Internationalist Aesthetics: China and Early Soviet Culture 9780231552981

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I N T E R N AT I O N A L I S T A E S T H E T I C S

STUDI ES OF THE HA R R IM A N IN ST IT UT E OF CO LU M B I A U N I V E R S I TY

INTERNATIONALIST AESTHETICS

CHINA AND E A R LY S O V I E T C U LT U R E

E D WA R D T Y E R M A N

Columbia University Press New York

Publication of this book was made possible, in part, by a grant from the First Book Subvention Program of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies and by a grant from the Harriman Institute of Columbia University. Columbia University Press wishes to express its appreciation for assistance given by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange and Council for Cultural Affairs in the publication of this book.

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2022 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Tyerman, Edward, author. Title: Internationalist aesthetics : China and early Soviet culture / Edward Tyerman. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021015966 (print) | LCCN 2021015967 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231199186 (hardback) | ISBN 9780231199193 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780231552981 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Soviet Union—Foreign relations—China. | China—Foreign relations—Soviet Union. | China—In mass media. | Communism and culture— Soviet Union—History. | Communist aesthetics. | Mass media and culture—Soviet Union—History. | China—Foreign public opinion, Soviet Union. | Soviet Union— Foreign public opinion, Chinese. Classification: LCC DK68.7.C5 T94 2021 (print) | LCC DK68.7.C5 (ebook) | DDC 303.48/24705109042—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021015966 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021015967

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover design: Chang Jae Lee

FOR ROBYN

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix

INTRODUCTION: CHINA AND EARLY SOVIET CULTURE1 1. SIGHT, SOUND, AND SIMILARITY: SOVIET WRITERS TRAVEL TO CHINA37 2. TRANSLATING CHINA ONSTAGE: ROAR, CHINA! AND THE RED POPPY85 3. THROUGH AN INTERNATIONALIST LENS: CHINA IN EARLY SOVIET CINEMA134 4. CONFESSIONS AND COLLABORATIONS: AUTHORITY, AGENCY AND FACTOGRAPHIC INTERNATIONALISM IN DEN SHI-KHUA187 EPILOGUE: INTERNATIONAL LITERATURE, NATIONAL FORM, AND MISSED CONNECTIONS231

Notes 247 Bibliography and Sources 309 Index 333

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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his project has incurred many debts, intellectual, practical, and emotional. The idea of working on early Soviet engagements with China first came to me when I wrote a paper about Boris Pilnyak in Shanghai for Lydia Liu’s Lu Xun seminar at Columbia University. I remain very grateful to Lydia and to everyone at Columbia’s Institute for Comparative Literature and Society for the formative influence that the seminars I took there had on my development as a scholar. I was lucky enough to call Columbia’s Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures home for seven years as a graduate student. To Boris Gasparov, I am indebted for patient and generous guidance as well as for his unparalleled modelling of intellectual possibilities. I was profoundly fortunate to have Cathy Nepomnyashchy for a mentor: her tireless support for her students was legendary, and none of this would have been possible without her. Katerina Clark has provided comradely advice, insight, and inspiration throughout my work on Sino-Soviet intersections. I could not imagine a better place to complete this book than the ever-stimulating environment of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. At Berkeley, I have had the rare good fortune to benefit from conversations and interactions with such colleagues as Weihong Bao, Luba Golburt, Andrew Jones, Steven Lee, Olga Matich, Anna Muza, Eric Naiman, Anne Nesbet, Irina Paperno, Djordje Popovic, and Harsha Ram. Equally essential to this book’s completion have

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been the conversations I have had in seminars with Berkeley graduate students, which have greatly enriched my thinking on a number of issues. Invaluable does not begin to describe the assistance I have received from Liladhar Pendse and Jianye He, Berkeley’s infinitely resourceful librarians for East European and Chinese collections. I am very grateful to Steve Smith and Mark Lipovetsky for attending my manuscript conference and offering generous feedback that greatly enriched the final product, as did the comments of the anonymous reviewers for Columbia University Press. Roy Chan has been a collaborator, co-conspirator, exemplar, and friend. Among the many others who have helped this project over the years, I am especially thankful to Tarik Amar, Aleksandar Bošković, Jinyi Chu, Anatoly Detwyler, Rossen Djagalov, Devin Fore, Mark Gamsa, Gal Gvili, Katie Holt, Liza Knapp, Greta Matzner-Gore, Elizabeth McGuire, Yu Min-ling, Mary Missirian, Simon Morrison, Elizabeth Papazian, Kevin Platt, Cathy Popkin, Emma Widdis, and Yurou Zhong. Finally, to return to the start, I would never have become a Slavist if I had not studied with Catriona Kelly at Oxford and Arnold McMillin at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, and I would never have learned Russian in the first place were it not for Hugh Aplin. A four-year Summer Fellowship from Columbia’s Institute for Comparative Literature and Society enabled me to spend my summers as a graduate student learning Chinese, and whatever success I had in that endeavor I owe to the wonderful Chinese language teachers of Columbia’s East Asian department and the Columbia in Beijing summer program (especially Liu Lening and Wang Zhirong). A crucial year of research in Moscow was made possible by a Moseley-Backer Fellowship from Columbia’s Harriman Institute, which has continued to support this book on its path to publication as a volume in the Studies of the Harriman Institute series and a recipient of the Harriman First Book Subvention Award. At Harriman, special thanks are due to Alex Cooley, Ron Meyer, and Alla Rachkov. In Moscow, I must thank the staff at the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History, the Russian State Documentary Film and Photo Archive, the Bolshoi Theater Museum, the A.  A. Bakhrushin State Central Theater Museum, Muzei kino, and the Russian State Library. In St. Petersburg, the same gratitude goes to the staff at the Central State Archive of Literature and Art and the archive of the Mariinsky Theater. Less institutional but

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equally essential research assistance came from Aleksandr Grishin, Evgeny Lyutko, Jill Roese, and Allyson Tang. Colin Siyuan Chinnery of the Beijing Sound Museum was kind enough to share some of his recordings with me. A fellowship at Berkeley’s Townsend Center for the Humanities gave me valuable time to complete the book, and also provided a stimulating intellectual community in our weekly discussions. A generous grant from Berkeley’s Institute of International Studies funded a miniconference on the manuscript in October 2019. The book’s publication has been supported by a First Book Subvention from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, and a grant from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange. At Columbia University Press, I am profoundly indebted to Christine Dunbar for her faith in the manuscript, and to Christian Winting for patient assistance. Part of what became chapter 2 of this book appeared as “Resignifying The Red Poppy: Internationalism and Symbolic Power in the Sino-Soviet Encounter,” Slavic and East European Journal 61, no. 3 (2017): 445–66. An early version of chapter 4 appeared as “Sino-Soviet Confessions: Authority, Agency and Autobiography in Sergei Tret’iakov’s Den Shi-khua,” Russian Review 77, no. 1 (2018). Both are reprinted with permission and have been substantially revised for this publication. My path to a book on internationalism has taken me across my own share of international borders, and I am grateful above all to those who have provided a sense of home across my various dislocations. The Safronov family in Yaroslavl taught me more than anyone about the living Russian language and the profound warmth of Russian hospitality. Michael Ossorgin, Ben Lussier, Mie Mortensen, Anna Dvigubski, John Wright, and Molly Rose Ávila provided incomparable musical and emotional camaraderie in New York City. My family in the United Kingdom and Ireland have patiently borne my absences, and remain my first and best source of inspiration and encouragement. Last but not least, to Robyn Jensen, who makes everything possible, I owe all of this and much more.

I N T E R N AT I O N A L I S T A E S T H E T I C S

INTRODUCTION China and Early Soviet Culture

Was it so long ago that China was considered the archetype of those countries that have experienced centuries of total stagnation? Today China is seething with political life, an energetic social movement and a democratic upsurge. —VLADIMIR LENIN, “THE AWAKENING OF ASIA” (1913)

We know nothing about China in Russia! —BORIS PILNYAK, “CHINESE STORY” (1927)

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n March 23, 1927, Vladimir Mayakovsky published a poem called “The Best Verse.” This short text describes a reading held in Yaroslavl two days earlier. An audience member gives Mayakovsky a simple request: “Comrade Mayakovsky, read your best poem.” While the poet ponders which of his poems to choose, the secretary of the local paper, The Northern Worker, whispers a piece of news into his ear. Mayakovsky turns to the audience and, in place of a composition of his own, announces the news he has just heard: “Comrades! Workers and Canton soldiers have taken Shanghai!” The poem reports the audience’s response: “As if crushing tin in their palms, / the force of the ovation grew and grew. / For five, ten, fifteen minutes, / Yaroslavl applauded.” Gathering power, this applause crosses Eurasia to join the anti-imperial

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uprising taking place in the port on the Pacific: “It seemed this storm stretched across the versts, / in response to all of Chamberlain’s notes, / rolled to China—and the dreadnoughts / turned their steel mugs away from Shanghai.”1 Solidarity, in Mayakovsky’s imagination, has material geopolitical effects: applause in Yaroslavl has the power to intervene in events in China. This applause has another, more local effect. It forces Mayakovsky to devalue his own life’s work in poetry relative to the latest news from the front line of the global revolution: Не приравняю всю поэтическую слякоть, любую из лучших поэтических слав, не приравняю к простому газетному факту, если так ему рукоплещет Ярославль. О, есть ли привязанность большей силищи, чем солидарность, прессующая рабочий улей?! Рукоплещи, ярославец, маслобой и текстильщик, незнаемым и родным китайским кули!

I will not equate all that poetic slush, any of the greatest poetic glories, I will not equate them to the simple newspaper fact, if Yaroslavl applauds it thus. O, is there an attachment of greater power than the solidarity that moulds the workers’ hive? Applaud, Yaroslavets, butter maker, textile worker, these unknown and kindred Chinese coolies!2

In line with what Elizabeth Papazian has called the “documentary moment” in early Soviet culture, Mayakovsky’s verses downgrade poetry to the subordinate role of celebrating the emotional power of the “simple

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newspaper fact.”3 “The Best Verse” acclaims the capacity of reported news, transmitted at high speed through the electrical medium of the telegraph, to produce a sense of transnational connection: the word priviazannost’ (attachment or affection), at its root, suggests a process of material binding or linking. But how did Mayakovsky’s best verse come to be a headline about events in China? How does the relationship between Yaroslavl and Shanghai become the key bond in the international workers’ hive? And how should we understand the nature of this bond that links Soviet factory workers to “Chinese coolies”? Can Mayakovsky deploy this term, with its derogatory associations with the global exploitation of indentured Asian labor, as an expression of solidarity?4 How can the “coolies” of Shanghai be both “unknown” and “kindred,” both distant and vitally connected? This book answers these questions by uncovering how the relationship with China became the key site for imagining internationalism in early Soviet culture. The final lines of The Communist Manifesto (1848) demanded the reshaping of political solidarity in response to capital’s globalization of productive forces: “Proletarians of all countries, unite!”5 But  this call contained an implicit limitation: proletarians did not yet cover the globe. In the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, industrial production remained concentrated in Europe, North America, and Japan. The International Workingmen’s Association (1864–1876) and the Second International (1889–1916) followed Marx and Engels in assigning primary importance to the socialist revolution in the industrialized West. Colonialism remained a secondary issue, even for some socialists a progressive force.6 When the Bolshevik Party came to power in Russia, they too conceived their revolution as the first step in a proletarian uprising that would sweep across Europe in the wake of the First World War. But the failure of revolution in Europe led to a pivot toward Asia, supported theoretically by Lenin’s analysis of the colonized world as a crucial source of wealth for the capitalist powers.7 At its Second Congress in 1920, the Third Communist International (Comintern) declared its intention to support national-revolutionary movements in colonized and semicolonized countries. A few months later, the First Congress of the Peoples of the East in Baku updated the Manifesto’s concluding phrase to encompass the colonized world: “Proletarians of all lands and oppressed peoples of the whole world, unite!”8 The Comintern’s turn to Asia involved fostering revolutions in societies with few industrial proletarians, in alliance

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with nationalist parties with little connection to Marxism. It also meant leaving the European comfort zone of nineteenth-century socialist internationalism and seeking to forge connections of solidarity and common interest with societies relegated to exotic inferiority by a Eurocentric and racialized model of world history. Thus, the political project of directing the global revolutionary process through the Comintern coexisted with a cultural project: to produce a sense of connection to an international community of enemies of capital. In the 1920s, the most important country for both these projects was China. Asia’s largest country offered a prime testing ground for the Soviet attempt to reverse Russia’s role in the world, from imperial power to leader of the global anti-imperialist movement. Whereas Tsarist Russia had expanded at China’s expense in the Far East, the Soviet government quickly renounced Chinese territories and concessions granted to its imperial predecessor. At the same time, the Comintern began an active intervention in China’s internal politics. From 1923 to 1927, the Comintern provided intensive support and training to the Guomindang (Nationalist Party), which sought to reunite under its rule a fragmented polity shaped by competing military factions and powerful foreign economic interests. The newly formed Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was pushed into an uncomfortable alliance with the Guomindang. In 1927, the Nationalists turned violently against their Communist allies, putting an end to Soviet ambitions to shape the course of China’s political development. The victory that Mayakovsky celebrated was, in fact, the prelude to a catastrophe. Parallel to this intensive investment in Chinese politics, China and its contemporary fate emerged as a central theme in Soviet culture of the 1920s. Across the genres and media of the new society, in films, plays, and ballet, in fictional and documentary literature, China appeared at the heart of Soviet explorations into the nature and meaning of internationalism. This book reconstructs early Soviet culture’s engagement with China as this period’s most sustained and profound attempt at imagining the possibilities of an internationalist, anti-imperialist community. Of course, China was not the only country where internationalism was at issue. It was, however, the most politically acute, and the closest the Comintern came to sponsoring a successful anti-imperial revolution in a major country. More importantly for my argument, China was the space where the question of creating a new internationalist political relationship

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intersected most insistently with the question of how such a relationship should be mediated, represented, and produced. In the case of China, the question of internationalism was for Soviet culture also a question of aesthetics. This was the space where issues of internationalist politics and aesthetic form overlapped, intertwined, and produced discoveries. While they tackled a vital contemporary theme, the writers, dramatists, and filmmakers considered in this book also participated in the antagonistic development of new forms and new media that occupied the first decade of Soviet cultural history. The political impetus to forge a new relationship with China was refracted into the cultural field as a series of struggles between writers and groups for the legitimacy of their approach to cultural production and transcultural connection.9 Hence, this book not only illuminates a central moment in the cultural history of Soviet internationalism but also reframes several of the key aesthetic debates of the Soviet 1920s: documentary versus fiction, fragmentation versus smoothness, modernism versus realism. These debates, at crucial moments, were also about internationalism. My analysis proceeds on two levels to illustrate how the aspirations and contradictions of the internationalist project took shape in culture. On the level of cultural history, I reconstruct the production histories of key texts, films, and stage performances to reveal a complex network of travel and collaboration embracing Soviet cultural producers, Soviet and Chinese spaces, and Chinese interlocutors and intermediaries. On the level of formal analysis, I contend that the aesthetic tensions within these works replay and seek to work through the contradictions that structured the political project of Comintern internationalism: between global solidarity and Soviet leadership, between transnational community and abiding cultural difference. Cultural texts may provide imaginary resolutions to real contradictions, as Fredric Jameson paraphrases Claude Lévi-Strauss, but  they can also materialize and dwell within those contradictions.10 I give the name “internationalist aesthetics” to this collective attempt to express and resolve the contradictions of internationalism through the production of culture. The central figure in this narrative is the avant-garde writer and theorist Sergei Mikhailovich Tretyakov, who spent eighteen months teaching Russian at Beijing University in 1924–1925 and became the decade’s most prominent cultural mediator of China for a Soviet audience (figure 0.1).

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FIGURE 0.1  Sergei

Tretyakov in Beijing.

Source: Russian State Archive of Literature and Art f. 2886 op. 1 ed. khr. 73 l. 10. Reproduced with permission.

Tretyakov condemned the established image of China in the popular imagination as an exotic fantasy that constituted a form of commodity fetishism, dehumanizing the Chinese and masking their contemporary, semicolonial reality. His assault on the fetishized image of China contributed to a wider critique of imperialist culture in the early Soviet period, one that built on elements from the prerevolutionary past while anticipating aspects of postcolonial thought in the later twentieth century. As a counter to exoticism, Tretyakov used his writings on China to develop the documentary principles that would later become known as

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the “literature of fact”: a mode of writing that deployed exclusively factual materials in active support of the socialist revolutionary project. Only a journalistic practice rooted in eyewitness reporting of contemporary reality, Tretyakov insisted, could transform the Soviet subject’s relationship to China. This documentary impulse toward China spread beyond Tretyakov’s work to embrace different media, including poetry, film, and even ballet. Hence Mayakovsky’s “Best Verse” insists that the technologically mediated circulation of reported facts can generate the new form of emotional connection on which internationalism must depend: a feeling of kinship with unknown cultural others on the opposite side of the Eurasian continent. Simultaneously renouncing and deploying the affective power of poetic language, the poem both represents and seeks to produce a new form of political subjectivity, one shaped by a modern media system and grounded in a sense of transcultural community. This is the aspiration of what I call internationalist aesthetics: to render the world knowable as the site of a global struggle against capital, and to create a new kind of political subject with horizontal affinities across the lines of nation, race, and culture. The cultural dimensions of Soviet internationalism have returned to focus in a series of excellent recent studies, which trace the complex networks that connected Soviet institutions and Soviet cultural agents to a diverse global field of leftists, anti-imperialists, and minority intellectuals.11 These studies reveal a cultural field shaped by a dynamic that Robert Young identifies in the political history of the Comintern itself: a “constant tension between centripetal and centrifugal forces,” between a vertical hierarchy and a horizontal network.12 On the one hand, socialist internationalism envisioned a horizontal relationship of political solidarity among individuals, groups, and communities previously separated by national, cultural, or racial borders. On the other hand, the historical primacy of the October Revolution and the domination of the Comintern by the Soviet Communist Party tended to recenter Moscow as the leader of the global revolutionary movement.13 My central claim is that this tension between centrifugal and centripetal forces also structured the formal innovations and contradictions of internationalist aesthetics. If Vladimir Papernyi described the horizontal, centrifugal “Culture One” of the Soviet 1920s giving way to a vertical, centripetal “Culture Two” in the 1930s, the culture of Soviet internationalism always held these

