. Mikhail Pavlovich was a pseudonym. His real name was Mikhail Lazarevich Vel’tman. See S. Vel’tman, “Kolonial’nye romany,” Novyi Vostok, no. 4 (1923): 474–481; “Literaturnye otkliki (kolonial’nyi byt),” Novyi Vostok, no. 7 (1925): 302–311; “Literaturnye otkliki (kolonial’nyi byt i vydumka),” Novyi Vostok, no. 8–9 (1925); “Pravda i nepravda o Vostoke (vostochnye stsenarii),” Novyi Vostok, no. 10–11 (1925): 290–306; “Kolonial’nye siluėty (Afrika i riffy v khudozhestvennoi lit­er­a­ture,” Novyi Vostok, no. 13–14 (1926): 364–381; “Literaturnye otkliki. Vostok v nashei khudozhestvennoi lit­er­a­ture,” Novyi Vostok, no. 12 (1926): 265–280, no. 15 (1926): 326–328; “Literaturnye otkliki (V poiskakh ‘Atlantid’),” Novyi Vostok, no. 16–17 (1927): 361–371; S. Vel’tman, Vostok v khudozhestvennoi lit­er­a­ture (Moscow-­Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1928). 98. S. Vel’tman, “Belye i chërnye (Kolonial’nye romany),” Novyi Vostok, no. 5 (1924): 449; cf. also S. Vel’tman, Vostok v khudozhestvennoi lit­er­a­ture, 7. 99. See, e.g., [unsigned], “P’er Loti,” Ogonëk, no. 16 (July 15, 1923): 5, discussed in Chapter 5. 100. E.g., P. Kogan, “P’er Loti (kritiko-­biograficheskii ocherk),” in P’er Loti, ­Islandskii rybak. Roman (Petrograd: Prosveshchenie, 1916), vii–­x vii; Maximilian Voloshin, “Klodel’ v Kitae,” Apollon, no. 7 (1911): 45–46. 101. Broido, Natsional’nyi i kolonial’nyi vopros, 56–58. 102. Lianov, “Na prazdnike narodov Vostoka,” 13. 103. Abdelaziz Bennis, “André Malraux, histoire d’un parcours entre deux tentations croisées: Le réalisme journalistique et le monde imaginaire du mythomane” (thèse, Université du Sorbonne, Paris III, 2000), 60. 104. Fish, Nazym Khikmet: Ėtiudy zhizni i tvorchestva, 32. 105. The best-­k nown of his several texts on the subject is Pierre Loti, Les massacres d’Arménie (Paris: Calman-­Lévy, 1918). Also, in 1919, an article by Loti on the Armenians and the Turks appeared in Ottoman Turkish. 106. Hikmet expert James H. Meyer, email message to Katerina Clark, January 10, 2020; Bilge Kaan Topçu, “Impacts of Balkan Wars on the Birth of Turkish Nationalism: Examples from Nazim Hikmet’s Youthful Poems (1913–1930),” Journal of the Balkan Research Institute 7, no. 2 (December 2018): 400–401. 107. A. A. Babaev, “Primechaniia,” in Khikmet, Izbrannye sochineniia, 1:555. 108. Le Corbusier, Journey to the East, ed., annotated, and trans. Ivan Žaknić (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007), 129.

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109. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 97. 110. Pierre Loti, Les désenchantées, roman des harems turcs contemporains (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1906), 84. 111. Ibid. 112. Le Corbusier, Journey to the East, 103; see also Bruno Taut, “Reiseeindrücke aus Konstantinopel, 1916,” in Ex Oriente Lux—­die Wirklichkeit einer Idee: Eine Sammlung von Schriften 1914–1938 (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 2007), 73–78. 113. See, e.g., GARF, f. 5283, op. 4, d. 44, ll. 4–11: “Turtsiia,” November 16, 1928. The information on Central Asian newspapers comes from Samuel Hodgkin, personal communication of August 26, 2019. 114. GARF, f. 5283, op. 4, d. 112, ll. 1, 24–25, 29. 115. GARF, f. 5283, op. 4, d. 112, l. 29. 116. GARF, f. 5283, op. 4, d. 28 (1928), l. 6: “K voprosu o latinskom alfavite Iz OBV NKID 9 / viii 1928.” 117. Nergis Erturk, Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 98–100. 118. Şehnaz Tahir Gürçağlar, The Politics and Poetics of Translation in Turkey, 1923–1960 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008). 119. Bernt Brendemoen, “The Turkish Language Reform and Language Policy in Turkey,” in Handbuch der tűrkischen Sprachwissenschaft, ed. Gyögy Hazai (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó), 456. 120. Babaev, Nazym Khikmet. Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo, 127. 121. Halman, Rapture and Revolution, 79. 122. Babaev, Nazym Khikmet. Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo, 183. 123. Nâzim Hikmet, Poems of Nazim Hikmet, canto 4, p. 51; an analogous passage comes in canto 9, p. 57. 124. Babaev, Nazym Khikmet. Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo, 268. 125. “Doklad A. M. Gor’kogo,” in Stenograficheskii otchët pervogo vsesoiuznogo s”ezda sovetskikh pisatelei, ed. I. K. Luppol (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1934), 10. 126. “Zakliuchitel’noe slovo A. M. Gor’kogo,” in Pervyi vsesoiznyi s”ezd pisatelei. Stenograficheskii otchët, ed. I. K. Luppol (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1934), 676. 127. GARF, f. 5283, op. 4, d. 109, l. l; d. 143 (1), l. 2; d. 229, ll. 31, 48, 78; d. 231, l. 10. 128. A good example would be a scene where Koreans, Annamese, Chinese, and Malays sing their vernacular songs and then all together sing “The Vanguard Marching Song” in Nym Wales (Helen Foster Snow) and Kim San [Jang Jirak], Song of Ariran: A Korean Communist in the Chinese Revolution (San Francisco: Ramparts Press, 1941), 56–59.

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129. Samuel Hodgkin in an email of June 24, 2019 suggests another pos­si­ble context: “Many leading Turkish leftists (including Khikmet’s sometime publishers) ­were Dönme, a crypto-­Jewish Turkish minority.” 130. Babaev, Nazym Khikmet. Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo, 175. 131. Ibid., 184. 132. Kader Konuk, East-­West Mimesis: Auerbach in Turkey (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010), 5; Gürçağlar, The Politics and Poetics of Translation. 133. Ö. Berk, “Translating the ‘West’: The Position of Translated Western Lit­er­a­ ture u ­ nder the Turkish Literary Polysystem,” Revue des Littératures de l’Union Européenne, no. 4 (2006): 1–18; Gürçağlar, The Politics and Poetics of Translation, 71; Konuk, East-­West Mimesis, 8, 71. 134. Gürçağlar, The Politics and Poetics of Translation, 71–72. 135. Konuk, East-­West Mimesis, 4. 136. David Damrosch, “Auerbach in Exile,” Comparative Lit­er­a­ture 47, no.  2 (Spring 1995): 97–117; Emily Apter, “Global Translation: The ‘Invention’ of Comparative Lit­er­at­ ure, Istanbul, 1933,” Critical Inquiry 29, no. 2 (Winter 2003): 253–281; Konuk, East-­West Mimesis. 137. Konuk, East-­West Mimesis, 40, 71. 138. See also the headline on page 1 of Iskusstvo kommuny, no. 15 (March 16, 1919): “Artists of the Entire World! The Language You Speak Is Understood by All P ­ eoples.” 139. Gannes Meier, “Novyi mir. Neue Welt,” trans. I. Gurevich, Sovremennaia arkhitektura, no. 5 (1928): 160. 140. M. Ia. Ginzburg, “Mezhdunarodnyi front sovremennoi arkhitektury,” Sovremennaia arkhitektura, no. 2 (1926): 41. 141. Sibel Bozdoğan, Modernism and Nation Building: Turkish Architectural Culture in the Early Republic (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001).

2. Revolutionary Poetry and the Persianate Tradition 1. Stalin’s ­earlier tract Marxism and the National Question (1913) provided the basic framework for nationality policy in the Soviet Union. 2. I. Stalin, “Politicheskie zadachi Universiteta narodov Vostoka,” Pravda, no. 115 (May 22, 1925); J. V. Stalin. “The Po­liti­cal Tasks of the University of the ­Peoples of the East,” in Works, (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954), 7:135–154. 3. XVI s”ezd VKP  /  b  / . Stenograficheskii otchët (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1930), 55–56. 4. Michael Holquist, Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2002), 69.

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5. Viktor Shklovskii, “Sviaz’ priëmov siuzhetoslozheniia s obshchimi priëmami stilia,” in Poėtika. Sborniki po teorii poėticheskogo iazyka (Petrograd, 1919), 144; Viktor Shklovskii, “Po povodu ‘Korolia Lira,’ ” in Khod konia. Sbornik statei (Moscow: Gelikon, 1923), 147–148. 6. Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Lit­er­a­ture,” New Left Review 1 (January–­February 2000): 56, 65. 7. See, e.g., David Damrosch, What Is World Lit­er­a­ture? (Prince­ton, N.J.: Prince­ton University Press, 2003), 13. 8. Lisa Yountchi, “Pushkin as a Young Saa’di: The Role of Persian Poetry in Pushkin’s Work” (unpublished manuscript, 2017), esp. 37. 9. Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 15, 9, 14. 10. Audrey Truschke, Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court, South Asia across the Disciplines (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). 11. Sofiia Starkina, Velimir Khlebnikov, Zhizn’ zamechatel’nykh liudei (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 2007), 238–239; for Lahuti’s attendance, see Sepehr Zabih, The Communist Movement in Iran (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 32, n74. 12. G. Lakhuti, “Moi tvorcheskii put’. Iz besedy Gasema Lakhuti s molodymi pisateliami Tashkenta,” Literaturnaia gazeta, October 15, 1937. 13. P. Tartakovskii, Sotsial’no-­ėsteticheskii opyt narodov Vostoka i poėziia V. Khlebnikova (1900–1910 gg.) (Tashkent: Izdatel’stvo “FAN” Uzbekskoi SSR, 1987), 131. 14. Harsha Ram discusses the manifesto in his essay “The Poetics of Eurasia: Velimir Khlebnikov between Empire and Revolution,” in Social Identities in Revolutionary Rus­sia, ed. Madhavan K. Palat (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 214–215. Ram provides the Rus­sian text and an En­glish translation of the manifesto (225–228). 15. E.g., Tartakovskii, Sotsial’no-­ėsteticheskii opyt narodov Vostoka, 219. 16. Anindita Banerjee, “Liberation Theosophy: Discovering India and Orienting Rus­sia between Velimir Khlebnikov and Helena Blavatsky,” PMLA 126, no. 3 (May 2001): 617, 618. 17. Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan (London: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1892), 23, 34. 18. See, e.g., H. P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled: A Master-­Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology (New York: J. W. Bouton, 1893), 90. 19. A. Parnis, “V. Khlebnikov—­sotrudnik ‘Krasnogo voina,’ ” Literaturnoe obozrenie, no. 2 (1980): 105–112. 20. A. Kosterin, “Russkie dervishi,” Moskva, no. 9 (1966): 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 255.

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21. Ibid., 212, 217–218, 220, 258, 260, 261; N. Stepanov, Poėty i prozaiki (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1966); Starkina, Velimir Khlebnikov, 260–263. 22. E.g., Viktor Shklovskii, Zoo, ili pis’ma ne o liubvi ili tret’ia Ėloiza (Berlin: Gelikon, 1923), 28; Viktor Shklovsky, Zoo, or, Letters Not about Love, trans. Richard Sheldon (Chicago: Dalkey Archive Press, 2001), 23. 23. Raymond Cooke, Velimir Khlebnikov: A Critical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 144–145, 147. 24. V. Kamenskii, “Iz poėmy ‘Serdtse narodnoe—­Sten’ka Razin,’ ” in Chtets-­ deklmator. Sbornik russkoi poėzii (Berlin: Izdatel’stvo I. P. Ladyzhnikova, 1923), esp. 189–200. 25. Iosif Orbeli, “Shakhnamė” [his address of May 29, 1934, in the main ceremony commemorating one thousand years of Ferdowsi], in Ferdousi 934– 1934, by Institut vostokovedeniia Akademii nauk SSSR i Gosudarstvennyi Ėrmitazh (Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk, 1934), 1. 26. On the Greek origin of Zahhak, see A. Lakhuti, “Ot avtora,” in Kuznets Kova. Libretto opery, perevod s tadzhikskogo Ts. Banu (Stalinabad / Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo Tadzhikskoi SSR, 1941), 4. 27. My summary of this episode loosely follows, in semi-­citation, the translation of Dick Davis in Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings (New York: ­Penguin Books, 2016), 18–21. 28. Homa Katouzian, Iran: Politics, History and Lit­er­a­ture (London: Routledge, 2013), 62–63. 29. Talat S. Halman, Rapture and Revolution: Essays on Turkish Lit­er­a­ture (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2007), 79. 30. Golbarg Rekabtalaei, Ira­nian Cosmopolitanism: A Cinematic History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). 31. P. Tartakovskii, Poėziia Khlebnikova i Vostok 1917–1922 gody (Tashkent: Izdatel’stvo “FAN” Akademii nauk Respubliki Uzbekistana, 1992), 184. 32. Victoria E. Bonnell, Iconography of Power: Soviet Po­liti­cal Posters ­under Lenin and Stalin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), chapter 1; Iurii Chiukov, “Kavė-­kuznets,” in Krasnyi Iran (Petr Usachev, Rudol’ f Abikh i Velemir Khlebnikov), 2nd ed. (Astrakhan: Izdatel’stvo Nizhnevolzhskogo ėkotsentra, 2010), 32. 33. Tartakovskii, Sotsial’no-­ėsteticheskii opyt narodov Vostoka, 176–196; Tartakovskii, Poėziia Khlebnikova i Vostok, 183–184; Abul’kasim Ferdovsi, Kniga o tsariakh (“Shakh-­name”), trans. from the Persian by S. Sokolov, first release (Moscow: Lazarevskii institut vostochnykh iazykov, 1905); Kosterin, “Russkie dervishi,” 218. 34. Rudol’f Abikh, “Oruzhie revoliutsionnoi Persii. Iskusstvo grazhdanskoi voiny,” Brigada khudozhnikov, no. 3 (1932): 11.

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35. For more information about the poem and poster, see Kosterin, “Russkie dervishi,” 218–219; Chiukov, Krasnyi Iran, 32–33; the poster is reproduced in Abikh, “Oruzhie revoliutsionnoi Persii,” 11; N. Stepanov, “Velimir Khlebnikov,” in Poėty i prozaiki (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1966), 357. 36. Note also Khlebnikov’s first poem published in Krasnyi Iran, “Navruz Truda,” discussed in Kosterin, “Russkie dervishi,” 218. 37. Harsha Ram has called it a sequel. See his analy­sis of “Ispaganskii verbliud” in Harsha Ram, “Geographies of Empire: The Poetics of Orientalism in ­Eu­rope and Rus­sia” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1995), 371–379. 38. V. V. Khlebnikov, “Esir,” in Sobranie proizvedenii V. V. Khlebnikova, vol. 4, Proza i dramaticheskie proizvedeniia, ed. Iu. Tynianov and N. Stepanov (Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo pisatelei v Leningrade, 1930), 92; Velimir Khlebnikov, “Yasir,” in Collected Works of Velimir Khlebnikov, vol. 2, Prose, Plays, and Supersagas, trans. Paul Schmidt, ed. Ronald Vroon (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 107–108. 39. Iranskii, “Russko-­persidskie otnosheniia za piat’ let,” pt. 1, Novyi Vostok, no. 3 (1923): 104. 40. On Dobrokosky work, see Kosterin, “Russkie dervishi,” 219–220. 41. Ibid., 220. [N. Stepanov], “Primechaniia,” in Sobranie proizvedenii Velimira Khlebnikova, vol. 3, Stikhotvoreniia 1917–1922, ed. N. Stepanov (Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo pisatelei v Leningrade, 1931), 379. 42. M. P. Pavlovich (Mikh. Vel’tman), Velikie zhelezno-­dorozhnye i morskie puti budushchego (St. Petersburg: V. M. Vol’f, 1913). 43. Starkina, Velimir Khlebnikov, 239. 44. Khlebnikov sometimes used the word “mari­ner” (plovets) to apply to Stenka Razin. See Cooke, Velimir Khlebnikov, 145. 45. E.g., Velimir Khlebnikov, “The Trumpet of the Martians” (1916) and “A Letter to Two Japa­nese” (1916), in Collected Works of Velimir Khlebnikov, vol. 1, Letters and Theoretical Writings, trans. Paul Schmidt, ed. ­Charlotte Douglas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 321, 326–328. 46. Le Corbusier-­Saugnier, “Trois rappels à MM. les architectes,” Esprit nouveau, no. 4 (1921): 470; Le Corbusier, “Three Reminders to Architects: III. Plan,” in ­Towards a New Architecture, trans. Frederick Etchells (Oxford, UK: ­Butterworth Architecture, 1989), 63. 47. Munibur Rahman, “Abu’l Qasim Lahuti: Iran’s Foremost Marxist Poet,” Journal of South Asian Lit­er­a­ture 27, no. 2 (1992): 118, 119. 48. ­Unless other­w ise indicated, most of my biographical information on Lahuti in Persia comes from Stephanie Cronin, “Iran’s Forgotten Revolutionary: Abulqasim Lahuti and the Tabriz Insurrection of 1922,” in Reformers and Revolutionaries in Modern Iran: New Perspectives on the Ira­nian Left,

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ed. Stephanie Cronin (London: Routledge, 2004), 118–146; see also Rahman, “Abu’l Qasim Lahuti,” 116–117; Lakhuti, “Moi tvorcheskii put’ ”; Leila Gasemovna Lahuti (Lahuti’s d ­ aughter), interview with author, Moscow, July 15, 2017. 49. Stephanie Cronin contends that Lahuti joined the gendarmes in 1911–1912 with the “objective” of “launching a new revolution.” Cronin, “Iran’s Forgotten Revolutionary,” 122, 137–141. 50. RGASPI, f. 532, op. 1, d. 12, ll. 47, 57. 51. My sense of how Lahuti became a communist is indebted to an email exchange I had with Samuel Hodgkin, February 12–13, 2018. 52. A. Lakhuti, “Kurdistan i kurdy” (perevod s persidskogo), Novyi Vostok, no. 4 (1923): 58–71. 53. Hikmet published alongside a panegyric to Lahuti. Samuel Hodgkin, “Classical Persian Canons of the Revolutionary Press: Abū al-­Qāsim Lāhūtī’s Circles in Istanbul and Moscow,” in Persian Lit­er­a­ture and Modernity: Production and Reception, ed. Hamid Rezaei Yazdi and Arshavez Mozafari (London: Routledge, 2018), 185; Samuel Hodgkin, “Revolutionary Springtimes: Reading Soviet Persian Poetry, from Ghazal to Lyric,” in Ira­nian Languages and Lit­er­a­tures of Central Asia: From the Eigh­teenth ­Century to the Pre­sent, ed. Matteo De Chiara and Evelin Grassi (Paris: Association pour l’avancement des études iraniennes, 2015), 273–305. 54. Lakhuti, “Moi tvorcheskii put’.” 55. See Ahmad Karimi-­Hakkak’s discussion of parody in another poem by ­Lahuti of his KUTV period, “To the D ­ aughters of Iran” (“Beh dokhtaran­e Iran”), in Recasting Persian Poetry: Scenarios of Poetic Modernity in Iran (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1996), 187–202. 56. The poem “Kreml’ ” appeared in Rus­sian translation by Irandust, in Poėma sovetskoi revoliutsii (Tashkent / Samarkand: Tadzhgiz,1929), and then in Izbrannye stikhi (Moscow: GIKhL, 1932), 3–9; A. L. Khromov, “Avtograf poėta-­ tribuna (A. Lakhuti i S. Ol’denburg),” Izvestiia akademii nauk Tadzhikskoi SSR. Seriia vostokovedenie, istoriia, filologiia, no. 2 (1987): 10; A. A. Babaev, Nazym Khikmet. Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo (Moscow: “Nauka,” Glavnaia redaktsiia vostochnoi literatury, 1975), 117–118; N. Khikmet’s introductory tribute to Lahuti in poetic form: “Sa’di” in Abū al Qāsim Lāhūtī, Nâzim Hikmet, and Ziynätullāh Nawşirvān, Krimil (Moscow: Tsentral’noe vostochnoe izdatel’stvo, 1923), 2. 57. Lakhuti, “Ot avtora,” 8. 58. Samuel Hodgkin, “A Soviet ‘Court Poet’: Lahuti’s Ode to the Kremlin and the Ruins of a Classical Canon in Soviet Central Asia” (unpublished paper from the conference “Language and Identity in Central Asia,” UCLA, May 4–5, 2012), 2. 59. Lakhuti, “Moi tvorcheskii put’.”

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60. According to his ­daughter, Lahuti himself requested this move. Leila Gasemovna Lahuti, interview in Moscow, July 20, 2017. 61. For example, he was secretary of the City Committee of the Party and deputy head of the Commissariat for Education. Mezhdu molotom i nakoval’nei. Soiuz sovetskikh pisatelei SSSR. Dokumenty i kommentarii, vol. 1, 1925-­iiun’ 1941 (Moscow: Rosspen, 2011), 264. 62. Leila Gasemovna Lahuti, interview. 63. Cronin, “Iran’s Forgotten Revolutionary,” 141. 64. Evg. Shteinberg, “Predislovie,” in Tadzhikskii sbornik. Proza i stikhi, ed. S. L. Vel’tman (Moscow: Gos. izd. khud. lit., 1933), 9. 65. “Doklad G. A. Lakhuti o lit­er­a­ture tadzhikskoi SSR,” in Pervyi s”ezd pisatelei. Stenograficheskii otchët (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1934), 142, 144–145; Abulkosim Lohuti in Paris 1935. Erster Internationaler Schriftstellerkongress zur Verteidigung der Kultur. Reden und Dokumente mit Materialien der Londoner Schriftstellerkonferenz 1936 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1982), 27, 92, 221, 250–258 (the speech), 378, 451, 510. 66. A. Lakhuti, “Vozhdu. Tovarishchu. Stalinu,” trans. B. Burkhanova, in Tad­ zhikskii sbornik. Proza i stikhi, ed. S. L. Vel’tman (Moscow: Gos. izd. khud. lit., 1933), 104–109. 67. Julie Scott Meisami, “Allegorical Gardens in the Persian Poetic Tradition: Nezami, Rumi, Hafez,” International Journal of ­Middle East Studies 17, no. 2 (May 1985): 229–260. 68. Rahman, “Abu’l Qasim Lahuti,” 119. 69. Mezhdu molotom i nakoval’nei, 1:264; Katherine Holt, “Performing as ­Soviet Central Asia’s Source Texts: Lahuti and Džambul in Moscow, 1935–1936,” Cahiers d’Asie centrale 24 (2015): 213–238. 70. Lahuti does not appear to have been so impor­tant ­earlier in the Soviet internationalist literary movement. He was not, for instance, sent to the Kharkov International Congress of Writers (1930), nor did he serve in the leadership of the Comintern’s international writers’ organ­ization, MORP, as did Ėmi Xiao. 71. Mezhdu molotom i nakoval’nei, 1:16, 262, 264, 299, 359, 362, 363, 442. 72. Yuri Slezkine, The House of Government: A Saga of the Rus­sian Revolution (Prince­ton, N.J.: Prince­ton University Press, 2017), 483–484, 816. 73. G. Lakhuti, V Evrope. Poėma, authorized trans. from Farsi by Ts. Banu (Moscow: Goslitizdat, 1936). 74. “Doklad A. M. Gor’kogo” and “Zakliuchitel’noe slovo A. M. Gor’kogo,” in Pervyi vsesoiznyi s”ezd pisatelei. Stenograficheskii otchët, ed. I. K. Luppol (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1934), 13, 15, 676. 75. A. Lakhuti, “Kuznets Kova,” in Kuznets Kova. Opera v chetyrëkh aktakh, by Komitet po delam iskusstv pri SNK SSSR (Moscow-­Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1941), 12.