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two principles in some form of dynamic interaction.14 This tension finds expression throughout this book in the shifting balance between Soviet authority and Sino-Soviet collaboration, between the theoretical power of a Soviet-centric perspective on global history and the need for forms of translation and localized interpretation. This is also a book about China, and one that seeks to contribute to a global history of modern China. This period of intensive Soviet political and cultural engagement came at a pivotal moment in China’s twentieth-century history. The May Thirtieth movement of 1925, triggered by protests against British imperial violence, saw a new “class-inflected anti-imperialist nationalism” sweep the country, while the ultimate collapse of the united front brokered by the Comintern led to a conflict between the Nationalist and Communist Parties that would shape China’s politics for decades to come.15 This was also a transformative time for China’s intellectual culture, when writers and thinkers associated with the iconoclastic New Culture and May Fourth movements criticized the cultural inheritance of the past and searched for viable paths to Chinese modernity. Central to that search was an unprecedented turn toward Russia. Russian literature became one of the key influences in the formation of modern Chinese literature, offering writers such as Lu Xun 元䖙, Mao Dun㣙Ⳓ, Ba Jin Ꮘ䞥, and others a model for modern vernacular writing and socially engaged realism.16 At the same time, Soviet socialism became one of the most powerful models for China’s political modernity.17 Beginning in the 1920s, thousands of young Chinese revolutionaries traveled to Moscow to study Marxism and the Soviet system at two newly founded institutions, the Communist University for the Workers of the East (f. 1921) and the Sun Yat-sen University for the Workers of China (f. 1925). Graduates and former employees of these institutions— including Qu Qiubai ⶓ⾟ⱑ, Xiao San 㭁ϝ (Emi Siao), Jiang Guangci 㩟‫ܝ‬᜜, Cao Jinghua ᳍䴪㧃, Liu Shaoqi ࡝ᇥ༛, and Deng Xiaoping 䛻ᇣᑇ—came to play prominent roles in China’s Communist movement, as political actors and as mediators for Soviet culture.18 The Soviet encounter with China in the 1920s was very much a two-way street, and many of the Soviet texts, films, and performances considered in this book emerged out of a complex process of interaction and collaboration with Chinese students and intellectuals. This book also intervenes in the history of China as a global signifier. Many contributions to this history describe China’s role in the cultural

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imagination of the West, although the Russian case has also received attention.19 Such studies (including mine) must negotiate the long shadow cast by Edward Said’s Orientalism, with its argument that European cultural and knowledge production about “the East” worked to affirm the cultural difference and developmental disparity between East and West, and thus the legitimacy of the latter’s rule over the former.20 In the case of China, the sense of geographical distance from the West has historically served to ground an understanding of Chinese civilization as paradigmatically other, although that otherness has not carried an exclusively negative charge.21 Rather, as Eric Hayot suggests, Western modernity’s “dream of the universalization of culture” has found itself obliged to negotiate the particular position of China as a test of its own limits: “ ‘China’ has been most consistently characterized as a limit or potential limit, a horizon neither of otherness nor of similarity, but rather of the very distinction between otherness and similarity.”22 China’s alterity has exerted a productive force on Western deliberations of universal questions, offering Leibniz and Voltaire a model of social harmony, yet serving as a paradigm of historical stagnation for Hegel.23 In the early twentieth century, key Western modernists, including Ezra Pound, Bertolt Brecht, and Sergei Eisenstein, turned to Chinese culture to hold up a critical mirror to their own culture’s accumulated understandings of aesthetics and semiotics.24 Tretyakov and the Soviet avant-garde also belong to the history of European modernism; indeed, Eisenstein will appear in these pages as the prospective director of an unmade film trilogy set in China. The Soviet case displays distinctive features, however. In part, this relates to Russia’s ambivalent position within the East-West divide that shaped Eurocentric geography.25 From a Russian point of view, China could be both culturally distant and geographically adjacent. As Lucien Bianco notes, Russia and China shared a certain experience of belated modernization, two semiperipheral Eurasian empires struggling to compete in a world system dominated by industrialized imperial powers.26 Yet the Soviet internationalist project offers something different again: it seeks to inscribe China into a new universalism, one centered around a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary narrative of world history. In place of exotic Oriental otherness, this new universalism asserts a form of commensurability, grounded in political economy, that locates China and Soviet Russia within the same revolutionary modernity.27 At the same time, true to the struggle between centrifugal and centripetal forces, the Comintern’s insistence on the universality

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of a Marxist-Leninist theory based on European class categories opened the door to a Soviet mode of Orientalism, which would relegate China to an earlier stage on the timeline of revolutionary development and position the Soviet Union in the role of advanced mentor. Any affirmation of commensurability and coevalness also had to contend with racialized notions of absolute difference inherited from the transnational discourse of Yellow Peril, an anxiety precisely over East Asian modernization that took root in prerevolutionary Russia in response to Chinese migration and the political rise of Japan.28 Nonetheless, the search for commensurability within a common revolutionary modernity renders the Orientalist model insufficient for this encounter, especially given that the search proceeded in both directions. The Soviet and Chinese cultural agents considered in this book encountered one another at a time when both sides were seeking alternative models of the future that could reframe these historically distinct cultures as inhabiting the same historical moment, a moment of social transformation and the collapse of old orders. This book, then, is not simply about the “representation” of China in Soviet culture. Its key concern might better be described as mediation: how did interpersonal interactions, forms of media, and modes of translation work to facilitate a new relationship of communication and contact between China and Soviet Russia within the same global present? In the rest of this introduction, I outline the immediate context of Sino-Soviet relations in the 1920s; expand on the longer historical and cultural relationship between Russia and China; and explore how Tretyakov’s project to transform this relationship was grounded in a particular early Soviet understanding of the connection between emotional or affective experience and political consciousness. Last, I offer a preview of the book’s argument as it moves through a series of chapters devoted to specific media and traces the shifting understandings of mediation that shaped this Sino-Soviet encounter.

C H I NA AND THE SOVIET UN ION I N T HE 1 920 s

The Comintern’s model of world revolution emerged from the interimperial slaughter of the First World War. Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest

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Stage of Capitalism, written during the war, treated the conflict as an inevitable result of capitalism’s expansion into a global system of competing imperial monopolies.29 Lenin’s account of the world economy placed especial emphasis on the vital role of the colonized and semicolonized countries of Asia, Africa, and South America as links in the global system of imperialism. The colonies supplied the imperialist powers with both materials and markets, and the wealth generated from their colonial possessions enabled the imperial nations to make concessions to their own workers.30 Thus, it became crucial for Lenin that the workers of “oppressor” nations make common cause with the “oppressed,” colonized nations: “In the internationalist education of the workers of the oppressor countries, emphasis must necessarily be laid on their advocating freedom for the oppressed countries to secede and their fighting for it. Without this there can be no internationalism.”31 Lenin’s internationalism involved a dialectical balancing act with nationalism: while suppressing their own nationalist instincts, the Western proletariat must encourage the nationalist aspirations of the colonized world. In turn, the independence of the colonies would deprive the capitalist powers of a valuable source of wealth and pave the way for the socialist revolution in the industrialized West. At its Second Congress in July 1920, the Comintern adopted Lenin’s “Theses on National and Colonial Questions,” which codified this strategy of supporting nationalist liberation movements in colonized and semicolonized countries. Communist parties in these countries were instructed to form strategic alliances with bourgeois–nationalist independence movements. Once imperial rule had been overthrown, the Comintern would work through these local Communists to guide developments toward the proletarian (and ultimately global) revolution.32 China provided a dramatic testing ground for this strategy. The last Chinese imperial dynasty, the Qing, had fallen in the Xinhai Revolution of 1911–1912. By the early 1920s, the Chinese Republic formed in its place had become a battleground. Control of the Beijing (Peking) government shifted between political groups supported by various “warlord” generals, while the Guomindang under Sun Yat-sen ᄿ䘌ҭ formed its own power base in Guangzhou (Canton) in the south. These political changes did little to damage the sizeable foreign economic interests in China. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the Qing Empire had suffered a series of military defeats, including the First (1839–1842) and Second Opium Wars

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(1856–1860) and the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895). The treaties concluded in the wake of these wars granted extensive commercial, legal and territorial concessions to Britain, France, Germany, Japan, the United States, and Russia. Treaty ports, such as Shanghai and Tianjin, operated under the administration of foreign nationals, and foreigners throughout China were exempt from Chinese law under the principle of “extraterritoriality.”33 By 1914, foreign investments in China were worth some $1.61 billion.34 The Comintern used a term coined by Lenin in Imperialism to describe this situation: they called China a “semicolonial” country, dominated economically by foreign powers but not administered directly as a colony.35 After 1927, this term would be taken up by Mao Zedong ↯╸ᵅ and other Chinese Marxists in their analyses of China’s political and economic condition.36 China’s crisis of sovereignty drew Chinese intellectuals, beginning in the late-Qing period, into a complex process of reassessing their cultural inheritance while absorbing a vast range of intellectual influences from abroad.37 The New Culture movement of the 1910s, spearheaded by intellectuals such as Hu Shi 㚵䘽, Chen Duxiu 䱇⤼⾔, and Lu Xun, advocated for a vernacularized literature and criticized Confucian tradition as a hindrance to China’s modernization. A political intensification of this process came with the student protests in Beijing on May 4, 1919, an enraged response to the transfer of Germany’s colonies in China to Japan at the Treaty of Versailles. The intellectual debates of the early 1920s, often labeled the May Fourth movement, showcased the complex combination of nationalism, iconoclasm, and cosmopolitanism that shaped this period of China’s intellectual history.38 The political cause of national sovereignty sanctioned an iconoclastic attack on the inherited traditions of the national past, while an expansive cosmopolitanism sought models in the cultures of the West and Japan—the very countries that profited from China’s semicolonial condition.39 A Leninist strain of Marxism entered this shifting intellectual field in the wake of the Russian Revolution of 1917, finding its first advocates in Chen Duxiu, editor of the journal Xin qingnian (New Youth), and Li Dazhao ᴢ໻䞫, head librarian of Beijing University.40 Lenin, in turn, had named China in 1913 as the prime example of the “Awakening of Asia”: “Was it so long ago that China was considered the archetype of those countries that have experienced centuries of total stagnation? Today China is seething with political life, an energetic social

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movement and a democratic upsurge.”41 Lenin invoked the hoary trope of the “slumbering East” only to overturn it, redrawing the coordinates of  Orientalist geography to place a newly revolutionary China at the heart of the historical process.42 Once in power, the Soviet government moved swiftly to distance itself from the Tsarist legacy in China. After acquiring the Amur and Ussuri regions from Qing China in 1858–1860, Imperial Russia had expanded its power into Manchuria with the building of the Chinese Eastern Railway (CER), a branch of the Trans-Siberian, in the 1890s.43 In July 1919, Lev Karakhan, deputy People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, issued the First Karakhan Manifesto, which pledged to renounce all the territorial, legal, and economic concessions won by the Russian Empire in Manchuria. This was an unprecedented move by a foreign power to relinquish its holdings in China, forming a stark contrast to China’s treatment by the victorious powers at Versailles. When the Republic of China established diplomatic relations with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1924, Karakhan would become the first Soviet ambassador to China.44 The Comintern, meanwhile, turned increasingly toward Asia, following the 1920 Baku Congress for the Peoples of the East with a Congress for the Toilers of the Far East in Moscow in 1922.45 As the decade proceeded, the focus of revolutionary hopes came to rest above all on China. True to Lenin’s theses, the Comintern cultivated an alliance with Sun Yat-sen’s Guomindang, China’s Nationalist Party, believing them to be the party most likely to reunify China and overthrow foreign influence. A declaration in January 1923, signed by Sun and Soviet diplomat Adolf Joffe, formalized the alliance.46 Comintern advisers led by Mikhail Borodin and Vasily Blyukher arrived in Guangzhou from 1923, determined to reorganize the Guomindang into a Leninist party structure with a modern army at its disposal.47 Comintern agents also traveled to the northern city of Kalgan in 1925 to assist the National Army (Guominjun) of General Feng Yuxiang 侂⥝⼹.48 Guomindang leaders, including General Chiang Kai-shek 㫷ҟ⷇, traveled to Moscow to meet with Soviet dignitaries.49 November 1925 saw the founding of Moscow’s Sun Yat-sen University, an institution designed to train Guomindang elites for the national revolution.50 Meanwhile, the CCP, founded in collaboration with the Comintern in 1921, followed Comintern strategy by forming a united front with the Nationalists and joining their campaign to reunify the country.51

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This plan backfired. By March 1927, the Guomindang army, trained and aided by Soviet advisers, had marched north from Guangzhou and entered Shanghai—the event celebrated in Mayakovsky’s “Best Verse.” Here, Chiang Kai-shek orchestrated a purge of the left-wing organizations in China’s most proletarian city. On April 12–14, Guomindang troops acting together with gangsters from Shanghai’s criminal underworld attacked union headquarters and fired on protestors, killing hundreds and imprisoning hundreds more.52 Earlier that month, police acting for the Fengtian government of Zhang Zuolin ᔉ԰䳪 had raided the Soviet embassy in Beijing, confiscating documents and arresting several Chinese Communists. Among them was Li Dazhao, the co-founder of the CCP, who was later executed.53 When the alliance in Wuhan between the CCP and the left wing of the Guomindang finally collapsed in July, Borodin and other Comintern agents set off for Russia, fleeing through the Gobi Desert by car.54 By August 1927, the Comintern mission in China was effectively over. Meanwhile, within the USSR, the dispute over China policy and its failure became the focal point of a climactic confrontation between Joseph Stalin and the Left Opposition. This struggle for power resulted in Lev Trotsky and Grigory Zinoviev’s expulsion from the party in November 1927 and Stalin’s effective installment as undisputed leader.55 The violent suppression of the Canton Uprising, launched under orders from Stalin in December 1927, finalized the defeat of Comintern policy in China.56

A N EW SENSE OF THE WORLD

This political pivot toward China coincided with a concerted cultural effort to reshape popular attitudes toward Russia’s eastern neighbor. Russia and China were first connected by the Mongol conquests, although trade and contact only began on a significant scale after the Treaty of Nerchinsk had fixed the border between the Qing Empire and the  expanding Romanov state in 1689.57 In the eighteenth century, negative firsthand accounts of the Middle Kingdom circulated in Russia alongside the positive assessments of Chinese institutions found in the writings of French Enlightenment thinkers, such as Voltaire.58 By the early nineteenth century, the philosophies of history penned by Herder and Hegel had recast

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China as a stagnant land of eternal despotism. In their wake, anti-Tsarist thinkers, such as Petr Chaadaev and Vissarion Belinsky, used Chinese stagnation—kitaishchina—as an Asiatic mirror for the despotism and belatedness of the Russian condition.59 As the Russian Empire expanded further into East Asia in the later nineteenth century, intellectuals close to the throne, including Esper Ukhtomsky and Petr Badmaev, envisioned Russian rule over China as part of the Empire’s Asian destiny.60 The colonization of the Russian Far East also led to an increased influx of Chinese migrants, which combined with fears of a rising Japan to produce a virulent Russian strain of the Yellow Peril anxieties that spread across Europe and its settler colonies in the 1890s and 1900s.61 Vladimir Solovyov’s apocalyptic visions of “pan-Mongolism,” a new Mongol invasion of Russia from the rising East, haunted the imaginations of Andrei Bely and other Silver Age writers.62 Yet the culture of the late-Imperial period engaged with China in ways that extended beyond racialized geopolitical fear. Other Russian modernists, including Lev Gumilev and Aleksei Remizov, turned to Chinese culture as a source of aesthetic renewal.63 Lev Tolstoy translated the Dao De Jing and praised Laozi as an exemplar of ancient moral wisdom.64 In the growing sphere of commercialized popular culture, transnational networks of circulation brought the theatrical chinoiserie of the European stage and the exotic, mysterious China of French literature to Russian audiences.65 Already in the late-nineteenth century, voices began to emerge that criticized the distorted nature of popular knowledge about China. Notable in this regard is the work of Sergei Georgievsky, a Sinologist associated with the Rozen school of Orientology at the University of St. Petersburg. As Vera Tolz has shown, this group of scholars launched a critique of essentialist divisions of West from East that in some respects anticipated the postcolonial work of Said and others in the later twentieth century.66 Georgievsky’s 1890 essay “The Importance of Studying China” denounced the Eurocentric tendency to equate China with stagnation and immobility and lamented the lack of space devoted to China in the so-called world histories from which educated Russians received their historical knowledge.67 These attacks on Eurocentrism acquired a more explicitly anticolonial dimension after the October Revolution, with the emergence of a Marxist school of Soviet Orientalism based from 1922 around the journal Novyi Vostok (The New East). The journal’s editor, Mikhail

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Pavlovich, denounced Western Orientalism as a handmaiden of imperial power.68 Pavlovich’s brother, the critic Solomon Veltman, published a range of articles on the representation and misrepresentation of the East in colonial novels, Russian literature, and cinema.69 In a restructuring of the relationship Said identified between Orientalism and political power, Novyi Vostok sought to produce new forms of knowledge about the contemporary East that could support the political projects of the Soviet state and the Comintern.70 Early Soviet engagements with China were frequently accompanied by lamentations of ignorance. “Essentially, we do not know China,” wrote Lev Karakhan, newly installed as ambassador in Beijing, in 1924.71 “We know nothing about China in Russia!” declared the writer Boris Pilnyak, writing his “Chinese Story” after a visit to Beijing, Hankou, and Shanghai in 1926.72 “We know almost nothing about China,” admitted the Formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky in his review of Chzhungo, a 1927 collection of Tretyakov’s articles on China.73 Such statements perform a tabula rasa: they insist that any knowledge accumulated in the prerevolutionary period is deficient and that a new form of knowledge must be generated to facilitate the political project of internationalism. But what new forms of knowledge are needed, and how should they be produced? One answer to this question came from the journalist and professor A. Ivin (Yiwen Ӟ᭛, the pseudonym of Aleksei Alekseevich Ivanov). Unlike many of the Soviet mediators of China discussed in this book, Ivin was fluent in Chinese, which he had studied in Paris before moving to Beijing sometime before 1917.74 During the 1920s, Ivin headed the Russian Department at Beijing University, which played a significant role in connecting radical Chinese intellectuals and students to the Soviet Union, hosting cultural emissaries such as Tretyakov, and maintaining close links with the Soviet Embassy.75 One of the department’s founding members, the Sinologist Sergei Polevoi, introduced the Comintern’s first emissary to China, Grigory Voitinsky, to Li Dazhao in 1920.76 That same year, Li began running his pioneering Marxism Research Group at Beijing University, where he also employed Mao Zedong as a library assistant.77 Lu Xun, who taught at Beijing University in the mid-1920s, recalls discussing Russian literature with Ivin and mentions that Ivin and Tretyakov helped him with a translation of Aleksandr Blok’s famous poem of the revolution, “The Twelve.”78 Ivin became an authoritative voice on contemporary

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China in the Soviet press, publishing articles in Pravda, Novyi Vostok, and elsewhere.79 His programmatic article “China and the Soviet Union,” published in the prestigious journal Krasnaia nov’ (Red Virgin Soil ) in March 1924, outlines the scale of the task that internationalist aesthetics sought to solve: the creation of a new political relationship between China and the USSR under conditions of widespread popular ignorance. China’s vast population, Ivin argues, makes it the focal point in the global struggle between socialism and capitalism: Here, in this immense land that has for century upon century been for Asia what Greece and Rome were for Europe, here, in the struggle between two irreconcilable worlds for mastery of an immeasurable human ocean, the fates of our planet are being decided. Will we enter the kingdom of socialism, or will we transition to a new, higher phase of capitalism—the answer to this fateful question will be given by Asia, and above all by China, by China’s evolution over the coming decade.80