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76. A. D’iakov, “Predislovie,” in Izbrannye poėmy, by Abul’gasem Lakhuti, trans. from Farsi (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1936), 5. 77. E.g., tributes to Gilan revolutionaries in A. Lakhuti, “Bakinskim rabochim,” “Na smert’ Gaidar-­k hana,” and “Na smert’ Khidzhazi,” in Izbrannye stikhi (Moscow: Sovetskaia literatura, 1933), 39, 91–93, 94–95. 78. “Doklad G. A. Lakhuti o lit­er­a­ture tadzhikskoi SSR,” 144. Samuel Hodgkin reported in a conversation of August 26, 2019 that this is not accurate and nightingales in classical Persian verse are normally frantic. 79. Orbeli, “Shakhnamė,” 1. 80. Lakhuti, “Ot avtora,” 4. 81. Bakhram Gur i Azadė, Iz Shakhnamė. Ferdovsi (Leningrad: Gosudarstvennyi Ėrmitazh, Muzei istorii i iskusstva, 1935), 3–6. 82. One poem from the 1920s where Lahuti invokes “Kova” is “Nasil’nikam, skazhite ot menia” (1924). On the poem’s popularity, see, e.g., Abdulkasim ­Lahuti, “About Myself,” Soviet Lit­er­at­ ure, no. 9 (1954): 138. 83. E. Ė. Bertel’s, Abu-­l’ Kasim Ferdousi i ego tvorchestvo (Leningrad-­Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1935), 68. 84. Abul’gasem Lakhuti, “Korona, Znamia,” in Izbrannye poėmy, trans. from Farsi (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1936), 156–157. 85. Literaturnaia gazeta, no. 48 (August 27, 1936): 2. 86. Boris Frezinskii, Pisateli i sovetskie vozhdi: Izbrannye siuzhety 1919–1960 godov (Moscow: Ėllis Lak, 2008), 151; Mezhdu molotom i nakoval’nei, 1:547, 648, 783, 785. 87. Evgeny Dobrenko, conversation with author, April 17, 2016; Mezhdu molotom i nakoval’nei, 1:783. 88. Nadezhda Mandel’shtam, Vospominaniia (New York: Izdatel’stvo imeni Chekhova, 1970), 49, 319, 322. 89. Lisa Yountchi, “An Ode to G ­ reat Friendship: Rus­sia, Iran and the Soviet Tajik Writer” (talk presented at the annual convention of the Association for Slavic, East Eu­ro­pean, and Eurasian Studies [ASEEES], Los Angeles, November 2010). 90. Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001), 445. 91. Theodore Levin, The Hundred Thousand Fools of God: Musical Travels in Central Asia (and Queens, New York) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 58. 92. Ibid., 13, 40. 93. Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire, 437–445. 94. Firuza Melville, conversation with author, Yale University conference on the Caspian, March 3, 2019; Kelsey Rice, “From Progressive to ­People’s Artist: Jadidist Influence in Early Azerbaijani Theater and Opera” (paper presented

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at the conference “In Empire’s Long Shadow: Modern Constructions of Central Eurasia, 1900–1941,” University of Chicago, February 26, 2016). 95. Marina Frolova-­Walker, Rus­sian ­Music and Nationalism: From Glinka to Stalin (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007), 313. 96. In 1947 Lahuti also produced a book on Kaveh, Kovai Ahangar (Kaveh the blacksmith). 97. [Unsigned], “ ‘Otello’ na tadzhikskom iazyke,” and V. Tingauzen, “Shekspir na tadzhikskom iazyke,” Sovetskoe iskusstvo, April 20, 1941, 1, 2, respectively. 98. “Programma zakliuchitel’nogo kontserta,” Sovetskoe iskusstvo, April 20, 1941, 1. 99. Naum Kleiman, “Sergei Eisenstein. 1933. Fil’m o Persii—­‘Shakh-­namė,’ ” in “K predisloviiu dlia nesdelannykh veshchei,” Iskusstvo kino, no. 6 (1992): 16. 100. E. Grosheva, “Geroicheskaia opera,” Sovetskoe iskusstvo, April 20, 1941, 2. 101. Lakhuti, “Ot avtora,” 7, 6. 102. Lakhuti, Kuznets Kova. Libretto opery, 75. 103. A. Lakhuti, “Kuznets Kova,” in Kova Okhangar. Dekada tadzhikskogo iskusstva v Moskve 1941 (Moscow-­Leningrad: Gos. izdatel’stvo “Iskusstvo,” 1941), 11–12; V. Gorodinskii, “Dekada tadzhikskogo iskusstva v Moskve,” Pravda, April 17, 1941, 4. 104. Grosheva, “Geroicheskaia opera,” 2. 105. Frolova-­Walker, Rus­sian ­Music and Nationalism, 314. 106. A. Shaverdian, “Predislovie,” in Kovi Okhangar (Kuznets Kova). Opera. Izbrannye otryvki dlia peniia i fortepiano. Libretto A. Lakhuti, by S. Balasanian (Moscow-­Leningrad: Gos. muzykal’noe izdatel’stvo, 1941), 6; A. Shaverdian, “ ‘Kuznets Kova’ S. Balasaniana,” in Kova Okhangar. Dekada tadzhikskogo iskusstva v Moskve 1941 (Moscow-­Leningrad: Gos. izdatel’stvo “Iskusstvo,” 1941), 5. 107. Iosif Orbeli, “Bakhram Gur,” in Bakhram Gur i Azadė iz Shakh-­namė Ferdovsi (Leningrad: Gosudarstvennyi Ėrmitazh, Muzei istorii i iskusstva, 1935), 10; A. Pir-­Mukhamed-­Zoda, “Skazanie sedoi drevnosti,” in Dekada tadzhikskogo iskusstva v Moskve. Rustam i Sukhrob, tragediia v 3-kh aktakh (Moscow-­Leningrad: Gos. izdatel’stvo, 1941), 5. 108. See Lisa Yountchi, “The Politics of Scholarship and the Scholarship of Politics: Imperial, Soviet, and Post-­Soviet Scholars Studying Tajikistan,” in The Heritage of Soviet Oriental Studies, ed., Michael Kemper and Stephan Conermann (London: Routledge, 2011), 219–221. 109. J. Stalin, “Speech at the Kremlin Reception for Participants in the Cele­ bration of Tajik Culture,” April 22, 1941, as cited in Masha Kirasirova, “My ­Enemy’s ­Enemy: Consequences of the CIA Operation against Abulqasim ­Lahuti, 1953–54,” Ira­nian Studies, no 3. (2017): 444. 110. Kirasirova, “My E ­ nemy’s ­Enemy,” 447; see also Yountchi, “The Politics of Scholarship,” 224.

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111. V. Ryndin, “Ideia oformleniia,” in Kova Okhangar. Dekada tadzhikskogo iskusstva v Moskve 1941 (Moscow-­Leningrad: Gos. izdatel’stvo “Iskusstvo,” 1941), 17–20. 112. Kirasirova, “My ­Enemy’s ­Enemy,” 446. 113. Leila Gasemovna Lahuti, interview with author, July 14, 2017. 114. Yountchi, “The Politics of Scholarship,” 20–23. 115. Saeed Talajooy, “The Impact of Soviet Contact on Ira­nian Theatre: Abdolhosein Nushin and the Tudeh Party,” in Iranian-­Russian Encounters: Empires and Revolutions since 1800, ed. Stephanie Cronin (London: Routledge, 2013), 344, 347. 116. Leila Gasemovna Lahuti, interview with author, July 15, 2017.

3. Across the G ­ reat Divide to Af­ghan­i­stan



1. Samuel Hirst, “Comrades on Elephants: Economic Anti-­Imperialism, and Soviet Diplomacy in Af­ghan­i­stan, 1921–23,” Kritika: Explorations in Rus­sian and Eurasian History, no. 1 (Winter 2021): 13–40. 2. E.g., Larisa Reisner, “V teni Gimalaev,” Zvezda, no. 1 (1924). 3. L. Nikulin, “Afganistan,” in Vremia, prostranstvo, dvizhenie, vol. I, Zapiski sputnika (Moscow: Sovetskaia literatura, 1933), 166. 4. Larisa Reisner-­Raskol’nikova, “Kak byl vziat v plen tov. Raskol’nikov,” ­Izvestiia, no. 10 (January 16, 1919): 3. 5. Peter Hopkirk, The G ­ reat Game: The Strug­gle for Empire in Central Asia (New York: Kodansha International, 1992); Peter Hopkirk, The G ­ reat Game: On Secret Ser­vice in High Asia (London: Murray, 1990). 6. Jean-­François Fayet, Karl Radek (1885–1939): Biographie politique (Bern: Peter Lang, 2004), 533. 7. Ibid. 8. “Manifesto of the Congress,” Congress of the ­Peoples of the East, Baku, September 1920, Stenographic Report, translated and annotated by Brian Pearce (London: New Park Publications, 1977), 171. 9. Nikulin, “Afganistan,” 210–211. 10. “Larisa Mikhailovna Reisner (1895–1926),” in Russkie sovetskie pisateli-­ prozaiki. Bibliobiograficheskii ukazatel’, vol. 7 (dopolnitel’nyi), pt. 2, ed. B. M. Tolochinskaia (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo “Kniga,” 1972), 65, 67, 68, 70, 81, 82–83. 11. Larisa Reisner, Aziatskie povesti, Biblioteka “Ogon’ka,” no. 10 (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo “Ogonëk,”1925). This work contains the following sketches in the following order, which is dif­fer­ent from that in Afganistan: “Vanderlip v RFSFR,” 3–9; “Vanderlip v Afganistane,” 10–19; “O liudiakh i stranakh, otdelënnykh ot Ry-­Sy-­Fy-­Ry pustynei, neskol’kimi vekami, kriazhamiu gor i krivoi musul’manskoi sablei,” 20–35; “Fashisty v Azii,” 36–42; “Mashin-­k hane,”

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43–52; “Nauka v Gareme,” 53–64. See also Larisa Reisner, “S puti (dnevnik),” Krasnaia nov’, no. 4 (December 1921): 34–46. 12. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 1. 13. See, e.g., S. Vel’tman, “Belye i chërnye (kolonial’nye romany),” Novyi Vostok, no. 5 (1923): 443–452. 14. See Katerina Clark, “Introduction: The Ecol­ogy of Revolution,” in Petersburg, Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995). 15. Leorinus [Larisa Reisner], “V ėkzoticheskoi strane. Ocherk iz zhizni Kabula,” Krasnaia pa­norama, no. 44 (1925): 12–13. 16. “ ‘Miatezhnaia cheta’ v Kabule.’ Pis’ma F. Raskol’nikova i L. Reisnera L. Trotskomu (1922 g.),” Otechestvennye arkhivy, no. 3 (2003), https://­znanium​.­com​ /­catalog ​/­product​/­529983 (accessed April  19, 2021); Vladimir Ivanovich Savchenko, Otstupnik: Drama Fëdora Raskol’nikova (Moscow: Detektiv-­ Press, 2001), 192–193. 17. John MacKay, Dziga Vertov: Life and Work, vol. 1, 1896–1921 (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2018), 72–84. 18. Polkovnik Ivan Chernyi, “Valkiriia Revoliutsii. Larisa Reisner,” Limonka, no. 25 (16 .09.2008). I am grateful to Fabrizio Fenghi for drawing my attention to this article. 19. Another writer-­diplomat was Nikolai Ravich, who ­later wrote the scenario for Vsevolod Pudovkin’s film Suvorov (1941). See Nikolai Ravich, Molodost’ veka (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1960), 41–52. 20. ­There are dif­fer­ent versions of Kolbas’ev’s death date ­after his arrest, and they include 1938 and 1942. 21. Said, Orientalism, 98, 81. 22. Savchenko, Otstupnik, 192–193. 23. See also the case of Ernst Jäckh and other German scholars in Germany’s campaigns in the Near East, in Katerina Clark, “Eu­ro­pean and Rus­sian Cultural Interactions with Turkey: 1910s–1930s,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the ­Middle East 33, no. 2 (2013): 201–213. 24. P. S. Kol’tsov, Diplomat Fëdor Raskol’nikov (Moscow: Politizdat, 1990), 40; Savchenko, Otstupnik; Larisa Reisner, letter from Kabul to her parents, November 25, 1921, in Nikolai Gumilev, Neivestnoe i nesobrannoe, compiled and with notes by Michael Basker and Sheila Duffin-­Graham (Paris: YMCA Press, 1986), 221. 25. [L. Reisner], “Kino v Kitae i Iaponii,” Vestnik rabotnikov iskusstv, no. 1 (1926): 32, signed Rikki-­Tikki; F. Raskol’nikov, “Iz pis’ma Larise Reisner 26 avgusta 1923 g.,” GBL f 245, kart. 7, l. 53 (obratno). 26. Rad”iard Kipling, Rasskazy, trans. M. I. Kniaginina-­Kondrat’eva, with an introduction by D. P. Mirskii (Leningrad: Academia, 1936).

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27. Genri Raider Khaggard (1856), Kopi tsaria Solomona, povest’ pod redaktsiei and s predisloviem K. Chukovskogo, Vsemirnaia literatura, vypusk no. 20 (Petersburg: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1922). 28. See, e.g., “Afrikanskaia okhota. Iz putevogo dnevnika N. Gumilëva,” first published in Niva, no. 8 (1916), and reprinted in the posthumously published collection of Gumilev’s prose, Ten’ ot pal’my (Petrograd: Mysl’, 1922); and “Lesnoi d’iavol,” first published in Vesna, no. 11 (1908). 29. “Umer li Menelik?” was first published in Niva, no. 5 (1914), but not republished in Ten’ ot pal’my. 30. Vil’iam Preskott, Istoriia zavoevaniia Meksiki (1843), sokrashchënnyi russkii perevod, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia E. Evdokimova, E. Ital’ianskaia, 1885). 31. Vladimir Polushin, Nikolai Gumilëv, Zhizn’ zamechatel’nykh liudei (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 2006), 540. 32. Ibid., 538; Valerii Shubinskii, Nikolai Gumilëv. Zhizn’ poėta (St. Petersburg: Vita nova, 2004), 465. 33. “Doklad Karla Radeka ‘Sovremennaia mirovaia literatura i zadachi proletarskogo iskusstva,’ ” in Pervyi s”ezd pisatelei. Stenograficheskii otchët (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1934), 307. 34. W. H. Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico, 2 vols. (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1843; repr., New York: E. P. Dutton, 1957), 1:218. 35. See, e.g., Linda Nochlin, “The Imaginary Orient,” in The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-­Century Art and Society (New York: Harper and Row, 1989), 35–36; Nicholas Tromans, ed., The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008), 103. 36. Larisa Reisner, Afganistan (Moscow-­Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1925), 4. 37. Galina Przhiborovskaia, Larisa Reisner, Zhizn’ zamechatel’nykh liudei (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 2008), 380. 38. Mark Naletnyi, “Po Afganistanu. Iz vospominanii kinooperatora,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski, no. 54 (2001): 71. Naletnyi had worked as a cameraman on Lev Kuleshov’s feature film Engineer Prite’s Proj­ect (1918). Fëdor Raskol’nikov o vremeni i o sebe. Vospominaniia, pis’ma dokumenty (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1989), 447; the citation is in Nikolai Ravich, Molodost’ veka (Moscow: “Sovetskaia Rossiia,” 1967), 288–291. 39. F. Raskol’nikov, letter, August 26, 1923, in Fëdor Raskol’nikov o vremeni i o sebe. Vospominaniia, pis’ma dokumenty (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1989), 447. 40. Afganistan was made by Politprosvet fil’m, Sovkino, Leningrad, 1929, with V. N. Beliaev as the cameraman. Aleksandr Deriabin, “Nasha psikhologiia i ikh psikhologiia sovershenno raznye veshchi. Afganistan Vladimira Erofeeva

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i sovetskii kul’turfil’m dvadtsatykh godov,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski, no. 54 (2001): 53–71. 41. Polushin, Nikolai Gumilëv, 191; Adel’ Alekseeva, Krasno-­belyi roman. Larisa Reisner v sud’be Nikolaia Gumilëva i Anny Akhmatovoi (Moscow: Algoritm, 2008), 107. 42. I. Borozdin, “M. P. Pavlovich i Vsesoiuznaia nauchnaia assotsiatsiia vostokovedeniia,” Novyi Vostok 18 (1927): xxxviii. 43. Vera Tolz, Rus­sia’s Own Orient: The Politics of Identity and Oriental Studies in the Late Imperial and Early Soviet Periods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 156. 44. Nochlin, “The Imaginary Orient,” 35–36. 45. Larisa Reisner, “S puti [v Afganistan] Dnevnik,” Krasnaia nov’, no.  4 (1921): 35. 46. Reisner, Afganistan, 25, 6, 16. 47. Douglas Kerr, Eastern Figures: Orient and Empire in British Writing (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008), 88. 48. Nochlin, “The Imaginary Orient,” 38–39. 49. Reisner, Afganistan, 87. 50. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (London: Routledge, 1994), 148. 51. W. J. T. Mitchell, Landscape and Power, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 265–266. 52. Reisner, Afganistan, 4. 53. Ibid., 7. 54. Karl Radek, in S”ezd narodov Vostoka, Baku, 1–8 sentiabria 1920 g. Stenograficheskie otchëty (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Kommunisticheskogo internatsionala, 1920), 72. 55. E.g., Mikhail Kuzmin’s novella “Podvigi velikogo Aleksandra” (1906). 56. F. Raskol’nikov, “Rossiia i Afganistan (Istoricheskii ocherk),” Novyi Vostok, no. 4 (1923): 14, 16, 28, 33, 34, 41. 57. E.g., Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico, 1:272. 58. Ibid. 59. E.g., ibid., 1:211. 60. Nikulin, “Afganistan,” 150–151. 61. “Kandagar—­Indeiskaia granitsa. Ocherk Larisy Reisner,” Ogonëk, no. 15 (1923): 11. 62. L. Nikulin, Chetyrnadtsat’ mesiatsev v Afganistane (Moscow: Krasnaia nov’, 1923), 23. 63. Reisner, Afganistan, 84. 64. RGALI, f. 1923, op. 1, d. 520, l. 1; Naum Kleiman, “Ferganskii kanal i bashnia Tamerlana,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski, no. 102 / 103 (2013): 8–9.

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65. Ivan Lavrovich Iavorskii, Puteshestvie russkogo posol’stva po Avganistanu i Bukharskomu khantsvu v 1878–1879 gg. Iz dnevnikov chlena posol’stva d-ra I. L. Iavorskogo, 2 vols. (St. Peterburg: Tipografiia M. A. Khana, 1882), 1:96–97, 150–151, 183–189. 66. V. Bartol’d, Turkestan v ėpokhu mongol’skogo nashestviia, pt. 2, Issledovaniia (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia V. Kirshbauma, 1900), 473–474, 496. 67. V. V. Bartol’d, “Kul’tura musul’manstva” (1918), in Sochineniia (Moscow: “Nauka,” 1966), 6, 195–197, quotation on 202. 68. B. Vladimirtsev, Chingis-­khan (Petersburg-­Berlin: Z. I. Grzhebin, 1922). 69. I. R. [N. S. Trubetskoi], Nasledie Chingiskhana. Vzgliad na Russkuiu istoriiu ne s Zapada a s Vostoka (Berlin: Evraziiskoe knigoizdatel’stvo, 1925), 22. 70. Said, Orientalism, 154. 71. E.g., for the British, see Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 154. 72. Nikulin, “Afganistan,” 172. 73. Reisner, “V teni Gimalaev,” 128. 74. ­Here I draw on the observations of Holly Myers, “Larisa Reisner in Af­ghan­ i­stan: Revolutionary, Writer, and Diplomat” (paper delivered at the annual conference of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East Eu­ ro­pean Languages [AATSEEL], New Orleans, February 9, 2019). 75. Naum Kleiman, “1940. Fil’m o Lourense,” in “Neosushchestvlënnye zamysli Ėizenshteina,” Iskusstvo kino, no. 6 (1992). 76. Nikulin, “Afganistan,” 163. 77. Lowell Thomas, Beyond Khyber Pass into Forbidden Af­ghan­i­stan (New York: ­Century, 1925), 248. 78. Ibid., v, 12, 15, 40, 124–125, 41. 79. M. N. Roy’s Memoirs (Bombay: Allied Publishers, 1964), 416. 80. Thomas, Beyond Khyber Pass, 64–65. 81. Ibid., vii. 82. Ibid., 190. 83. On the Italian effort, see ibid., 216–217; on the En­glish, see Lev Nikulin, “Afganistan i Angora,” Novyi Vostok, no. 2 (1922): 289–296. 84. V. Khripin, “Bol’shoi vostochnyi perelët,” Pravda, no. 245 (September 5, 1930): 2. 85. Mikhail Kol’tsov, “Bol’shoi vostochnyi perelët,” Pravda, no. 255 (September 25, 1930): 2; Mikhail Kol’tsov, “Na kraiu sveta” (from Kabul), Pravda, no. 257 (September 27, 1930): 2. 86. Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Macmillan, 1970). 87. I. R., “Vstuptel’nyi ocherk,” in F. Raskol’nikov i angliiskii ul’timatum (Moscow: Krasnaia nov’, 1924), ix.

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88. Reisner, Afganistan, 55. 89. Reisner, “V teni Gimalaev,” 129. 90. Larisa Reisner, “Vanderlip na Vostoke,” Pravda, no. 26 (February 6, 1923): 2. 91. Ibid., 3. 92. F. Raskol’nikov i angliiskii ul’timatum (Moscow: Krasnaia nov’, 1924), 29–32. 93. Reisner, Afganistan, 78–80. 94. M. N. Roy’s Memoirs, 416, 492. 95. “Tele­g ramma polpreda RSFSR v Afganistane v Narkomindel,” in Fëdor Raskol’nikov o vremeni i o sebe. Vospominaniia, pis’ma dokumenty (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1989), 438. 96. All ­t hese quotations come from Reisner, Afganistan, 27–28. 97. Shohat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism, 137. 98. Reisner, Afganistan, 25. 99. Siraj Ahmed, Archaeology of Babel: The Colonial Foundation of the Humanities (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2018), 54. 100. Reisner, Afganistan, 84. 101. Ibid., 82. 102. Ahmed, Archaeology of Babel, 83–85. 103. Reisner, Afganistan, 10. 104. E.g., K. Bal’mont, “Omar Khaiiam,” Russkaia mysl’, bk. 4 (1910): 1–2; A. Umov, “Omar Khaiiam. Biograficheskie svedeniia. Perevody,” Russkaia mysl’, no. 8 (1911): 41–48. 105. E.g., by Bal’mont, Valerii Briusov, Gumilev, Viacheslav Ivanov, and Kuz’min. 106. Iuliia Babicheva, “Dramaticheskie skazki Nikolaia Gumilëva (‘Ditia Allakha’ i ‘Derevo prevrashchenii’),” Voprosy russkoi literatury 1, no. 57 (1991): 53. 107. Vostok, Zhurnal literatury, nauki i iskusstva, published by Vsemirnaia literatura: Bk. 1 (Petersburg, 1922): “Vostokovedenie” and “Vostochnaia kollegiia Vsemirnoi literatury,” by S.  O. [Oldenburg], 106, reports that Gulistan by Saadi is in press; “Bibliografiia,” Sergei Ol’denburg review of Edvard Fittsdzheral’d, Omar Khaiiam “Rubai,” trans. O. Rumer (Moscow: Knigoizdatel’stvo “Bereg,” 1922). Bk. 2 (Moscow-­Petersburg, 1923): “Bibliografiia,” Nizami, “Sem’ krasavits,” reviewed by A.  E. Gruzinski, trans. (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Sabashnikovye, 1922), 143–144, reviewed by E.E. Bk. 4 (Moscow-­L eningrad, 1924): “Otryvki iz Avesty,” trans. from Avesta by E. Bertel’s, 3–11. 108. Persidskie liriki, translated by Fëdor Evgen’evich Korsh and issued by Sabashnikovye; P. Tartakovskii, Russkie poėty i Vostok. Bunin, Khlebnikov, Esenin. Stat’i (Tashkent: Izdatel’stvo literatury i iskusstva imeni Gafura Guliama, 1986), 38; “Praded mechtal o sovetskom Gollivude v Krymu,” Kirill Zhurenkov pobesedoval s ego pravnukom, Kommersant, April 6, 2015.

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109. GARF, f. 5283, op. 4, d. 10 (1): Perepiska s NKID i upolnomochennym VOKS v Irane po organizatsionnym voprosam, o tekuchei rabote VOKS, godovoi otchët sovetskoi Russko-­iranskoi shkoly i dr., reel 1, ll. 92, 95, 96, 98, 99; reel 2, ll. 100, 101, 103. 110. GARF, f. 5283, op. 4, d. 10 (1): Perepiska s NKID i upolnomochennym VOKS v Irane po organizatsionnym voprosam, o tekuchei rabote VOKS, godovoi otchët sovetskoi Russko-­iranskoi shkoly i dr., reel 2, l. 106. 111. E.g., the translation of Hafez’s Divan by Lieut. Col. H. Wilberforce Clarke, is discussed in Ahmed, Archaeology of Babel; see esp. 54. 112. Nikulin, “Afganistan,” 104–233. 113. Ibid., 1:197. 114. E.g., Robert Crews, Afghan Modern: The History of a Global Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2015). 115. Reisner, Afganistan, 94. 116. Radek, in S”ezd narodov Vostoka, Baku, 1–8 sentiabria 1920 g., 72. 117. Thomas, Beyond Khyber Pass, 67. 118. F. Raskol’nikov i angliiskii ul’timatum, 20–35. 119. Crews, Afghan Modern, 7, 114, 121–124; Hirst, “Of Comrades on Elephants,” 3; Vartan Gregorian, The Emergence of Modern Af­ghan­i­stan: Politics of Reform and Modernization (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1969), 234–245. 120. Nikulin, “Afganistan i Angora,” 292, 294, 295, 296, 290. 121. Hirst, “Of Comrades on Elephants,” 3. 122. Nikulin, “Afganistan,” 108. 123. Kol’tsov, Diplomat Fëdor Raskol’nikov, 6. 124. Thomas, Beyond Khyber Pass, 248. 125. Nikulin, “Afganistan,” 127. 126. Ibid., 1:115. 127. “  ‘Miatezhnaia cheta’ v Kabule,” https://­znanium​.­com​/­catalog ​/­product​ /­529983 (accessed April 19, 2021). 128. A. V. Pantsov, “Karl Radek—­k itaeved,” Vestnik Moskovskogo universiteta, no. 1 (2005): 14. 129. “Doklad o Mezhdunarodnom biuro proletarskoi literatury,” publikatsiia L. K. Shevtsovoi, in Iz istorii Mezhdunarodnogo ob”edineniia revoliutsionnykh pisatelei (MORP), Literaturnoe nasledstvo, no. 81 (Moscow: “Nauka,” 1969), 41. 130. Leon Trotskii, Voprosy kul’tury pri diktature proletariata (Moscow-­Leningrad: Gosudartsvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1925), 93–110. 131. G.  M. Adibekov et  al. Organizatsionnaia struktura Kominterna, 1919–1943 (Moscow: Rosspen, 1997), 74; VKP(b), Komintern i natsional’no-­revoliut­ sionnoe dvizhenie v Kitae. Dokumenty, vol. II, 1926–1927, pt. 2 (Moscow:

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Rossiiskii tsentr khraneniia i izucheniia dokumentov noveishei istorii, et al., 1996), 984. 132. Lev Nikulin, Stambul, Ankara, Izmir (Moscow: Goslitizdat, 1935). 133. I. R., “Vstuptel’nyi ocherk,” iii, vi. 134. Lev Nikulin, “Afganistan,” 159.