Given China’s vital importance for this global struggle, Ivin can only lament his compatriots’ general ignorance of their Eastern neighbor. “For tens of thousands of versts,” he notes, “we share a border with a great and ancient country, an entire separate world comparable only to ancient Rome,” one of the “main branches of human civilization.”81 Along this vast border, “we are neighbors to a country whose role in the global economy is growing with astonishing speed, neighbors to a people 400-million strong, whose imminent evolution will determine to a significant extent the fate of all of Asia.”82 And yet Soviet Russia is both adjacent to and distant from China: the Soviet population knows as much about China “as if China was not our neighbor, but located on another planet.”83 Echoing Georgievsky, Ivin traces this troubling ignorance to an ingrained cultural Eurocentrism. The history taught in Soviet schools still locates the origins of world history in Rome and the Mediterranean, reducing the rest of the world to a “grey formless mass” subdued by superior European technology. Schoolchildren learn that the East is “backward and uncivilized.”84 Even for a “conscious socialist,” Ivin admits, “it can be difficult to renounce this instinctively semi-suspicious attitude towards everything that lies outside of the so-called ‘civilized world.’ ”85 This produces a remarkable ignorance of Asia, despite the fact that territorially

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“we ourselves are more or less an Asiatic country.”86 Soviet culture can hardly claim to have overcome the prejudices of the capitalist world until it sheds this “European chauvinism” and the distorted map of the world that it produces.87 As a geopolitical entity only ambivalently located in the European center, Soviet Russia can accelerate the decentering of the West by embracing China. Countering the received notion of “the East” as stagnant and backward, Ivin reports that China is undergoing an unprecedented cultural transformation, a “revaluation of all values” in which imported foreign knowledge challenges traditional forms of understanding.88 Ivin’s use of Nietzschean language echoes the discourse of Hu Shi, perhaps the most prominent figure on the liberal wing of the New Culture movement, who also taught at Beijing University in the early 1920s. Hu Shi frequently used this Nietzschean phrase in his articles to describe the cultural iconoclasm of the time.89 Ivin was well aware that Russian culture and Soviet Marxism had to compete with a dizzying array of Western literature and social theories for the attention of China’s increasingly cosmopolitan intellectuals. To defeat its Western rivals for cultural and political influence in China, the Soviet Union must come to know and understand Chinese culture just as Chinese intellectuals are turning in significant numbers toward Russia. Ivin calls this process the “cultural convergence” (kul’turnoe sblizhenie) of the Soviet and Chinese peoples, echoing Lenin’s writings on internationalism, which frequently deploy the formula “the convergence and fusion of nations” (sblizhenie i sliianie natsii) to describe the resolution of national separation under socialism.90 But Ivin’s wording places particular emphasis on the cultural dimension of this process. In other words, without a greater cultural understanding of China, without a greater sense of the history and human experience of the Chinese, the internationalist political project is bound to fail. If the revolution is truly to globalize, the Soviet people must overcome the Eurocentrism in their own culture and strive to know China as equal and commensurable. But how can this be done? For a start, Ivin advocates the widespread teaching of Chinese language in Soviet schools, in addition to Chinese history and economics. Alongside linguistic barriers, however, Ivin identifies a general problem of abstraction. Lack of direct experience of China leads commentators to treat the problems of China without a concrete awareness of their complexity. Even a well-known fact, such as

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the enormity of the Chinese population, is too easily experienced as a geographical abstraction rather than as a living reality. Ivin insists that only direct bodily experience can reveal the complexities of China’s modernization: “In truth, one must wander oneself through the boundless expanses of Asia, observing up close the human beings that dwell there, in order to feel profoundly [gluboko oshchutit’] how small the European world is, and what enormous problems would arise tomorrow before the victorious European revolution, if it decided to become global.”91 If internationalist socialism is to win out over rival forms of modernity in the battle for China, facts and figures will not be enough to secure the necessary connection. The Soviet public needs to achieve a new sense of China, if it is to achieve genuine cultural closeness. In the words of contemporary scholar Bruce Robbins, “internationalism demands feeling as well as knowing, or feeling combined in some proportion with knowing, if it is going to rouse any support.”92 Ivin uses the language of sensation (oshchushchenie) to suggest a deeper understanding of China that can be achieved only through bodily experience. But how can the Soviet public acquire a concrete, sensorial understanding of a distant and unfamiliar land they have never visited? This book frames the reimagining of China in 1920s Soviet culture as a series of answers to the questions raised by Ivin’s article. The political project of Comintern internationalism demanded a transformed sense of connection to the non-European spaces of the world. For all the reasons outlined by Ivin, the relationship with China invoked a particular urgency. The attempt to reshape that relationship through the production of culture thus constitutes a sustained experiment in forming the contours of an internationalist subjectivity.93 The writers, filmmakers, and theater artists considered herein sought to deploy the aesthetic forms of a modern media system to produce in their audience a new “sense” of China as coeval and connected. In this regard, they followed a broader trend that conceived the formation of the new Soviet subject as a task bound up with the transformation of sensory experience. The new human being of socialism was expected to have a radically different relationship with the material world, a relationship mediated by a transformed sensorium.94 The aspiration to create an internationalist subjectivity, however, sought to transform the relationship not with objects but rather with other human subjects. Indeed, we might say that it sought to confer equal

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subjecthood on foreign peoples previously relegated to object status by the ingrained Eurocentrism derided by Ivin. Thus, the two forms of contact outlined by Ivin—language and direct sensory experience—intertwine through this book in complex and sometimes contradictory ways. Ivin’s calls for enhancing cultural understanding through language learning went largely unheeded: most of the figures considered in this book lacked a substantial command of the Chinese language. Their attempts to render China visible and audible through the media of early Soviet culture thus combine an appeal to sensory experience with an often-concealed dependence on translation and collaboration. I offer the term internationalist aesthetics to describe this project of shaping internationalist consciousness through mediated sensory experience, invoking the etymological origins of aisthesthai, to perceive through the senses.95 The term may seem a surprising choice, given that many members of the Soviet avant-garde (including Tretyakov) spent the 1920s denouncing post-Kantian understandings of aesthetics as an autonomous mode of contemplation and pleasure detached from active social construction, or as an ossified set of representational or formal principles that distanced images from reality.96 In fact, I argue that internationalist aesthetics offers one response to this critique. The emphasis on connection, on overcoming the physical and cultural distances between spaces and groups, replaces an understanding of aesthetics as representation with an affirmation of the transformative possibilities of the body’s sensory experiences within a modern media system that includes print, film, photography, and theater. I have found it useful in this regard to draw on the work of Jacques Rancière, who understands aesthetics less as a theory of art than as an arrangement of forms that determines what can and cannot be presented to sense experience. For Rancière, aesthetics is inseparable from politics as a “distribution of the sensible” (partage du sensible) that renders the social world perceptible: “a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience.”97 Rancière’s formulation can help us to see what was distinctive about the relationship between politics and aesthetics in the context of early Soviet internationalism. Internationalist aesthetics sought a “redistribution of the sensible”: a reordering of what can be seen, heard, and felt that might enable expanded forms of political association to take shape. Rather than

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constituting a set of formal rules to be applied to content, internationalist aesthetics encompasses a series of experiments with different forms to shape their (often documentary) material toward achieving a specific political function: connecting Soviet and Chinese subjects within a single revolutionary present. This reshaping of the form–content binary into a form-material-function triad, a common move in Tretyakov’s work, reflects the wider ambitions of the Soviet leftist avant-garde that coalesced in the 1920s around the Left Front of the Arts (Levyi front iskusstv; LEF).98 This group, which at various times included Tretyakov, Mayakovsky, Eisenstein, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Osip Brik, and Dziga Vertov, sought to rework the innovations of Russian Formalism and Futurism to generate a politicized form of aesthetic production that could produce new forms of ideological consciousness through the affective and cognitive power of modern media.99 Much like their contemporary Walter Benjamin, the Soviet avant-garde envisioned a new form of politicized aesthetics, founded in the capacity of sensory experience to awaken critical consciousness, that could break through what they saw as the illusory relationship to the world produced by their aesthetic rivals.100 Yet they also harnessed their experiments in subject formation explicitly to the social program of the Soviet state. A tension thus emerges in the history of the Soviet avant-garde, between an investment in the emancipatory potential of a critical assault on ossified consciousness and the desire to shape subjects into alignment with the hegemonic state ideology.101 What forms the core of my interest in this book are the ways in which these aesthetic tensions between emancipation and control map onto and intersect with the political tensions of Comintern internationalism. Internationalist aesthetics claims to dismantle a false image of the world to reveal common economic and political interests across national boundaries. At the same time, there emerges a new hegemonic vision of how the world and its interrelationships are structured. This constant oscillation between control and agency shapes both the social encounters and the aesthetic forms considered here. The central figure of Sergei Tretyakov serves as the lynchpin that connects these questions of avant-garde aesthetics to the early Soviet encounter with China. Born in Latvia in 1892, the son of a schoolteacher, Tretyakov began his literary career in Vladivostok during the Russian Civil War, contributing to the Futurist journal Tvorchestvo (Creation) alongside

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Nikolai Aseev and David Burliuk. When Japanese troops occupied Vladivostok in 1920, Tretyakov fled to Chita in Siberia, passing through Harbin, Tianjin, and China en route.102 From 1923, Tretyakov emerged as a central figure in the left avant-garde in Moscow. A founding member of LEF, Tretyakov contributed poems and theoretical articles to its eponymous journal. He also wrote for the theater, collaborating with Vsevolod Meyerhold and Eisenstein. In early 1924, Tretyakov departed for Beijing, where he was to spend eighteen months teaching Russian at Beijing University.103 Soon after his arrival, Tretyakov began to publish articles on China in the Soviet press: in all, he published more than 130 articles about China between 1924 and 1928.104 (A selected volume of articles appeared in 1927 under the title Chzhungo—a Cyrillic rendering of Zhongguo Ё೟, “Central State,” the Chinese name for China.) After his return to Moscow in 1925, Tretyakov experimented with other aesthetic strategies to push the urgency of contemporary China onto the Soviet public. In 1926, the Meyerhold Theater in Moscow staged Roar, China! (1926), a play that dramatized the execution of Chinese boatmen under pressure from the British Navy. Tretyakov also wrote the scripts for an unmade trilogy of feature films called Dzhungo (Zhongguo), intended for production with Eisenstein, and composed a “bio-interview” named Den Shi-khua, a collaborative autobiography of one of his former students from Beijing. The opening to Den Shi-khua, first published in Novyi Lef (The New LEF ) in 1927, offers a succinct introduction to Tretyakov’s project of shaping an internationalist subjectivity through his mediations of China. These startling first lines frame the production of knowledge about China as a corporeal process that binds the Chinese and Soviet populations: We, who are suckling the incalculable Chinese revolution on the black soil of our October, feverishly and legitimately force into ourselves any knowledge about China, as an anaemic forces syringes of arsenic under his skin. Our previous knowledge of China is like a crippled arm. It must first be broken, and then re-set correctly.105

The subject is a collective agent, the “we” of Soviet identity, which actively pursues its own self-formation. This “we” stands in a relationship of corporeal connection with China, a symbiotic loop defined through a series

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of visceral metaphors. We are a nurturing mother to the Chinese Revolution and also the earth that lets it grow. At the same time (in the same sentence!), we are a diseased body that administers violent treatment to itself. Knowledge of China functions here as a transformative material substance, forced desperately into the social body. And this must be new knowledge of China, for the old knowledge is a damaged limb, an essential element of the body that is unable to function. The solution comes again through violence: the crippled arm must be broken and reshaped before it can grow into a healthy, useful appendage. This dense parataxis of metaphors shuttles the collective self ’s sense of its relationship to “China” from comforting natural nourishment to an urgent crisis that must be rectified by violent force. Borrowing from Futurist shock tactics, these arrestingly physical images of cognitive processes frame cultural production as a material(ist) intervention into mass consciousness. Tretyakov’s identification of mind with body and knowledge with material action betrays the influence of the protocybernetic theories of Aleksandr Bogdanov. Bogdanov, the founder of the Proletarian Culture (Proletkul’t) movement, rejected any distinction between physical and intellectual labor. He considered both to be forms of organization, the basic monistic principle that shapes all interactions between humans and nature.106 Bogdanov’s ideas, alongside the Soviet Taylorism of Aleksei Gastev, enabled Tretyakov and other “productivists” among the LEF ranks to reconceive art as a part of production, a form of collective labor directed at the organization of consciousness.107 In his programmatic 1923 essay “Whence and Whither?” Tretyakov insisted that the true task of avantgarde artists must be “the production of a new human being by means of art,” a human being who “feels the world in a new way” (chelovek, po novomu chuvstvuiushchii mir) and possesses a “new sense of the world” (novoe mirooshchushchenie).108 This sense of the world is an emotional, sensorial experience that cannot be reduced to rational cognition: By sense of the world [mirooshchushchenie]—as opposed to understanding of the world [miroponimanie], or worldview [mirovozzrenie], which is constructed on cognition, on a logical system—we understand the sum of emotional (sensual) judgements formed within a human being. Judgements along the lines of sympathy and repulsion, comradeship and hostility, joy and sadness, fear and courage . . . An understanding of the

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world has no vitality unless it has been melted down to form a sense of the world, unless it has become a living motive force that determines all the actions of the entire everyday physiognomy of a human being.109

This understanding of mirooshchushchenie as a heightened perception of the world through art that supersedes the abstractions of cognition correlates with the wider turn toward the sensory and the material in the Russian and Soviet avant-garde.110 Just as Viktor Shklovsky celebrated the power of art to give back the “sensation” (oshchushchenie) of things, so Dziga Vertov conceptualized film as offering a new mode of “cinematic sensation” (kinooshchushchenie).111 Tretyakov’s understanding of art’s task explicitly links aesthetics and politics, connecting the revivifying powers of oshchushchenie to new forms of sociopolitical consciousness. A new sense of the world mediated through avant-garde cultural production transforms the individual’s understanding of “comradeship and hostility,” producing the contours of a new political subjectivity. To borrow once more the language of Rancière, it is the redistribution not just of the thinkable but also of the sensible that enables the new human being to take shape. When Tretyakov arrived in China, the task of producing a new “sense of the world” took on an explicitly internationalist dimension. This particular redistribution of the sensible required that older aesthetic experiences of China must first be shaken off: the crippled arm must be broken before it can be reset. In his programmatic 1925 essay “Loving China” (“Liubit’ Kitai,” reprinted as the introduction to Chzhungo two years later), Tretyakov identifies this task specifically as the overcoming of exoticism, understood here as a form of commodity fetishism. The essay opens with an ironic summary of the false image of China that dominates the popular imagination: A mysterious country. An inscrutable people. Chinese porcelain. Chinese shadows. Chinese silk. Chinese tea. The Chinese wall. Chinese writing. Chinese umbrellas. “Ah, those refined Chinese tortures! The Chinese princess Turandot, porcelain nodding dolls, Chinese fans, Chinese gowns, ah, opium dens!” groans in addition one of our “sensitive” laywomen, attracted to the theatre and exotic books.

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This is the knowledge of China held by ninety percent of our average men-in-the-street.112

Cutting China up into bits and pieces, Tretyakov presents China’s social reality as mystified by the regime of commodified exoticism. First and foremost, this China is known as unknowable: the country a mystery, its people inscrutable. Beyond this primary impenetrability, China is experienced through its commodities: the famous exports such as porcelain, silk, and tea that proved so popular and so profitable in the European world. Under the Marxist notion of commodity fetishism, the commodity form obscures the social nature of production relations by disguising the social labor that produced the object. Through the intervention of exchange-value, a social relationship between people becomes a reified relationship between things.113 Adapting this notion of fetishism to the particular dynamic of commodified exoticism, Tretyakov suggests that a form of reification has occurred in the public’s relationship with China. The focus on exotic commodities transforms what should be a relationship between two connected groups of human subjects into a relationship between consumers and objects to be consumed. This reification expands into the realm of the cultural imaginary, where a sequence of fragmented synecdoches stand in for “China”: the theater of shadows, the Great Wall, ideographic writing, parasols. The paratactic quality of Tretyakov’s list emphasizes the lack of connection between these elements: they float beside one another as impressionistic fragments, unable to elucidate the link between part and whole. Mystification deepens as we enter the realm of popular entertainment, “the theatre and exotic books,” wherein a commodity logic also holds sway. Tretyakov lists stereotypical images disseminated through popular culture, depicting vices and tempers both disturbing and alluring: torture, opium dens, Turandot. These exotic images of China circulate through a global cultural economy whose center is Western Europe. When Tretyakov laments the theatrical chinoiserie on the contemporary Soviet stage— “all those plays with princesses, courtesans, princes”—he names four recent plays, three of which were based on translations from German.114 In a later essay, Tretyakov lambasts three prominent representatives of what Jonathan Spence has called the “French exotic”—Pierre Loti, Claude Farrère, and Gustave Mirbeau— for presenting China as a “land of mysterious wonders, opium narcoses,

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the refined sensuality of torture, knife-wielding conspirators behind every corner.”115 This exotic image of China exemplifies the negative mode of aesthetics that Tretyakov resists, a world of illusions detached from material reality whose conventions refer only to themselves. Both Chinese commodities and images of China, then, circulate through a global capitalist economy that reifies China as consumable exotica and mystifies its contemporary reality. Through this reification, the Chinese people are effaced; pronounced unknowable from the start, they vanish behind a catalog of products and stereotypes. Their true position in the global system is concealed. Tretyakov’s understanding of exoticism as fragmented reification resonates with the wider anti-imperialist critiques of the period, as visible in venues such as Novyi Vostok. In a 1922 Moscow lecture on “The Exotic in Philology,” prominent Sinologist Vasily Mikhailovich Alekseev defined the exotic thus: “The exotic constitutes a failure to consider a foreign culture to be of full value. When divided into parts a foreign culture is indeed comic or fantastical (chinoiserie). Human value is attained only by the whole.”116 Tretyakov’s essay, however, moves the sphere of action from rigorous academic philology to engaged materialist reportage. In place of the fetishized fragments of exoticism, Tretyakov offers a montage of newspaper articles emerging from prolonged contact with contemporary China. These parts, he contends, will combine to reveal the whole of Chzhungo. Nonetheless, Tretyakov knows that the commodified exotic provides a source of pleasure that individuals will not part with willingly. The groans of his sensitive torture enthusiast find their echo in a repeated refrain in the essay attributed to “the lovers of exotica”: deistvitel’nost’ seree fantazii, “reality is more grey than fantasy.”117 With an almost Freudian insight into the economy of pleasure, Tretyakov acknowledges that a documentary reportage approach must replace and even outdo the affective charge of exotic color if it is to win over its audience. The Soviet reporter in China, then, will not simply report facts. He will prove that fantaziia seree deistvitel’nosti, “fantasy is more grey than reality.” Reality can supply more color, more sensory stimulation, than exotic cliché: And what invented fantasy could merit discussion, when millions of bare-handed students and workers beat against the walls of the foreign concessions and fall under English bullets, cut off their own fingers at

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inflammatory meetings to write oaths of hatred on screens with the stump, and stand guard at the gates of harbour warehouses, factories, ships’ gang-planks and stores, conducting a silent, remorseless boycott; when hundreds of thousands of workers freeze as one in strike. Before this new, explosive China, rearing up on its hind legs, the nodding dolls of fantasy collapse into dust. Fantasy is more grey than reality.118

In contrast to the fragmented paratactic list that began the essay, Tretyakov encompasses contemporary China in one sweeping sentence, its temporal clauses asserting the simultaneity of multiple processes that can be understood as the connected parts of a single social whole. Static fragmentation gives way to dynamism and movement. The aesthetic effect of alterity that undergirds exoticism, however, is not so much gone as refashioned. The exotic fascination with torture, itself connected to longstanding European perceptions of Chinese punishments as uniquely cruel and Chinese people as exceptionally resilient toward pain, cedes its place to an image of self-mutilation as an act of protest.119 The biologized notion of a special Chinese relationship to pain is not so much rejected as redirected toward a revolutionary purpose.120 At the same time, this image of revolutionary politics as necessarily violent and self-sacrificial might not seem too unfamiliar to a Soviet reader in 1925, echoing as it does the increasingly standardized representations of the Russian Revolution and Civil War. Tretyakov’s balancing act between alterity and commensurability thus preserves an element of visceral fascination while inscribing China into the same revolutionary modernity as the Soviet Union. Tretyakov’s reframing of China aims to produce more than simply excitement. His goal is to call forth a new kind of love, rejecting the solipsistic pleasures of the “lovers of exotica”: “Fantasy is more grey than reality. But this formula will be evident to us when we do not simply understand China schematically, but rather capture it through touch [voz’mem ego naoshchup’], with a prolonged gaze, when we come to know and love China as our own kith and kin [rodnogo i blizkogo].”121 Tretyakov’s invocation of love echoes Alexandra Kollontai’s contemporaneous writings on the role of love and emotional connection in social solidarity: “Solidarity is not only an awareness of common interests; it depends also on the intellectual and emotional ties linking the members of a collective.

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For a social system to be built on solidarity and co-operation it is essential that people should be capable of love and warm emotions.”122 Moreover, Tretyakov’s focus on sensory experience explicitly conceives love as a form of mirooshchushchenie, a sense of the world, shaped not by abstract cognition but rather through material contact. To the ethnographic notion of prolonged observation Tretyakov adds the striking phrase vziat’ naoshchup’, suggesting that something can be taken up and absorbed purely through the experience of touch, as felt and explored by one’s own hands. Knowledge in this case proceeds through the body. “Loving China” offers a utopian notion of mediated reportage as immediate contact, whereby reading a newspaper report can provide a direct encounter with the realia of Chinese social life. Strikingly absent, however, are speech, voice, and listening. Tretyakov’s turn to sensation erases any mediation through language and translation, and perhaps makes us question whether a new form of reification has not taken place. This China, asserted as “real” and not a fantasy, inscribed into a recognizable revolutionary modernity, remains an object to be seen and touched, but not a voice to be heard. By seeking to grasp China naoshchup’, the Soviet internationalist subject runs the risk of encountering China as an object rather than as an equal, speaking subject.

MEDIATING CHINA

These two aspects of “Loving China”—its call to overcome exoticism and shape emotional connection through mediated sensory experiences, and its silence on the question of language and Chinese voices—set the parameters within which we can assess the diverse attempts to bring China to early Soviet audiences. These attempts took shape through the media of print, film, and theatrical spectacle, reflecting complex contemporary struggles over the correct way to mediate the world in a revolutionary age. The 1920s witnessed a rapid transformation in media technologies that changed the way subjects engaged with the world. The expansion of newspapers from the second half of the nineteenth century, facilitated by the invention of the electric telegraph, had already created

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a transnational system for disseminating information at high speed.123 The Soviet state’s drive for literacy produced a new readership with a transformed relationship to language. Photographic printing in the press became more widespread, and popular photography organizations proliferated.124 Cinema became entrenched as a vitally influential form of mass culture, “the most important of all the arts” in Lenin’s famous phrase.125 These changes in the media landscape accompanied the ongoing development of a political revolution whose social consequences remained unclear. Against the backdrop of these seismic transformations in the social environment, the Soviet 1920s witnessed a complex struggle for legitimacy between different cultural groups and modes. Although the state would increasingly impose a hegemonic cultural line by the decade’s end, a striking heterogeneity defines the cultural field in this period. Avant-garde artists, modernist poets, montage theoreticians, proletarian writers, and defenders of the nineteenth-century canon competed with foreign literature and Hollywood films for the right to shape the art and mass culture of the future. The search for new ways of experiencing China weaves itself through this wider contest between forms and media that characterized early Soviet culture. This study therefore proceeds by considering in each chapter a different medium employed in the attempt to fashion an internationalist subjectivity. The role of modern media forms in crafting modern sociopolitical subjectivities is well established.126 What particularly interests me, however, is the way that a focus on mediation can complicate a Saidian mode of Orientalist critique. Without doubt, cultural expressions of Soviet internationalism frequently embraced a mode of representation that we might today call Orientalist. This Soviet Orientalist aesthetic emerges particularly strongly in representations aimed at younger audiences. Evgeny Steiner shows how Soviet children’s books of the 1920s depicted adventures in China (and Africa) as salvation narratives, with Soviet children armed with modern technology saving the benighted inhabitants of distant lands.127 (We will find a similar dynamic at work in 1920s adventure fiction, considered in chapter 4.) Such representations express the centripetal force within internationalist aesthetics: this is Soviet internationalism as mission civilisatrice, with a clear hierarchy established between the Soviet Russians and the non-European spaces they have come to redeem.

3 0 INTRO D U C TIO N

A similar dynamic of temporal hierarchy entered into the fabric of Soviet nationalities policy and its stage theory of revolutionary development, founded as it was on a distinction between Western, advanced nations and Eastern, backward nations within the USSR.128 China, too, was generally understood as occupying a lower rung on the ladder of revolutionary modernity relative to its Soviet neighbor. In this book, however, this centripetal, Soviet Orientalist tendency exists in constant tension with a centrifugal force that emphasizes mediation. As Richard So argues in his study of China-U.S. connections in the early twentieth century, the speed of electrical media in connecting distant spaces disrupts the denial of temporal coevalness foundational to the Orientalist paradigm. While that paradigm operates on a logic of representation, So suggests that a focus on mediation can foreground transnational communication over the production of hallucinatory images of the other.129 This same shift—from the illusory images of nineteenth-century exotica to a mediated form of transnational connection—shapes Tretyakov’s aspiration to engineer love for China through print journalism. Moreover, his project coincides with a heightened influx of translated Russian texts and news from Russia into the Chinese media system. On both sides, a modern media system reduces the sense of spatial and temporal separation. As the central figure in the early Soviet remediation of China, Tretyakov will figure in every chapter of this book. Indeed, the book’s core chronological structure follows Tretyakov’s engagement with China through the high period of Sino-Soviet contact in the 1920s, beginning with his arrival in Beijing in 1924 and moving through his work in reportage, theater, and cinema to conclude with the composition of Den Shi-khua (1927–1930). In each chapter, however, Tretyakov’s own experiments in internationalist aesthetics are juxtaposed to the work of other cultural producers, not all of whom shared Tretyakov’s aesthetic and ideological assumptions. As will be explored in more detail in chapter 1, Tretyakov’s writings on China constitute pioneering experiments in what became known in the late 1920s as the “literature of fact” or “factography.” A form of writing developed on productivist principles in explicit response to a transformed media environment, factography sought to use reported facts as indexical signs of reality that could transform social consciousness—a practice Tretyakov called “operativity.”130 Not everyone who wrote about, filmed, or staged the Sino-Soviet relationship in the 1920s was a factographer,

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however. The  figures considered here alongside Tretyakov employed a broad spectrum of aesthetic strategies in their attempts to mediate and reformulate this relationship. Nor were their understandings of internationalism necessarily homogenous. As Samera Esmeir observes, the term internationalism has accommodated a multiplicity of contrasting and even contradictory meanings at different historical moments: indeed, the Marxist paradigm of socialist internationalism emerged as a direct challenge to an existing international order dominated by European imperialism.131 In the context of the Sino-Soviet encounter of the 1920s, we see the Comintern model of socialist internationalism seeking to establish its own hegemony in a world populated by diverse understandings of the relationship between the national and the international. Some of Tretyakov’s Soviet colleagues foregrounded Soviet patriotism or Russian nationalism in a manner that casts doubt on the achievability of internationalist subjecthood. For many of his Chinese contemporaries, the internationalist project remained ultimately subordinate to the urgency of restoring national sovereignty and ensuring national survival. Internationalist aesthetics thus emerges from this study as a contested, heterogeneous experiment across multiple media. My focus on mediation also encompasses the intersubjective encounters between Soviet and Chinese subjects that produced these works, and the vexed and vital question of translation. Because Tretyakov and most other Soviet visitors to China had limited linguistic abilities in Chinese, their access to this foreign reality frequently required the mediation of Chinese intermediaries. These intermediaries possessed their own perspectives and agendas, shaped by the complex social dynamics of 1920s China and its relationship to Soviet Russia. On the question of translation, I draw on the insights of translation studies to emphasize the ambivalent role that translation can play as a form of mediation. Translation strategies can produce a sense of smooth access to a foreign context, but they can also resist transparency and highlight the heterogeneity of that foreign context.132 In this regard, the ambivalent dynamics of translation dovetail with a profound aesthetic tension over the question of mediation in the culture of the Soviet 1920s. We might loosely call this the tension between realism and modernism, between an approach to the object that emphasizes smoothness and transparency, and one that highlights process and madeness. In what follows, we will see how working through these aesthetic issues intersected

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with working through the political and ethical questions of internationalism. To use the language of another key figure in early Soviet culture, Mikhail Bakhtin, I argue that smoothness and transparency tend to acquire the centripetal authority of a Soviet monologue about China, while an awareness of process leads to an awareness of the dialogic, collaborative origins of text, image, and performance. Tretyakov’s trajectory through this book is a negotiation of these conflicting impulses, and one that moves gradually from the monological to the dialogical pole. Chapter 1 considers Soviet traveling writers in China as mediators, both through the texts they write and the encounters their presence facilitates. Tretyakov’s extensive reporting from China deploys the medium of the newspaper to affirm a privileged form of vision, enabled by prolonged observation and undergirded by a theory of revolutionary development in semicolonial conditions. These smooth accounts of the reporter’s eyewitness experience, however, frequently elide the mediating role of Tretyakov’s Chinese interpreters and interlocutors. A different model of mediation emerges in Tretyakov’s poem “Roar China,” which bypasses the problem of language by capturing the sounds of Beijing street traders through onomatopoeia. The initial estrangement of these novel sonic units gives way to a confident prediction of imminent anti-imperial uprising. The affective charge of alterity in this instance provides a sensory jolt that opens the pathway to commensurability and connection. By contrast, the relationships between affect, knowledge, and internationalist connection become radically unmoored in Boris Pilnyak’s “Chinese Story,” an account of a visit to China in 1926. Pilnyak’s fragmented text combines abstract proclamations of internationalist solidarity and concrete attempts at cross-cultural communication with bodily discomfort, linguistic incomprehension, alienation, and nostalgic yearning for the national home. Finally, a consideration of Pilnyak’s failed cinematic collaboration with the leftist intellectuals Tian Han ⬄⓶ and Jiang Guangci illustrates the divergent understandings of nation and internationalism that circulated across the Sino-Soviet encounter. Chapter 2 follows Tretyakov as he returns to Moscow and takes up his work in the theater. This chapter tells the stories of the two most high-profile productions to bring China to the Soviet stage of the 1920s: Tretyakov’s docu-drama Roar, China! (1926) and the Bolshoi Ballet’s The Red Poppy (1927). What emerges from this comparison are two opposed

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approaches to the question of how theatrical performance might mediate a connection with a foreign reality, a difference my argument illuminates by focusing on issues of translation. The Meyerhold Theater’s production of Roar, China! juxtaposed authentic Chinese props and costumes with openly conventional elements, producing a combination of naturalism and theatrical artifice, two modes considered incompatible by contemporary critics. Tretyakov’s script offered a similar combination of naturalism and convention with its constant switching between multiple languages: Chinese, Russian, and Chinese Pidgin Russian. I call the cumulative effect a performance of translation: a performance that gestures toward the existence of a foreign social context, while simultaneously admitting that this foreign context is not fully present onstage. The Red Poppy was a divided production, offering a contradictory mix of realist tendencies with the aestheticism and Oriental exoticism of nineteenth-century ballet. By staging the drama of a Chinese dancer awakening to revolutionary consciousness through her love for a Soviet naval captain, the Bolshoi hoped to demonstrate ballet’s capacity to become a mass art for an internationalist age. Yet the choice of the red poppy as the symbol for this internationalist love affair—a choice enabled by a productive act of mistranslation—revealed the lack of attention the ballet’s creators paid to the Chinese historical context. Chinese Communist spectators of the ballet insisted that the poppy retained for them a different meaning: a direct association with the imperialist opium wars of the nineteenth century. Chapter 3 embeds Tretyakov’s work in cinema within a corpus of early Soviet films devoted to China, which together offer a series of experiments in rethinking cinema as a medium for internationalist connection. Common to them all is a concern with cinema’s capacity to reorder space and reshape the social relationship between the cinematic spectator and the image onscreen. The Great Flight (1926), a documentary account of a pioneering expedition from Russia through Mongolia to China, celebrates the dual power of Soviet aviation and Soviet cinema to traverse, perceive, and give meaning to Eurasian space. China emerges as not simply “backward” relative to the Soviet center, but rather as inhabiting a rival, semicolonial modernity. Tretyakov’s unrealized Dzhungo project—a trilogy of films slated for production with Eisenstein in 1926—sought to produce a totalizing vision of China’s present moment.

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This vision was explicitly conceived as exportable to Chinese audiences, who would encounter their reality on screen as mediated through Soviet film. Although Eisenstein never made his films about China, Soviet montage theory received a brilliant application to contemporary China in Shanghai Document (1928), an expedition film that chronicled the Guomindang’s coup against the Communists in 1927. This generic hybrid of expedition film and city symphony uses parallel montage to decode the urban space of Shanghai as a microcosm of global class dynamics, exhibiting in the process a privileged capacity for spatial cognition that it denies to its Chinese subjects. Lastly, Isaac Babel’s script for the film The Chinese Mill (1928) offers a comic take on the connections between mediated perception, political affect, and internationalist action. Among the Komsomol activists of a Russian village, the sense of internationalist connection to China enabled by photojournalism becomes a form of Quixotic madness that must give way to the sober business of building socialism in one country. Lastly, chapter 4 reads the “bio-interview” Den Shi-khua as the culmination of Tretyakov’s experiments in internationalist aesthetics. Den Shikhua emerged from a series of interviews between Tretyakov and one of his former students from Beijing, Gao Shihua 催Ϫ㧃 (the name was later changed for the sake of anonymity). This mediated autobiography aimed to replace fictional novels with factual knowledge supplied by an eyewitness, thus healing the “crippled arm” of exoticized ignorance. The confessional structure of Tretyakov’s interview practice also overlaps with Soviet uses of autobiography as a tool for producing subjectivity, suggesting that the text may work to both represent and produce Den as a model Chinese revolutionary. This trajectory is counterbalanced, however, by the ways in which the bio-interview exposes its complex dynamics of mediation. We learn that Gao spoke Russian with difficulty, and Tretyakov openly admits that he has taken a dialogic interview situation and fashioned its contents into a smooth, first-person literary narrative. At the end of the book, an interview with a second student suggests Den/Gao may not have told Tretyakov the whole truth about his life. Instead of immersing themselves in the autobiography of a model Chinese revolutionary, readers become aware of the unrecoverable processes of translation and collaboration that have shaped this text and its claims to truth. Den Shi-khua decenters the hermeneutic authority of the Soviet author, offering instead a dialogical,

INTRODUCTION35

collaborative model of internationalist knowledge production shaped by multiple agents and multiple perspectives. The epilogue traces the aftermath of this intense period of SinoSoviet encounter into the 1930s, in the wake of the Comintern’s defeat in China in 1927. Although the 1930s saw no high-profile Soviet works on China, Chinese literature and politics found a prominent place on the pages of the journal International Literature, due in no small part to the mediation of the Chinese poet Xiao San 㧻ϝ (known in Russian as Emi Siao). Xiao’s work with the translator Alexander Romm offers a model of collaborative authorship that asserts the fundamental commensurability of Chinese and Soviet contexts. For a different account of mediation, I turn to the famous visit of the actor Mei Lanfang ṙ㰁㢇 to Moscow in 1935. Mei’s visit offered a moment of validation for an increasingly embattled Soviet avant-garde. Yet the Soviet reception of Mei also exemplified the absorption of China into a new Stalinist universalism, founded on the formulation “socialist in content, national in form.” At the same time, Mao Zedong’s adoption of this same concept of national form served precisely to emphasize China’s distinctive revolutionary path. When Sino-Soviet friendship entered a new phase after the Chinese Communist victory in 1949, it coexisted with a heightened awareness of the national form of the Chinese Revolution. From the late 1950s, the Soviet and Chinese models of state socialism would diverge in the Sino-Soviet Split, as Maoism rejected Soviet authority to establish the universal form of socialist internationalism. By that time, the Comintern, increasingly subordinated to Soviet state interests, had been dissolved by Stalin in 1943. In the wake of these historical developments, it is hard not to read this experiment in internationalist aesthetics as marked by the shadow of failure. Nonetheless, the experiment represents a radical attempt to reshape the relationship between these two major countries in a manner that might escape the logic of an early twentieth-century world dominated by the alliance between capitalism and imperialism. The Soviet side framed their revolution as emerging from and acting against imperialism, even as they pursued new forms of hegemony. China’s sense of modernity, meanwhile, involved a strong awareness of the loss of sovereignty at the hands of global capitalism in an imperialist form. Internationalist aesthetics, in its various instantiations, was concerned with the possibility that

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these two perspectives might merge into a shared vision. The internationalist subject remains one of the most compelling dreams of this period, the dream of a global political consciousness. As we wrestle to imagine the possibilities of transnational community in a radically unequal world still shaped by the legacies of imperialism, both the aspirations and the failures of this project remain worthy of our consideration.