4. India’s Place in Eurasian Cultural Geographies







1. Lev Nikulin, “Afganistan,” in Vremia, prostranstvo, dvizhenie, vol. 1, Zapiski sputnika (Moscow: Sovetskaia literatura, 1933), 173; see a similar statement on 159. 2. Perry Anderson, The Indian Ideology (London: Verso, 2013), 10. 3. Harish Trivedi, Colonial Transactions: En­glish Lit­er­a­ture and India (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 126. 4. V. I. Lenin, “Goriuchii material v mirovoi politike” (“Inflammable Material in World Politics”), in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5th ed. (Moscow: Izdanie politicheskoi literatury, 1968), 17:179. Originally published in Proletarii, no. 33 (July 23 [August 5], 1908). 5. E.g.,  Vsevolod Ivanov made a quixotic and unsuccessful attempt to get through to India via the Pamirs. Elena Alekseevna Pankova (Ivanov’s grand­ daughter), interview with author, Moscow, July 7, 2015. 6. Galina Przhiborovskaia, Larisa Reisner, Zhizn’ zamechatel’nykh liudei (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 2008), 376. 7. “No 2483, dt. The 25th November 1919. From: Sir William Morris, K.C.I.E., Secy. To the Government of India, Home Department. To (all local Governments and Administration except Burma, Assam, Coorg and Delhi),” in A Documented History of the Communist Movement in India, ed. P. Joshi and K. Damodaran (Delhi: Jawaharlal University, School of Social ­Science  / Sunrise Publications, 2007), 1:77. 8. Kris Manjapra, M. N. Roy: Marxism and Colonial Cosmopolitanism (London: Routledge, 2010), 43, 48, 63–97; Fredrik Petersson, “ ‘We Are Neither Visionaries Nor Utopian Dreamers’: Willi Münzenberg, the League against Imperialism, and the Comintern, 1925–1933” (doctoral thesis, Åbo Akademi ­University, Turku, Finland, 2013), 239–241. 9. Sibnarayan Ray, In Freedom’s Quest: A Study of the Life and Works of M. N. Roy, vol. 2, The Comintern Years (1922–1927) (Calcutta: Minerva Associates, 2002), 2, 6–10, 29. 10. “Protokol soveshchaniia o rabote po Indii,” GARF, f. 5283, op. 3, d. 106. 11. GARF, f. 5283, op. 3, d. 106, l. 1; GARF, f. 5283, op. 3, d. 18, ll. 1–27. 12. On the sources from Russell, see Suchetana Chattopadhyay, An Early Communist: Muzaffar Ahmad in Calcutta 1913–1919 (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2011), 78; on the translations, see Purabi Roy, “Tagore and Rus­sia: A Few

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Unknown Facts,” Visva-­Bharati Quarterly 19, no. 3–4 / 20, no. 1–2 (October 2010–­September 2011): 41. 13. B. Lapin, Dvadtsat’ dnei v Indii (Moscow: OGIZ Molodaia gvardiia, 1932), 3–39. 14. Ia. I. Gordon, “Ot avtora,” in Otkryvateli nekhozhenykh trop (Dushanbe: Izdatel’stvo “Irfon,” 1973), 8–9. 15. Ibid., 5. 16. B. Lapin, Zhurnalist na granitse (Leningrad: Krasnaia gazeta, 1930), 3. 17. “Hegel on the Philosophy of the Hindus,” in German Scholars on India: Contributions to Indian Studies, ed. the Cultural Department of the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany, New Delhi (Varanasi, India: Chowkhamba Sanskrit Series Office, 1973), 107–108. 18. See, e.g., Siraj Ahmed, Archaeology of Babel: The Colonial Foundation of the Humanities (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2018), 34, 43–44, 53–58. 19. Chattopadhyay, An Early Communist, 33. 20. Max Müller, “To the P ­ eople of E ­ ngland” (1870), in Letters on the War between E ­ ngland and France, by T. Mommsen, D. F. Strauss, F. Max Müller, and T. Carlyle (London: Trübner, 1871), 58–114. 21. Max Müller, India, What Can It Teach Us? A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University of Cambridge (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, [ca. 1883]), 32. 22. Max Müller, Lectures on the Science of Language Delivered at the Royal Institution of G ­ reat Britain in April, May, and June, 1861 (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1862), 237. 23. Ibid., 241. 24. Müller, India: What Can It Teach Us?, 116. 25. The Hon. Mr. Justice Kumaraswamy Sastri, “Aryan Rule in India,” Indian Review 20 (March 1919): 153–154. 26. Lévi cited in Dr. Krishnaswami Aiyenger, “A French Orientalist Silvain Levi,” Indian Review 23 (February 1922): 241. 27. Lévi cited in ibid., 243. 28. Ibid. 29. Mr. P. K. Anant Narayan, “A Vision of Vedic India,” Indian Review 23 (February 1922): 253, 254. 30. Müller, India: What Can It Teach Us?, 49, 24. 31. E.g., M. Miuller, Lektsii po nauke o iazyke (St. Petersburg, 1865); Sravnitel’naia mifologiia (Moscow, 1863); Nauka o iazyke, issues 1–2 ­ (Voronezh, 1868–1870). 32. Akademik S. F. Ol’denburg, “Vstupitel’naia stat’ia,” Vostok, bk. 1 (1922): [3]. 33. S. Ol’denburg, “Indiiskaia literatura,” in Literatura Vostoka. Sbornik statei, vypusk pervyi (Petersburg: Vsemirnaia literatura, 1919), 8–9.

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34. Michael David-­Fox, Revolution of the Mind: Higher Learning among the Bolsheviks, 1918–1929 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997), 243. 35. Michael Kemper, “Red Orientalism: Mikhail Pavlovich and Marxist Oriental Studies in Early Soviet Rus­sia,” Die Welt des Islams 50, no. 3–4 (2010): 475. 36. Müller also referred to Japhetic as an alternative name for Indo-­European. Müller, Lectures on the Science of Language, 250. 37. N. Marr, “Iafetidy,” in Vostok. Zhurnal literatury, nauki i iskusstva (Petersburg: Vsemirnaia literatura, 1922), bk. 1, 82–92. 38. N. Marr, “Ob iafeticheskoi teorii,” Novyi Vostok, no. 5 (1924): 303–339. 39. Ibid., 303. 40. Ibid., 304. 41. Ibid., 337. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid., 330. 44. Ibid., 332. See also N. Ia. Marr, “Termin Skif,” in Iafeticheskii sbornik (Moscow, 1922), 1:67–122. 45. Müller, India: What Can It Teach Us?, 39; Marr, “Ob iafeticheskoi teorii,” 306. 46. Marr, “Ob iafeticheskoi teorii,” 316. 47. Ibid., 333. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid., 306. 50. Katerina Clark, “Eisenstein’s Two Proj­ects for a Film about Moscow,” Modern Language Review 101 (2006): 188–200. 51. E.g., N. Ia. Marr, “K proiskhozhdeniiu iazykov,” Krasnaia gazeta, no. 247 (October 2, 1925). 52. Marr, “Ob iafeticheskoi teorii,” 306. See also Marr, “K proiskhozhdeniiu iazykov.” 53. Marr, “Ob iafeticheskoi teorii,” 307. 54. N. Ia. Marr, Iafeticheskaia teoriia. Programma obshchego kursa ob iazyke (Baku, 1927), 19. 55. Marr, “Ob iafeticheskoi teorii,” 306. 56. Ibid., 336–337. 57. Marr, “K proiskhozhdeniiu iazykov.” 58. Marr, “Ob iafeticheskoi teorii,” 337. 59. N. Ia. Marr, “Pochemu tak trudno stat’ lingvistom teoretikom,” in his Iazykovedenie i materializm (Leningrad: ILIaZV RANION, 1929), 25–26. 60. Nikulin, “Afganistan,” 173. In the sphere of plant ge­ne­t ics, see, e.g., N. I. Vavilov, “Predislovie,” in Zemledel’cheskii Afganistan, by N. I. Vavilov and D. I. Bukinich, sostavlen po materialam ėkspeditsii Gosudarstvennogo instituta opytnoi agronomii i Vsesoiuznogo instituta prikladnoi botaniki v Afganistan (Leningrad: Izdanie Vsesoiuznogo instituta prikladnoi botaniki i novykh kul’tur pri SNK SSSR i Gosudarstvennyi institut opytnoi agronomii

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NKZ RSFSR, 1929), 2–3; “Prilozhenie,” K trudam po prikladnoi botaniki, genetiki i selektsii, no. 33 (1927): 1. 61. Carolien Stolte, “ ‘Enough of the ­Great Napoleons!’ Raja Mahendra Pratap’s Pan-­Asian Proj­ects (1929–1939),” in Sites of Asian Interaction: Ideas, Networks and Mobility, ed. Tim Harper and Sunil Amrith (Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 171–190, esp. 172, 180. 62. Maria Carlson, “No Religion Higher than the Truth”: A History of the Theosophical Movement in Rus­sia, 1875–1922 (Prince­ton, N.J.: Prince­ton University Press, 1993), 51–52. 63. Blavatsky also published on India, using the same pseudonym, Zagadochnye plemena (mysterious tribes) (St. Peterburg, 1893). 64. E.g., Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan (London: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1892), 52; Radda-­Bai [Blavatsky], Iz peshcher i debrei Indostana. Pis’ma na rodinu (Moscow: Universitetskaia tipografiia M. Katkova, 1883), 104–106. 65. E.g., Radda-­Bai [Blavatsky], Iz peshcher i debrei Indostana, 104–106. 66. F. Max Müller, K.M., Theosophy, or Psychological Religion: The Gifford Lectures Delivered before the University of Glasgow in 1892 (London: Longmans, Green, 1893), 541. 67. Blavatsky, From the Caves and Jungles, 90, 89–93, 108; Müller, India: What Can It Teach Us?, 56. 68. Blavatsky, From the Caves and Jungles, 108, 110, 203, 204. 69. Ibid., 23, 34. 70. Ibid., 51–52; Marina Alexandrova, “Madame Blavatsky and the Rus­sian Reading Public” (paper delivered at the annual convention of the Association for Slavic, East Eu­ro­pean, and Eurasian Studies [ASEEES], San Francisco, November 24, 2019), [8]. 71. N. Shchetkina-­Roshe, “Prizrak kitcha kak ėsteticheskoe basso ostinato u Nikolaia Rerikha,” in Rerikhi. Mify i fakty. Sbornik statei, ed. A. I. Andreev and Z. D. Savelli (St. Petersburg: Nestor-­Istoriia, 2011), 30. 72. A. I. Andreev, “Okkul’tizm i mistika v zhizni i tvorchestve N. K. i E. I. Rerikh,” in Rerikhi. Mify i fakty. Sbornik statei, ed. A. I. Andreev and Z. D. Savelli (St. Petersburg: Nestor-­Istoriia, 2011), 72; N. K. Rerikh, Vrata v budushchee. Ėsse. Rasskazy. Ocherki (Moscow: Ėksmo, 2010), 171. 73. Nikolai Rerikh, Shambala. Serdtse Azii (Moscow: Ėksmo, 2013), 77, 78. 74. Andrei A. Znamenski, Red Shambhala: Magic, Prophecy, and Geopolitics in the Heart of Asia (Wheaton, Ill.: Quest Books / Theosophical Publishing House, 2011), 134. 75. Rerikh, Shambala, 77, 78. 76. Ibid., 10, 39, 43. 77. Ibid., 190. 78. Andreev, “Okkul’tizm i mistika,” 83, 85.

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79. Znamenski, Red Shambhala, 46–66, 179–204. 80. Andreev, Okkul’tizm i mistika, 85. 81. Znamenski, Red Shambhala, 167. 82. Rerikh, Shambala, 27. 83. Nicholas Roerich, Shambhala (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1930); see “Chinghiz-­K han (A Song),” 97–100, and “Shambhala, the Resplendent,” 1–33. 84. Andreev, “Okkul’tizm i mistika,” 83. 85. Rerikh, Shambala, 69. 86. Ibid,, 115. 87. This is reminiscent of a trend among artists in Petersburg in the 1920s who sought in their work ways to heighten intuition and called their movement “Zorved” (seeknow). See Katerina Clark, Petersburg, Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 44. 88. Rerikh, Shambala, 39. 89. Ibid., 67, 78. 90. Regina Bittner and Kathrin Rhomberg, “The Bauhaus in Calcutta: World Art since 1922; On the Topicality of an Exhibition,” in The Bauhaus in Calcutta: An Encounter of Cosmopolitan Avant-­Gardes, ed. Regina Bittner and Kathrin Rhomberg (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2013), 76. 91. Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, trans. M. T. H. Sadler (New York: Dover, 1972), 13–14. 92. Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt against the West and the Remaking of Asia (London: Allen Lane, 2012), 120. 93. Ibid., 166. 94. Kakuzo Okakura, The Ideals of the East, with Special Reference to the Art of Japan (Berkeley, Calif.: Stone Bridge Press, 2007), 8. 95. Ibid., 10, 126, 123. 96. Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire, 224, 231. 97. Partha Mitter, “Modernity, Art and National Identity in India: Background to the Bauhaus Exhibition in Calcutta, 1922,” in The Bauhaus in Calcutta: An Encounter of Cosmopolitan Avant-­Gardes, ed. Regina Bittner and Kathrin Rhomberg (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2013), 89, 96, 90. 98. Anderson, The Indian Ideology, 10. 99. Rabindranath Tagore, “Nationalism in the West,” in Nationalism (San Francisco: Book Club of California, 1917), 15, 17, 24, 19, 51, 18, respectively. 100. Rabindranath Tagore, “Nationalism in Japan,” in Nationalism (San Francisco: Book Club of California, 1917), 66, 85, 75, 66, 68, 70, respectively. 101. Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire, 235–238. 102. Georg Lukács, “Tagore’s Gandhi Novel,” reprinted in Reviews and Articles from Die Rote Fahne, trans. Peter Palmer (London: Merlin Press, 1983), 8–11.

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103. R. Tagor, Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Sovremennye problemy, 1914), bk. 1. The six volumes came out between 1914 and 1916, but in the second edition of 1916–1917 only three volumes managed to appear; additionally, the poems and some plays came out in a six-­volume edition of 1915, published in Moscow by V. Portugalov, and again with the Jurgis Baltrušaitis translation of Gitanjali in the first volume. 104. R. Tagor, Gitanzhali, trans. N. A. Pusheshnikov (Moscow: Knigoizdatel’stvo pisatelei v Moskve, 1914). 105. E.g., “Gitanzhali. Pesni,” trans. S. Tatarina, Vestnik teosofii, 1914; Carlson, “No Religion Higher than the Truth,” 71. 106. Tagore Archive, prerevolutionary letter: CFE AC, no. 333, fols. 1, 2; post­ revolutionary: CFE AC, no. 333, fols. 3, 6, 7; Indo-­Russian Relations, 1917– 1947: Select Documents from the Archives of the Rus­sian Federation, pt. 2, 1929–1947, ed. and comp. Purabi Roy, Sobhanal Datta Gupta, and Hari Vasudevan (Calcutta: Asiatic Society, 2000), 1–3. 107. The Soviet coverage of Gandhi as a revolutionary includes “Revoliutsionnaia Indiia,” Ogonëk, no. 9 (1923); “Revoliutsionnaia bor’ba” (on Gandhi’s hunger strike), Prozhektor, no. 23 (1924): 11; A. Barbius, “M. Gandi,” Prozhektor, no. 13 (August 15, 1923): 21. 108. Sudhi Pradhan, foreword to Marxist Cultural Movement in India: Chronicles and Documents (1936–1947), vol. 1, comp. and ed. Sudhi Pradhan, 2nd ed. (Calcutta: New Rooplekha Press, 1985), ix. 109. A. V. Lunacharskii, “Indiiskii Tol’stoi,” Krasnaia niva, no. 1 (1923): 30. See also S. F. Ol’denburg, Ogonëk, no. 51 (1926). 110. Purabi Roy, “Tagore and Rus­sia,” 36. 111. R. Tagor, Dom i mir, trans. S. A. Adrianova (Petrograd, 1923), 2nd ed. (Leningrad: Mysl’, 1925), also a Berlin Rus­sian edition, trans. Z. Zhuravskaia (Efron, 1920); Dom i mir, trans. A. M. Karnoukhova (Petrograd: Mysl’, 1923); Gora, trans. E. K. Pimenova (Leningrad-­Moscow: Kniga, 1924); Gora, trans. P. A. Voinov (Leningrad-­Moscow: “Petrograd,” 1924); the same translation ed. by M. Tubianskii (Leningrad: Mysl’, 1926); Zhertvoprinoshenie. Otshel’nik, trans. S. A. Adrianova (Petrograd: Mysl’, 1922); Zalëtnye ptitsy, trans. T. L. Shchepkina-­Kupernik (Petrograd / Moscow: “Petrograd,” 1924); Izbrannye rasskazy, trans. L. Rakitin (Moscow / Leningrad: Ogonëk, 1927); Korol’ tëmnogo pokoia i dr. p’esy, trans. S. A. Adrianova and G. P. Fedotov, ed and with introduction and notes by M. Tubianskii (Leningrad: Mysl’, 1927); Krushenie. Roman, trans. S. A. Adrianova (Petrograd-­Moscow: “Petrograd,” 1923); Genii Iaponii, trans. M. Tubianskii (Peterburg: Antei, 1919); Bengaliia. Izbrannye otryvki iz pisem 1885–1895, trans. O. Chernovskaia (Moscow-­ Leningrad: Giz, 1927); V chetyre golosa. Povest’, trans. Iu. N. Deni (Leningrad: Seiatel’, 1925); V chetyre golosa. Povest’, trans. E. Rusat (Leningrad-­Moscow:

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Puchina, 1925); Vospominaniia (Vsemirnaia literatura, 1917); Vospominaniia, trans. with notes by M. Tubianskii (Leningrad: Mysl’, 1927); Rabindranat Tagor “Malen’kaia poėma v proze,” trans. from Bengali by M. Tubianskogo, Vostok, Zhurnal literatury, nauki i iskusstva (Peterburg: Vsemirnaia literatura, 1922), bk. 1, [55–56]. 112. “Pis’mo F. F. Raskol’nikova L. D. Trotskomu 5 aprelia 1922” and “ ‘Miatezhnaia cheta’ v Kabule.’ Pis’ma F. Raskol’nikova i L. Reisnera L. Trotskomu (1922 g.),” Otechestvennye arkhivy, no. 3 (2003). 113. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The Burden of En­glish,” in Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 134–157. 114. V. A. Vdovin and L. S. Gamaiunov, eds., Rabindranat Tagor—­Drug Sovetskogo Soiuza. Sbornik dokumentov i materialov (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Vostochnoi literatury, 1961), 17. 115. Letter dated November 20, 1928, from O. D. Kameneva to Kul’tsviaz requesting the opening of cultural contacts with Visva Bharati, published in Indo-­Russian Relations, 1917–1947: Select Documents from the Archives of the Rus­sian Federation, pt. 2, 1929–1947, ed. and comp. Purabi Roy, Sobhanal Datta Gupta, and Hari Vasudevan (Calcutta: Asiatic Society, 2000), 10. 116. Vdovin and Gamaiunov, Rabindranat Tagor, 17; letter from Kameneva to Kul’tsviaz, 10. 117. GARF, f. 5283, op. 3, d. 18, ll. 13, 22, 24. 118. Georgii Shengeli, “Oda k Rabindranatu Tagoru,” GARF, f. 5283, op. 3, d. 18, l. 43. 119. Purabi Roy, “Tagore and Rus­sia,” 40.

5. The “Roar” of Revolution in the Far East 1. Zand-­Bey, in The First Congress of the Toilers of the Far East (Petrograd: Communist International, 1922), 200; “Sostav s”ezda po narodnostiam,” in S”ezd narodov Vostoka, Baku, 1–8 sentiabria 1920 g. Stenograficheskie otchëty (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Kommunisticheskogo internatsionala, 1920), 5. 2. Lozovsky, in The First Congress of the Toilers of the Far East, 18. 3. The First Congress of the Toilers of the Far East, 13. 4. Ibid., 4. 5. E.g., Pak-­K ieng, in The First Congress of the Toilers of the Far East, 12. 6. The First Congress of the Toilers of the Far East, 5. 7. Congress of the ­Peoples of the Eas, Baku, September 1920, Stenographic Report, translated and annotated by Brian Pearce (London: New Park Publications, 1920), 171.



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8. Sophie Quinn-­Judge, Ho Chi Minh: The Missing Years, 1919–1941 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 53. 9. Bonnie S. McDougall, The Introduction of Western Literary Theories into Modern China, 1919–1925 (Tokyo: Centre for East Asian Cultural Studies, 1971); The Rus­sian Impact on Japan: Lit­er­a­ture and Social Thought; Two essays by Nobori Shomu and Akamatsu Katsumaro, trans. and edited with an introduction by Peter Berton, Paul F. Langer, and George O. Totten (Los Angeles: University of Southern California Press, 1981); Mark Gamsa, The Reading of Rus­sian Lit­er­a­ture in China: A Moral Example and Manual of Practice, Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Mark Gamsa, The Chinese Translation of Rus­ sian Lit­er­a­ture: Three Case Studies, Sinica Leidensia, (Leiden: Brill, 2008); GARF, f. 5283, op. 4, d. 6, ll. 164–165. 10. GARF, f. 5283, op. 4, d. 26 (2), l. 109. 11. GARF, f. 5283, op. 4, d. 6, l. 83. 12. Paul G. Pickowicz, “Ch’ü Ch’iu-­pai and the Origins of Marxist Literary Criticism in China” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 1973; Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms, 1975), 28. 13. GARF, f. 5283, op. 4, d. 6, l. 92. 14. McDougall, The Introduction of Western Literary Theories, 173–181, 239. 15. Marston Anderson, The Limits of Realism: Chinese Fiction in the Revolutionary Period (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 33, 46, 48, 49, 127; Pickowicz, “Marxist Literary Criticism in China,” 28, 217; GARF, f. 5283, op. 4, d. 6, l. 83. 16. Mark Gamsa, The Reading of Rus­sian Lit­er­a­ture in China: A Moral Example and Manual of Practice (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 77. 17. [Tretiakov rec­ord], Peking University archive, MC192402, MC1925 03–04. 18. Vsevolod Ivanov was meant to accompany Pilniak on the trip but opted out at the last minute (a pos­si­ble explanation is that he was worried that he would be tainted by association with Pilniak and the looming scandal occasioned by the publication of Pilniak’s Povest’ nepogashennoi luny in 1926). 19. P. Vorob’ev, “Pekinskii natsional’nyi universitet,” Vostok, bk. 4 (1924): 171–172. 20. Abdelaziz Bennis, “André Malraux, histoire d’un parcours entre deux tentations croisées: Le réalisme journalistique et le monde imaginaire du mythomane” (thèse, Université du Sorbonne, Paris III, 2000), 159–172. 21. Elizabeth McGuire, Red at Heart: How Chinese Communists Fell in Love with the Rus­sian Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 74–75. 22. M. E. Shneider, Tvorcheskii put’ Tsiu Tsiu-bo (1899–1935) (Moscow: “Nauka,” 1964), 150, 156, 157; Pickowicz, “Marxist Literary Criticism in China,” 69, 81–85.

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23. Pickowicz, “Marxist Literary Criticism in China,” 89. 24. Tsiui Tsiubo, Putevye zametki o Novoi Rossii, in Publitsistika raznykh let (Moscow: Glavnaia redaktsiia vostochnoi literatury, 1979), 15–107; Tsiui Tsiubo, Vpechatleniia o Krasnoi stolitse, in Izbrannoe, trans. from the Chinese (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1975). Both works ­were first published as Tsin tian’tsun’ iutszi in the book Chidi sin’ishi (Shanghai, 1924). 25. Tsiui, Vpechatleniia o Krasnoi stolitse, 40, 26, 27, 33, 43. 26. “Vecher kul’turnogo sblizheniia s Iaponiei,” GARF, f. 5283, op. 4, d. 6, ll. 81, 86, 87. 27. Sergei Tret’iakov, Chungo (Moscow-­L eningrad: Gos. izd., 1927); Edward Tyerman, Internationalist Aesthetics: Imagining China in Early Soviet Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, forthcoming). 28. On the film scripts, see “Dokladnaia zapiska zamestitelia khudozhestvennogo soveta 1-oi Goskinofabrikoi S. M. Tret’iakova v Goskino ob organizatsii kinoėkspeditsii v Kitai dlia s”ëmok 3-­I seriinogo fil’ma ‘Dzhungo’ i orientirovochnye smety,” RGALI, f. 1923, op. 1, d. 33, ll. 1–3. Much of Dėn Shi-­khua was published as “Dėn Sy-­K hua” in the avant-­garde periodical Novyi lef between 1927 and 1928, before it appeared as a book. For a more complete account of its publication, see Myong Ja Jung-­Boek, S. Tretjakov und China. Dissertation zur Erlagung des Philosophischen Doktorgrades am Fachbereich Historisch-­Philologische Wissenschaften der Georg-­August-­ Universität zu Göttingen (M. J. Jung-­Baek: Göttingen, 1987), 90–91. 29. [Unsigned], “P’er Loti,” Ogonëk, no. 16 (July 15, 1923): 5. 30. Sara Suleri, The Rhe­toric of En­glish India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 31. See Tzvetan Todorov, Nous et les autres. La réflexion française sur la diversité humaine, Points essais (1989; Paris: Seuil, 2004), chapter 4, on exoticism. In En­glish: Tzvetan Todorov, On H ­ uman Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). 32. Pierre Loti, Les derniers jours de Pékin (Paris: Calmann-­Levy, 1914), 464. 33. S. Vel’tman, “Literaturnye otkliki (kolonial’nyi byt),” Novyi Vostok, no. 7 (1925): 324, 331. 34. Daniel Purdy, “Goethe, Rémusat, and the Chinese Novel: Translation and the Circulation of World Lit­er­a­ture,” in German Lit­er­a­ture as World Lit­er­a­ ture, ed. Thomas Oliver Beebee (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 54. 35. Talal Asad, “Two Eu­ro­pean Images of Non-­European Rule,” in Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, ed. Talal Asad (London: Ithaca Press, 1975), 103–118. 36. Aijaz Ahmad, “Jameson’s Rhe­toric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory,’ ” Social Text, no. 17 (Autumn 1987): 6.