1 SIGHT, SOUND, AND SIMILARITY Soviet Writers Travel to China

“Y

ou are travelling to Beijing. You must write travel notes. But not just as notes for yourself. No, they must have social significance.”1 Thus speaks Osip Brik, seeing Sergei Tretyakov off at the train station in the first lines of the travel sketch “Moscow– Beijing” (“Moskva–Pekin,” 1925). This social significance will only come, Brik insists, if Tretyakov observes a rigorous observational discipline: “Be observant. Do not let a single detail slip away. You are in the train carriage: Kodak [kodach’] every line, every conversation. You are at a station: make a note of everything, right down to the posters washed away by the rain.”2 Brik’s description of the writer’s activity with the neologistic verb kodachit’ (to Kodak, to take snapshots) expresses the values of the “factographic” project that he and Tretyakov would later promote in the pages of Novyi LEF. Brik exhorts his fellow writer to transform himself into a visual recording device, on the model of the photographic camera. Tretyakov, in turn, subtitled his sketch a “journey-film” (put’fil’ma). The finished sketch eschews inner emotion to relay a long sequence of observed details: ashtrays, locked toilets, baggage policies, and the state of stations along the route all command the traveler’s quasi-mechanical attention. “Moscow–Beijing” sets up Tretyakov’s journey to China as a search for a new method, a new way of conceiving the mediating role of the traveling writer. In this experimental “journey-film,” the writer connects Russia and China spatially, through a form of fragmentary observational mapping.3

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Our journey in search of an internationalist aesthetics begins by considering the traveling writer as a mediator of the relationship between China and Soviet Russia and as a figure who expresses different perspectives on the “internationalist” quality of that relationship. This chapter focuses on the two most prominent travelling writers to visit China in the 1920s: Sergei Tretyakov and Boris Pilnyak. These men were just two of a host of Soviet writers who wrote eyewitness accounts of their travels in China during this period. A longer list might include the Komsomol activist Sergei Dalin, the writer Galina Serebryakova, the journalist Nikolai Kostarev, and the Comintern agent Oskar Tarkhanov.4 But Tretyakov and Pilnyak were the most high-profile figures, and a comparison of their activities as traveling writers highlights the divergent perspectives on internationalism that emerged from the China–Russia encounter. Although these two writers differed from each other both poetically and politically, their accounts of China deploy a similar toolkit of literary devices to mediate the relationship between Chinese reality and Soviet audiences. Both focus on sight and sound as sensory modes of access to Chinese reality, and both wrestle with questions of translation and equivalence. Their visits to China demonstrate that the mediating roles of these two traveling writers were not limited to their texts. Both men established connections and attempted collaborations with Chinese students and intellectuals that shaped their own work and contributed to the complex engagement with Russian culture and Marxist–Leninist politics then developing in the Chinese intellectual world. This chapter juxtaposes Tretyakov’s factographic experiments in China against Pilnyak’s impressionistic travel narrative and concludes with a discussion of an attempted cinematic collaboration between Pilnyak and the Chinese writer and director Tian Han. My central contention is that this constellation allows us to see how competing models of internationalism circulated around the Sino-Soviet encounter, each of them connected to different understandings of the writer’s role as a mediator. Tretyakov’s China sketches (ocherki) draw on the medium of the newspaper to affirm a form of privileged vision enabled by prolonged observation. Prolonged observation from an embedded position overcomes the fragmentary perception of “Moscow–Beijing,” enabling a process of visual decoding by means of which the traveling writer transforms sensory experience into sociopolitical and historical meaning. This decoding relies on the

SIGHT, SOUND, AND SIMILARITY39

Soviet reporter’s mastery of an authoritative explanatory framework, a Marxist–Leninist theory of revolutionary development in semicolonial conditions that allows localized and concrete details to be placed meaningfully within a global historical narrative. Tretyakov’s China sketches thus replace the temporal distancing of exoticism with a sense of China as distinct and concrete yet also coeval and commensurable, subject to the same dynamics of uneven and combined development that shaped the Russian Revolution. At certain moments, however, Tretyakov reveals his Chinese students playing the role of translators and interpreters, mediating what seems elsewhere to be a direct movement from observation to cognition. The Soviet reporter’s ability to serve as a mediator of China for his readers turns out to rely on the mediation of others. An attempted overcoming of this translation barrier occurs in the poem “Roar China” (“Rychi Kitai,” 1924). Here Tretyakov sidesteps his linguistic limitations by decoding the “sound signs” of the Beijing streets and recoding them into a recognizable discourse of revolutionary internationalism. By contrast, the smooth integration of the particular into the general experiences a crisis in Pilnyak’s fragmented travel narrative, “Chinese Story” (“Kitaiskaia povest’,” 1927). Here affective experience fails to translate smoothly into a coherent ideological message. Instead, proclamations of internationalist solidarity and pan-Eurasian identity sit side by side with descriptions of alienation and disgust, dehumanizing accounts of Chinese life, and a nostalgic desire to return to the nation as home. When sight and sound produce only confusion, Pilnyak deploys translation and analogy to establish a sense of equivalence between China and Russia; however, this discovery of Sino-Russian similarity is unstable, even “catastrophic.” If Tretyakov operates a form of montage wherein parts can be fitted into a meaningful whole, in Pilnyak, the moment of comforting synthesis remains elusive. This formal distinction expresses a divergent perspective on internationalism: the desire for national identity disrupts and frustrates the possibilities of Sino-Soviet community. Finally, the chapter concludes with a reading of Pilnyak’s collaboration with the Chinese leftist writers Tian Han and Jiang Guangci on the unfinished film Go to the People (Dao minjian qu ࠄ⇥䭧এ, 1926). Tian cast Pilnyak in his film as a Soviet writer who symbolically mediates a dispute between young Chinese students about the country’s possible paths toward modernization and national sovereignty.

40 S IGH T, S O U ND, AND S IMI LA R I TY

Tian and Jiang’s engagement with Pilnyak reveals their complex sense of Russian revolutionary precedent as influencing, yet not determining, the course of China’s own development. Go to the People offered a vision of the  Sino-Soviet relationship in which the national and international are complementary, and the transnational circulation of texts, concepts, and individuals lends support to the process of national emancipation. By contrast, Pilnyak’s account of his experience on the film set stages the final collapse of mediation into communication breakdown, alienation, and irreconcilable difference.

CH ZHUNGO: PROLONGED OB SERVAT I ON A N D N EWSPA PER FORM

In the period between the two world wars, the reporter emerged as a heroic figure for global leftist culture. Rejecting the fantasies of fiction, the reporter served as a mediator whose direct bodily experiences, transformed into text, could help readers grasp the relationship between distant localized events and broader global dynamics.5 Reportage mapped a changing world for its readers, and Russia and China feature prominently in the work of the defining left-wing reporters of the age. For John Reed, Egon Erwin Kisch, Agnes Smedley, Anna Louise Strong, and Edgar Snow, Eurasia’s largest counties served as sites of revolutionary potential, crucial spaces for understanding the new world created by the First World War.6 The pioneer of Chinese reportage, the future Communist Party leader Qu Qiubai, made his name from 1920 with a series of reports in the Beijing newspaper Chen Bao on his journey to and sojourn in Soviet Moscow. These were later collated and expanded into two foundational texts of Chinese reportage: Journey to the Land of Hunger and A History of the Heart in the Red Capital.7 The Soviet Union of the 1920s and early 1930s experienced its own “documentary moment,” connecting the drive to document a changed world to the social transformations pursued by the new Bolshevik government.8 In literature, this documentary imperative found its most avantgarde expression in the “literature of fact” movement, centered on the journal Novyi Lef and spearheaded by Tretyakov and Nikolai Chuzhak.9

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Taking the newspaper as a model, the factographers denounced fictional literature as a harmful relic of prerevolutionary culture. For Chuzhak, realist fiction constituted an idealist, contemplative “literature of cognizing life” (literatura zhiznepoznaniia) that should make way for a materialist, interventionist “literature of constructing life” (literatura zhiznestroeniia).10 Tretyakov and Chuzhak understood reporting facts about the world as not simply a reflection of reality, but rather an active process that could shape social reality in a particular direction—a practice Tretyakov called “operativity.” Rejecting fantasy, abstraction, and interiorized psychology, their new factographic literature sought to assist in the organization of socialist society by communicating to readers the concrete details of social life.11 The explicit formulation of the literature of fact program belongs to the period of the First Five-Year Plan, with its rhetoric of proletarianization and suspicion of bourgeois specialists.12 Its prehistory can be traced, however, to Tretyakov’s writings on China and their anti-exoticist platform. Indeed, while Soviet culture’s documentary moment gathered steam in the 1920s, China emerged as one of the global spaces most urgently in need of documentation. In the high period of Soviet involvement in China, from the diplomatic treaty between the two countries in March 1924 to the catastrophic defeat of the Canton Uprising in December 1927, the Soviet press covered China with greater intensity than any foreign country outside the West.13 Two of the first Comintern agents to enter China in 1920, Vladimir Vilensky-Sibiryakov and Grigory Voitinsky, both published accounts of contemporary China and its importance for Soviet Russia.14 Tretyakov’s own sojourn in China in 1924–1925 marked the beginning of his career as a traveling writer who combined literary and theoretical work with the role of a Soviet cultural ambassador and intermediary.15 By his own account, the writer received an invitation to teach Russian literature at Beijing University, then the center of China’s radical student movement and one of the breeding grounds of Chinese Marxism.16 At the same time, his teaching in the Russian section alongside his journalistic work clearly served official Soviet interests.17 Arriving shortly before the Sino-Soviet Agreement of March 1924 and staying until the summer of 1925, the Tretyakovs lived at the Soviet Embassy and seem to have been closely integrated into the Soviet diplomatic community.18 On his first visit to Beijing in 1921, fleeing the Japanese occupation of

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Vladivostok, Tretyakov had composed the Futurist poem “Night. Beijing” (“Noch’. Pekin,”) a dense concatenation of sensory estrangement and linguistic novelty.19 With his return in 1924, Tretyakov began to inaugurate a different kind of writing practice, using China as the testing ground for his nascent theories on the literature of fact. Tretyakov turned on his second visit to the newspaper, embracing a medium that came to provide a model for factography’s program for postrevolutionary literature. Tretyakov was later to hail the newspaper as the “epic literature” of the postrevolutionary age, a “bible of the present day” that rendered older literary forms redundant.20 Tretyakov and the other faktoviki shared the Bolsheviks’ belief in the organizing powers of the newspaper, wedded to an aesthetic affinity for its poetics of montage, bricolage, and fragmentation. Moreover, the newspaper’s montage of heterogeneous global spaces and events within the confines of a single page offered a compelling poetic form for the centrifugal, horizontalizing energies of internationalism. At the same time, the geopoetics of the newspaper retained a centripetal, totalizing dynamic, subordinating global space to centralized editorial control and engaging actively in the organization of its readers.21 Both of these forces are present in Tretyakov’s articles on China, which seek to expand the Soviet newspaper reader’s picture of the world, while also fitting China into a coherent global narrative of revolution emanating from Russia. During Tretyakov’s time in China in 1924–1925, he published around fifty articles in a dozen Soviet newspapers and journals, including Pravda, Prozhektor, and Krasnaia gazeta.22 This material was later reworked into a second series of articles that appeared in 1927 in Rabochaia Moskva and the Georgian newspaper Zaria vostoka.23 That same year, as the Comintern alliance with the Guomindang collapsed, a selection of Tretyakov’s China articles appeared as a single collection entitled Chzhungo (republished in an expanded edition in 1930). Taken together, Tretyakov’s articles can be considered a form of montage, deploying a series of interconnected fragments to convey a sense of China’s totality. Two basic modes shape the fragments in this montage. Some articles constitute short studies of particular aspects of Chinese society: family, marriage, foreigners, education, religion, and theater. Others offer eyewitness accounts of specific historical events and figures, including Sun Yat-sen’s death in Beijing and the anti-imperialist protests of 1925. Scattered spatially across the pages

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of multiple newspapers, Tretyakov’s sketches retain their unity by adhering to a common temporal structure, one laid out in the first article of the Rabochaia Moskva series in 1927: “Chinese culture, formed over the centuries, like a million-pound ally of reaction and counter-revolution, slowly, too slowly crumbling under the blows of the new China—that, essentially, is the theme of my sketches.”24 Pieced together by the reader from a cumulative reading of these fragments, this narrative of historical transformation asserts itself as the “natural plottedness” (natural’naia siuzhetnost’) of reality that Chuzhak was later to claim as factography’s true structure.25 Searching in Beijing for a method for the new factual literature, Tretyakov grounds the authority of his historical narrative in a form of prolonged and embedded observation. The introduction to the 1927 collection Chzhungo declares that Tretyakov’s eighteen months in Beijing enabled him to be a “witness” to major political events and also to “observe Beijing at length” (dlitel’no nabliudat’ na Pekin). This mode of observation offers a form of material contact with the object, China, that is unavailable to the flitting gaze of the tourist. “Without scrutinizing everyday Chinese life,” Tretyakov declares, “it is impossible to grasp China”—the final phrase in Russian, vziat’ Kitai naoshchup’, repeats the tactile language of contact found in “Loving China.”26 Tretyakov initiated in Beijing an observational practice that he would canonize in a 1934 essay as the basic method of the Soviet ocherk or sketch: “It was essential for the ocherkist to grow more deeply into his material, to enter into it with his own biography, in order to become responsible for it. Hence there arises prolonged observation and even direct participation in certain processes.”27 Tretyakov’s combination of observation and writing with teaching work in Beijing anticipates his later theory of the “operative” writer, who does not simply record social reality but actively participates in its production.28 In a similar vein, a piece on photography from 1931 advocates “prolonged photo-observation” (dlitel’noe fotonabliudenie) as a method for perceiving the diachronic development of social processes.29 Indeed, Tretyakov included his own photographs in his China sketches—particularly those published in the photo-journal Prozhektor—to supplement the primacy of observation as an epistemological mode.30 We also note a family resemblance to the method of participant observation that was being canonized at exactly this time in Western ethnography, which grounded its authority

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in a combination of social embeddedness, observation, and the theoretically justified interpretation of observed details.31 However, while the ethnographic texts of scholars such as Bronislaw Malinowski tended to offer synchronic depictions of an unchanging “ethnographic present,” Tretyakov’s Marxist ethnography is necessarily diachronic.32 He records Chinese social life only to assert its transformation by the forces of class conflict, anti-imperial struggle, and cultural modernization. This position of the embedded, prolonged observer grounds Tretyakov’s claim to serve as a mediator of contemporary China for a Soviet audience. Its efficacy depends, however, on the mediation of others, a fact that is sporadically acknowledged in the sketches. In a sketch named “Beijing Enraged” (“Iarostnyi Pekin”), Tretyakov describes attending a demonstration in the wake of the shooting of Shanghai protestors by British troops in May 1925: “I walk through the seething crowd with the students. Distrustful looks from the crowd. Who is this foreigner? Perhaps the accursed ‘yingguoren’ (Englishman)? My student companion keeps projecting on all sides ‘eguoren’ (Russian), ‘sunguoren’ [sic] (Soviet person), and the hateful eyes are extinguished, and the ranks part amicably, allowing the camera to enter their dense core.”33 Tretyakov’s camera, a synecdoche of his factographic practice, attains an embedded perspective unavailable to the Western gaze. The Soviet reporter’s visual penetration to the heart of events relies, however, on the linguistic mediation of his Chinese students, who forestall his potential misrecognition by the reciprocal gazes of the protestors. Language emerges as a site where mediation becomes unavoidable. By his own admission, Tretyakov spoke no Chinese when he first arrived in Beijing.34 His sketches occasionally reveal his students playing the role of interpreters. In “Sun Yat-sen in Beijing” (“Sun-Iat-Sen v Pekine”), an account of the Chinese leader’s last days, Tretyakov attributes a fragment of translated dialogue to one of his students. The rest of the translated material in the sketch—which includes speeches at meetings and commemorative inscriptions beside Sun’s  tomb—appears without attribution.35 In the final sketch in Chzhungo, “Homeward” (“Domoi”), Tretyakov’s translator for an interview with Feng Yuxiang becomes a character in his own right: a graduate of the Communist University for the Workers of the East (Kommunisticheskii universitet trudiashchikhsia vostoka—KUTV), he pesters Tretyakov with questions about Soviet literary disputes.36 Elsewhere, however, the formational work of local

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mediators in the production of these texts is effaced.37 What develops is a tension between the primacy of visual observation and the need for a collaborative process of translation.

R Questions of translation and mediation confronted readers of Tretyakov’s 1927 sketch collection, Chzhungo, from their first encounter with the cover. Chzhungo (Чжунго) is a Cyrillic rendering of zhongguo (Ё೟), a term of ancient origin that referred originally to the “central states” unified under the Qin dynasty (221–206 BC). By the Republican period, zhongguo had become the standard name in Chinese for the Chinese state.38 Tretyakov’s choice of Chzhungo as his title amounts to a deliberate rejection of the Russian word for China, Kitai, a word that does not correspond to any term used by the inhabitants of zhongguo to refer to their state.39 In the terminology of translation studies, Kitai enacts a domestication of zhongguo, a process whereby “the foreign text [. . .] is not so much communicated as inscribed with domestic intelligibilities and interests.”40 Kitai signifies the accumulated meanings that have accrued around China in the Russian cultural context, a dynamic that recalls the exotic commodification of Kitai as fans, silk, and Turandot. Tretyakov’s rejection of Kitai thus expresses an ambition to convey China on its own terms, freed from the distortions of domestication. Nonetheless, the first encounter with Chzhungo for most readers of Russian will most likely cause a sense of confusion and estrangement. The term’s lack of significations in the domestic context produces an initial effect close to the Futurist practice of zaum: a verbal unit experienced for its sonic and graphic materiality rather than any established semantic function. Russian readers seeking traces of the familiar in this unfamiliar term might even grasp for the word chuzhoi (чужой; “strange, alien”), which shares four of its five letters with Chzhungo (Чжунго).41 This strangeness, however, will be overcome once the reader understands that Chzhungo transliterates a meaningful semantic unit in Chinese. An initial experience of estrangement becomes the first step toward enabling a new understanding of the foreign context behind the text as distinctive and autonomous. Aleksandr Rodchenko’s striking cover design (figure 1.1) reinforces this movement through estrangement to a new understanding. The unfamiliar phonetic and visual unit Chzhungo is counterbalanced by two legible

FIGURE 1.1  Cover

to Chzhungo (1927), designed by Aleksandr Rodchenko.

Source: From the holdings of the Russian State Library.

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Cyrillic expressions in the same red font: S. Tretyakov and Gosizdat (the State Publishing House). Furthermore, this illegible Chzhungo appears between the two characters, zhong (Ё) and guo (೟), that render the term in Chinese, within a design whose balance and sense of symmetry insists upon the theme of equivalence. Two identical red spheres—two fraternal “red” nations?—are drawn together and held apart by identical white lines, conveying a sense of order and balance that offsets the alienating impact of the unfamiliar term in the center. Estrangement works to jolt the reader out of the frame of the familiar exotic, dispelling Kitai and its accumulated cultural baggage. Instead, we are confronted with a term that is truly foreign, and yet reassured visually that this otherness can be rendered equivalent. Resisting the history of “translating” China as a form of domestication, the cover of Chzhungo asserts that the book within will transmit China as it really is, without distortion, while at the same time rendering China commensurable and comprehensible. The sketches within constantly enact this double movement: rejecting exotic stereotype to engage with the concrete social reality of contemporary China, they simultaneously render that contemporary reality comprehensible by placing it within an analytical framework that Tretyakov brings with him from Moscow.

S OVI ET RUSSIA IN THE MIDDLE ( K I N GDOM) : BEIJIN G UN DER SOVIE T EY ES

To illustrate this dynamic, we might turn to Tretyakov’s longest China sketch, “Beijing” (“Pekin”), an account of the Chinese capital presented as a single continuous act of observation. This journey of Tretyakov’s narrating consciousness into and through the Chinese capital replays the movement from alienation to understanding, casting off exotic stereotypes and replacing them with a focus on Chinese cultural practices within their functional, pragmatic context. At the same time, Tretyakov’s temporal perspective emphasizes historical contradictions that can be processed through a Soviet understanding of revolution, while his spatial journey ends by positioning the Soviet embassy at the heart of the city. “Beijing” uses multiple vantage points to provide a detailed eyewitness report on

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everyday life in the Chinese capital. Although Tretyakov indicates at points that the sketch emerged from several months of residency and observation, the text is structured around the chronotope of arrival in and exploration of an unknown city.42 This reduction of time into a single narrative movement also elides the processes of investigation, conversation, and translation that produced the knowledge of the city displayed in the sketch. Shorn of such complications, “Beijing” presents a city that unfolds its spaces and inhabitants before the all-seeing eye of the Soviet reporter. Our first sight of Beijing is veiled in the language of exotic fantasy. Compared with Tianjin, where traditional Chinese buildings rub shoulders with cranes and factory chimneys, “Beijing is a city from another world entirely.”43 To add to the sense of mystery, huge stone walls render this alien city invisible from the outside: “only some fantastic multicoloured towers, reminiscent of boats or the tiaras of Chinese actors, break the monotonous toothed line of these mountainous walls.”44 These metaphors should give us pause; it seems Tretyakov is employing the very aesthetic devices that he elsewhere denounces as illusory and deceptive. In an essay on aerial perspective entitled “Through Unwiped Glasses” (“Skvoz’ neprotertye ochki,” 1928), Tretyakov juxtaposes two types of metaphorical imagery. Some metaphors, he suggests, elucidate the objective nature of things and processes, while other metaphors obscure this objective reality through an aesthetic appeal to the subject as consumer. The view from an airplane lures the writer to compare “strip farms” to a “patchwork quilt,” but this tell us nothing about the practical functioning of strip farms.45 A comparison of humans and termites offers a more acceptable form of figurative language: in this case, the fact that both transform the landscape through their productive activity elucidates their function rather than fixating entirely on aesthetic appearance.46 Returning to “Beijing,” it seems that Tretyakov’s use of metaphor on first sight of the city accentuates the mythical and distances the practical. Here a tower is not a structure intended for defense, but a boat, or perhaps a tiara. From the outside, at a distance, the traveling writer retains a sense of the fantastic and exotic. Next Tretyakov switches his vantage point to the walls, a popular promenade for tourists and a common perspective in China travelogues. From this elevated position, he observes, “as far as the eye can see, like a petrified dead wave, the dull, gray undulation of the tiled roofs of Beijing’s one-storey houses.”47 Earlier the towers along

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the walls were like boats, and now the roofs of the houses become waves. If we follow Tretyakov’s own theory of metaphor from “Through Unwiped Glasses,” these metaphorical descriptions distance what Beijing seems to be from what it is, form from function, appearance from reality. Worse still, they suggest that Tretyakov looks with what he later calls “the eyes of a consumer”: a mode of observation that foregrounds the aesthetic experience of the observer over knowledge of the object.48 Tretyakov would seem, on first glance, to look at Beijing through the exotic spectacles of his enemies, transforming a large and complex city into a clichéd poetic image. Indeed, the simile of the petrified wave plays directly into nineteenth-century European stereotypes of China as ossified and incapable of historical development. Tretyakov mimics the exotic perspective of the consumer here precisely in order to dislodge this way of seeing in his readers. Following a line in Russian travel writing that traces back as least as far as Ivan Goncharov’s Frigate Pallada (Fregat Pallada, 1858), Tretyakov frames travel as a process of disenchantment: the exotic foreign world of the imagination is nowhere to be found.49 Yet this disenchantment clears a path toward a new way of seeing. As we move further into Beijing, the touristic gaze gives way to a mode of observation that emphasizes concrete, functional social knowledge. In “Through Unwiped Glasses,” Tretyakov calls this seeing through “production eyes”: eyes that can comprehend the productive processes in the surrounding environment, from the workings of a plane’s motor to the patterns of agricultural land use.50 In “Beijing,” Tretyakov describes everyday social processes in a manner that resists exotic aestheticization. At the same time, the sketch depends for its unity on a formal, aesthetic choice: the reduction of prolonged observation into a single narrative that draws the  reader on a journey from ignorance to understanding. Tretyakov’s sketch still presents “Beijing” as a whole, but the single image glimpsed from the walls cedes its place to a dynamic visual totality united by a certain understanding of contradictory temporal development. This notion of heightened dialectical vision can be traced back to the foundational texts of Marxism. In The German Ideology, Marx lambasts Feuerbach for looking at the cityscapes of Manchester or Rome and seeing only the scene in front of him, while failing to see the historical process within which that view constitutes a moment.51 Tretyakov builds on Marx by insisting that what is in front of him, be it Beijing or the view from a plane, is always

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FIGURE 1.2  Interior

of a Beijing home (taken from the neighboring roof).

Source: From the holdings of the Russian State Library.

already aestheticized. The first step must be to break up the aesthetic illusion into the concrete and observable realia of productive economic life. Only then, in a dialectical act of reaestheticization, can these fragments be reassembled into a newly dynamic totality inscribed within a general theory of history. Tretyakov’s next vantage point brings him closer to the everyday life of Beijing. “Living on the second floor of a flat-roofed building,” he recounts, “on several occasions I observed at length these courtyards, in which Bejingers pass three quarters of their life.”52 A photograph accompanying the version of the sketch published in Prozhektor shows this new point of observation, which reveals the social life taking place beneath the gray wave of Beijing’s roofs (figure 1.2). Despite his admission that these observations took place over a period of extended residence, the sketch condenses them into a single act of viewing, focused on concrete economic processes of socially necessary labor. “Here is the house of a collier”: a detailed technical description follows of the labor process

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through which the collier and his assistants convert discarded fragments of charcoal into cheap fuel, mixing them with coal dust and clay into little pellets that dry in the sun.53 Next, the writer’s gaze pans round to another courtyard, where the products of this labor are consumed: “And here, in another courtyard, I see the pellets being poured into a portable white clay stove, reminiscent of a toilet bowl.”54 In a third courtyard, a meal is prepared. Although Chinese cuisine often functions in European travel accounts as a symbolic expression of irreconcilable alterity, Tretyakov’s description of the meal lacks any strangeness.55 Chopsticks are explained in practical, organizational terms: “The Chinese do not use knives during a meal. The knife is an instrument for the kitchen. Food should be brought to the table in such a form that it can be put straight in the mouth and chewed.”56 As with the two preceding scenes, eating appears as a technical, goal-oriented form of social labor, rather than an exotic marker of cultural difference. As the Soviet reporter’s gaze moves down from his vantage point and through the streets, Beijing continues to gain complexity. The homogeneous gray sea observed from the walls becomes a social system organized by distinctions of class and occupation. Tretyakov describes the typical homes of the rich, middle-class, and poor. He differentiates the various types of transport on the main roads, from automobiles to rickshaw drivers to camel caravans.57 We see the commercial district with its range of trades and crafts, the gastronomic customs of private homes, the crowds at New Year celebrations, and even a typical scene of client-courtesan relations.58 The photographs inserted into the text accentuate the power of observation to produce knowledge: we glimpse typical scenes from the city’s economic life, including a shot of a commercial street, a man transporting pigs to market, a wealthy Chinese woman on a rickshaw, manure carriers, and a water carrier.59 Eighteen months’ residence are condensed into a single movement from the outside to the inside, in the course of which nothing in Beijing is closed to Tretyakov’s roving eye. This all-access vision contrasts to the myopia of Western tourists, who flock to abandoned temples and, even here, require visual assistance: they must pay the monks at the Lama Temple to lift the covers and reveal the notorious statues of Buddha copulating.60 Tretyakov’s gaze seemingly needs no such local assistance to see everything he sees. Indeed, “Beijing” makes no mention of the translators and intermediaries whose crucial role can be

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glimpsed in other sketches. In this account, their mediation is concealed, replaced by a camera-like eye that moves seamlessly from observation to social meaning. “Beijing” may represent the apex of observational power, but Tretyakov still requires a theoretical framework through which to process his observations. The key organizing concept becomes uneven development, a condition theorized by Trotsky in the context of Russia, which also plays a central role in Lenin’s analysis of the capitalist world economy.61 Tretyakov’s eye seeks out the signs of what Ernst Bloch was later to call “nonsynchronism,” the simultaneous coexistence of seemingly contradictory historical phases.62 A lengthy description of traditional handicrafts— from furniture and carpets to vases and watches—culminates with the claim that their guild system faces disruption from the introduction of machines.63 Rickshaw drivers, desperate to preserve their livelihood, lie down in protest on the newly constructed tram lines that spread across the city.64 Among the paper embroidery stencils at the market, alongside traditional images of dragons, butterflies, and bamboo, Tretyakov finds  the shapes of airplanes, automobiles, and bicycles. The airplane image is reproduced in the text, forming a striking contrast to the more traditional pattern of a flowering bamboo plant (figure 1.3). These are not lamentable instances of the destruction of tradition, as they were for some contemporaneous Western visitors.65 For Tretyakov, the social tensions caused by the incursion of industrial capitalism and the rupture of the old order contain the seeds of revolution. Tretyakov concludes his tour of Beijing with a glimpse of the city’s centers of power. The old center, the imperial palace of the Forbidden City, has been displaced: its pleasure gardens now serve as public parks where the city’s small but active intelligentsia gather. The new center, and the end-point of Tretyakov’s journey, is the Diplomatic Quarter, which is metaphorized in a way fully fitting its function: “a stone loudspeaker, through which imperial capital dictates its orders to China.”66 Yet this hostile new center of power contains the seeds of its own negation, as asserted by the final image of the sketch: “Guards pace outside embassy gates. But there are no guards at the gates of that embassy from whose bastion a red banner with our hammer and sickle flutters at Beijing.”67 By ending at the Soviet embassy, Tretyakov retains for his tour of Beijing, with all the intricate knowledge it displays, the narrative shape of a single arriving journey.

FIGURE 1.3  Paper

embroidery stencils at the market in “Beijing.”

Source: From the holdings of the Russian State Library.

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But this decision also places that embassy and the power it represents at the spatial center and temporal climax of this journey. This chronotope of arrival offers the allegorical implications of a particular narrative of history. Arriving in ignorance, his vision clouded by fantasy, Tretyakov learns through observation to understand Beijing as a society with a rich and complex culture, while at the same time recognizing that this culture is being transformed by the contradictory forces of uneven development. The conclusion of this journey from outside to inside locates the center of the city at the Soviet embassy, suggesting that it is here that a resolution to the conflict of tradition and modernity may be found. The analysis of Beijing as a space of temporal contradictions is not unique to Tretyakov. Li Dazhao, one of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party and the librarian at Beijing University while Tretyakov taught there, described the Qianmen neighborhood in 1918 as a space where “all the things of the twentieth century alongside those from before the fifteenth are brought together in one place.”68 Another Beijing University colleague was Aleksei Ivin, whose article on China and the Soviet Union was discussed in the introduction. Tretyakov encountered Ivin on his first visit to China in 1921 and later described him (in tones that veer toward exotic simile) as his teacher: “A. Ivin, a veteran resident of Beijing, taught me to see China, laying it out before my maddened eyes carefully and tastefully, like a jeweller laying out precious stones.”69 Perhaps we should not be surprised, then, at the familiar shape of Ivin’s short sketch “Revolutionary Beijing” (“Revoliutsionnyi Pekin”), which first appeared in Prozhektor’s special issue on the Chinese Revolution in March 1927—just before the fall of Shanghai to the Guomindang and subsequent purge of the Communists.70 Ivin, like Tretyakov, shapes his account of the city where he had lived for years as a journey from outside to inside. Beijing on arrival appears once more through an exotic, aestheticized lens. From the vantage point of its “cyclopic walls,” the city resembles a “garden in full bloom,” or a “sea of buildings” decorated with “fantastically curved roofs.”71 The traveler’s expectations of Eastern exotica are fully met on first glance: “it begins to seem that you have flown over the mountains and across the seas to be deposited by magic carpet in a fantastical land of fairy-tale.”72 As we enter the city, however, this exotic image outside time is disrupted by a host of temporal contradictions that Ivin describes as a “hotchpotch of the centuries” (vinegret stoletii). Again, the contradictions of uneven development

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catch the Soviet observer’s eye: the automobiles of the rich speed past a caravan of camels on the sidewalk; bicycles and rickshaws share the road with two-wheeled carts that survive from the time of Genghis Khan; traditional theater and cinema compete for audiences; the one-step and the foxtrot are danced in foreign hotels while hordes of chancrous beggars roam the streets. The fantastic remains, but now in the key of contradiction: Beijing offers “some kind of fantastical, monstrous blend of Europe and Asia.”73 Moreover, Ivin grants the Russian observer a special power to decipher this riddle-some place: “This whole human anthill with its strange customs, understandings, beliefs and legends produces the impression of an unknown world that is at the same time mysteriously close to us, close to us Russians as to none of the Europeans. For despite all the dissimilitude, there is in this China something of Tatar, pre-Petrine Rus’, of boyars’ gowns, painted mansions and lubok garishness.”74 The degrading image of Chinese society as an “anthill” was an established cliché for Soviet writers of the 1920s, traceable back to the writings of Alexander Herzen in the previous century.75 But Ivin balances this  trope of alterity with a mysterious similarity. For Russian observers, this fantastical world recalls their own exoticized, “Oriental” past, and  thus their own experience of belated, uneven modernization. Ivin extends this historical kinship into the more recent past, comparing the radical students in the halls of Beijing University to “our eighteen forties, sixties, seventies, and nineties, the period of student demonstrations and the first protests by Russian workers.”76 From this point, it is a short step to claim that China’s own October is not far away. If Tretyakov’s journey places the Soviet embassy at the spatial center of Beijing, Ivin confidently locates Soviet Russia in Beijing’s future.

T H E S O UNDS OF CHINA THROU G H SOV I ET EA RS

These sketches of Beijing position sight as the key mode of perception for overcoming exoticism and repositioning China within the same revolutionary modernity as Soviet Russia. But Soviet traveling writers in China also dwelt repeatedly on sound, as another form of sensory experience in which the discovery of commonality competed with difference

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and alienation. Ivin aside, the Soviet reporters who visited China in the 1920s had limited access to Chinese speech. We have already seen that Tretyakov largely masked the processes of interpretation that lay behind his sketches. But auditory alienation extended beyond the verbal sphere. Many Soviet accounts of the period describe a visit to a Chinese theater, which offered an occasion to comment on the music accompanying theatrical performances. These responses do not stray far from a longstanding tendency among Western visitors to describe Chinese musical performances as more “noise” than music.77 Galina Serebryakova, who wrote her Sketches of China (Zarisovki Kitaia, 1927) while accompanying her husband Leonid Serebryakov on a diplomatic mission, records her auditory experience in a theater: “several instruments issuing sounds unusual to the ear of a foreigner: a gong, a wooden flapper, flutes and a one-stringed violin. At first Chinese music deafens with its unaccustomed idiosyncracy.”78 The journalist Zinaida Rikhter, who accompanied the Great Flight aviation expedition to China in 1925 (see chapter 2), had a similar reaction: “The most powerful hurricane could not compare with the frenzied noise made by a Chinese orchestra.”79 Even Tretyakov agreed that the music of the Chinese theatrical orchestra “shocks and deafens a European to the point of headache,” although he tied his aesthetic response to an ideological critique.80 Chinese theater, with its sonic assault, played for Tretyakov the same ideological role as religious cult: an aesthetic narcotic that prevented its pacified spectators from perceiving the true nature of their social relations.81 One sonic alternative to this culturally alien and ideologically suspicious musical form could be found in the economic sphere of daily life. Serebryakova, alienated by the music in the theater, discovers an “incomparable symphony” in the “sound signs” used by traders and craftsmen on the streets of Beijing. Her Sketches describe the “tender melodic strain” of the fruit-seller, the “hissing” of the water carrier, and the “click-clacking” (treshchotka) of the barber.82 These sounds, known in Chinese as huosheng (䉼㙆, trade sounds), were an audible presence in Chinese urban life into the middle of the twentieth century.83 In Beijing, street peddlers operated mainly in the narrow lanes called hutong, where the walled courtyard homes faced inward, with little or no exposure to the street. To reach the attention of those within the courtyard homes, these peddlers and hawkers developed distinctive sounds to announce their presence and

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advertise the goods or services they offered for sale.84 In addition to a range of human cries, Beijing’s traders deployed various “sound instruments” (xiangqi ䷓఼) to create their signature sounds. Gongs, bells, drums, pipes, and flappers joined the human voice in creating the distinctive soundscape of Beijing’s commercial street life.85 Serebryakova’s interest in the huosheng as aesthetic experience echoes other foreign visitors to Beijing in the early twentieth century, from American Sinophile George N. Kates to Shanghai-based Russian–Jewish composer Aaron Avshalamov.86 Tretyakov, too, was drawn to the sounds of street trade on his first encounter with the Chinese capital. The poem “Night. Beijing,” written after his first visit in 1921, incorporates the sounds of the peddlers into its attempt to capture Beijing’s “acoustic landscape” in verse.87 Tretyakov later rejected his first impressions of Beijing as “overwhelming, but processed above all from an exotic perspective,” including the “mournful, completely incomprehensible cries of the peddlers.”88 On his return to Beijing in 1924, he approached the trade sounds in the guise of a diligent researcher: “On the first days after my arrival in Beijing, sitting on the second floor above the hutong, I would write down on notepaper the musical phrases arising beneath my window. Soon I could tell the time of day from the first notes of a tune, and later I learned to recognize the product or trade that the tune proclaimed.”89 The results of his research appeared not in an ethnographic article but in a poem: “Roar China” (“Rychi Kitai”), precisely dated “Beijing, 20 March 1924.”90 The poem “Roar China” contains fourteen sections. The seven central sections offer portraits of individual peddlers and tradesmen from the Beijing streets: “Rickshaw Driver,” “Knife-Sharpener,” “Load-Carrier,” “Manure-Seller,” “Water-Carrier,” “Fruit-Seller,” and “Barber.” (Note that several of these figures appear also in the photographs that accompanied the various editions of the “Beijing” sketch.)91 A prose postscript appended to the poem explains its source material: “The foundational core of the poem is constructed around the ‘sound signs’ of the wandering street craftsmen and traders of Beijing. Тhese are either cries, or sounds emitted by various instruments.”92 Four of these traders and their distinctive sounds, all of them instrumental, are described in the postscript: the water-carrier, the barber, the knife-sharpener, and the fruitseller. The poem deploys the device of onomatopoeia to incorporate these

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sounds into its verbal texture. “Roar China” thus makes a documentary claim to transmit actual experienced sound: you hear what I heard. Hearing replaces sight as the textually mediated sensation through which the internationalist subject experiences contemporary Chinese reality. This turn to sound endorses some of the stereotypical distinctions between sight and hearing that Jonathan Sterne calls the “audiovisual litany”: where vision in “Beijing” formed associations with distance, cognition, and mastery, mimetic sound in “Roar China” aspires to connect the reader to the Beijing streets with the validating force of sensory immediacy.93 At the same time, however, these sounds are signs, and their transposition into Russian poetry involves a complex process of semiotic decoding and recoding. For an example of how this documentary onomatopoeia works, let us begin with the water-carrier, whose “instrument” is the cart that he pushes down the street. The postscript informs us that this cart emits a characteristic screech (vizzhanie) that no other cart makes.94 In the section of the poem devoted to the water-carrier, Tretyakov renders this sound as “vzhi-zzi,” borrowing these phonemes from the Russian onomatopoeic verb vizzhat’ (to screech): Тачка поет: Вжи—ззи; вжи—ззи. Воду, воду Вези, вези. Плечи под цепью.— Тачка пой! Везу водопой. Визжит водопой.95

The cart sings: Vzhi—zzi; vzhi—zzi. Water, water Bring, bring. Shoulders to the chain.— Sing, cart! I bring the water trough. The water trough screeches.