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37. Elizabeth Astrid Papazian, Manufacturing Truth: The Documentary Moment in Early Soviet Culture (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009), 27; Devin Fore, All the Graphs: Soviet Factography and the Emergence of Avant-­Garde Documentary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming). 38. “Ob organizatsii kinoėkspeditsii v Kitai. Dokladnaia zapiska S. Tret’iakova,” RGALI, f. 1923, op. 1, d. 133, ll. 1–3; R. Belousov, V tysiachakh ieroglifov. O knigakh i liudiakh (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo vostochnoi literatury, 1963). 39. Lef, “Ob ėtoi knige i o nas (Predislovie),” in Literatura fakta. Pervyi sbornik materialov rabotnikov Lefa, ed. N. Chuzhak (Moscow: Federatsiia, 1929), 5. 40. For a discussion of this text, see Katerina Clark, “Boris Pilniak and Sergei Tretiakov as Soviet Envoys to China and Forgers of New, Post-­Imperial Narratives (1924–1926),” Cross-­Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review 7, no. 2 (November 2018): 423–448; and Edward Tyerman, “Sino-­Soviet Confessions: Authority, Agency, and Autobiography in Sergei Tret’iakov’s Den Shi-­khua,” Rus­sian Review 77, no. 1 (January 2018): 47–64. 41. S. Tret’iakov, “Liubit’ Kitai,” Shkval, no. 25 (September 1925): 14–15. 42. The manifesto was published in Kommunist international, no. 15 (December 1920). 43. This account is taken from “Execution of Chinese Upheld by Americans; British Officer’s Action in the Hawley Case Is Regarded as Helpful to Foreigners,” New York Times, August 16, 1924, 3. See also “Tells How American Was Slain by Chinese; Peking Learns Hawley Was Killed by Junk Men in Row over Landing of Wood Oil Cargo,” New York Times, July 1, 1924, 23; “British Captain Cheered; Punishment of Chinese for Killing American Defended in Commons,” New York Times, July 3, 1924, 3. 44. This information, based on Western press reports, comes from Walter J. Meserve and Ruth I. Meserve, “The Stage History of Roar China!: Documentary Drama as Propaganda,” Theatre Survey 21, no. 1 (May 1980): 2. 45. S. Tret’iakov, “O ‘Rychi Kitai!,” Shkval, no. 50 (May 8, 1926). 46. E.g., S. Tret’iakov, “Kitai rychit,” Prozhektor, no. 13 (1925): 23–25. 47. S. Tret’iakov, Rychi, Kitai! Sobytiia v 9-­zven’iakh (Moscow-­Leningrad: Gos. izdatel’stvo, 1930), 5. 48. S. Tret’iakov, “O p’ese ‘Rychi, Kitai!,’ ” in Slyshish’, Moskva?; Protivogazy; Rychi, Kitai!, by Sergei Tret’iakov (Moscow: “Iskusstvo,” 1966), 158. Ellipsis in original. 49. Tret’iakov, Rychi, Kitai! Sobytie v 9-­zven’iakh, 92. 50. Ibid., 40. 51. Ibid., 95. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid., 5.

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54. Dobrin Michev, Mezhrabpom—­organizatsiia proletarskoi solidarnosti, 1925– 1935, trans. from the Bulgarian by V. K. Volkov (Moscow: Mysl’, 1971), 139. 55. See, e.g., “Zabastovochnoe dvizhenie v Kantone ne razrastaetsia,” Pravda, July 30, 1924, 2. 56. Tret’iakov, “O p’ese ‘Rychi, Kitai!,’ ” 157. 57. “Novaia provokatsiia imperialistov v Kitae,” Pravda, June 26, 1924, 2. 58. “Vozmushcheniia naglym proizvolom angliiskogo kapitana,” Pravda, July 11, 1924, 2. 59. “Bor’ba protiv imperialistov v Kitae. Za annulirovanie dogovorov s imperialistami,” Pravda, July 13, 1924, 2. 60. S. Tret’iakov, “Sovremennyi Kitai,” Krasnaia pa­norama, no. 13 (55) (March 28, 1925): 11. 61. Radii Fish, Nazym Khikmet, Zhizn’ zamechatel’nykh liudei (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1968), 95. See Katerina Clark, “Petrograd: Ritual Capital of Revolutionary Rus­sia,” chapter 5 in Petersburg, Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995). 62. Tret’iakov, Rychi, Kitai! Sobytiia v 9-­zven’iakh, 6. 63. Weijia Li, China und China-­Erfahrung in Leben und Werk von Anna Seghers (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2010), 80; Die rote Fahne am Morgen, August 17, 1925. 64. Michev, Mezhrabpom, 138–147. 65. Curtis Cate, André Malraux: A Biography (London: Random House, 1995), 52. 66. Denis Boak, “Malraux and T. E. Lawrence,” Modern Language Review 61, no. 2 (April 1966): 218–224. 67. Walter G. Langlois, André Malraux: The Indochina Adventure (New York: Praeger, 1966), 32, 40. 68. David P. Chandler, “The Assassination of Resident Bardez (1925): A Premonition of Revolt in Colonial Cambodia,” Journal of the Siam Society 7 (1982): 43, 44; a slightly dif­fer­ent version is provided in Langlois, André Malraux, 188–197. 69. Langlois, André Malraux, 188, 189. 70. A.M., “Editorial. Encore? Les débats de l’affaire Bardez se poursuivent,” L’Indochine enchaînée, no. 11 (1925): 1–2. See also no. 12, 6–7; no. 13, 6; no. 14, 4–5. Monin also wrote editorials on the case, and the long summation of the defense ­lawyer in Indochina was published in no. 16, 6–7; no. 17, 5–8; no. 18, 5–8. 71. Chandler, “The Assassination of Resident Bardez,” 36, 49. 72. André Malraux, “Ce que nous pouvons faire,” editorial, L’Indochine enchaînée, no. 16, (December 1925): 6–7. 73. Langlois, André Malraux, 190–191. 74. Cate, André Malraux, 125.

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75. Bennis, “André Malraux,” 60–61. 76. Ibid., 201. 77. Ibid., 209–210. 78. Katerina Clark, “Rosa Luxemburg, The Rus­sian Revolution,” Studies in East Eu­ro­pean Thought 70, no. 2 (2018): 153–165. 79. André Malraux, The Conquerors, trans. Stephen Becker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 106. 80. Langlois, André Malraux, 69, 128–129. 81. Geoffrey T. Harris, André Malraux: A Reassessment (London: Macmillan, 1996), 30. 82. E.g., Malraux, “Ce que nous pouvons faire”; and Le Te Vinh, “Verrons nous la révolution en Indochine?,” L’Indochine enchaînée, no. 16 (December 1925). 83. “Secret et confidential. Canton le 1er novembre, 1925,” L’Indochine enchaînée, no. 22 (February 20, 1926). 84. André Malraux, Voyage au Congo (Paris: Gallimard, 1927), chapter 4. 85. O. D. Kameneva, letter of 1926: “VOKS namereno ispol’zovat’ ego prebyvanie v svoikh tseliakh, t. e. kul’turnogo sblizheniia s Iaponiei,” GARF, f. 5283, op. 1, ed. khr. 65, l. 58; Dani Savelli, “Primechaniia k tekstu ‘Kornei iaponskogo solntsa,’ ” in Boris Pil’niak, Korni iaponskogo solntsa; Dani Savelli, Boris Pil’niak v Iaponii: 1926 (Moscow: Tri kvadrata, 2004), 28, 95. 86. Boris Pil’niak, “Kamni i korni,” Novyi mir, no. 4 (1933): 5–46; no. 7–8, 87–155; Kamni i korni (Moscow: Sovetskaia literatura, 1934); Kamni i korni (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1935). 87. RGALI, f. 1692, op. 1, d. 32: Boris Andreevich Pil’niak, “Putevye zametki o poezdke v Kitai.” For a discussion of Kitaiskaia povest’, see Clark, “Boris Pilniak and Sergei Tretiakov as Soviet Envoys”; and Edward Tyerman, “Catastrophic Similarities: Boris Pil’niak’s Chinese Story,” in Brown Slavic Contributions, vol. 4, Estrangement (Department of Slavic Languages, Brown University, 2013). 88. Boris Pil’niak, “Sovremennaia sovetskaia literatura i eë osobennosti,” in Boris Pil’niak, Korni iaponskogo solntsa; Dani Savelli, Boris Pil’niak v Iaponii: 1926 (Moscow: Tri kvadrata, 2004), 276–292. As discussed in this source, Pilniak’s article also attracted the attention of the noted translator and expert on Rus­ sian lit­er­a­ture Shomu Nobori, who included it in the June number of the journal Kaidzo for 1926, prob­ably in his translation (276). 89. Pil’niak, “Sovremennaia sovetskaia literatura i eë osobennosti,” 287. 90. Notably, the Korean writer Yðm Sangsðp. See Sunyoung Park, “Confessing the Colonial Self: Yðm Sangsðp’s Literary Ethnographies of the Proletarian Nation,” chapter 5 in The Proletarian Wave: Lit­er­a­ture and Leftist Culture in Colonial K ­ orea, 1910–1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2015), 169.

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91. Pil’niak, “Sovremennaia sovetskaia literatura i eë osobennosti,” 286. 92. Boris Pil’niak, Bol’shoe serdtse, in Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow-­Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1929), 6:196–198. 93. “A Short Tale about the Antichrist” (“Kratkaia povest’ ob antikhriste”), which, allegedly written by a monk, was appended to Solovyov’s Three Conversations about War, Pro­g ress and the End of World History; Vladimir Solovëv, Tri razgovora o voine, progresse i kontse vsemirnoi istorii, so vkliucheniem kratkoi povesti ob antikhriste i s prilozheniiami, 4th ed. (St. Petersburg: Min. T-va pechatnogo i izdatel’skogo dela “Trud,” 1900), xix; see also 156–157. 94. In E. Zamiatin’s novel My (We, 1920), the wild h ­ orse­men (Mephi) are especially associated with the irrational and giving f­ ree play to the imagination. 95. Bor. Pil’niak, Kitaiskaia povest’ (Moscow-­Leningrad: Giz, 1928), 51. 96. See Dani Savelli, “Motif ‘soshestvie vo ad’ v ‘Dnevnikakh s Sinso’ B. A. Pil’niaka,” in B. A. Pil’niak. Issledovaniia i materialy. Mezhdunarodnyi sbornik nauchnykh trudov, vyp. iii–iv (Kolomna: Izdatel’stvo Kolomenskogo gosudarstvennogo pedagogicheskogo instituta, 2001), 90n14. 97. Pil’niak, Kitaiskaia povest’, 50. For a further discussion of this text, see Clark, “Boris Pilniak and Sergei Tretiakov as Soviet Envoys”; and Tyerman, Internationalist Aesthetics, chapter 1. 98. S. Vel’tman, “Literaturnye otkliki (Vostok v izobrazhenii B. Pil’niaka, S. Treti’akova i dr.),” Novyi Vostok, no. 19 (1927): 214, 219. 99. Leonard Woolf, Imperialism and Civilization (New York: Harcourt, Brace [1928]), 16, 17. 100. Willard Sunderland, The Baron’s Cloak: A History of the Rus­sian Empire in War and Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2014), 187. 101. Paul A. Rodell, “Southeast Asian Nationalism and the Russo-­Japanese War: Reexamining Assumptions,” Southeast Review of Asian Studies 29 (2007): 20. 102. Pilniak cites the novel in Korni iaponskogo solntsa, 83. John Paris was the pseudonym of Frank Trelawny Arthur Ashton-­Gwatkin (1889–1976). Kimono was published in Rus­sian in Moscow by the private publishing ­house L. Nekrasova in 1925. 103. Claude Farrère, Bataille (Paris: Les inédits, 1909); The ­Battle, trans. E. de Clermont-­Tonnerre (London: Mills and Boon, [1912]); volume 2 of Bitva was published in Moscow in 1927 (Knigoizdatel’stvo sovremennika), with a critical essay by P. Grossman. Boris Pil’niak, Korni iaponskogo solntsa; Dani Savelli, Boris Pil’niak v Iaponii: 1926, 49. 104. Albert Mordell, introduction to Stories from Pierre Loti, trans. Lafcadio Hearn (Tokyo: Hokuseido Press, 1933), vi–­v ii. 105. E.g., Boris Pil’niak, Korni iaponskogo solntsa; Dani Savelli, Boris Pil’niak v Iaponii: 1926, 57.

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106. Lafcadio Hearn, Japan, an Attempt at Interpretation (New York: Macmillan, 1904), 312–320. 107. Boris Pil’niak, Korni iaponskogo solntsa; Dani Savelli, Boris Pil’niak v Iaponii: 1926, 35, 36, 50. 108. Farrère, Bataille, 134–139, 164. 109. Boris Pil’niak, Korni iaponskogo solntsa; Dani Savelli, Boris Pil’niak v Iaponii: 1926, 56. 110. E.g., Hearn, Japan, an Attempt at Interpretation, 47. 111. Farrère, Bataille, 165. 112. Boris Pil’niak, Korni iaponskogo solntsa; Dani Savelli, Boris Pil’niak v Iaponii: 1926, 26; see also 17–25, 66. 113. P’er Loti, Iaponskie negativy (Osennie kartinki), with a foreword by kniaz’ N. Urusov (St. Petersburg: Izd-vo Malakhovskogo, [1904]), 203. My information comes from a footnote in Boris Pil’niak, Korni iaponskogo solntsa; Dani Savelli, Boris Pil’niak v Iaponii: 1926, 138. 114. E.g., as Dani Savelli points out in her “Primechaniia k tekstu ‘Kornei iaponskogo solntsa’ ” (203), Pilniak draws on Loti’s Japoneries d’automne using a 1904 Rus­sian translation (Loti, Iaponskie negativy). 115. Boris Pil’niak, Korni iaponskogo solntsa; Dani Savelli, Boris Pil’niak v Iaponii: 1926, 26. 116. Ibid., 71 (factories), 58 (workers). 117. Ibid., 67. 118. Ibid., 27; B. Pil’niak, letter of April 2, 1926, from Tokyo to his ­family (A. I. and O. I. Vogau), in Pis’ma, vol. 2, 1923–1937 (Moscow: IMLI RAN, 2010), 259. 119. Boris Pil’niak, Korni iaponskogo solntsa; Dani Savelli, Boris Pil’niak v Iaponii: 1926, 51. 120. Cf. Sofiia Starkina, Velimir Khlebnikov, Zhizn’ zamechatel’nykh liudei (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 2007), e.g., 228–229. 121. See Katerina Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), 192–208. 122. Boris Pil’niak, “Stat’ chlenom Iaponsko-­ russkogo literaturno-­ khudozhest­ vennogo obshchestvo bylo by dlia menia vysokoi chest’iu,” an appendix to Savelli, “Primechaniia k tekstu ‘Kornei iaponskogo solntsa,’ ” 193–194; “Vecher kul’turnogo sblizheniia s Iaponiei,” GARF, f. 5283, op. 4, d. 6, l. 86. 123. Boris Pil’niak, Korni iaponskogo solntsa; Dani Savelli, Boris Pil’niak v Iaponii: 1926, 55. 124. Ibid., 104. 125. Ibid., 15. 126. Ibid., 71.

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127. Ibid., 104. 128. Ibid. 129. Ibid. 130. V. I. Lenin, “Sotsialisticheskaia revoliutsiia i pravo natsii na samoopredelenie,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5th ed. (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1969), 27:255, 256. 131. Clark, “Boris Pilniak and Sergei Tretiakov as Soviet Envoys,” 438–439. 132. Boris Pil’niak, Korni iaponskogo solntsa; Dani Savelli, Boris Pil’niak v Iaponii: 1926, 17. 133. Pil’niak, Pis’ma, 2:281. 134. E.g., the prob­lems of communication between Tretiakov and his student in Tretiakov’s Dėn Shi-­khua. See Clark, “Boris Pilniak and Sergei Tretiakov as Soviet Envoys,” 441–443.

6. From Shanghai to Berlin and Beyond





1. On the organ­ization for artists, see Angelina Lucento, “Painting against Empire: Béla Uitz and the Birth and Fate of Internationalist Socialist Realism,” Rus­sian Review 79, no. 4 (October 2020): 578–605. 2. Harry Heslop, Out of the Old Earth (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1994), 228. 3. Fredrik Petersson, “ ‘We Are Neither Visionaries Nor Utopian Dreamers’: Willi Münzenberg, the League against Imperialism, and the Comintern, 1925–1933” (doctoral thesis, Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland), 342. 4. See Katerina Clark, “Moscow, the Lettered City,” chapter 2 in Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011). 5. “Doklad o Mezhdunarodnom biuro proletarskoi literatury,” publikatsiia L. K. Shevtsovoi, in Iz istorii Mezhdunarodnogo ob”edineniia revoliutsionnykh pisatelei (MORP), Literaturnoe nasledstvo, no. 81 (Moscow: “Nauka,” 1969), 41. 6. “Itogi Khar’kovskoi konferentsii,” Literaturnaia gazeta, November 24, 1930, 1; “V Khar’kove otkrylsia plenum Mezhdunarodnogo biuro revoliutsionnoi literatury,” Literaturnaia gazeta, November 10, 1930, 1. 7. “Zadachi plenuma Mezhdunarodnogo biuro revoliutsionnoi literatury. Beseda s otvetsvennym sekretarëm Mezhdunarodnogo biuro tov. Bela Illeshem,” Literaturnaia gazeta, October 29, 1930, 1. 8. As far as is known, only two issues of the Chinese version appeared, in January and August 1935, and a third, which was a reissue of number 2, came out in 1939. Yazhe Yang, email communication with author, December 13, 2020.

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9. Benedict Anderson, ­Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991). 10. A. S. Deriabin, ed., Letopis’ rossiiskogo kino 1863–1929 (Moscow: Materik, 2004), 637. 11. “Zadachi plenuma mezhdunarodnogo biuro revoliutsionnoi literatury,” 1. 12. Ibid.; Bella Illesh, “Plenum Mezhdunarodnogo biuro revoliutsionnoi literatury,” Vestnik inostrannoi literatury, no. 1 (1928): 146–149. 13. “Itogi Khar’kovskoi konferentsii,” 1. 14. Heslop, Out of the Old Earth, 215. 15. Zoltan Lippai, sekretar’ Soiuza vengerskikh revoliutsionnykh pisatelei, “Obsuzhdaem voprosy plenuma MBRL. Chto dast plenum mezhdunarodnoi proletliteratury,” Literaturnaia gazeta, September 9, 1930, 1. 16. Allegedly, ­these articles ­were actually written by one of the many former ­Soviet advisers in China, Pavel Mif, the deputy head of Sun Yat-­sen University, who succeeded the Trotskyite Radek ­a fter he was dismissed that year. 17. “Voprosy kitaiskoi revoliutsii (tezisy t. Stalina dlia propagandistov, ­odobrennye TsK VKP[b]),” Pravda, April 21, 1927, 3. 18. This formula was also used by Ėmi Xiao. See Ėmi Siao, “Literatura i kitaiskaia revoliutsiia,” Internatsional’naia literatura, no. 3–4 (1934): 323. 19. Wang-­chi Wong, Politics and Lit­er­a­ture in Shanghai: The Chinese League of Left-­Wing Writers, 1930–1936 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), 6. 20. GARF, f. 5283, op. 4 (Turtsiia), d. 55, ll. 57, 58. 21. Walter J. Meserve and Ruth I. Meserve, “The Stage History of Roar China!: Documentary Drama as Propaganda,” Theatre Survey 21, no. 1 (May 1980): 1–13. 22. Note also Langston Hughes’s poem “Roar China” of 1937. 23. I am grateful to Hsiang-­Yin Sasha Chen for this information. 24. Ėmi Siao, “Literatura kitaiskoi revoliutsii,” Internatsional’naia literatura, no. 3–4 (1934): 334; Meserve and Meserve, “The Stage History of Roar China!” 25. A.F., “Sovetskaia p’esa za rubezhom. ‘Rychi Kitai!’ v Evrope, Amerike i Azii,” Literatura mirovoi revoliutsii, no. 4 (1932): 125–127. (A.F. is prob­ably Aleksandr Fevral’skii, a g­ reat enthusiast for the Meyerhold Theater, and consequently the enthusiasm he reports for the play may be exaggerated.) 26. The novel by Ivan Novokshonov on which the scenario is loosely based ends not with an uprising but with Bair’s discovery that his childhood sweetheart has been reduced to prostitution. 27. Deriabin, Letopis’ rossiiskogo kino 1863–1929, 604; Amy Sargeant, Storm over Asia, KINOfiles Film Companions (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007), 58. 28. V. I. Fomin, ed., Letopis’ rossiiskogo kino 1930–1945 (Moscow: Materik, 2007), 49; Gan’ Ikh, “Sovetskie fil’my i p’esy v Kitae,” Internatsional’naia literatura, no. 3–4 (1940): 274.

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29. Sargeant, Storm over Asia, 64–68. 30. G. Prozhiko, “Iakov Bliokh,” in Letopistsy nashego vremeni. Rezhissëry dokumental’nogo kino (Moscow: “Iskusstvo,” 1987), 100–102. 31. Deriabin, Letopis’ rossiiskogo kino 1863–1929, 673. 32. A. Fëdorova, “The Aesthetic of Montage and the Films of Fumio Kamei,” Cinema Studies, no. 10 (2015): 4, 6. 33. L. Vaks, “ ‘Shankhaiskii dokument’ (Prosmotr v ODSK),” Kino, no.  7 (April 24, 1928): 5. 34. On the film’s opening, see A. S. Deriabin, Letopis’ rossiiskogo kino 1863–1929, 617. For a discussion of Red Poppy, see Edward Tyerman, “Resignifying The Red Poppy: Internationalism and Symbolic Power in the Sino-­Soviet Encounter,” Slavic and East Eu­ro­pean Journal 61, no. 3 (Autumn 2017): 445–466. 35. Rus­sian editions of Erdberg’s book appeared in 1929, 1930, and 1932; an En­ glish translation, Tales of Modern China, in 1932; and a German translation, Die drei Grundsätze des Mister Kung, u.a. chinesische Novellen, likewise in 1932. For more coverage, see Katerina Clark, “Berlin–­Moscow–­Shanghai: Translating Revolution across Cultures in the Aftermath of the 1927 Shanghai Debacle,” in Comintern Aesthetics, ed. Amelia  M. Glaser and Steven  S. Lee (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020), 92–95, 97, 103. 36. A.F., “Sovetskaia p’esa za rubezhom,” 125. 37. Egon Kisch berichtet: China geheim (Berlin: E. Reiss, 1933); Egon Erwin Kisch, Secret China (London: John Lane, 1935); Ėgon Ėrvin Kish, Razoblachënnyi Kitai, trans. Vera Gurvich (Moscow: Gos. izd. khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1934). 38. Charles A. Laughlin, Chinese Reportage: The Aesthetics of Historical Experience (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 13, 15, 187, 286–287. 39. Benno Reisenberg, “ ‘Brülle China,’ ” Frank­furter Zeitung, November 11, 1929, eve­ning edition. 40. Friedrich Wolf, “Tai Yang erwacht. Ein Schauspiel,” in Gesammelte Werke in sechzehn Bänden, vol. 3, Dramen (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 1960), 163. 41. Friedrich Wolf, “Weshalb schrieb ich ‘Tai Yang erwacht’?,” in Aufsätze über Theater (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 1957), 370. 42. Weijia Li, China und China-­Erfahrung in Leben und Werk von Anna Seghers (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2010), 52; Die Massnahme is discussed in Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome, 50–62. 43. Cecil L’Estrange Malone, Das neue China und seine sozialen Kämpfe (Berlin: Allg. Dt. Gewerkschaftsbund, 1928). 44. New China: Report of an Investigation by Col. C. L’Estrange Malone, F.R.Ae.S., pt. 2, ­Labour Conditions and ­Labour Organ­izations, 1926 (London: In­de­pen­ dent L ­ abour Party Publication Department, 1926), 4, 5, 6, 10, 25.