The direct inclusion of vizzhit (it screeches) in the final line makes the debt clear. But the cart’s sound is also echoed in various forms of the verb vezti, to haul or to transport: vezi, vezu. These in turn connect to the  tradesman’s Russian name, vodovoz. The poem’s phonetic texture binds the tradesman and his activity to his distinctive trade sound. The poem’s postscript describes the barber carrying an idiosyncratic instrument, “similar to a huge tuning fork with its ends brought close together. Snapping the tuning fork with a stick produces a rising sound:

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dzzz.”96 In Chinese this device is called a huantou (୮丁), a shortening of “jiaohuan ren lai titou” (ি୮Ҏ՚ࠗ丁), something that “calls people to come and be shaved.”97 Tretyakov replicates its sound in the poem through a purely onomatopoeic collection of letters: “Dzzzzyi / Breiu / Dzzzzyi / Strigu” (Dzzzzyi / I shave / Dzzzzyi / I trim).98 This use of onomatopoeia deploys the same defamiliarization strategy practiced on the cover of Chzhungo: the strangeness of this phonetic construction jars the reader into alertness, before a translation of its meaning is supplied. We may even detect a faint echo of the first syllable of the barber’s name in Russian, tsiriul’nik (t͡sɪ / dzɨ). The knife-sharpener (tochil’shchik) uses a different instrument, a long thin trumpet-like horn, whose sound recalls a “military signal.”99 This militaristic trumpet blast is approximated in the poem through the repetition of the verb tochu (I grind, I sharpen), which appears seven times in twenty-two lines.100 Accounts of the huosheng suggest that this trumpet blast consisted of two notes, the second longer and higher.101 Toward the end of this section, Tretyakov splits tochu into two syllables to emphasize the onomatopoeia: “To—Chu!” The combination of an open, unstressed first vowel and a closed, stressed, longer second vowel approximates the two notes of the trumpet blast. Tretyakov’s most ingenious use of onomatopoeic comes with the fruit seller (fruktovshchik), who advertises his presence with a rattle drum (kolotushka).102 The postscript includes a musical annotation for the rhythm beaten on the fruit-seller’s drum: В частности “фруктовщик” построен на определенной ритмической фигуре даваемой колотушкой ♩♩ ♩♩ │♩♩ ♩♩ │♩♩ ♩♩ ♩♩ ♩♩ и т. д. до 80—100 раз и заключительное ♩♩ ♩♩♩, резко обрывающееся (метроном ♩ = 100).103 In particular, “The Fruit Seller” is built on a specific rhythmical figure made by the rattle drum: ♩♩ ♩♩ │♩♩ ♩♩ │♩♩ ♩♩ ♩♩ ♩♩ and so forth up to eighty to one hundred times, and a conclusive ♩♩ ♩♩♩, breaking off sharply (metronome ♩ = 100).

Tretyakov even invents a new onomatopoeic name for the drum, “tuptup-ka,” that approximates its insistent double rhythm. The fruit-seller’s poem reproduces this rhythm of varying double beats plus a final triple

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beat as a series of two-syllable or four-syllable lines culminating in a trisyllabic line: Сливы Груши Каки Вишни Мандарины Мандарины Бананы ба— Наны . . . Что потом?

Plums pears kaki cherries mandarins mandarins bananas ba— nanas . . . What comes next?104

Tretyakov’s onomatopoeia works here only if we are willing to take every single syllable as a beat—a mode of reading accentuated when the word “banany” (“bananas”) is split in two to serve the drum’s rhythm. This deviates from the standard mode for reading Russian verse, which would regard only the stressed syllables as beats. It pushes us, however, to read the poem in a manner that approximates the insistent beat of the rattle drum. This defamiliarizing of poetic language communicates an unfamiliar sonic reality through the medium of familiar Russian words. Tretyakov’s use of onomatopoeia to capture urban sound echoes some of the earliest Futurist manifestos.105 Writing in 1914, Filippo Marinetti explained his attraction to onomatopoeia as stemming from a desire to engage with and capture the material world: “Our growing love for matter, the will to penetrate it and know its vibrations, the physical sympathy that links us to motors, push us to the use of onomatopoeia. Since noise is the result of rubbing or striking rapidly moving solids, liquids, or gases, onomatopoeia, which reproduces noise, is necessarily one of the most dynamic elements of poetry.”106 Some Russian Futurist advocates of zaum’ and the “self-valued word” disparaged Marinetti’s onomatopoeia as an inferior poetic device. For Roman Jakobson, the Italian Futurists’ use of onomatopoeia subordinated the creation of new forms to the communication of facts about the physical world, a dynamic that Jakobson opposed to the Russian Futurists’ creation of new content through the creation of

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new forms. Hence, Jakobson dismissed Marinetti’s onomatopoeia as an activity that belonged to a separate sphere of verbal creation: “This is a reform in the field of reportage, not in the field of poetic language.”107 Tretyakov, by contrast, deploys onomatopoeia in “Roar China” precisely because he wants to use poetry as a form of reportage. Revolutionary art, Tretyakov proclaimed in 1923, must combine Marinetti’s orientation toward material life with an emphasis on proletarian experience: “Art’s center of gravity will be situated in life itself, in the lines and forms of its objects, in everyday language, in the sounds of plants, factories, ports, streets, tractors, and workers’ assemblies.”108 A year later, Tretyakov deploys onomatopoeia to transmit his experience of Beijing’s trade sounds to a distant audience in Soviet Russia. To use the language of Peircean semiotics, the onomatopoeias in “Roar China” seek to function as both icons and indices. They mimetically reproduce the original instrumental sounds, and they also assert the fact of Tretyakov’s presence, his material contact with the sounds that his poem records. At the same time, however, these sounds are not simply the “noises” that Marinetti describes, the sonic result of matter striking other matter. They are also what Peirce called symbols, signs with a conventional referent whose meaning is widely understood in the everyday life of the Beijing streets. After phonetic recording, then, comes the decoding of these symbols and their social function. The reader’s initial sense of confusion on encountering such strange phonetic constructions as “vzhi-zzi” or “dzzzzyi” gives way to an understanding of the signs’ functions in their home environment. This poem’s version of internationalist aesthetics, however, performs a third move, recoding the trade sounds as harbingers of popular uprising. This recoding positions these itinerant peddlers as an exploited class with revolutionary potential, part of the global proletariat of internationalism.109 Each verse on a different tradesman begins with a description of their activity, vivified by their distinctive sound, but progresses in every case to conclude with the same political message: the hatred these Chinese workers feel toward the foreign imperialists who dominate their economic system will lead to violent rebellion. The objective recording of experience in the present merges into a prophecy of uprising in the future.

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As the section on the water-carrier (vodovoz) progresses, the words linked to his distinctive trade sound recur in a description of the pain his labor causes: Воду везу. Воду везу. Плечи калечит цепь, цепь. Визжит на мясе звеньями зуд. Пилит пыль—морщь на лице.110

I bring water. I bring water. Shoulders maimed by the chain, the chain. Scratch screeches its links in flesh. Dust saws a furrow in a face.

Now the screech of the cart (“vzhi-zzi”) becomes the screech of its chain (“viz-zhit”) digging into the water-carrier’s body. The sound that advertises his service becomes the sound of the suffering his labor creates. By contrast, he observes the leisurely life of Europeans in the city, their “white hats” keeping them cool, their “white paws” free from the blemishes of work. The water-carrier’s growing awareness of these inequities leads to a prophecy of violent vengeance: В лоханьях пятнадцать пудов воды. There are fifteen poods of water in these tubs. В ней тебя и твою утоплю. I will drown you and your woman in it. Белым лицом рвану по грязи. I will grind your white face in the dirt. Вжи—ззи. Vzhi—zzi. Вжи—ззи.111 Vzhi—zzi.

Thus, the screeching sound of the cart, “vzhi-zzi,” a sign of water for sale, changes its signification as the poem proceeds. Through Tretyakov’s onomatopoeic associations, its meaning shifts to signify first oppressive labor and then violent uprising, the sound of a hated face ground into the dirt. What we see at work in this poem is a variation on the Futurist technique known as sdvig, a “shift” or “displacement” produced by the artist’s work on their material.112 The initial meaning of these sounds, fixed through onomatopoeia, is displaced by a new, secondary meaning. The knife-grinder’s sharpened tools become convenient weapons to use against

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foreigners, and the semantic associations of his trade sound shift accordingly to suggest new significations: Точу, точу. Лучшая точка. Острейшая точка. Кто злобой гружен— Ставь красную точку Моим ножом. То— Чу! Точу.

I sharpen, I sharpen. The best point. The sharpest point. Whoever is burdened with malice— Make a red full stop With my knife Shar— Pen! I sharpen.

The verb tochu, equated through repetition with the knife-grinder’s trumpet blast, now develops a sonic connection to the sharpened point (tochka) of the knife. Through a further shift of meaning into the realm of punctuation and idiom, Tretyakov suggests that the angry laborer can “put a full stop” to (i.e., “draw a line under”) his exploitation with the knife. The red color of this “full stop” indicates that its punctuation is also the puncturing of human skin. Likewise, the repetition of the fruit-seller’s rattle-drum rhythm recodes his trade sound into an insistent demand for violent revenge: В сливу надо Каплю яду. Чтобы мучил Корчил, пучил, Чтоб туптупку Врезать в рубку Топотом. Топотом.

Put a drop of poison In a plum. So that he suffers Writhes, swells, So as to turn the tuptupka to hacking Rat-a-tat. Rat-a-tat.

The first six lines contain two sets of double beats, and the last two lines repeat the three-beat conclusion, even rhyming with the previous threebeat ending (chto potom/topotom). Now, however, this insistent beat proclaims not wares for sale but rather ways to kill. The continuity provided

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by recoding the same sonic elements suggests that this violence emerges spontaneously from the social situation here described: the global power of the imperialists leads inevitably to uprising from below. “Roar China” thus exemplifies the double movement of Tretyakov’s mediation strategy. The poem communicates Beijing’s trade sounds on their own terms, as facts gathered through prolonged observation, while simultaneously reinscribing them into a narrative of anti-imperialist revolutionary violence recognizable to Soviet readers. There remains one last sound in the poem to consider: the “roar” demanded by its title. This sonic expression of rage seeks a universality that exceeds the human realm of signification. Its origins may lie in Tretyakov’s exposure to contemporaneous nationalist rhetoric in China, which imagined the Chinese nation as a sleeping tiger, lion, or dragon, expected to awaken and roar with rage.113 Indeed, the phrase migrated back into the hands of leftist Chinese artists through translations and stagings of Tretyakov’s 1926 play, most famously providing the title for Li Hua’s woodblock print of 1935 (“Nuhou ba, Zhongguo!”). Later still, “roar, China!” was adopted by Langston Hughes for a 1937 poem written in response to the Japanese invasion of China.114 Here we find a compelling instance of the horizontal aspiration of internationalist aesthetics: a sonic formulation whose affective immediacy overcomes linguistic borders. Yet Tretyakov’s poem counterbalances this centrifugal aspiration with a centripetal dynamic that places the power of interpretation in the Soviet poet’s hands. The only person who roars in “Roar China” is Tretyakov himself: “Eto ia v kvartal’nyi uiut / Ot litsa kitaitsev poiu. Eto ia v arsenal’niu dyru / Ot litsa kitaitsev oru” (It is I who sings at the comfort of the Quarter / On behalf of the Chinese. / It is I who yells at this armored hole / On behalf of the Chinese).115 Embedded in the Diplomatic Quarter, the center of imperial power in China, Tretyakov claims the right to roar on behalf of the laborers oppressed by that power—literally “from the face of ” (ot litsa), as if Tretyakov has donned a Chinese mask. The poem’s imperative title demands that China roar, but thereby admits that China is not roaring yet: for now, Tretyakov roars on China’s behalf. Beijing’s everyday sonic reality requires his mediation in order to be transformed into the roar of uprising. Once again, the decoding of China’s future passes through a Soviet center.

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CATASTROPHIC SIMIL A R I T I ES: BO RIS PIL N YAK’ S “CHINE SE STORY ”

“Roar, China” seeks to overcome one of the most significant obstacles facing the construction of an internationalist sense of the world: the division of languages. It does so, however, by effectively bypassing the Chinese language altogether, replacing linguistic translation with the decoding and recoding of trade sounds. Tretyakov’s mediation strategy seeks to balance difference with commensurability, maintaining a sense of a foreign cultural reality while affirming the power of a Soviet observer’s perspective to decode the historical trajectory of that reality. Boris Pilnyak’s “Chinese Story” offers a more skeptical perspective on these operations. This attempt to mediate between difference and commensurability produces an unstable, fragmented account that veers between domestication and alienation, denying the Soviet observer a stable interpretative perspective. Behind this skepticism lies a profound ambivalence about the proposition that Russia and China now occupy a common revolutionary modernity. When Pilnyak set out for Japan and China in early 1926, he was president of the Moscow branch of the All-Russian Writers’ Union and one of the most prominent writers in the Soviet Union.116 He rose to fame with The Naked Year (Golyi god, 1922), a chaotic and fragmented modernist novel about revolution and civil war in provincial Russia. In contrast to Tretyakov, who consistently theorized his artistic output as a contribution to the construction of a revolutionary society, Pilnyak belonged to the strain of 1920s literary culture that sought to affirm art’s autonomy from politics.117 During his trip to the Far East in 1926, a scandal erupted back in Moscow around his “Tale of the Unextinguished Moon” (“Povest’ nepogashennoi luny”), which dramatized the death of Red Army commander Mikhail Vasilevich Frunze and pointed to the complicity of a thinly disguised Stalin. This scandal began Pilnyak’s fall from political grace, which ended with his arrest in 1937 and subsequent execution. Tretyakov’s determination to fuse his artistic activities with the political work of the Bolshevik Party did not save him from the same fate: both he and Pilnyak were arrested and executed in the late 1930s on charges that included spying for the Japanese, an association enabled by their work in the Far East.118

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Like Tretyakov, Pilnyak established himself as a writer who traveled, his publications before and after 1926 inspired by a host of global spaces across Russia, Europe, and the Middle East.119 A visit to East Asia by a writer of Pilnyak’s stature offered clear benefits to the Soviet authorities. Pilnyak traveled under the auspices of the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (Vsesoiuznoe obshchestvo kul’turnoi sviazi s zagranitsei, VOKS), the primary agency for cultural diplomacy in the early Soviet period.120 The visit of a prominent Soviet writer offered cultural prestige in the context of Soviet engagement with China and the recent recognition of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) by Japan in January 1925, as well as an opportunity for Soviet readers to learn more about these crucial Far Eastern spaces. It appears, however, that VOKS had limited control over or even knowledge of Pilnyak’s actual actions, at least in China.121 Indeed, his trip should be seen as motivated by personal as well as official desire. Pilnyak had his own reasons for wanting to visit East Asia: as early as July 1924, he had written to Vsevolod Ivanov suggesting they embark on a trip to China together.122 Notably, China has made its way into Pilnyak’s writing before Pilnyak made his way to China. The Naked Year inherits from the Silver Age the geohistorical theme of “Russia between East and West,” echoing Vladimir Solovyov’s “pan-Mongolist” image of Asia as apocalyptic invader alongside Aleksandr Blok’s “Scythian” notion of Russia as a wild, semi-Asiatic opponent to civilized, decadent Europe.123 Pilnyak exploits the name of Kitai-gorod (China-town), a district of Moscow with no historical relation to China, to position China as the novel’s metonymic image for Asia at the heart of Russia.124 By day, Kitai-gorod is a bustling site of modern, capitalist trade, “all bowler-hatted, altogether Europe.” At night, however, the bowler hats cede place to “China without a bowler hat on, the Celestial Empire, which lies somewhere beyond the steppes to the East, beyond the Great Stone Wall, and looks at the world with slanting eyes, like the buttons of Russian soldiers’ greatcoats.”125 In the geohistorical schema of The Naked Year, this sinister, racialized “China” comes to stand for stagnant Asiatic backwardness, fighting with the bowler hats of Europe for possession of Russia’s soul.126 Pilnyak’s approach to Russian history as a problem of geography shows certain affinities with the intellectual movement of Eurasianism, which took shape in the 1920s among Russian émigré thinkers in Europe.

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Prominent Eurasianist Nikolai Trubetskoy—one of the founders of structuralist linguistics—reframed Russia’s torn position between East and West as a distinctive “Eurasian” identity, the felicitous product of Russia’s incorporation into the Mongol Empire. Trubetskoy’s Eurasianism was profoundly antimodern and anti-Western: it celebrated subordination to religion and social hierarchy as values supposedly bequeathed to Russia by the Mongols, and it rejected the Europeanizing reforms of Peter the Great as a betrayal of Russia’s Eurasian identity.127 Noting parallels with the thought of Trubetskoy and other Eurasianists, Tatiana Filimonova argues that The Naked Year positions Russia as a positive model of Eurasian community poised between the mechanized emptiness of the West and the sinister chaos of the East.128 A later story, “Sankt-Piter-Burkh” (1923), shifts these coordinates to present Russia and China as Eurasian neighbors both experiencing the chaos of revolution and civil war in the early twentieth century. Here, a Chinese migrant becomes a Red Army soldier in Russia’s Civil War, whereas a White Russian officer ends the tale begging on the streets of Beijing. Although “Sankt-Piter-Burkh” borrows heavily from Andrei Bely in its depiction of Petersburg as a nightmarish space invaded by sinister forces from the East, it ends with the Chinese migrant settling down to till the Russian land, suggesting a regenerative return to pre-modern, Eurasian values.129 Thus, Pilnyak arrived in China in May 1926 as both a Soviet emissary and a writer inclined to insert China into a speculative historiosophical discourse concerning Russia’s relationship to Europe, Asia, and Eurasia. This ambiguity shapes the text that his visit produced. “Chinese Story,” published in Novyi mir in June and August 1927, offers a disjointed account of Pilnyak’s experiences traveling through China and staying in Shanghai, where he spent several weeks living at the Russian Consulate and waiting for a voyage home.130 Much in this curious travelogue fits the model of engaged China reportage established by Tretyakov. Echoing Tretyakov’s factographic aspirations, Pilnyak’s text is filled with various kinds of documents: newspaper reports translated from English and Chinese, telegrams, private letters, and diary entries. In addition to such elements of documentary form, some passages appear to do the same work of mediating an internationalist connection with China. We see Pilnyak attending parties with left-wing Chinese intellectuals and commenting on the brutish behavior of Western imperialists. We see a rickshaw driver, standard

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symbol of oppressed Chinese labor, kicked in the back by an Englishman in a cork helmet. We learn of executions and police violence.131 Pilnyak declares at one point that he and his companions are in Shanghai “because the Russian Revolution has sent us, because we, the Russians, are now against the entire world.”132 Elsewhere he insists that, in contrast to the rapacious intentions of the capitalist powers, “the USSR intends to see the entire Earthly Globe free, endowed with equal rights, working and educated.”133 These fragments of official internationalist discourse sit uncomfortably alongside Pilnyak’s reproduction of certain stereotypes of racialized difference: on the first page, for example, he repeats the comparison of the Chinese to ants or termites.134 More fundamentally, the gestures in “Chinese Story” toward correct ideological messaging lose their valency when embedded in the text’s chaotic, fragmentary structure, which disrupts the travelogue as a coherent chronotope. As we have seen, Tretyakov structured his travelogues through a chronotope of arrival that draws the reader from ignorance through exploration to understanding. Pilnyak’s narrative, by contrast, resists a coherent progression in space and time. The travelogue begins with a vivid assertion of location: “I am standing on the bank of the Yangtze.”135 But where exactly along the world’s third-longest river is Pilnyak standing? He tells us only that he is opposite a village “whose name I will never know.”136 Next we learn that Pilnyak is staying in an international concession in the largest city on the Pacific, which must be Shanghai, although again the name of the city is withheld. Several pages in, we finally get a geographical and temporal marker, inland and upriver: “Hankou, June.”137 After a scene in Hankou, however, the narrative shifts again to recall a railway journey from Mukden in the northeast, through Beijing, to Hankou. Finally, the chapter concludes with a journey by boat from Hankou to Shanghai, the latter city now identified by name. With external knowledge of China’s geography and Pilnyak’s visit, we can deduce that his actual journey through China began in the northeast and proceeded by way of Beijing and Hankou to Shanghai. The account in “Chinese Story,” however, jumbles the different stages of Pilnyak’s journey. This modernist confusion of narrative order would not surprise a reader of Pilnyak’s early, ornamentalist texts. Read in the context of Tretyakov’s sketches, however, this disruption of the chronotope of arrival produces in the reader a sense of travel—and of China—as disorienting and confusing.