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45. E.g., Agnes Smedley, “Shanghai, die unruhige Stadt,” Frank­furter Zeitung, November 27, 1929, eve­ning edition, 3; Agnes Smedley, “Das Schicksal von Hsü Mei-­ling,” Aus Schanghai, im November, Frank­f urter Zeitung, December 8, 1929, second morning edition, 2; (Sonderbericht für die ‘Frank­ furter Zeitung’ [presumably by Smedley, who was its correspondent in Shanghai—­its dateline is Shanghai, November]), “Immer kein Ausweg in China,” Frank­f urter Zeitung, December 8, 1929, second morning edition; A.S., “Shanghai. Mitte Dezember,” Frank­furter Zeitung, February 5, 1930, first morning edition, 1–2; 46. David Featherstone, Solidarity: Hidden Histories and Geographies of Internationalism (London: Zed Books, 2012). 47. Agnes Smedley, ­Battle Hymn of China (London: Victor Gollancz, 1944). 63; Xiaobing Tang, “1936, October: Resonances of a Visual Image in the Early Twentieth ­Century,” in A New Literary History of Modern China, ed. David Der-­wei Wang (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017), 426–432. 48. RGALI f. 631, op. 6, d. 36. 49. André Malraux, Man’s Fate (La condition humaine), trans. Haakon M. Chevalier (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 337–338. 50. Karl Wittfogel, “Was ist ‘rechte Kuomintang’?,” Rote Fahne, May 7, 1927; Karl Wittfogel, “Chinas Bewässerungssystem” [an excerpt from Wittfogel’s Das erwachende China], Rote Fahne, May 7, 1927; Karl August Wittfogel, Das erwachende China. Ein Abriss der Geschichte und der gegenwärtigen Probleme Chinas (Vienna: Agis-­Verlag, 1926); K. A. Vittfolgel’, Probuzhdaiushchiisia Kitai, trans. D. Strashunskii (Leningrad: Priboi 1927). 51. Diskussiia ob aziatskom sposobe proizvodstva po dokladu M. Godesa. Obshchestvo marksistov-­vostokovedov pri leningradskom otdelenii Kommunisticheskoi akademii i Leningradskom vostochnom institute im. A. Enukidze (Leningrad: Gos. sotsial’no-­ėkonomicheskoe izdatel’stvo, 1931), 22–23. 52. Petersson, “ ‘Neither Visionaries Nor Utopian Dreamers,’ ” 36, 398, 426, 530. 53. Pseudonym of Netty Reiling Radvanyi (Reiling was her birth name). 54. Schü Yin and Anna Seghers, “1 Mai Yanschuhpou,” Rote Fahne 15, no. 94 (May 1, 1932); Li, Leben und Werk von Anna Seghers, 92. 55. Li, Leben und Werk von Anna Seghers, 54–55, 97. 56. Ibid., 69. 57. Schü Yin and Seghers, “1 Mai Yanschuhpou.” 58. Rosa Luxemburg, “Massenstreik, Partei und Gewerkschaften,” in Ausgewählte politische Schriften in drei Bänden (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Marxistische Blätter, 1971), 2:64, 84; Rosa Luxemburg, The Mass Strike, in The Essential Rosa Luxemburg: “Reform or Revolution” and “The Mass Strike,” ed. Helen Scott (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2008), 148, 166.

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59. Luxemburg, “Massenstreik, Partei und Gewerkschaften,” 86; Luxemburg, The Mass Strike, 168. 60. Rosa Luxemburg, Die Russische Revolution: Eine kritische Würdigung, Herausgegeben und eingeleitet von Paul Levi (Berlin: Verlag und Gesellschaft GmBH, 1922), 118, 110; Rosa Luxemburg, “The Rus­sian Revolution” and “Leninism or Marxism?” (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970), 79, 70. 61. Georg Lukács, “A Correspondence with Anna Seghers [1938–1939],” in Essays on Realism, ed. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), 174, 175. 62. Anna Seghers, Die Gefährten (Berlin: Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag, 1932); published in German in the Soviet Union as Die Gefährten (Moscow-­ Leningrad: Genossenschaft Ausländischer Arbeiter in der UdSSR, 1933); Anna Zegers, Sputniki, trans. Izabella Grinberg (Leningrad, 1934); “The Wayfarers: Chapter One,” trans. Hunter Bivens, in Anna Seghers: The Challenge of History, ed. Helen Fehervary, Christiane Zehl Romero, and Amy Kepple Strawser (Leiden : Brill, 2020), 325–340. 63. Anna Seghers, [Briefe an Georg Lukács], in Aufsätze, Ansprachen, Essays 1927–1953 (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 1980), 71–83; Christiane Zehl Romero, Anna Seghers (Hamburg: Rohwolt, 1993), 37–38. 64. Anna Seghers: Eine Biographie in Bildern (Berlin-­Weimar: Aufbau Verlag, 1993), 50. 65. Seghers, Die Gefährten (1932), 242. 66. Anna Seghers, “Revoliutionärer Alltag” (1927), in Aufsätze, Ansprachen, Essays 1927–1953 (Leipzig: Aufbau Verlag, 1980), [5]. 67. Li, Leben und Werk von Anna Seghers, 84; “Inostrannye proletarskie pisateli o Dneprostroe,” Khronika Dneprostroia, no.  10 (December  31, 1930): 42. I am grateful to Nick Kupensky for this reference. 68. E.g., Sekretariat MBRL, “Plenum MBRL—20 oktiabria,” and “Pered mezhdunarodnym plenumom revoliutsionnykh pisatelei,” both in Literaturnaia gazeta, August 15, 1930. 69. Deriabin, Letopis’ rossiiskogo kino 1863–1929, 34. 70. GARF, f. 5283, op. 4, d. 6, ll. 67–83, 84, 93, 95. China: GARF, f. 5283, op. 4, d. 12, ll. 2, 11; GARF, f. 5283, op. 4, d. 13 (1), ll. 3, 15, 18, 56; GARF, f. 5283, op. 4, d. 13 (2), ll. 36, 121–134. 71. Mats Karlsson, “Kurahara’s Road to Proletarian Author(s),” Japan Review, no. 20 (2008): 231–273. 72. Heather Bowen-­Struyk, “Why a Boom in Proletarian Lit­er­a­ture in Japan? The Kobayashi Takiji Memorial and The Factory Ship,” Asia-­Pacific Journal 7, no. 26 (June 29, 2009): 1–8. 73. Kobaiasi Takidzi, Krabokonservnaia faktoriia (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo TsK MOPR SSSR, 1932); an abridged Rus­sian version also appeared in Internatsional’naia literatura, no. 2 (1932): 3–34; the En­glish translation is incomplete.

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74. A. Fedorova, “The Beginnings of Japa­nese Film Export in Postwar Soviet Union: ­Woman Walking Alone on the Earth (1953),” Istoriia i kul’tura Iaponii 7 (Fall 2014): 384–388; “Iaponiia,” Literatura mirovoi revoliutsii, no. 1 (1932): 125–127. 75. Ėmi Siao, “Kitai. Godovshchina rasstrela kitaiskikh revoliutsionnykh rabochikh,” Literatura mirovoi revoliutsii, no. 5 (1932): 99. 76. Joshua A. Fogel, A Friend in Deed: Lu Xun, Uchiyama Kanzō, and the Intellectual World of Shanghai on the Eve of War, Asia Shorts (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Association for Asian Studies, 2019). 77. Paul G. Pickowicz, China on Film: A C ­ entury of Exploration, Confrontation, and Controversy (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012), 83–84; Paul G. Pickowicz, “Ch’ü Ch’iu-­pai and the Origins of Marxist Literary Criticism in China” (PhD diss. University of Wisconsin, 1973; Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms, 1975), 317–318. 78. Its full name was the Chinese League of Left-­Wing Writers, though Xiao sometimes referred to it as a federation or a bloc. Ė. Siao, “Zadachi kitaiskoi revoliutsionnoi literatury. K plenumu Mezhdunarodnogo biuro revoliutsionoi literatury,” Literaturnaia gazeta, no. 48 (October 19, 1930): 1. 79. Ji’an Xia, Ch’ü Ch’iu-­pai’s Autobiographical Writings: The Making and Destruction of a “Tender-­Hearted” Communist (Berkeley: Center for Chinese Studies, Institute for International Studies, University of California, [1966]), 202. 80. Siao, “Literatura i kitaiskaia revoliutsiia,” 329; “Kitai. Polozhenie Ligi levykh pisatelei. Pis’mo iz Shankhaia,” Literatura mirovoi revoliutsii, no. 1 (1932): 127–128. 81. Wong, Politics and Lit­er­a­ture in Shanghai, 6. 82. Ibid., 109. 83. My biographical information on Xiao largely comes from my interview with Xiao’s sons, Xiao Leon (Li’ang) and Xiao Viktor (Weijia), in Beijing, June 27, 2016. 84. Gao Hua says it was actually Wang Ming who proposed Xiao, hoping to extend the Communist Chinese Party (CCP) influence among leftist writers, though Gao mistakenly dates the Kharkov conference to 1932. Gao Hua, How the Red Sun Rose: The Origins and Development of the Yan’an Rectification Movement, 1930–1945, trans. Stacey Mosher and Guo Jian (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2018), 114. 85. Siao, “Zadachi kitaiskoi revoliutsionnoi literatury,” 1; see also “Kitai. Liga levykh pisatelei Kitaia,” Literatura mirovoi revoliutsii, no. 3 (1932): 35. 86. “Po Sekretariatu 4.X.33,” RGASPI, f. 541, op. 1, d. 7, l. 21; “Protokol zasedaniia Sekretariata MORP ot 26 noiabria 1933,” RGASPI, f. 541, op. 1, d. 7, l. 29. 87. “Po Sekretariatu 4.X.33,” RGASPI, f. 541, op. 1, d. 7, l. 26. 88. A. N. Pirozhkova, At His Side: The Last Years of Isaac Babel, trans. Anne ­Frydman and Robert L. Busch (South Royalton, Vt.: Steerforth Press, 1996).

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89. Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s”ezd sovetskikh pisatelei, 1934: Stenograficheskii otchët (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia lit­er­a­ture, 1934), 365. 90. Liu Sin’, “Shangkhaiskie vpechatleniia 1933 goda,” trans. Ėmi Siao, in Liu Sin’ 1881–1936: Sbornik statei i perevodov posviashchënnyi pamiati velikogo pisatelia sovremennogo Kitaia (Moscow-­Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk, 1938), 178–181. 91. Katerina Clark, “Socialist Intermediaries: The Case of Emi Siao, Intermediary between Soviet Lit­er­a­ture and Chinese Leftist Lit­er­a­ture,” in “Socialist Intermediaries,” ed. Charles Shaw, Rus­sian Review (forthcoming); Katerina Clark, “Translation and Transnationalism: Non-­European Writers and Soviet Power in the 1920s and 1930s,” in Translation in Rus­sian Contexts: Culture, Politics, Identity, ed. Brian James Baer and Susanna Witt (New York: Routledge, 2018), 139–158. 92. Zhen Zhang, “Chinese Stories for International Readers: Aesthetics of Xiao San’s Rus­sian Poems,” a paper delivered (on Zoom) on April 18, 2021 to the virtual workshop “Transcultural Encounters between Rus­sia and East Asia,” or­ga­nized by the Division of the Humanities at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. 93. Ėmi Siao, “Krovavoe pis’mo,” Literatura mirovoi revoliutsii, no.  1 (1932): ­70–74; no. 6, 29–30. 94. E.g., A. Ivin [pseudonym of Aleksei Alekseevich Ivanov], “Kitaiskii iazyk i kitaiskaia literatura,” Novyi Vostok, no. 16–17 (1927): 316–318. 95. Ė. Siao, “Latinizatsiia kitaiskoi pis’mennosti,” Literatura mirovoi revoliutsii, no. 11–12 (1931): 147; Ivin, “Kitaiskii iazyk i kitaiskaia literatura,” 311–312. 96. Pickowicz, “Marxist Literary Criticism in China,” 310; Siao, “Latinizatsiia kitaiskoi pis’mennosti,” 144–147. 97. “Diskussiia o ‘Lit­er­a­t ure na iazyke mass,’ ” Internatsional’naia literatura, no. 12 (1935); Siao, “Latinizatsiia kitaiskoi pis’mennosti,” 144–147; Pickowicz, “Marxist Literary Criticism in China,” 310. 98. “Diskussiia o ‘Lit­er­a­ture na iazyke mass’ ”; Siao, “Latinizatsiia kitaiskoi pis’mennosti,” 144–147. On publishing texts in two Chinese languages, the Shanghai and Northern, see Xiao, “Literatura kitaiskoi revoliutsii,” 330. 99. “Translator’s Introduction,” in Rainbow, by Mao Dun, trans. Madeleine Zelin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), vii. 100. The first three chapters of Rainbow ­were published in the Short Story Monthly, which Mao Dun helped found, in 1929. 101. Christopher Hill, “The Travels of Naturalism and the Challenges of a World Literary History,” Lit­er­at­ ure Compass 6, no. 6 (2009): 1198–1210, https://­doi​ .­org​/­10​.1­ 111​/­j.​ ­1741​-­4113​.­2009​.­00662​.­x. 102. Mao Dun, Rainbow, 219. 103. Li, Leben und Werk von Anna Seghers, 67–69.

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104. Mao Dun, Rainbow, 185. 105. Ibid., 206, 207. 106. Leo Ou-­fan Lee, “Shanghai (Midnight, Mao Dun, 1932),” in The Novel, ed. Franco Moretti, vol. 2, Forms and Themes (Prince­ton, N.J.: Prince­ton University Press, 2006), 687. 107. Mao Tun, Midnight, trans. Hsu Meng-­hsiung and corr. A. C. Barnes (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1957), 31. 108. Ibid., 104. 109. Ibid., 455–456. 110. Paul G. Pickowicz says that Mao Dun learned of the Zola novel from a translation of an article on it by the Marxist Paul Lafargue. Pickowicz, “Ch’ü Ch’iu-­pai,” 213–214. 111. Mao Tun, Midnight, 294. 112. “Voprosy kitaiskoi revoliutsii (tezisy t. Stalina dlia propagandistov, odobrennye TsK VKP(b),” Pravda, April 21, 1927, 3; Leon Trotsky, Prob­lems of the Chinese Revolution, with a foreword by Max Shachtman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967), 22; see also Alexander Pantsov, The Bolsheviks and the Chinese Revolution, 1919–1927 (London: Routledge, 2015), 196–197. 113. James P. Harrison, “The Li Li-­san Line and the CCP in 1930 (Part 1),” China Quarterly, no. 14 (June 1963): 192. 114. Wolf, “Tai Yang Erwacht,” 163. 115. Harrison, “The Li Li-­san Line and the CCP in 1930 (Part 1),” 193; James P. Harrison, “The Li Li-­san Line and the CCP in 1930 (Part 2),” China Quarterly, no. 15 (July–­September 1963): 143. 116. Harrison, “The Li Li-­san Line and the CCP in 1930 (Part 2),” 155. 117. Mao Tun, Midnight, 354. 118. Ibid., 356. 119. Ibid. 120. Ibid., 355. 121. Ibid., 357. 122. “Tailism” (khvostism) is a term coined by Lenin. He first used it to describe the “Economists,” ­t hose who argued that the Communist Party should not take the lead in a revolutionary situation, but should allow eco­nom­ically motivated events—­crises, strikes, unrest—to unfold on their own. The Party would then follow the tail of ­these events. Lenin insisted that since the Party was the vanguard, it should lead. On Trotsky’s critique of Stalin’s policies, see Leon Trotsky, “The Chinese Revolution and the Th ­ eses of Comrade Stalin,” May 17, 1927, in Prob­lems of the Chinese Revolution, with a foreword by Max Shachtman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967), 17. 123. Mao Tun, Midnight, 426 (ellipsis in original).

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124. Ibid., 83, 84, 85 (Romanticism); 384 (avant-­gardism). 125. Ibid., 422. 126. Nicolai Volland, Socialist Cosmopolitanism: The Chinese Literary Universe, 1945–1965 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 40. 127. Marston Anderson, The Limits of Realism: Chinese Fiction in the Revolutionary Period (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 120, 125, 127. 128. Mao Tun, “About ‘Midnight’ ” [an excerpt from a talk given by the author in 1939 to a group of students at a school in Xinjiang], dated May 5–7, 1939, in Midnight, trans. Hsu Meng-­hsiung and corr. A. C. Barnes (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1957), 7. 129. Mao Tun, Midnight, 466. 130. Ibid., 334. 131. Ibid., 522. 132. Ibid., 240–241. 133. Mao Tun, “About Midnight,” 7. 134. Anna Seghers: Eine Biographie in Bildern, 50. 135. “Doklad Karla Radeka ‘Sovremennaia mirovaia literatura i zadachi proletarskogo iskusstva [August 24, 1934],” in Pervyi s”ezd pisatelei. Stenograficheskii otchët (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1934), 310–311. 136. Naum Kleiman, “1934–1935. ‘Usloviia chelovecheskogo sushchestvovaniia’ (‘La condition humaine’),” in “Neosushchestvlennye zamysli Ėizenshteina,” Iskusstvo kino, no. 6 (1992): 16. 137. Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome, 71–72. 138. V. I. Rudman and Kho Fu, “Tvorcheskii put’ Mao Dunia,” in Pered rassvetom, by Mao Dun’, trans. Kho Fu and V. I. Rudman (Leningrad: GIKhL, 1937), 61.

7. Mulk Raj Anand and the London Literary Left

1. ­There was an intimation of this shift even before Kharkov; Stalin at the Sixteenth Party Congress held in June 1930 had modified his formula for lit­er­a­ture, “proletarian in content, national in form,” substituting “socialist” for “proletarian.” XVI s”ezd VKP / b / . Stenograficheskii otchët (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1930), 55–56. 2. Resolution of the TsK VKP(b) Politburo, “On Restructuring Lit­er­a­ture and Arts Organ­izations,” in Soviet Culture and Power: A History in Documents, 1917–1953, ed. Katerina Clark and Evgeny Dobrenko (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007), 151–152. 3. [Unsigned], “MORP na novom ėtape,” Literaturnaia gazeta, August 23, 1932. 4. Pervyi s”ezd pisatelei. Stenograficheskii otchët (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1934), 286. 5. Dzhems Dzhois, Uliss, Internatsional’naia literatura, nos. 1–3, 9–12 (1936), nos. 1–4 (1936) (small sections of the novel translated by V. Stenich appeared

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in other journals); “Materialy po istorii angliiskoi sektsii Mezhdunarodnogo soiuza revoliutsionnykh pisatelei, 1931–1934,” RGALI, f. 631, op. 11, d. 192, l. 15. 6. Oldos Khėksli, “Prekrasnyi novyi mir,” trans. I. Romanovich, Internatsional’naia literatura, no. 8 (1935): 82. 7. Pervyi s”ezd pisatelei. Stenograficheskii otchët, 287. 8. “Doklad Karla Radeka ‘Sovremennaia mirovaia literatura i zadachi proletarskogo iskusstva,’ ” in Pervyi s”ezd pisatelei. Stenograficheskii otchët (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1934), 318. 9. Ibid., 315, 316, 317. 10. Georg Lukács, “Erzählen oder Beschreiben,” Internatsionale Literatur, no. 11 (1936): 100–118; no. 12, 108–123; Georg Lukach, “Rasskaz ili opisanie,” trans. from the German by N. Volkenau, Literaturnyi kritik, no. 8 (1936): 44–67. 11. Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual, 3rd ed., with an updated afterword (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000). 12. On Wright: Katerina Clark, “The Repre­sen­ta­tion of the African American as Colonial Oppressed in Texts of the Soviet Interwar Years,” Rus­sian ­Review 75 (July 2016): 368–385; on Malraux: Katerina Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), 251, 259–268. 13. Andrė Mal’ro, Nadezhda. Roman, trans. T. Sorokin and I. Erenburg, Internatsional’naia literatura, no. 4 (1938): 3–21; no. 5, 89–134; no. 6, 41–166; Richard Rait, Syn Ameriki [sic], trans. Evg. Kalashnikova, Internatsional’naia literatura, no. 1 (1941): 3–44; no. 2, 4–153. 14. Mėlk Radzh Ėnand, “Pis’ma v redaktsiiu,” Internatsional’naia literatura, no. 5 (1938): 231. 15. Christopher Hilliard, “Producers by Hand and by Brain: Working-­Class Writers and Left-­Wing Publishers in 1930s Britain,” Journal of Modern History 78, no. 1 (March 2006): 42. 16. David Damrosch, What Is World Lit­er­a­ture? (Prince­ton, N.J.: Prince­ton University Press, 2003), 13. 17. Kristin Bluemel, George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics: Intermodernism in Literary London (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 67. 18. Damrosch, What Is World Lit­er­at­ ure?, 4. 19. On Zaheer’s leadership, see, e.g., Ahmed Ali, “The Progressive Writers’ Movement and Creative Writers in Urdu,” in Marxist Influences and South Asian Lit­er­a­ture, vol. 1, ed. Carlo Coppola (East Lansing: Asian Studies Center, Michigan State University, 1974), 35. On the formation of the IPWA, see Shabana Mahmud, “Angāre and the Founding of the Progressive Writers’ Association,” Modern Asian Studies 30, no. 2 (May, 1996): 447–467; Talat Ahmed, Lit­er­a­ture and Politics in the Age of Nationalism: The Progressive

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Writers’ Movement in South Asia, 1932–56 (London: Routledge, 2009); Maia Ramnath, Art for Life: Conversations with the Progressive Writers Movement on Pens, Swords, and Internationalism, from Anti-­fascism to Afro-­Asian Solidarity (self published in the US by Maia Ramnath, 2020), 11–107. 20. R. K. Dhawan, “The Thirties Movement and Coolie,” in The Novels of Mulk Raj Anand, ed. R. K. Dhawan (New Delhi: Prestige, 1992), 55. 21. Mulk Raj Anand, Persian Painting (London: Faber and Faber, 1930), 26. 22. Ibid., 18, 21–22, 28. 23. Ibid., 18, 23. 24. Mulk Raj Anand, The Hindu View of Art (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1933), 31, 38, 40, 44, 54, 57, 60, 63, 73, 109–110, 114, 169, 176. 25. Ibid., 217. 26. Krishna Nandan Sinha, Mulk Raj Anand (New York: Twayne, 1972), 22. 27. Stephen Spender, “Writers and Manifestoes,” Left Review 1, no.  5 (February 1935): 154. 28. Dhawan, “The Thirties Movement and Coolie,” 57; Jack Lindsay, The Elephant and the Lotus: A Study of the Novels of Mulk Raj Anand (Bombay: Kutub Popu­lar, 1965), 52; Hilliard, “Producers by Hand and by Brain,” 41, 45. 29. Lawrence and Wishart was set up in February 1936 as an amalgamation of the British Communist Party’s primary publishing h ­ ouse, Martin Lawrence, named for Marx and Lenin, and Wishart Books, which had been founded in 1927. 30. “Writers’ International (British Section),” Left Review 1, no.  1 (October 1934): 3. 31. “Manifesto of the Indian Progressive Writers’ Association, London,” Left Review 2, no. 5 (February 1936): 240. 32. John Lehmann, Christopher Isherwood: A Personal Memoir (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987), 24. 33. John Lehmann, The Whispering Gallery: Autobiography (London: Longmans, Green, 1955), 232; see also 240. 34. Tony Pinkney, “Editor’s Introduction: Modernism and Cultural Theory,” in The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists, by Raymond Williams (London: Verso, 1989), 8. 35. Adrian Wright, John Lehmann: A Pagan Adventure (London: Duckworth, 1998), 75–76. 36. RGALI, f. 1397, op. 1, d. 577: “Perepiska redaktsii ‘Internatsional’naia literatura’ s Dzhonom Lemanom, 1935–1947”; e.g., “Pervyi nomer zhurnala ‘N’iu Raiting,’ ” Internatsional’naia literatura, no. 7 (1937): 212. 37. John Lehmann, Thrown to the Woolfs (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1978), 16, 27, 32–33, 74, 101, 130–150. 38. “Manifesto,” New Writing, no. 1 (Spring 1936): [iv].

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39. “Writers’ International (British Section),” Left Review 1, no. 1 (October 1934): 3; “Forward,” New Writing 2 (Autumn 1936): 1. 40. A.  P. Kiselev, Ral’ f Foks—­publitsist kompartii Velikobritanii (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Moskovskogo universiteta, 1961), 22. 41. Don Hallett, “ ‘ The Hand That History Dealt,’ Ralph Fox (1900–1936),” in Transactions of the Halifax Antiquarian Society, n.s., 17 (2009): 113; Michael Freeman, “Ralph Fox: Telling the Times” (unpublished manuscript, 2009), 27; Ralph Fox, “Catching Tatars,” Workers Notebook, Daily Worker, January 8, 1936. 42. Listed as a “praktikant referent Vostochnogo otdela,” RGASPI, Komintern, f. 495, op. 198, d. 391 (Angliia), l. 16; Security Ser­vice File, NAGB KV 2 / 1377, 15, 28, 92; Freeman, “Ralph Fox,” 149, 207; Hallett, “ ‘The Hand That History Dealt,’ ” 114. 43. RGASPI, Komintern, f. 495, op. 198, d. 391 (Angliia), l. 26; Seven Writers of the En­glish Left: A Bibliography of Lit­er­a­ture and Politics, 1916–1980, comp. Alan Munton and Alan Young (New York: Garland, 1981), 117–118. 44. Vol. 1 of Literaturnoe nasledstvo (1931) contains the correspondence of Engels with Paul Ernst; vol. 2 of 1932 contains the correspondence between Engels and Margaret Harkness; vol. 3 of 1932 contains the correspondence of Marx and Engels with Ferdinand Lassalle about his play Franz von Sickingen (the most complete version published to that date); and vols. 7–8 of 1933 contain Engels’s letters to Minna Kautsky about her novel The Old and the New. 45. “Avtobiografiia Ral’fa Foksa,” RGASPI, Komintern, f. 495, op. 198, d. 391 (Angliia), ll. 34–35. 46. Diskussiia ob aziatskom sposobe proizvodstva po dokladu M. Godesa. Obshchestvo marksistov-­ vostokovedov pri leningradskom otdelenii Kommunisticheskoi akademii i Leningradskom vostochnom institute im. A. Enukidze (Leningrad: Gos. sotsial’no-­ėkonomicheskoe izdatel’stvo, 1931); R. Foks, “Vzgliady Marksa i Ėngel’sa na aziatskii sposob proizvodstva i ikh istochniki,” Letopisi marksizma (Institut K. Marksa i F. Ėngel’sa), no. 3 (8) (1930): 3–29. 47. K. Marks, “Pis’ma ob Indii,” Letopisi marksizma, no. 3 (1927): 36–55; Bill Alexander, letter of May 2, 1978, Ralph Fox files, Mar Museum and Library, London; Seven Writers of the En­glish Left, 117–118. 48. Ralph Fox, The Colonial Policy of British Imperialism (London: Martin Lawrence, 1933); R. Foks, Kolonial’naia politika Anglii, trans. N. Kamionskaia (Moscow-­Leningrad: Ogiz “Moskovskii rabochii,” 1931); Ral’f Foks, Angliiskaia kolonial’naia politika (populiarnyi ocherk) (Moscow-­Leningrad: Gos. sotsial’no-­ėkonomicheskoe izdatel’stvo, 1934); Katerina Clark, “The Intellectual Migrations of Ralph Fox in Moscow and Central Eurasia,” unpublished manuscript, part of Red Migrations, edited by Philip Gleissner and Bradley Gorski.

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49. A. P. Kraevskii, letter of July 3, 1936, RGASPI, Komintern, f. 495, op. 198, d. 391 (Angliia), ll. 1, 23–25; Hallett, “ ‘The Hand That History Dealt,’ ” 114. Fox had recently published The ­People’s Republic of Mongolia (1935). 50. Note the reproaches of S. Dinamov, president of the Anglo-­American Commission, International Union of Revolutionary Writers, Moscow, in a letter to Fox of November 19, 1934 (S. Dimanov [sic], NAGB 67a O. F. 42 / 5 in KV 2 / 1377, 77; NAGB KV 2 / 1376, 55). 51. Sajjad Zaheer, in Indian Lit­er­a­ture, no. 2 (1952), cited in Marxist Cultural Movement in India: Chronicles and Documents (1936–1947), vol. 1, comp. and ed. Sudhi Pradhan, 2nd ed. (Calcutta: New Rooplekha Press, 1985), 28; Mulk Raj Anand, preface to The Novel and the ­People, by Ralph Fox, 2nd  ed. (London: Cobbett Publishing, 1944), 9–10. 52. Dhawan, “The Thirties Movement and Coolie,” 57. In this text, Cornford is mistakenly rendered as Karnford and Caudwell as Caulwell. 53. I.P.I. [Indian Po­liti­cal Intelligence], entry 113a 464 / 14 of July 5, 1934, NAGB KV 2 / 1377, 71. 54. NAGB KV 2 / 1337, 70, 98. Anand also produced in 1933 a volume of Marx and Engels on India, published in India but brokered by Martin Lawrence. The volume included the letters Marx published in the New York Herald Tribune on which Fox had recently worked at IMEL: M.R.A., “Acknowledgements,” in Marx and Engels on India, Socialist Book Club, no. 4, ed. and with a preface by Mulk Raj Anand (Allahabad: Socialist Book Club, 1938), 3. 55. Gen MSS 703, Series 1: Correspondence (Lawrence and Wishart), box 1, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 56. RGALI, f. 631 (Inostrannaia komissiia), op. 14, d. 179 (1937 svodki. Angliia), l. 155. 57. John Lehmann to Mulk Raj Anand, June 26, 1936, John Lehmann Archive, Harry Ransom Center Archives, University of Texas at Austin, Box 13. 58. Sudhi Pradhan, “Preface to the Second Edition,” in Marxist Cultural Movement in India: Chronicles and Documents (1936–1947), vol. 1, comp. and ed. Sudhi Pradhan, 2nd ed. (Calcutta: New Rooplekha Press, 1985), xi. 59. The speech was published in New Indian Lit­er­a­ture, no. 1 (1939). 60. Marxist Cultural Movement in India, 1:23. 61. Ibid., 1:7–9. 62. Ibid., 1:20. 63. Ibid., 1:6, 16–17. 64. Anand was also influenced by other Irish writers, such as Sean O’Casey, who wrote of the lower classes. Mulk Raj Anand, “On the Genesis of Untouchable: A Note,” in The Novels of Mulk Raj Anand, ed. R. K. Dhawan (New Delhi: Prestige, 1992), 9–12.

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65. Anand, “On the Genesis of Untouchable,” 9–12. 66. Jessica Berman, “Comparative Colonialisms: Joyce, Anand, and the Question of Engagement,” in Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics, and Transnational Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 110. 67. S. P. Jain, “ ‘Angare’: A Reappraisal,” Indian Lit­er­a­ture 30, no. 4 (July–­August 1987): 101–107. 68. Iu. E. Tupikov, Mulk Raj Anand, Laureat mezhdunarodnoi premii mira (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo “Znanie,” 1955), 7; Mulk Raj Anand, letter from Bombay of August 2, 1968, in Author to Critic: The Letters of Mulk Raj Anand, ed. with an introduction and notes by Saros Cowasjee (Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1973), 52. 69. Anand, “On the Genesis of Untouchable,” 11. 70. Anand, letter from Bombay of August 2, 1968, 52. 71. Foks, Kolonial’naia politika Anglii, 38; Fox, The Colonial Policy of British Imperialism. 72. Alex Tickell, Terrorism, Insurgency and Indian-­English Lit­er­a­ture, 1830–1947 (New York: Routledge, 2012); M. K. Gandhi, “The Untouchables,” in The Gandhi Reader: A Source Book of His Life and Writings, ed. Homer A. Jack (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1956), 162–167. 73. Mulk Raj Anand, Untouchable (London: Penguin Books, 1940), 150. 74. Snehal Shingavi, “ ‘The Mahatma D ­ idn’t Say So, But . . .’: Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable and the Sympathies of Middle-­Class Nationalists,” in The Mahatma Misunderstood: The Politics and Forms of Literary Nationalism in India (London: Anthem Press, 2013), 31. 75. Anand, Untouchable, 153, 150. 76. Shingavi, “ ‘The Mahatma ­Didn’t Say So, But . . . ,’ ” 31. 77. Anand, Untouchable, 152–153; Shingavi, “ ‘The Mahatma ­Didn’t Say So, But . . . ,’ ” 30–31. 78. Mulk Raj Anand, “Sources of Protest,” 23, cited in Bluemel, George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics, 17. 79. Mulk Raj Anand, “Author’s Preface,” in Mulk Raj Anand: A Reader; Se­ lections from His Fictional and Non-­fictional Writings, ed. with an introduction by Atma Ram (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2007), x. 80. Margot Heinemann, “Left Review, New Writing and the Broad Alliance against Fascism,” in Visions and Blueprints: Avant-­Garde Culture and Radical Politics in Early Twentieth-­Century Eu­rope, ed. Edward Timms and Peter Collier (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 116–117. 81. Saros Cowasjee, “Coolie: An Appraisal,” in The Novels of Mulk Raj Anand, ed. R. K. Dhawan (New Delhi: Prestige, 1992), 66. 82. E. Ia. Kalinnikova, Mulk Radzh Anand (Moscow: Institut vostokovedeniia Akademii nauk, 1986), 67.

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83. Mulk Raj Anand, Marx and Engels on India; Gillian Packham, “Mulk Raj Anand and the Thirties Movement in E ­ ngland,” in Perspectives on Mulk Raj Anand, ed. K. K. Sharma (Ghaziabad [India]: Vimal Prakashan, 1978), 56. 84. M. Ėnand, in “Vospominaniia o Ral’fe Fokse,” Internatsional’naia literatura, no. 1 (1938). 85. Mulk Raj Anand, Coolie (London: Penguin, 1945), 155. 86. Anand, preface to Fox, The Novel and the ­People, 10. 87. Raymond Williams, “Cambridge,” in Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review (London: NLB, 1979). 88. Ral’f Foks, Roman i narod, perevod s angliiskogo i primechaniia V. P. Isakova (Leningrad: Goslitizdat, 1939); G. Lukach, “ ‘Roman i narod,’ ” Literaturnoe obozrenie, no. 16 (1939): 45. 89. E.g., Anand, Coolie, 56, 113, 201. 90. See Clark, The Soviet Novel. 91. Christopher Hilliard, “The Literary Under­ground of 1920s London,” Social History 33, no. 2 (May 2008): 164, 166. 92. Ralph Fox, The Novel and the ­People, 2nd ed. (London: Cobbett Publishing, 1944), 128. 93. Jain, “ ‘Angare’: A Reappraisal,” 101–107. 94. Mulk Raj Anand, “Preface,” Two Leaves and a Bud [2nd Indian ed.] (Bombay: Kutub Popu­lar, [1951]), 6. 95. Mulk Raj Anand, Two Leaves and a Bud (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1937), 120–121. 96. Jatindranath Sarkar, “Tea Garden Laborers in Assam,” Modern Review, December 1929. 97. V. H. Rutherford, Modern India: Its Prob­lems and Their Solution (London: ­Labour Publishing Com­pany, 1928), esp. 99; A. A. Purcell and J. Hallsworth, Report on ­Labor Conditions in India (London: Trade Union Congress General Council, 1928), esp. 34–35 (on the tea plantations); John Whitley, Report of the Royal Commission on ­Labour in India [and Evidence] (London: H. M. Stationery Office, 1931). 98. Foks, Kolonial’naia politika Anglii, 17, 38–41; Foks, Angliiskaia kolonial’naia politika, 34–37. 99. See Priyamvada Gopal, Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Re­sis­tance and British Dissent (London: Verso, 2019), chapter 6. 100. Ibid., 254. 101. E.g., RGALI, f. 631, op. 11, d.192 (Materialy po istorii angliiskoi sektsii Mezhdunarodnogo soiuza revoliutsionnykh pisatelei), l. 33; RGALI, f. 1397, op. 1, d. 681 (Perepiska redaktsii zhurnala ”Internatsional’naia literatura” s Ėnandom); e.g., L. Borovoi, “Predvoennoe pokolenie,” Internatsional’naia literatura, no. 5 (1938): 190–194.

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102. E.g., RGALI, f. 1397 (“Internatsional’naia literatura”), op. 1, d. 681: “Perepiska s redaktsiei “Internatsional’naia literatura” o sotrudnichestve Ananda v zhurnale, ob Indiiskoi assotsiatsii progressivnykh pisatelei i dr.,” 31, V. 1937–4.X.1941. 103. E.g., RGALI, f. 631, op. 11, d. 148 (Perepiska Ananda, Mulk Radzha s ­Inostrannoi komissiei Soiuza sovetskikh pisatelei), l. 8. 104. RGALI, f. 1397, op. 1, d. 681 (Perepiska redaktsii zhurnala s Ėnandom. ­Redaktsiia zhurnala “Internatsional’ia literatura”), l. 22. 105. E.g., IMLI, f. 75, op. 3, d. 58 (“Ėnand, Melk Rėdzh, ‘Pis’mo Dinamovu ­Sergeiu Sergeevichu 8 avgusta, 1938’ ”), ll. 1–3. 106. RGALI, f. 1397, op. 1, d. 681 (Perepiska redaktsii zhurnala s Ėnandom. ­Redaktsiia zhurnala “Internatsional’naia literatura”), Anand to Rokotov, March 29, 1938, l. 10. 107. “Pod piatoi kapitala,” Literaturnaia gazeta, March 26, 1941. 108. Mulk Radzh Anand, Kuli, perevod s angliiskogo V. Stanevich, predislovie I. M. Reisner (Moscow: Gos. izdatel’stvo “Khudozhestvennaia literatura,” 1941); and Oktiabr’, no. 2 (1941): 72–116; no. 3, 68–107; an extract appeared as “Na fabrike v Bombee. Rasskaz,” Internatsional’naia literatura, no.  7 (1939): 14. 109. Aijaz Ahmad, “The Progressive Movement in Its International Setting,” ­Social Scientist 59, no. 11–12 (November–­December 2011): 28. 110. E. M. S. Namboodiripad, “Half a C ­ entury of Marxist Cultural Movement in India,” Social Scientist 59, no. 11–12 (November–­December 2011): 93. 111. Snehal Shingavi, “India–­England–­Russia: The Comintern Translated,” in ­Comintern Aesthetics, ed. Amelia M. Glaser and Steven S. Lee (Toronto: ­Toronto University Press, 2020), 112–113. 112. M. Salganik, “Ob avtore,” in Izbrannoe, by Sadzhad Zakhir, trans. from Urdu by M. Salganik (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo inostrannoi literatury, 1961), 262.

8. The Sino-­Japanese War, Mao’s Talks, and the Ecumene Unraveled

1. GARF, f. 5283, op. 18, d. 27, ll. 13–15: “Kitaiskoe kino v voennoe vremia.” 2. Ėmi Siao, “Vysshe znamia Kominterna,” trans. Aleksandr Romm, Inter­ natsional’naia literatura, no. 3–4 (1939): 7. 3. Ėmi Siao, “God bor’by kitaiskogo naroda,” Literaturnaia gazeta, July 10, 1938. 4. Volunteer for Liberty of the XVth International Brigade, September 6, 1937, 3. 5. Edwin Gentzler and Maria Tymoczko, introduction to Translation and Power, ed. Maria Tymoczko and Edwin Gentzler (Amherst: University of Mas­sa­chu­setts Press, 2002), 3.

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6. Emily Apter, Against World Lit­er­a­ture: On the Politics of Untranslatability (New York: Verso, 2013); see the introduction and the appendices in Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice: Lit­er­a­ture, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—­China, 1900–1937 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 1–42, 265–378. 7. R. Karmen, God v Kitae. Zapiski kino-­zhurnalista (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1941), 95. 8. Karmen’s films feature the atrocities in the bombing of Guilin, Chungking, and Changsha. RGALI, f. 2989, op. 1, d. 3: R. l. Karmen, “ ‘Kitai v bor’be’ Montazhnye litsty i rabochie zapisi dlia vypuskov kinokhroniki 1938–1939 gg.,” ll. 10 (Montazhnyi list no. 5), 11 (Montazhnyi list no. 6). 9. Thomas Waugh, “The Four Hundred Million (1938) and the Solidarity Film,” Studies in Documentary Film 3, no. 1 (2009): 9. 10. L. Borovoi, “Predvoennoe pokolenie,” Internatsional’naia literatura, no. 5 (1938): 190. 11. Alan Wilde, Christopher Isherwood (New York: Twayne, 1971), 80–81. 12. James Smith, British Writers and MI5 Surveillance, 1930–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 42. 13. Christopher Isherwood, “Travel-­Diary,” in Journey to a War, by W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood (London: Faber and Faber, 1939), 44. 14. Ibid., 74. 15. Ibid., 230. 16. Ibid., 202; this repre­sen­ta­tion bears comparison with Orwell’s account of the Spanish Civil War in Homage to Catalonia, where war is shown to be largely not about action and heroics but about long periods of inaction and boredom interrupted by the stray bullet. 17. Isherwood, “Travel-­Diary,” 76. 18. Ibid., 172. 19. Ibid., 234. 20. Ana Gimeno Sanz, “­Towards a Bibliotextual Edition of W. H. Auden’s ‘In Time of War,’ ” Estudios Ingleses de la Universidad Complatense 2 (1994): 187–188. 21. W. H Auden, “In Time of War,” in Journey to a War, by W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood (New York: Random House, 1939), 281. 22. Ibid., 285. 23. Ibid., 276. 24. Hong Shen’s “translation” as presented by Julia Chan in “Shangri-­La on the Global Popu­lar Front,” chapter 4 of “Veritable Utopia: Soviet Rus­sia and the Modernism of the British Left, 1905–39” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2020). 25. Anne-­Marie Brady, The Friend of China: The Myth of Rewi Alley (London : RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), 26–27, 38. Although this is not explicit in the text,

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it is pos­si­ble that Alley was impor­tant for Isherwood and Ivens ­because he was, like them, gay. 26. Isherwood, “Travel-­Diary,” 252–253. 27. Ibid., 214. 28. Marsha Bryant, “Documentary Dilemmas: Shifting Fronts in Journey to a War,” in The Isherwood C ­ entury: Essays on the Life and Work of Christopher Isherwood, ed. James Berg and Chris Freeman (Madison: University of ­Wisconsin Press, 2000), 182–185. 29. Isherwood, “Travel-­Diary,” 214–215, 224. 30. Ibid., 207. 31. Edgar Snow, “China’s Blitzbuilder, Rewi Alley,” Saturday Eve­ning Post 213, no. 32 (February 8, 1941): 31. 32. Edgar Snow, Red Star over China, first revised and enlarged edition (New York: Grove Press, 1973), 205. 33. Agnes Smedley, ­Battle Hymn of China (London: Victor Gollancz, 1944), 210. 34. Another Soviet film on the Sino-­Japanese was Vladimir Erofeev’s Geroicheskii Kitai (Heroic China) of 1939. 35. See especially Karmen’s four sketches published in Izvestiia from September to October 1939, about a par­tic­u ­lar campaign he went on. 36. RGALI, f. 2989, op. 1, d. 3: R. l. Karmen, “ ‘Kitai v bor’be.’ Montazhnye litsty i rabochie zapisi dlia vypuskov kinokhroniki. 1938–1939,” l. 14. 37. RGALI, f. 2989, op. 1, d. 3: R. l. Karmen, “ ‘Kitai v bor’be.’ Montazhnye litsty i rabochie zapisi dlia vypuskov kinokhroniki 1938–1939 gg.,” l. 14. 38. RGALI, f. 2989, op. 1, d. 5: [R.  L.  Karmen], “ ‘V Kitae.’ Anotatsiia dokumental’nogo fil’ma,” l. 2. 39. E.g., Siu Lin, “Krasnye shtany,” trans. T. Ozerskaia, Internatsional’naia literatura, no. 3–4 (1940): 145–147; Lo Fen, “Sed’maia iama,” trans. L. Ėidlin, Internatsional’naia literatura, no. 7–8 (1939): 196–199. 40. RGALI, f. 2989, op. 1, d. 247 (2): Roman Karmen, “Tetradi s dnevnikovymi zapisiami o poezdke v Kitai,” l. 99. 41. For other examples of clichéd repre­sen­ta­tion of leader figures, see RGALI, f. 2989, op.1, d. 5: [R. L. Karmen], “ ‘V Kitae.’ Anotatsiia dokumental’nogo fil’ma,” ll. 8, 9. 42. Variants are to be found in Karmen, God v Kitae, 108, 109, 111, 113, 114. 43. “U Mao Tsze-­duna (ot spetsial’nogo korrespondenta ‘Izvestii’),” Izvestiia, July 8, 1939. 44. Gao Hua, How the Red Sun Rose: The Origins and Development of the Yan’an Rectification Movement, 1930–1945, trans. Stacey Mosher and Guo Jian (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2018), 197–203. 45. The Soviet Union commissioned an e­ arlier, brief biography that was published in both Communist International and Pravda in December 1935, and

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then as part of the book. A. Khamadan, Vozhdi i geroi kitaiskogo naroda (Moscow: Ogiz-­Sotsėkgiz, 1936). See Alexander V. Pantsov with Steven I. Levine, Mao: The Real Story (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012), 293. 46. Socialist Book Club, Allahabad, to Mulk Raj Anand, July 28, 1939, Gen MSS 703, Series 1: Correspondence (Lawrence and Wishart), Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 47. I am grateful to Yang Hua, who in an email of June 6, 2019, supplied me with this information. He derived much of it from Zhang Xiaoding, “Xixing Manji zai zhongguo de liuchuan he yingxiang—­Hongxing zhaoyao zhongguo zhongyao zhong yi ben 50 nian shu hua” [The circulation and influence of “Random Notes on a Journey to the West” in China—­a study on critical Chinese translations of Red Star over China over the past fifty years], Tushuguan xue tongxun 3 (1988): 73–84. As Yang Hua’s research has established, ­t here exists what some Chinese scholars have called an “embryonic version” of Red Star over China in Chinese, a book published in Beijing in April 1937 titled Waiguo Jizhe Xibei Yinxiang ji (Notes of impression on northwestern China by foreign correspondents). This book is a compilation in Chinese of published essays by Edgar Snow and Norman Hanwell, including a long interview Snow had with Mao in Yan’an. Mao quotes several passages from this interview in his famous 1938 speech, “On Protracted War.” Some of that interview and a long chapter called “Hongqi xia de zhongguo” (China u ­ nder the red banner) became part of the original En­g lish Red Star over China. Zhang, “Xixing Manji zai zhongguo de liuchuan he yingxiang.” 48. Mao Tsze-­dun, Moia zhizn’, trans. from En­glish by N. Sh., Internatsional’naia literatura, no 11 (1937): 101–111; no. 12, 95–101; Ė. Snou, Geroicheskii narod Kitaia, trans. L. Mirtseva v obrabotke Z. Sheinina (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1938); Mao Tsze-­Dun. Biograficheskii ocherk (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1939). 49. RGALI, f. 2989, op. 1, d. 3: R. l. Karmen, “ ‘Kitai v bor’be’. Montazhnye litsty i rabochie zapisi dlia vypuskov kinokhroniki 1938–1939 gg.” (Montazhnyi list no. 7. Operator R. Karmen), l. 18. 50. Edgar Snow, Red Star over China (London: V. Gollancz, 1937), 112. 51. Wang-­chi Wong, Politics and Lit­er­a­ture in Shanghai: The Chinese League of Left-­Wing Writers, 1930–1936 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), 177–182. 52. Helen Foster Snow, Inside Red China (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1939; repr., New York: DaCapo, 1977), 78; David Holm, “The Literary Rectification in Yan’an,” in Essays in Modern Chinese Lit­er­a­ture and Literary Criticism: Papers of the Berlin Conference 1978, ed. Wolfgang Kubin and Rudolf G. Wagner (Bochum: Studienverlag Brockmeier, 1982), 274.

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53. Mark Gamsa, The Reading of Rus­sian Lit­er­a­ture in China: A Moral Example and Manual of Practice, Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 89–90. 54. GARF, f. 5283, op. 18, d. 32: VOKS, Otdel vostochnykh narodnykh respublik, “Perepiska s upolnomochenymi VOKS v Kitae o deiatel’nosti KSKO, ob obmene literatury, organizatsii, o posylke kinofil’mov i po drugim voprosam 25 Dec. 1942–5 April 1943,” l. 31. 55. Gamsa, The Reading of Rus­sian Lit­er­a­ture in China, 76, 88. 56. E.g., GARF, f. 5283, op. 18, d. 32: VOKS, Otdel vostochnykh narodnykh respublik, “Perepiska s upolnomochenymi VOKS v Kitae o deiatel’nosti KSKO, ob obmene literatury, organizatsii, o posylke kinofil’mov i po drugim voprosam 25 Dec. 1942–5 April 1943,” ll. 13–37. 57. Karmen, God v Kitae, 43, 95. 58. RGALI, f. 2989, op. 1, d. 247 (2): Roman Karmen, “Tetradi s dnevnikovymi zapisiami o poezdke v Kitai”: entry of 19 / V, l. 98. 59. L. E. Cherkasskii, Maiakovskii v Kitae (Moscow: Institut vostokovedeniia Akademii nauk, izdatel’stvo “Nauka,” 1976), 28. 60. Ibid., 137. 61. Ibid., 88–136. 62. Xiao Leon (Li’ang) and Xiao Viktor (Weijia), interview with author, Beijing, June 27, 2016. 63. David E. Apter and Tony Saich, Revolutionary Discourse in Mao’s Republic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994). 64. Paul G. Pickowicz, “Ch’ü Ch’iu-­pai and the Origins of Marxist Literary Criticism in China” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 1973; Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms, 1975), 372–374. 65. E.g., Hsiao Li Lindsay, Bold Plum: With the Guerillas in China’s War against Japan (Morrisville, N.C.: Lulu Press, 2007), 265. 66. Nym Wales (Helen Foster Snow), China Builds for Democracy: A Story of Cooperative Industry (New York: Modern Age Books, 1941; repr., St.  Clair Shores, Mich.: Scholarly Press, 1972), 47. 67. RGALI, f. 631, op. l, d. 605: “Perepiska Kitai. Natsional’noe obshchestvo sviazi s zagranitsei,” l. 320. 68. Emi Siao, “Literatura i iskusstvo Kitaia v bor’be za natsional’nuiu nezavisimost’,” in Kitai. Istoriia, ėkonomika, kul’tura, geroicheskaia bor’ba za natsional’nuiu nezavisimost’, Otdel’nyi ottisk iz izdanii (Moscow-­Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk, 1940), 319; Xiao makes the same point in his biography of Mao in Kitaiskie rasskazy (Moscow: GIKhL, 1940), 141. 69. Harrison Forman, Report from Red China (New York: H. Holt, [1945]), 85. 70. David Holm, Art and Ideology in Revolutionary China (Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1991), 45.

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71. Karmen, God v Kitae, 107. 72. This conclusion is based on repertoire lists from the late 1930s and early 1940s that the author saw in the Lu Xun Acad­emy Museum in Yan’an on June 26, 2019. 73. Holm, “The Literary Rectification in Yan’an,” 276n13, 304. 74. RGASPI, f. 495, op. 225, d. 96, l. 102. 75. Elizabeth McGuire, Red at Heart: How Chinese Communists Fell in Love with the Rus­sian Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 202–203. 76. RGASPI, f. 495, op. 225, d. 96, l. 64. 77. Gao, How the Red Sun Rose, 162n. 78. RGASPI, f. 495, op. 225, d. 96 (“Ėmi Siao”), l. 104. 79. Xiao Leon (Li’ang) and Xiao Viktor (Weijia), interview. 80. Gao, How the Red Sun Rose, 224. 81. Zhu Ziqi, “In a Holy Land for Poetry” [Zai shi de shengdi], in Recollections of Yan’an Lit­er­a­ture and Art [Yan’an wenyi huiyilu], ed. Ai Ke’en (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1992), 152–156. For this source I am indebted to Yang Hua. 82. RGALI, f. 631, op. 11, d. 599, letter to Apletin of July 9, 1940, in “Perepiska Ėmi Siao s Inostrannoi komissiei,” l. 36 (ob.). 83. [Unsigned], “Kitai,” Internatsional’naia literatura, no. 11 (1942): 163. 84. Zhou Yang, “Conversation with Zhao Haosheng on Historical Merits and Demerits [Excerpt]” [Yu Zhao Haosheng tan lishi gong guo, jie xuan], in Recollections of Yan’an Lit­er­a­ture and Art [Yan’an wenyi huiyilu], ed. Ai Ke’en (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1992), 33–39; Tani Barlow, The Question of ­Women in Chinese Feminism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), 193. 85. Pickowicz, “Marxist Literary Criticism in China,” 310; Xiao Leon (Li’ang) and Xiao Viktor (Weijia), interview. 86. Holm, Art and Ideology in Revolutionary China, 52–53. 87. David Holm, “National Form and the Popularization of Lit­er­a­ture in Yenan,” in La Littérature chinoise au temps de la guerre de résistance contre le Japon (de 1937 à 1945), Colloque internationale organisé par la Fondation Singer-­ Polignac en juin 1980 (Paris: Éditions de la Fondation Singer-­Polignac, 1982), 228. 88. GARF, f. 5283, op. 18, d. 27, ll. 23–24, “Stat’i o kitaiskom kino nachala 1941 g.” The title of the slightly dif­fer­ent German version was ­Daughter of the Samurai (Die Tochter des Samurai). 89. Holm, “National Form and the Popularization of Lit­er­a­ture,” 227–230; Xiao Leon (Li’ang) and Xiao Viktor (Weijia), interview. 90. Ban Wang, “1940–1942: Chinese Revolution and Western Lit­er­a­ture,” in the A New Literary History of Modern China, ed. David Der-­wei Wang (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017), 473.

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91. Apter and Saich, Revolutionary Discourse in Mao’s Republic, 217–219. 92. E.g., GARF, f. 5293, op. 18, d. 23, ll. 40, 54, 67, 234, 242; d. 25, ll. 54, 67, 89; d. 26, ll. 62, 55, 125; d. 27, ll. 11–12; d. 30, l. 8; d. 31, l. 39; d. 32, ll. 3, 5–6, 30–31. 93. P. [Petr] P. Vladimirov, Osobyi raion Kitaia 1942–1945 (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Agenstva pechati Novosti, 1973), 23, 25. 94. Xiao Leon (Li’ang) and Xiao Viktor (Weijia), interview. 95. Mao’s Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Lit­er­a­ture and Art ­were first published in Jiefang ribao on October 19, 1943. Bonnie S. McDougall, in her published translation of the Talks, provides an appendix that lists the changes in the ­later edition and another that lists the major editions of the Talks. Bonnie S. McDougall, Mao Zedong’s “Talks at the Yan’an Conference on Lit­er­a­ture and Art”: A Translation of the 1943 Text with Commentary Michigan Papers in Chinese Studies, no. 39 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies, 1980), 87–107. 96. Mao Tse-­t ung, “The Role of the Communist Party in the National War,” https://­w ww​.­marxists​.­org​/­reference​/­archive​/­mao​/­selected​-­works​/­volume​-­2​ /­mswv2​_­10​.­htm, accessed April 24, 2021. 97. Wang, “1940–42: Chinese Revolution and Western Lit­er­a­ture,” 98. Mao Tse-­t ung, “The Role of the Communist Party in the National War,” https://­w ww​.­marxists​.­org​/­reference​/­archive​/­mao​/­selected​-­works​/­volume​-­2​ /­mswv2​_­10​.­htm, accessed April 24, 2021. 99. McDougall, Mao Zedong’s “Talks,” 81. 100. Elizabeth McGuire, conversation with author, November 22, 2016. 101. Ai Ke’en, “On ‘The Yan’an Forum on Lit­er­a­ture and Art’ and Cultural Movements in Yan’an” [Zai yan’an wenyi zuo tan hui shang de jianghua yu yan’anwenyi yundong], in Recollections of Yan’an Lit­er­a­ture and Art [Yan’an wenyi huiyilu], ed. Ai Ke’en (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1992), 390–420 (esp. 394, 420). 102. The letter has been published as an appendix in Ai, Recollections of Yan’an Lit­er­at­ ure and Art.. 103. David Holm, “Art and Ideology in the Yenan Period, 1937–1945” (PhD diss., Oxford University, 1979), 34. 104. Max Lowell Bohnenkamp, “Turning Ghosts into ­People: “The White-­Haired Girl,” Revolutionary Folklorism and the Politics of Aesthetics in Modern China” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2014), 125n48, 133–135. 105. “ ‘Kitai,’ Sbornik statei Marksa, Ėngel’sa i Lenina ob iskusstve na kitaiskom iazyke,” Internatsional’naia literatura, no. 11–12 (1940): 340. Gao Hua has a slightly dif­fer­ent account, but also stresses the importance of Zhou Yang in the formulation of the positions taken in Mao’s Talks. Gao, How the Red Sun Rose, 374–387. 106. Mao’s tele­gram to Dimitrov of 26 May, 1942, indicates that the situation of the Yan’an enclave was particularly perilous at the very time t­ hese talks ­were

434

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delivered. “Tele­gramma Mao Tszėduna G. Dimitrovu,” VKP(b), Komintern i Kitai. Dokumenty, vol V, VKP(b), Komintern i KPK v period antiiaponskoi voiny 1937–­mai 1943 (Moscow: Rosspėn, 2007), 601–602. 107. Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual, 3rd ed., with an updated afterword (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 262–263. 108. Gamsa, The Reading of Rus­sian Lit­er­a­ture in China, 112. 109. Ibid., 78n1, 14, 19. 110. Ts’iui Tsiu-bo, “Manchurskii ‘Razgrom,’ ” in Ocherki i stat’i (Moscow: GIKhL, 1959), 158–159. 111. A. Fadeev, Razgrom. Roman (Leningrad: Priboi, 1927), 17. 112. Bohnenkamp, “Turning Ghosts into ­People.” 113. McDougall, Mao Zedong’s Talks, 69. 114. E.g., A. Ivin, “Burnyi potok i uzkii ruchei,” Literaturnaia gazeta, September 1, 1940. 115. A. Bushmin, Roman A. Fadeeva “Razgrom” (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1954), 179. 116. I have to thank Yang Hua for checking the Lu Xun translation for me and establishing that the points I make about it are true. 117. Gamsa, The Reading of Rus­sian Lit­er­a­ture in China, 78. 118. Apter, Against World Lit­er­a­ture, 3. 119. Max Bohnenkamp, email communication with author, January 2, 2018. 120. One example would be “dazhuonghua, which more or less corresponds to “the mass line” in Rus­sian and has a Japa­nese counterpart, taishu-ka (despite the dif­fer­ent pronunciation, the kanji spelling in Chinese characters is the same). I am indebted to Sho Konishi and Xiaolu Ma for this example. 121. The observations in this paragraph come from Max Bohnenkamp’s email communication with the author of January 2, 2018, and also an email exchange between Xiaolu Ma and the author of April 19–20, 2021. 122. RGALI, f. 631, op. 11, d. 599, “Perepiska Ėmi Siao s inostrannoi komissiei,” l. 57. 123. RGALI, f. 631, op. 11, d. 599. “Perepiska Ėmi Siao s inostrannoi komissiei,” l. 57. 124. In Yan’an, Rus­sian writers ­were still being translated in 1944: GARF, f. 5283, op. 18, d. 38, “VOKS”; GARF, f. 5283, op. 18, d. 32 (“VOKS. Perepiska s upolnomochenymi VOKS v Kitae o deiatel’nosti KSKO, ob obmene literatury, organizatsii, o posylke kinofil’mov i po drugim voprosam 25 Dec. 1942–5 April 1943”), l. 9. 125. RGALI, f. 631, op. 11, d. 599, ll. 40, 105–106. 126. Katerina Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), chapter 6.

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127. GARF, f. 5283, op. 18, d. 32; Chen Siui-­shan’, “Tvorcheskii metod Stanislavskogo i narodnyi teatr Kitaia,” Internatsional’naia literatura, no.  11–12 (1940): 225–226; “Novye kitaiskie perevody,” Internatsional’naia literatura, no. 1 (1941): 202. 128. Zhang Geng, “Recollecting the Theater Activities of Luyi before and ­a fter the Yan’an Talks” [Huiyi jianghua qianhou de xiju huodong], in Recollections of Yan’an Lit­er­a­ture and Art [Yan’an wenyi huiyilu], ed. Ai Ke’en (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1992), 171–185, esp. 173–174. 129. GARF, f. 5283, op. 18, d. 38 (“VOKS”), l. 7. 130. GARF, f. 5283, op. 18, d. 30 (“Otdel vostochnykh narodnykh respublik. ­Zaprosy upol. VOKS v Kitae za 1942 g.”), l. 9. 131. Gamsa, The Reading of Rus­sian Lit­er­a­ture in China, 104. 132. In a 1975 En­glish translation, mention of the Talks is followed by an ellipsis. Diary entry of May 15, 1942, in The Vladimirov Diaries: Yenan, China, 1942– 1945, by Peter Vladimirov (New York: Doubleday, 1975), 17. 133. N. Fedorenko, “O novoi kitaiskoi lit­er­a­ture,” Znamia, no.  19 (October 1049): 64. 134. F. Ienzen, Kitai pobezhdaet, trans. from German by A. Semënova (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo inostrannoi literatury, 1950), 196–204. 135. Xiao Leon (Leong) and Xiao Viktor (Weijia), interview. 136. Antoinette Burton and Isabel Hofmeyr, “Introduction: The Spine of Empire? Books and the Making of an Imperial Commons,” in Ten Books That ­Shaped the British Empire: Creating an Imperial Commons, ed. Antoinette Burton and Isabel Hofmeyr (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014), 23.

Acknowl­edgments

In the course of writing this book I received scholarly assistance from a large number of p ­ eople. Many of them ­were crucial to the proj­ect in that they had ­expertise in one of the Asian languages and lit­er­a­tures featured in the text, as I do not. In consequence, I am citing them by the par­tic­u ­lar language and culture in which they have expertise. For general help: Benjamin Conisbee Baer, Michael David-­Fox, Rossen Djagalov, Samuel Hodgkin, and Edward Tyerman read the entire manuscript and participated in a workshop at Yale on it. For help with Rus­sian sources: Liliya Dashevsky, Anastasia Gacheva, Peter Holquist, Yakov Klots, John MacKay, Elena Ostrovskaia, Elena Alekseevna Pankova (Vsevolod Ivanov’s grand­daughter), Kira Borisovna ­Pilniak (the grand­d aughter of Boris Pilniak), Andrei Rossomakhin,Svetlana ­Semenova, Katie Trumpener, and Elena Zemskova. For help with Chinese sources: Max Bohnenkamp, Hsiang-­Yin Sasha Chen, Jinyi Chu, Yang Hua, Zhang Hui, Sho Konishi, Charles Laughlin, Steven Lee, Liang Luo, Lydia Liu, Xiaolu Ma, Yazhe Yang, Zhen Zhang, Bo Zheng, and the ­children of Li Lisan and Emi Xiao (Inna Li [Li Yangnan], Leon Xiao, and Viktor Xiao). For help with Indian sources: Benjamin Conisbee Baer, David Engerman, Purabi Roy, Jit Singh Uberoi, Patricia Uberoi, and Hari Vasudevan. For help with Indo-­Chinese sources: Ben Kiernan. For help with Persian (Ira­nian) sources: Oliver Bast, Masha Kirasirova, Denis Volkov, Lisa Yountchi, Lahuti’s d ­ aughter Leila Gasemovna Lahuti, and especially Samuel Hodgkin, who wrote his dissertation on Abolqasem Lahuti and gave generously of his own time and writings. For help with Turkish sources: Rossen Djagalov, Samuel J. Hirst, Samuel Hodgkin, Duygu Köksal, and James H. Meyer.

Index

Abich (Abikh), Rudolf, 99, 103, 104 Achebe, Chinua, 365 Af­g han­i­stan, 12, 13, 14–38 Africa, 9, 32, 38, 71, 75, 133; Gide and, 219, 230, 327; and imperialism, 167, 185; Marr and, 179; Pan-­A frican Congress, 38. See also Afro-­Asian Writers’ Association (AAWA) Afro-­Asian Writers’ Association (AAWA), 356–363 Ahmad, Ajaz, 204, 310 Aini, Sadriddin, 110, 112 Aitmatov, Chingiz, 363 Akbar, 137 Alexander the ­Great, 17, 91, 137–140, 145, 147–148 Alexandrov, Grigorii: Volga-­Volga, 118 Alley, Rewi, 324–326 Amanullah (Ghazi Amanullah khan), 124, 144–147, 156, 157 Anand, Mulk Raj, 23–24, 276, 284–285, 296, 300–307, 309, 324; in Afro-­Asian Writers’ Association (AAWA), 356–358, 363; British leftists and, 285, 288, 292; Coolie, 284–285, 296, 300–307, 309; Ralph Fox and, 290, 300–301; in India, 293–295; Two Leaves and a Bud, 296, 304; Untouchable, 284–285, 287, 296, 302, 309; The Village, 296, 309. See also Indian Progressive Writers’ Association (IPWA) Anderson, Benedict, 14–15, 19 Anderson, Perry, 161, 189, 139

anti-­colonialism. See anti-­imperialism antifascism, 24, 30, 79, 281–282, 295. See also League against Fascism; Paris Congress for the Defense of Culture anti-­imperialism, 30, 61, 281–282, 289–290, 359, 362–363; and anti-­i mperialist lit­er­a­t ure, 8, 20, 126–127. See also Anand, Mulk Raj; KUTV (Communist University of Toilers of the East); League against Imperialism; Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich; Loti, Pierre; Marr, Nikolai; Raskolnikov, Fëdor; Reisner, Larisa; Tretiakov, Sergei Apter, Emily, 315, 348 Arabian Nights, 145 Arabic, 14, 15, 51, 80, 109–110, 129, 134 Aragon, Louis, 239 architecture, 81–82, 105–106, 140, 146. See also Corbusier, Le (Charles-­Édouard Jeanneret) Armenia, 13, 90, 119 Aryanism, 88, 169–184, 286 Asad, Talal, 204 Aseev, Nikolai, 48, 211 Asiatic Society of Calcutta, 172 Astrakhan, 88, 91–92 Atatürk, Kemal, 48–49, 57–58, 70, 82, 110, 146; and theories of Turkish language and history, 74–76 Auden, W. H., 25, 38, 316–332, 361 Auerbach, Erich, 80 Austria, 43–45, 80, 320, 321. See also Vienna

440

avant-­garde: Rus­sian, 17, 37, 105–106; Soviet, 2, 27, 43–57, 62, 64, 69, 91, 182. See also Constructivism Averbakh, Leopold, 240. See also RAPP (Rus­sian Association of Proletarian Writers) Azerbaijan, 1–4, 13, 116, 119. See also Baku Babel, Isaak, 263 Babur, 17, 137, 286 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 85, 108, 191 Baku: First Congress of the Toilers of the East and, 1–27, 32, 33, 39, 43, 83, 309; Khlebnikov and Lahuti and, 86, 90, 104–105; manifesto of, 124, 150, 194–195, 204–209, 211 ballet, 246 Balzac, Honoré de, 266, 335, 340, 350 Banu, Cecilia (Lahuti’s wife), 110, 121–122 Bardez, Felix Louis, 214–215, 219 Barthold (Bartol’d), V.V., 120, 141–142 Bashkir, 21 Batu, 91, 100 Bauhaus, 48, 81, 186–187 Beecroft, Alexander, 15 Benjamin, Walter, 45–46 Berlin, 26, 43, 127; as anti-­imperialist mecca, 9, 37, 164–165, 212, 251, 283 Besant, Annie, 181–182 Blavatsky, Madame Helena, 89, 180–185, 187 Bliokh, Iakov: Shanghai Document, 244–246, 248–249 Bolshevik Revolution, 35, 53, 57, 126, 141, 164, 167, 173, 242, 321 Border Region. See Yan’an Borodin, Mikhail, 164, 216, 219 Bose, Subhas Chandra, 292–293, 310 Brecht, Bertolt, 69, 134, 247, 251, 254, 278, 359, 369; Mea­sures Taken, 249–250, 270 Brik, Osip, 45, 48, 50 British East India Com­pany, 10, 152, 167–170, 181, 187 British Empire, 124, 147, 153–154, 160, 163, 166–181, 189 Broido, Grigory, 61–65, 71–72, 108 Buck, Pearl, 264 Buddhism, 88, 162, 173, 183–186, 188, 228 Bukharin, Nikolai, 197, 199 Burton, Antoinette. See Ten Books that ­Shaped the British Empire (Burton and Hofmeyr) Byron, George Gordon, 73

INDEX

Cambodia. See Bardez, Felix Louis; Indochine enchâinée; Malraux, André: in Indo-­ China Capa, Robert, 316 Casanova, Pascale, 14, 15, 26; and The World Republic of Letters, 9, 19 Central Asia, 2, 13, 14, 61, 156, 163, 184–185; and Sans­k rit, 13. See also Kirghizia (Kyrgyzstan); Tajikistan; Turkestan; Turkmenistan; Uzbekistan Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 224 Chapaev, Vasily, 68 Chattopadhyaya, Virendranath, 251 Chekhov, Anton, 196, 350 Chernyshevsky, Nikolai, 197, 209 Chiang Kai-­shek, 66, 68, 216, 238, 242, 248, 257, 353; and communist Border Region, 324–325, 345 China: Chinese language 46–47; “Hands off China!” campaign, 211–212, 215. See also Guomin­dang; League of Leftist Writers (in China); Lu Xun; Qu Qiubai; translation; Xiao, Ėmi (Xiao San) Chinese Nationalists. See Guomin­dang Chris­t ian­ity, 30, 31, 89, 181 Chu Chiupai. See Qu Qiubai Chuzhak, Nikolai, 48 Cohn, Norman, 57 Cold War, 287–288, 310, 361–362 colonialism, 33, 143. See also anti-­imperialism Comintern (Communist International), 2, 19, 32, 33, 37–39, 43, 45, 49; congresses of, 1–22, 28, 48, 50, 55, 238; cultural activities and administration, 28, 38, 44, 238, 243, 279; Seventh Congress of 279, 332. See also Dimitrov, Georgi; International Lit­er­a­ture (formerly Lit­er­at­ ure of World Revolution); International Union of Revolutionary Writers (MORP); Internatsional’naia literatura; KUTV (Communist University of Toilers of the East); Paris Congress for the Defense of Culture Communism, 20, 23, 35. See also Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich; Marx, Karl; Marxism; Marxism-­L eninism; Stalin, Joseph [Djugashvili] Communist Party of China (CCP), 195–196, 199, 254, 313, 328 Communist Party of G ­ reat Britain (CPGB), 283, 290

Index

Communist Party of India (CPI), 164, 283, 297 Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 25, 49, 84, 86, 108, 158, 174 Communist Party of Turkey, 49. See also Hikmet, Nâzim Communist University of Toilers of the East. See KUTV Confucius, 329 Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), 361–363 Congress of the Toilers of the East, First. See Baku Congress of the Toilers of the Far East, First, 194–196, 199, 225, 231 Conrad, Joseph: Heart of Darkness, 363 Constructivism, 81, 186–187. See also avant­garde: Soviet Corbusier, Le (Charles-­Édouard Jeanneret), 73–74, 105–106 Cortés, Hernán, 131–132, 139 Cosmopolitanism, 11–18, 155–156, 162, 187, 219, 231, 295 Cosmopolitans, leftist, 24, 298, 241, 287–289 Daghestan, 19, 90 Damrosch, David, 10, 20, 284–285 Darwish, Mahmoud, 363 Descartes, 18 Dimitrov, Georgi, 278–279, 338 Djagalov, Rossen, 9 Dobrokosky, M. V., 94, 103 Dos Passos, John, 256 Dostoevsky, Fëdor, 191, 196, 218 Druzhba narodov, 360 ecumene (of literary leftists), 22–27, 38, 241, 278, 314, 373n64. See also Manjapra Eisenstein, Sergei, 55, 117, 144, 177, 229, 244, 275, 352; The ­Great Ferghana Canal, 117, 140–141; Japa­nese culture and, 259; Tretiakov and, 201, 205, 211 Eisler, Gerhart, 247, 249 Eisler, Hanns, 247, 251, 278 Ėkk, Nikolai, 70 Eliot, T. S., 16, 24, 88, 154, 161–162, 188, 285 empire, 12–14, 35; Austro-­Hungarian, 162; British, 13, 138–139, 143, 154; Rus­sian, 13, 154–155. See also anti-­imperialism Encounter, 361–362

441

Engels, Friedrich, 51, 300, 329, 342; on lit­er­a­ture and art, 125, 290, 304, 344 En­g lish language, 46 Enlightenment, 11–12, 17–18 Ėrdberg (Tarkhanov-­Razumov), Oskar, 247, 275 Erofeev, Vladimir, 133, 429n34 Ertuğrul, Muhsin, 70, 78 Ertürk, Nergis, 71 Esenin, Sergei, 151 Esperanto, 47, 81 Eurasia: as a geo-­c ultural unit, 31–33; pan-­Eurasian culture, 2–8, 11, 14–17, 21–30, 37 Eurasianism, Rus­sian, 32, 142 eurocentrism, 3, 4, 9, 21–22, 30, 33, 38, 65, 110, 140, 232; Isherwood and Auden and, 320; Lukács and, 45 exoticism, 8, 36, 49, 145, 202–203; exoticist romance and, 73, 145, 225–227, 231; Malraux and, 213, 215; Larisa Reisner and, 125–127; Roerich and, 186; Tretiakov and, 202, 207, 321. See also Loti, Pierre factography, 203–208, 217, 272 Fadeev, Aleksandr, 340, 353; The Rout, 344–348, 354 Faiz Ahmad Faiz, 358, 362, 363 Fanck, Arnold: New Land, 339–340 Fanon, Franz: Wretched of the Earth, 364 Farrère, Claude, 71–74, 225, 227 Farsi (Persian language), 3, 4, 13, 19, 51, 119 fascism, 53, 79, 238–239, 279, 287, 321–322. See also antifascism; Nazi accession to power Featherstone, David, 251 Featherstone, Mike, 23 fellow traveler. See poputchik Fenollosa, Ernest, 10, 46, 229, 264 Ferdowsi, Abul-­Qâsem, 89; Shahnameh, 92–100, 116, 150–151; one thousandth anniversary of birth of, 114–115 film, 133, 142–144, 339–340, 359; Persia and, 94; Turkey and, 59. See also Eisenstein, Sergei; Ivens, Joris; Lang, Fritz; Pudovkin, Vsevolod; Vertov, Dziga Fleming, Peter, 319, 325–326 Formalism, Rus­sian, 85, 129 Forster, E. M., 24, 285, 300, 301

442

Foucault, Michel, 166 Fox, Ralph, 290–292, 298; Anand and, 293, 304, 305–306; Genghis Khan, 291, 303; Novel and the ­People, 301, 303 France. See Gide, André; Malraux, André; Paris Congress for the Defense of Culture French language, 19, 46, 54 Freud, Sigmund, 304 Futurism. See avant-­garde; Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso Gafurov, Bobodzhan, 120–121 Gandhi, 123, 161, 190, 216, 224–225, 294, 298–299 Genghis Khan, 17, 185, 225, 244, 286; Fox and, 291, 303; Khlebnikov and, 91, 100, 106; Reisner and, 138–142, 145–146 Gentzler, Edwin. See Translation and Power (Gentzler and Tymoczko) Georgia. See Transcaucasia Germany, 43–45, 359–360; China and the German left, 211–212, 215, 247–258, 289; German exiles from Nazism, 80; German language and the international movement, 19, 43, 46; German leftist journals, 239; German proletarian lit­er­a­ture, 240–241. See also Berlin; revolution in Germany Gibbon, Edward: Decline and Fall, 136, 154–155 Gide, André, 24, 107, 112–113, 190, 213, 219, 232 Gilan, uprising in, 87, 107, 113 Ginzburg, Mosei, 81, 105–106 Gladkov, Fëdor: Cement, 258, 272, 345, 352, 354 Goethe, Wolfgang, 132, 203, 340, 350; and world lit­er­a­ture, 10, 15, 85, 150, 151, 168 Gogol, Nikolai, 22, 340, 350 Gorky, Maxim, 196, 297–298, 350; at First Congress of the Soviet Writers’ Union, 78, 113; ­Mother, 258 Gramsci, Antonio, 18 ­Great Game, 124, 153, 164, 166–169; in scholarship, 174 ­Great Purge. See purges Greece, ancient, 6, 10, 11, 15, 30; ancient Greek language and lit­er­a­ture, 16, 134, 167, 168, 176 Greenberg, Clement, 362 Gumilëv, Nikolai, 128–133, 151, 153

INDEX

Guomin­dang, 195, 216, 219, 233, 242–243, 254, 261; and the Sino-­Japanese War, 311, 313, 316–317, 341, 335, 341, 345 Guo Moruo, 197, 363 Hafez (Xāwje Shams-­od-­Dīn Moḥammad Ḥāfeẓ-­e Shīrāzī), 10, 89, 112, 129, 150–153, 168 Haggard, H. Rider, 36, 130, 131, 134–135, 213 Hearn, Lafcadio, 226 Heartfield, John, 251, 278 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 34, 178 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 34 Herzen, Alexander, 56 Hikmet, Nâzim, 21, 29, 38, 39, 44–73, 83, 97, 107; in Afro-­Asian postwar movements, 357–359; Epic of Sheik Bedreddin, 75–79; Gioconda and Si-­Ya-­U, 66–70, 72, 75, 77; Mayakovsky and, 334; Xiao and, 193, 307 Hinduism, 162, 188, 286–287, 292, 302, 306 Hitler, Adolf, 146 Ho Chi Minh, 26, 29, 33, 60, 193, 198 Hofmeyr, Isabel. See Ten Books that ­Shaped the British Empire (Burton and Hofmeyr) Holquist, Michael, 85 Homer, 78, 80, 92, 113, 144 Hughes, Langston, 313, 413n22 Hulagu, 145 Hu Lanxi (Lanqi), 254–255, 258, 266, 275 Hungary, 4, 38, 43. See also Illesh, Bella; Kun, Béla Huxley, Aldous: Brave New World, 280 Iavorskii, Ivan, 136, 141, 142 IBRL. See International Bureau of Revolutionary Lit­er­a­ture Illesh, Bella. 240 imperialism, 12, 15. See also anti-­ imperialism; British empire; empire; neo-­imperialism; postcolonialism Indian Progressive Writers’ Association (IPWA), 283–285, 296, 304, 308–310, 356 Indian Review, 171–173 Indochina, 213–219 Indochine enchâinée, 214–216, 219 Indo-­Europeanism, 16, 167–179 Inostrannaia literatura, 360 intermediaries, socialist, 20, 26, 315, 339; 363. See also Hikmet, Nâzim; Lahuti, Abulqasem; Xiao, Ėmi (Xiao San)

Index

International Association of Writers for the Defense of Culture, 279, 283, 293, 312. See also Paris Congress of the International Association for the Defense of Culture International Bureau of Revolutionary Lit­er­a­ture (IBRL), 237, 239, 240, 258, 262 International Congress of Writers, Second. See Kharkov International Lit­er­a­ture (formerly Lit­er­at­ ure of World Revolution), 28, 239, 262, 308–309, 357 International of the Arts, 44–48, 75, 182 International Union of Revolutionary Writers (MORP), 28, 30, 237, 260, 262, 277–279, 280, 293; British Section of, 288, 360 International Workers’ Aid (IAH). See Mezhrabpom Internatsional iskusstva, 46–47, 81 Internatsional’naia literatura, 28, 360, 361; China and, 259, 262, 263–264, 331, 333, 338; 360, 361; India and, 280, 282, 300, 308–309 Iqbal, Muhammad, 286, 299 Isherwood, Christopher, 25, 38, 289, 316, 361 Islam, 19–20, 25, 31, 136, 156–157, 184; at Baku, 2, 18–19, 194; Hikmet and, 74, 77, 88, 89; Indian Muslims, 162, 293, 302, 306; Reisner’s anti-­Muslim bias, 140–142, 150. See also Pan-­Islamism Istanbul, 26, 74, 107. See also Loti, Pierre Itten, Johannes, 186–187 Ivanov, Viachelsav, 151, 153 Ivanov, Vsevolod, 16–17 Ivens, Joris: Four Hundred Million, 313, 316–319 Ivin, A. (pseudonym of Alexei A. Ivanov), 16, 210–211, 264 Jameson, Fredric, 229 Jami (Djāmī), 152 Japan, 26; Japa­nese language, 46, 47; translations via Japa ­nese, 20, 347–349. See also Kobayashi, Takiji; Kabuki; Pilniak (Vogau), Boris; Russo-­Japanese War; Sino-­Japanese War Jones, Sir William, 168, 173 Joyce, James, 26, 280, 284, 296–298, 362 Kabuki, 229, 259 Kalatozov, Mikhail: Salt for Svanetia, 142–143

443

Kamei, Fumio, 245 Kamenev, Lev, 115 Kamensky, Vasily, 50, 52 Kandinsky, Wassily, 45, 48, 182, 186–187 Kant, Immanuel, 11, 17–18 Karmen, Roman, 316, 319, 327, 332, 334, 337 Katayama, Sen, 60 Kerzhentsev, Platon, 47 Kharkov: Second International Congress of Writers in, 28, 29, 193, 233, 237–241, 277; Seghers at, 254, 258; Xiao at, 261–262 Khayyam, Omar, 151–152 Khlebnikov, Velemir, 45–48, 85–92, 117, 122, 161, 166, 221; Chinese and Japa­nese hieroglyphics and, 229, 264; “Ispahan Camel”(With a Copper Womb) and, 99–107, 134; “Kaveh the Blacksmith” and, 94–99, 119; Stenka Razin and, 88, 89, 90, 92, 103, 221; Theosophy and, 182. See also trans-­ sense verse; Ferdowsi, Abul-­Q âsem: Shahnameh Kipling, Rudyard, 36, 120, 166 Kirghizia (Kyrgyzstan), 21, 114, 290 Kisch, Egon Erwin, 247–248, 272 Klee, Paul, 186–187 Kobayashi, Takiji, 259–260, 275 Kolbas’ev, Sergei, 128 Kollwitz, Käthe, 252 Koltsov, Mikhail, 146, 279, 355, 359 ­Korea, 1, 194–196, 201, 221, 251, 261 Korneichuk, Aleksandr, 351 Krasnyi Iran, 91, 94, 97, 99 Kropotkin, Pëtr, 25, 196 Kruchënykh, Aleksei, 50, 53, 87. See also trans-­sense Kun, Béla, 3–4 KUTV (Communist University of Toilers of the East), 29, 83, 86, 211, 291; China and, 196, 197, 199–200, 211; Hikmet and, 44, 59–65, 68, 70, 112, 260; Lahuti and, 108–109, 112; M. N. Roy and, 164. See also Stalin, Joseph [Djugashvili] La Guma, Alex, 363 Lahuti, Abulqasem, 21, 29, 64, 86–87, 91, 150, 279, 388n70; opera Kaveh the Blacksmith, 116–120; Soviet Writers’ Union and, 110–114; translation of Shahnameh, 121–122. See also Ferdowsi, Abul-­Qâsem: Shahnameh Lang, Fritz: Harakiri, 226, 227; Metropolis, 68

444

language, international (a common language, universal language), 3–4, 43, 54–56. See also Esperanto Lapin, Boris, 165–166 Latin, 14–16, 19, 134, 167, 168, 176, 192, 265 Latin Amer­ic­ a, 9, 355 latinization, 58, 74, 264–265, 294, 339 Lawrence, D. H., 24, 285, 301, 303, 306 Lawrence, T. E. (Lawrence of Arabia), 129, 146, 165–166, 213, 326 Lawrence and Wishart, 28, 288, 292 League against Fascism, 294 League against Imperialism, 37 League of Leftist Writers (in China), 28, 260–263, 332–333, 417n78 Left Book Club, 288–289, 292–293 Leftist cosmopolitans. See cosmopolitans, leftist Left Review, 28, 288–289, 293 Lehmann, John, 288–290, 293, 317 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 7–8, 25, 35, 65; Mulk Raj Anand and, 300; on China, 34; on imperialism, 8, 62–63, 70, 126; on India, 163; Lahuti and, 111; Rosa Luxemburg and, 255; Malraux and, 219; Mao Zedong’s “Talks at the Yana’n Forum on Lit­er­a­ture and Art” and, 342, 344; postcolonialism and, 354; “On the National Pride of the ­Great Rus­sians,” 79; on self-­determination, 6–7, 230–231 Lermontov, Mikhail, 22, 33, 340 Lévi, Sylvain, 171–173 Li Li-­san, 269–270 Linkskurve, 239 Literary international, 23–28, 38, 44, 218; ­a fter the Kharkov Congress, 237–241, 262; in response to the fascist threat, 278–279, 281–283, 306, 314; Cold War and the, 357–359 Lit­e r­a­ture of World Revolution. See Inter­ natsional’naia literatura Litintern, 45, 240 Liu, Lydia, 315 Liu, Shaoqi, 186 Lobachevsky, Nikolai, 106 Loti, Pierre, 36, 71–74, 186, 202–206, 213, 223; Aziyadé, 72–74, 91; China and, 202, 223–224; Japan and, 226, 228; Malraux and,

INDEX

215; Pierre Loti café, 82; Tretiakov and, 207 Lotus, 357, 360 Lotus Prize, 363 Lukács, Georg, 16, 43, 45, 57, 190, 256, 281 Lumumba Friendship University, 359 Lunacharsky, Anatoli, 191, 197, 261 Luria, Aleksandr, 177 Luxemburg, Rosa, 25, 217, 255 Lu Xun, 20–21, 190, 197, 252, 260, 262, 343; Mao Zedong on, 346, 347, 348; Xiao translation 263 Lu Xun Acad­emy, 331, 336–340, 349, 352 Macaulay, Thomas Babbington, 10, 295 Mahabharata, 10, 89, 93, 122 Malevich, Kasimir, 45–47, 182 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 52 Malraux, André, 24, 198, 282, 318, 361; Conquerors, 215–222, 232, 252; First Congress of the Writers’ Union and, 278–281; in Indo-­China, 213–219; Man’s Fate, 252–253, 274, 275; Paris Congress for the Defense of Culture and, 279 Manas, 114 Manchuria, 17, 244, 261, 262 Mandelshtam, Nadezhda, 115 Mandelshtam, Osip, 163 Manjapra, Kris, 22, 24, 60–61. See also ecumene (of literary leftists) Mao Dun (Shen Dehong), 190, 197, 265–275, 348, 357, 363; compared with Mulk Raj Anand and Friedrich Wolf, 268, 269, 284, 296, 302; Disintegration, 335; Midnight 265, 267–275, 307; Rainbow 265–267 Mao Zedong, 39, 248, 328–332, 337, 338, 341; “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Lit­er­a­ture and Art,” 20–21, 39, 316, 336, 339, 340–353, 433n95 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 52, 53, 56, 57, 67, 69, 105 Marr, Nikolai, 16, 163, 166–167, 174–179, 182, 264 Marx, Karl, 10, 91, 124–125, 178, 194, 219, 354; Capital, 51, 300; the Chinese and, 34, 344, 253–254; cosmopolitanism and, 11; The German Ideology, 175; India and, 291, 300, 301, 305, 307, 308; lit­er­a­ture and, 290. See also Marx-­Engels Institute

Index

Marx-­Engels Institute (IMEL), 290–291, 298, 301 Marxism, 8, 19, 20, 32–33, 36, 63, 66, Marr and, 178; proletarian internationalism and, 3, 194; Qu and, 200; Mao Dun and, 266. See also Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich; Lukács, Georg; Mao Zedong; Marxism-­Leninism Marxism-­Leninism, 15, 18, 204, 205; Marr and, 175, 178, 217, 282 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 90, 121, 192, 334–336, 338; and Hikmet, 48–56, 69, 73, 78 McKay, Claude, 48 Metternich, Klemens von, 31 Meyer, Hannes, 81, 105–106 Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 48, 54, 70; Meyerhold Studio, 48–49; Meyerhold Theater, 48, 49, 50, 52, 70, 207, 211, 229 Mezhrabpom (International Workers’ Aid), 212, 248–249 Modernism, 161–162, 186–187, 296–297, 362 Mohammedanism. See Islam Molotov-­R ibbentrop Pact, 310, 340 Mongolia, Mongols, 17, 142, 291. See also Genghis Khan; Pilniak (Vogau), Boris: Mighty Heart Monin, Paul, 214, 219 Montesquieu: Persian Letters, 249 Moretti, Franco, 15, 19, 21, 85, 106 MORP. See International Union of Revolutionary Writers Moscow: Asians and, 44, 65, 195–196; Chinese writers and, 258, 332–333; Indian writers and, 282, 292; as metropole, 9, 14, 23, 25, 26, 33, 198; MORP and, 239, 28; post-­war, 360, 363; Tretiakov and, 206, 219, 232, 250 Mughals, 13, 103, 137–138, 147, 152, 286. See also Akbar; Tamerlane (Timur) Müller, Max, 169–173, 181, 286 Münzenberg, Willi, 248–249. See also Mezhrabpom Muslim. See Islam Nalëtnyi-­Izrail’son, Mark, 133 NAPF (All-­Japan Federation of Proletarian Artists), 243, 259–260 Napoleon, 129, 137 Naumann, Friedrich, 31 Nazi accession to power, 29, 79–82, 276, 278–279, 310, 359. See also antifascism; fascism

445

Nehru, Jawaharlal, 122, 161, 294, 299 neo-­imperialism, 126, 138 Neruda, Pablo, 358, 359 networks (of literary leftists), 27, 108, 179, 195, 240, 251. See also ecumene (of literary leftists); Manjapra, Kris New Masses, 28, 239 New Writing, 28, 288–290, 293, 317–318, 361 Ngugi wa Thiong’o, 359, 363 Nietz­sche, Friedrich, 54–55, 218, 266; Dionysian, the, 148–153, 156, 162, 222 Nikulin (Ol’konitskii), Lev, 123–161, 167, 169, 179, 191 Nizami, 89, 91; Leila and Majnun, 116 Nochlin, Linda, 135–137 Novyi Vostok, 61, 71, 108, 111, 155, 174–175, 203 Okakura, Kakuzō, 187–189, 192 Oldenburg, Sergei, 173–174, 191–192 opera, 116–119, 226, 352 Oppenheim, Max von, 165–166 Orwell, George, 310 Ostrovsky, Nikolai, 334, 345 Ottomans, 73–82, 156, 162, 213 Ouspensky, Pëtr, 182, 185 Owen, Wilfred, 323 Pan-­Asianism, 32 Pan-­Islamism, 19, 156 Pan-­Turkism, 19 Paris, John, 225, 227 Paris as metropole, 9, 14, 26, 165. See also Paris Congress for the Defense of Culture Paris Congress for the Defense of Culture, 19, 111–113, 279–283, 293, 300, 312, 316 Pavlovich (Vel’tman), Mikhail: at Baku Congress, 3, 20, 30; KUTV and, 61; literary tastes, 110; the “common international ocean of poetry and language” and, 5–7, 13–14, 21, 44, 81, 201, 281, 363. See also Novyi Vostok; railways Persianate literary tradition, 86, 105–111, 116, 152, 153, 168 Persian language. See Farsi (Persian language) Persian lit­er­a­ture, classical, 10, 91, 113, 122, 150–151, 168; see also Hafez (Xāwje Shams-­o d-­D īn Moḥammad Ḥāfeẓ-­e Shīrāzī); Jami (Djāmī); Khayyam, Omar; Lahuti, Abulqasem; Saadi Shiraz

446

Picasso, Pablo, 69 Pilniak (Vogau), Boris, 25, 197–198, 201, 219–232, 240, 287; on Japan 224–231; Mighty Heart, 220–223, 244 Piscator, Erwin, 248, 251 Plato, 51, 80 Plekhanov, Georgi, 261 Pogodin, Nikolai: Man with a Gun, 351 Pollock, Sheldon, 12–13, 85, 168, 172, 241, 286 Popu­lar Front, 79, 294 poputchik (fellow traveler), 221, 277 postcolonialism, 15, 18, 357, 363–364 Pound, Ezra, 10, 46, 190, 229, 264 Prescott, William H.: History of the Conquest of Mexico, 131–132, 134, 139 Profintern (trade u ­ nion international), 48, 212 Proletarian lit­er­a­ture, 5–7, 11, 21, 27, 30, 84, 110; Aini, Lahuti and, 159, 259, 275, 277–278. See also NAPF (All-­Japan Federation of Proletarian Artists); RAPP (Rus­sian Association of Proletarian Writers); Stalin, Joseph [Djugashvili] Proletcult, 25 Pudovkin, Vsevolod, 352; Storm over Asia, 244, 246, 248 Punin, Nikolai, 47, 80 purges, 111–112, 115, 118, 158–159, 310, 312, 355; purge-­t ime rhe­toric, 111–112, 328, 351. See also secret police Pushkin, Aleksandr, 22, 85, 88, 116, 121; Captain’s ­Daughter, 143 Qu Qiubai, 29, 60; first trip to the Soviet Union, 197–198, 199–201, 219–221, 232; second trip to the Soviet Union, a­ fter, 260–261, 264, 266, 272, 334, 339; Mao’s “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Lit­er­a­ture and Art” and, 343–345 Radek, Karl, 158–159; speech at the Baku conference, 1, 4–5, 13, 15, 138, 154; speech to the First Congress of the Writers’ Union, 26, 131, 158, 274–275, 280–281, 284, 362 railways, 104–105, 143, 147–148 RAPP (Rus­sian Association of Proletarian Writers), 110, 114, 115, 159, 238, 240, 259; establishment of Soviet Writers’ Union and the demise of, 277–278

INDEX

Raskolnikov, Fëdor, 38, 122–125, 127–129, 13, 145, 158–159, 191 Razin, Stenka, 52, 88–92, 103, 221 Realism, 16, 240, 272–273, 281; Anand and, 330, 342; Lukács and 191, 328, 347 Red East, 5, 13–14, 16–17, 35, 138 Red Poppy (ballet), 246 Reed, John, 3 Reisner, Igor, 124, 147 Reisner, Larisa, 122, 123–127, 135–139, 143–144, 155–159; Asian conquerors and, 137–142; Gumilëv and, 129–133; Nietz­sche and, 148–153; Thomas and, 144–148 Republic of Letters, 11–12. See also Casanova, Pascale Resht, 88, 90, 92, 101, 103 revolution in Germany, 38, 43, 49, 57, 153, 206, 248; abandoned as Comintern cause, 238 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 321–322 Rimbaud, Arthur, 52 Roerich, Nikolai, 182–186, 192 Romanticism, 16, 98, 116, 166, 186. See also Schlegel, Friedrich Rome, ancient, 10, 15, 16; Roman Empire, 14–15; See also empire; Latin Romm, Aleksandr, 263 Rote Fahne, 190, 211–212, 247, 255 Roy, M. N., 25, 60, 145, 149, 164, 193, 251, 283 Rumi, Jalal-­a l-­Din, 112 Rus­sian Revolution. See Bolshevik Revolution Russo-­Japanese War, 35, 162, 185–186, 224–227 Rustaveli, Shota: Knight in the Panther’s Skin, 114, 116 Saadi Shiraz, 89, 108, 151, 152 Said, Edward, 125–126, 129, 142, 166, 364 Sakantula, 10, 93 Sans­k rit, 10, 12, 19, 86, 89, 91, 105; and Indo-­Europeanism, 167–177, 182, 184, 191 Sans­k rit cosmopolis. See Pollock, Sheldon Sassoon, Siegfried, 323 Scherbatskoi, Fëdor, 191 Schlegel, Friedrich, 167–168, 171 Schütte-­Lihotzky, Margarete, 82 Scythians, 155, 172, 176, 222 secret police: Rus­sian imperial (Third Section), 182; Soviet (Cheka), 68; OGPU 182, 184

Index

Segalen, Victor: René Leys, 223 Seghers, Anna, 247, 254, 266, 269, 279, 284, 360; Die Gefährten, 254–258, 274, 275 Sembène, Ousmane, 359, 363 Serafimovich, Aleksandr, 334, 345 Shanghai debacle, 38, 66–67, 206, 233, 238, 241–242, 245, 247, 257, 261, 265, 269, 324–325, 345 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 136, 140 Shengeli, Georgi, 192–193 Shevchenko, Taras, 22 Shklovsky, Viktor, 97; Marco Polo 291, 337 Shohat, Ellen,136–137, 149 Sholokhov, Mikhail, 334 Shub, Esfir, 328 Silk Road, 99, 102–107 Simonov, Konstantin, 353 sinification, 342, 344 Sino-­Japanese War, 38, 39, 311–313. See also Yan’an Smedley, Agnes, 250, 251, 275, 326, 330–331 Snow, Edgar, 326; Red Star over China, 326–327, 330–332, 340, 430n47 socialist intermediaries. See intermediaries, socialist socialist realism, 12–13, 20, 29–30, 272; Mulk Raj Anand and, 293, 296, 302–304; insti­ tutionalization of, 274, 276, 277, 280–281; masterplot of, 256–257, 276, 278–279, 281–282, 284, 303–304, 328. See also Mao Zedong: “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Lit­er­a­ture and Art” Solovyov, Vladimir, 222, 228 Sophocles, 80 Soviet Civil War, 2, 32, 68, 124, 127, 128, 281 Soviet Union; bureaucracies of the Soviet state, 37, 45, 47, 53, 90–91, 197, 359. See also Communist Party of the Soviet Union; VOKS (All-­Union Society for Cultural Ties with Abroad); Writers’ Union, Soviet Spanish Civil War, 279, 282, 291, 295, 305, 308, 310; Sino-­Japanese War and, 311, 312, 313–317, 318, 328, 340 Speer, Albert, 146 Spender, Stephen, 361 Spengler, Oswald, 36, 155 Stalin, Joseph [Djugashvili], 6, 111, 176, 192, 197, 246, 372n53; death of; 355; “Friendship of ­Peoples” doctrine and, 115–116, 119;

447

Lahuti and, 111, 114–115; Mao Zedong and, 328–330, 342; 1925 speech at KUTV (“Po­liti­cal Tasks of the University of the ­Peoples of the East”), 21, 83–87, 97, 107–108, 113–120, 264; Prob­lems of Leninism, 14–15; Trotsky and, 38, 241–242, 269, 283 Stalsky, Suleiman, 78, 113 Stam, Robert, 136–137, 149 Stanislavsky, Konstantin, 70, 247, 351–352 Sun Yat-­sen, 216, 333 Sun Yat-­sen University, 158, 193, 196, 205, 257, 299 Surrealism, 69, 71, 213, 239, 279 Tagore, Abindranath, 187 Tagore, Rabindranath, 10, 122, 187–193, 294 Tajikistan, 32, 93, 109–120; Tajik Writers’ Union, 110–112 Tamerlane (Timur), 17, 137, 140–141, 145–146, 286 Tashkent as Asian revolutionary center, 125, 164, 179, 283; and Afro-­Asian Writers’ Association (AAWA), 356–359 Tatar, 21, 88 Tatlin, Vladimir, 45 Taut, Bruno, 81–82 Theosophy, 89, 152, 180–186. See also Besant, Annie; Blavatsky, Madame Helena; Vestnik teosofii Thomas, Lowell, 144–148, 153–157, 190 Timur. See Tamerlane Ten Books that ­Shaped the British Empire (Burton and Hofmeyr), 13, 25, 354 Todorov, Tsvetan, 202 Tokyo as internationalist center, 26 Tolstoy, Leo, 22, 110, 191, 196, 337, 340 Tolz, Vera, 135 Transcaucasia, 2, 13, 119 translation, 20–21, 39, 315, 239, 352–353; Benjamin and, 45–46; to and from Chinese, 196–197, 200, 263, 315–316, 322–323, 331–332, 334–335, 338–339, 348–349, 354; Japan, ­Korea, and translations from Rus­sian, 196–197; German to Rus­sian and Rus­sian to German, 251; and VOKS, 243 Translation and Power (Gentzler and Tymoczko), 315, 323 trans-­sense language (zaum), 46–47; verse, 53, 87, 98. See also Khlebnikov, Velemir; Kruchënykh, Aleksei

448

INDEX

Tretiakov, Sergei, 197–198, 201, 203, 222, 232; Khikmet and, 48, 52, 72, 211; Malraux and, 215; as official of literary international, 197–198, 277–278, 355, 362; Roar, China!, 206–212, 214, 222, 332; promotion of Roar, China! ­a fter Shanghai debacle, 243–244, 246, 247, 248, 249, 252, 255, 313. See also factography Trotsky (Bronstein), Leon, 25, 38, 112, 127, 158, 197, 215, 269; on China 158–159, 269; demise, 158–159, 241–242; Lit­er­a­ture and Revolution, 221 Trotskyism, Trotskyites, 112, 115, 159, 279, 328 Trubetskoi, Nikolai, 142 Tubiansky, Mikhail, 191 Turgenev, Ivan, 128, 133, 191, 196, 305 Turin, Viktor: Turksib, 143 Turkestan, 17, 19, 132 Turkey, 4, 13, 19. See also Atatürk, Kemal; Hikmet, Nâzim Turkmenistan, 19, 114 Tymoczko, Maria. See Translation and Power (Gentzler and Tymoczko)

196–197; Pilniak and, 220–221; Tretiakov and, 243; Turkey and, 74, 78 Voltaire. See Republic of Letters Voynich, Ethel, 347–348 Vygotsky, Lev, 177

Upanishads, 171 Uzbekistan, 109–110, 120

Xiao, Ėmi (Xiao San), 25, 29, 63–68, 112, 258; ­career a­ fter disbanding of Comintern, 357, 358–359; ­career ­a fter Shanghai debacle, 193, 258–266, 275, 313, 341; in Yan’an, 328, 332, 334, 337–350, 353 Xi Jinping, 342

Vaillant-­Couturier, Paul, 252 Vakhtangov, Yevgeny, 70 VAPP (All-­Union Association of Proletarian Writers). See RAPP (Rus­sian Association of Proletarian Writers) Ve­das, 170, 171, 172, 181, 183, 188 Vel’tman, Solomon, 71–72, 203, 232 vernacular forms, 20, 83–85, 339, 342–345, 349–351 Vertov, Dziga, 375n6 Vestnik inostrannoi literatury, 259 Vestnik teosofii, 182, 190 Vienna, 43, 56. See also Austria Vietnam, 198, 232. See also Ho Chi Minh; Indochina Vishnevsky, Vsevolod: Optimistic Tragedy, 128 Vladimirtsov, Boris, 142 VOKS (All-­Union Society for Cultural Ties with Abroad), 27, 58–59, 151,179, 238, 355; China and, 196–197, 201, 333–334, 338, 340; East Asia and, 196–197, 201; Germany and, 251; India and, 164–165, 191; Japan and,

Wittfogel, Karl, 253–254 Wolf, Friedrich, 247, 254, 284, 369; Anand and, 302, 307, 324; Mao Dun, and, 266, 268, 269, 270, 274, 296; Tai Yang Awakens, 248–251; Woolf, Leonard, 224, 285, 289 Woolf, ­Virginia, 224, 285, 289, 297, 299 World Lit­er­a­ture, 7–15, 20, 27, 30, 38, 85, 191, 362–367; leftist journals foster a, 239, 290. See also Casanova, Pascale; Moretti, Franco Wright, Richard, 282 Writers’ Union, Soviet, 262–263, 274, 277, 344, 359; First Congress of, 26, 28, 272, 277, 284, 303, 347; Foreign Commission of, 279–280, 308–309, 334–335, 340; Lahuti at First Congress of, 111, 113–114. See also Tajikistan

Yan’an, 313, 328, 329, 335–340. See also Lu Xun Acad­emy; Mao Zedong; Xiao Yeats, William Butler, 190 yellow peril myth, 148, 122 Zaheer (Zahir), Sajjad, 283, 285, 310, 357 Zend-­Avesta, 89, 92, 120 Zhdanov, Andrei, 303, 347 Zhizn’ natsional’nostei, 16, 35–36, 61 Zhou Yang, 333, 339, 340, 343–344, 348–350, 357 Zhukovsky, Vasily, 119 Zinoviev, Grigory, 127; at Baku Congress of the Toilers of the East, 1–5, 17–18, 33, 34, 35, 203; at Congress of Toilers of the Far East, 194–195, 202, 230; purge of, 115 Zola, Émile, 63, 266, 268, 272–273, 335 Zoroastrianism, 89, 150