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Perhaps this initial confusion could, as in Tretyakov’s “Beijing,” represent the ignorance of arrival that is to be replaced by greater knowledge and understanding? Sure enough, in his second chapter, Pilnyak announces that his true purpose is to tell the story of Liu Hua, a Shanghai trade union leader arrested by the British and executed by Sun Chuanfang’s military government in 1925.138 Pilnyak finally seems to be getting around to his “mission”: the depiction of semicolonized China moving inexorably toward revolution. A lengthy passage catalogs Shanghai’s contradictions: the Chinese workers living on cramped boats beside huge Western hotels;  the workers’ unions that coexist with the remnants of the feudal economy; the luxurious restaurants and dingy brothels. Pilnyak’s rhetorical effusions build toward prophecies of revolution: “Oh, when the Canton revolution smashes through all this—even though three Hindu policemen stand on every corner here—oh, with what chilly joy one looks upon the Chinese who must inevitably be moved—not by marshals, but by revolutions!”139 This crescendo culminates with the naming of Liu Hua, a “worker, librarian, student” recently killed by shooting or strangulation. It seems that Liu Hua is being positioned as some kind of protagonist whose life story will serve as a synecdoche for the Chinese Revolution—precisely the approach taken by Tretyakov in his “bio-interview,” Den Shi-khua, which began publication at around the same time “Chinese Story” appeared.140 Immediately after this proclamation, however, Pilnyak abandons this line of narration, pleading exhaustion and homesickness: “Essentially, though, all this is not about me. I don’t feel at all well. I am very tired. I would like to go home now, to Russia, onto the stove ledge, into thoughts, into books, into quiet—and far, far away from this unbearable heat, horrible and tormenting.”141 The remapping of China as a commensurable revolutionary space is interrupted by the nostalgic desire to abandon this uncomfortable foreign place altogether and return to the comfort of home. Pilnyak’s turn away from internationalist mediation is not simply an affirmation of the self (“all this is not about me”). It is also an affirmation of the nation as the true home, a note of Russocentric homesickness that runs through “Chinese Story” and seems to put the possibility of internationalist community under a cloud. The fragmentary, confused narrative form endures, meanwhile, and prevents the discourse of solidarity from building any sustained momentum: the story of Liu Hua is resumed only after another thirty pages, almost a third of the text.

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Next, there is the issue of veracity, which is also an issue of genre. If this is documentary reportage, why the generic label povest’ (tale) in the title? In fact, after opening as a confused travelogue and briefly threatening to become a revolutionary biography, in its third chapter, “Chinese Story” begins openly to violate the border between reality and fantasy. “I am making this up,” Pilnyak announces, as he begins to concoct a romantic narrative between Liu Hua and a visiting American missionary.142 These digressions into fiction perhaps make the reader question the authenticity of what they had hitherto read, trusting the generic markers of documentary and travelogue, as fact.143 Adding to this tension between fact and fiction is Pilnyak’s sporadic use of the diary form: the second and fourth of the text’s four main chapters are arranged as a sequence of diary entries. The diary combines the status of a document with a tendency toward explorations of subjectivity, offering “an uncertain genre uneasily balanced between literary and historical writing, between the spontaneity of reportage and reflectiveness of the crafted text.”144 Pilnyak’s Chinese diary turns increasingly inward, away from China, to document the writer’s discomfort, homesickness, and frustration over his delayed departure. A typical sample from chapter 4 reads: “4 o’clock. Impossible to breathe! . . . Dreadful! . . . But in Moscow there is the coolness of nine o’clock in the morning.”145 The mediation of China for a Soviet audience cedes place to a journey into the self and a longing for home. All this might seem unremarkable. Should we expect a romantic Scythian modernist, who spent a total of two months in China (and most of that holed up in an apartment), to validate either the Comintern project or the LEF program for a literature of fact? The critic Solomon Veltman, writing in Novyi Vostok, dismissed “Chinese Story” for deploying a solipsistic exoticism that he, like Tretyakov, linked to the imperialist West: “Everything in it is juxtaposed to the author’s own ‘I,’ and Eastern reality is depicted from this perspective. [. . .] B. Pilnyak, like a whole host of West European writers, tries to grasp the East while approaching it as something external, seeking to capture the ‘scent’ of the East.”146 By contrast, Veltman praised Tretyakov’s Chzhungo for its objective clarity, a “discrete and artistically crystallized reflection of the various aspects of Chinese life, which elucidates and accentuates the transition from old to new.”147 What Veltman does not address, however, are the similarities between the two texts. My claim is that Pilnyak’s text calls into question the project

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of internationalist aesthetics precisely by engaging with the same toolkit of devices that Tretyakov uses to mediate China for a Soviet audience. “Chinese Story” experiments with observation, aural experience, and translation as methods for producing knowledge about China, and also explores the role of the Soviet traveling writer as eyewitness, mediator, and collaborator. The model of internationalism endorsed by Tretyakov, wherein histories of backwardness and oppression converge in a revolutionary present, cedes place to a vision of Sino-Russian historical connection that links a common Eurasian past to a chaotic, alienating modernity. Pilnyak’s text begins by linking sensory experience to confusion and ignorance. The very first paragraph describes the perceptual experience of a “European eye” that sees only racialized clichés of otherness: “to a European eye—first, the individuality of each separate Chinese face is erased, and second, it is impossible to understand where, why, and from whence these endless Chinese crowds are going.”148 Here, at least, Pilnyak seems to share this alienating European gaze. Two paragraphs later, in Shanghai, the darkness of night combines with the cries of boat-dwellers on the canal to produce confusion and terror: “At midnight, when the tide comes in, all the Chinese immediately begin shouting,—and then it becomes frightening in the midst of this incomprehensibility, in this dark night, darker than any night in Russia.”149 A visit to an opium den affirms the impossibility that observation can lead to knowledge: “And here, on the threshold of these dens, just as in the temples and in the streets,—I realize that I do not know, do not understand, and never will understand China and the Chinese. I ask everyone left and right to find some keys to China—and I do not have these keys, everything that I see, I see in order not to know [vse, chto ia vizhu, ia vizhu dlia togo, chtoby—ne znat’].”150 The peculiar phrasing of this final sentence suggests that sight causes ignorance. As Pilnyak puts it in the draft version of this passage, “This tale is written about what I do not know and about what I saw in order not to know.”151 In an attempt to overcome the limits of sensory experience, Pilnyak turns instead to translation. Two paragraphs after bemoaning the absence of the “keys” he needs to unlock China’s meaning, Pilnyak latches onto the Chinese term manmande (᜶᜶ⱘ, “slowly”) as the basic expression of all that is quintessentially Chinese. Pilnyak’s rendering in Cyrillic, mamandi, suggests that he may have picked up this adverb from the SinoRussian pidgin spoken in Harbin.152 He explains its fundamental character

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through a series of translations that culminates in an idiomatic equivalent in Russian: “Mamandi means in Chinese—wait a moment, don’t hurry, don’t rush, it means the same as the Russian seichas. This mamandi is hidden within Chinese distances, Chinese time, Chinese affairs, and Chinese philosophy.”153 This act of translation enables mamandi to function for the remainder of the text as a signifier for the metaphysical peculiarity of Chinese culture. Anything that Pilnyak does not understand—the apparent disappearance of the ship on which he was supposed to depart, the delays in setting up his projected Sino-Russian Society for Cultural Relations (Kitrus)—all this can now be ascribed to mamandi. In a private letter written after his return to Russia, Pilnyak refers to mamandi as “this inexplicable Chinese disease,” suggesting that the condition is so idiosyncratically Chinese that it cannot be explained.154 “Chinese Story,” however, renders mamandi comprehensible through a proposed equivalence with the idiomatic use of the Russian word seichas (literally “now”) to mean “in a moment” or “just a minute.” By a striking coincidence, Walter Benjamin, who visited Moscow the winter after Pilnyak returned from China, identified seichas as the “real unit of time” in the Soviet capital. For Benjamin, seichas encapsulated a Russian indifference to timeliness that conflicted with modern, rationalized time: “In his use of time, therefore, the Russian will remain ‘Asiatic’ longest of all.”155 Pilnyak’s claim to an equivalence between these Chinese and Russian idioms likewise suggests these late-developing Eurasian neighbors may share a certain experience of temporality. In this era of steamships, railways, and world revolution, Russia too may suffer from the “disease” of slowness and delay. Once the discussion of mamandi has established the possibility of translation and commensurability, Pilnyak moves swiftly from absolute difference to absolute identity. Once more sound replaces sight as the sense that produces connection. As Tretyakov turned to the audial sphere to discover a familiar revolution hidden in the trade sounds of the Beijing streets, so, too, Pilnyak latches onto a distinctive sound from China’s economic life. The sounds of the morning by the Yangtze River in Hankou transport the Russian writer back to his own past: “I awoke today with the most astonishing sensation of childhood, my childhood in Saratov, in the house of my grandmother Katerina Ivanovna, among the noises of the  embankment, the boom of the barge haulers’ song [dubinushka].”156 Pilnyak’s use of the Russian term dubinushka, the title

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of a traditional Volga barge haulers’ work song, suggests that the chant he hears in Hankou is not just similar to but the same as the singing he remembers from Saratov. This sense of identity expands from the song alone to embrace all the sounds heard along the river: “I listened hard: the Chinese ‘Ha-hey-ho!’ is exactly the same as at my grandmother’s—and the noises are exactly the same—both the roars of the steamers and the shouts of the crowd.”157 Liberated from the nightmare of sleep as from the nightmare of alienation, Pilnyak walks down the embankment and back into his childhood: And in the morning, freed from the nightmare of sleep under a mosquito net, I went to the embankment to wander through my childhood, for the picture is exactly the same, strikingly so: the same barge haulers [burlaki] wearing a variety of national costumes, the same overseers, people carrying sacks and bales on their backs in the same way (impossible to understand how their spines do not break). Childhood is a happy memory; I feel happy and sad, and it is not at all in vain to travel thousands of miles just to stumble into one’s childhood.158

The discomforts of travel are now justified, because they have brought Pilnyak back, quite by chance, to the home that is his own past. Beyond personal nostalgia, Pilnyak links this sense of commonality to a speculative history of Sino-Russian contact: “I don’t know who took from whom this dubinushka, this harbour dubinushka,” he admits, “but I know that its tune and rhythm here in Hankou, as everywhere in China, are the same as in Saratov and everywhere on the Volga.”159 This suggestion of historical exchange at the level of folk culture provides a new, Eurasian framework for Pilnyak’s attempts to make sense of China. Later, attending a film studio party in Shanghai, Pilnyak will declare: “Of all the countries I have seen, China is most of all similar to Russia.” This time he links similarity to an explicitly shared Eurasian history: “It is no accident that both China and Russia were under the Mongol yoke.”160 Indeed, Pilnyak’s thesis of a common folk music heritage between Russia and China echoes certain arguments made by the academic Eurasianists in the 1920s. In the first collection of Eurasianist writings (1921), Nikolai Trubetskoy sought to prove the influence of “Turanian” culture on Russia by pointing to the common use of the pentatonic scale across the

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folk-music traditions of Eurasia, extending from China to encompass the Mongols, the Turkic tribes of Siberia and Central Asia, and the Russians.161 Even Pilnyak’s nostalgic return to a rural childhood echoes the Eurasianist focus on a lost utopia of past wholeness destroyed by modernization and European influence. The dubinushka, however, could go another way. Starting in the 1860s, this work song, with its insistent labor chants (“Ei, ukhnem!”), was revalorized as a song about the awakening power of the working masses: an audial equivalent to Repin’s famous painting of Volga barge haulers, Burlaki na Volge (1870–1873). As Boris Gasparov explains: “in the context of Russian revolutions—first in 1905, then in and after 1917—this labour song, with its ominously pushing rhythm, was interpreted as an emblem of the awakening masses whose thrust is aimed at the edifice of the old order.”162 Pilnyak’s identification of this Chinese work song as a dubinushka, then, could also serve the task of internationalist aesthetics: these similar sonic units could point toward commensurable historical experiences of labor exploitation in China and Russia. One famous exponent of the dubinushka in English, Paul Robeson, believed that the performance of folk songs could generate forms of transnational community by mediating between the particular and the universal, because folk music expressed “a ‘common undertone’ through which peoples of different nations articulated their marginalizations from majority discourses.”163 Like Trubetskoy, Robeson’s theory coalesced around the pentatonic scale, understood not as a signifier of Eurasian unity but rather as the basis for “a world body—a universal body—of folk music based on a universal pentatonic (five tone) scale.”164 The embrace of the archaic, then, does not necessarily mean a rejection of revolution. Steven Lee has suggested that Soviet internationalism’s focus on national liberation enabled productive connections between identities rooted in the deep past and a revolution projected into the future. This temporal dynamic proved capable of attracting artists and intellectuals from minority or colonized ethnic groups (like Robeson), while also engaging the European avant-garde’s attraction to the primitive as a source of aesthetic revitalization.165 Thus the beginning of “Chinese Story” suggests we may travel the same trajectory traced by Ivin’s “Revolutionary Beijing”: an initial sense of alienation gives way to a perception of commonality granted exclusively to the Russian observer, opening the path to a common revolutionary future.

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Pilnyak, however, fails to follow this trajectory. He announces the discovery of commensurability with a certain totalizing relief: “All of China is constructed on analogies.”166 The political chaos of 1920s China can be analogized to the turmoil of Russia’s civil war, with disorder on the railways and militarized Beijing described as “a city under arms of Russia’s 1918.”167 Yet Pilnyak cannot find his way to a vision of a shared revolutionary future.168 Moreover, the notion of similarity with China, discovered beneath the initial experience of alienation, does not always appear bathed in the affirming glow of nostalgia. We recall that the Russian seichas shares something of the Chinese “disease” of mamandi, its slowness and lack of energy. Elsewhere, Pilnyak speculates that the Mongol invasion may have introduced into Russia some influences from Chinese culture, specifically the “China of slownesses, ceremonies.”169 In a letter written after his return to Russia, Pilnyak links his identification with home to a lingering, unnerving sense of similarity with the place he has just left: “I know that there is no better country than Russia, there could not be, even though Russia is similar—catastrophically!—to China.”170 This sense of transcultural similarity discovered through analogies and historical speculation represents a catastrophe, an overturning of the order of things. For Pilnyak, the discovery of commonalities beneath cultural difference is a double-edged sword, capable of producing a positive sense of connection but also a sense of alarm or threat to the self. Pilnyak thus produces a vision of internationalism that is profoundly ambiguous. The erosion of firm distinctions between national identities, the “convergence and fusion of nations” (sblizhenie i sliianie natsii) predicted by Lenin, can be experienced as utopian regeneration or as a kind of horror.171 One of Pilnyak’s descriptions of Shanghai opens by heralding a global moment of international fusion: “The world is now living through an epoch when national cultures feel cramped behind their fences, when national boundaries are collapsing, when cultures have set off to roam about the world.”172 Pilnyak’s account of Shanghai, however, reframes this collapsing of boundaries as a form of monstrosity: “Asia has mixed horrifyingly (uzhasneishe) with Europe.”173 Where Tretyakov or Ivin might project this semicolonial contradiction into a revolutionary future, Pilnyak retreats into himself as his text progresses, writing increasingly about his discomfort and desire to return home. The sense of historical commonality fails to extend into a vision of shared revolutionary destiny and future

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partnership. This failure is dramatized in the final scene of “Chinese Story,” which recounts an attempted cinematic collaboration among Pilnyak, playwright and filmmaker Tian Han, and writer Jiang Guangci. Although they never finished the film, the textual traces of this collaboration reveal that both sides deployed notions of Sino-Russian similarity to shape their understandings of the present moment. Yet they diverged in their understanding of the relationship between national specificity and international connection. Tian’s unfinished film offers a vision of the national and the international as complementary, wherein the influence of revolutionary Russia can assist in the search for the correct path toward China’s modernization and national sovereignty. Pilnyak’s account of the filming process, by contrast, reverts to traumatic experiences of absolute difference at the very moment when the common inhabiting of a technologized, transnational modernity would seem to be affirmed.

GOING TO THE PEOP LE

The Communist writer Jiang Guangci (1901–1931) served as Pilnyak’s interpreter in Shanghai. A member of the first group of Chinese students to study at KUTV in Moscow, Jiang was one of the few Chinese intellectuals in Shanghai who knew Russian.174 After his return from Moscow in 1923, Jiang embarked on a literary career. He became one of China’s first avowedly Communist writers, notable in particular for his sensationalist combination of romance and revolution.175 He also became an important agent in facilitating the rising interest among Chinese intellectuals in Soviet literature, publishing a survey titled “The October Revolution and Russian Literature” in Chuangzao yuekan (Creation Monthly) between April 1926 and January 1928.176 Jiang’s entry on Pilnyak suggests a familiarity with Lev Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution, a text that played a formative role in Chinese debates on revolutionary literature.177 Pilnyak was the first name on Trotsky’s list of poputchiki, “fellow-traveller” writers whose “transitional” works were “organically connected” to the revolution without grasping its true, proletarian character.178 Jiang borrowed Trotsky’s terminology, describing Pilnyak as a gifted “fellow traveller of the revolution” (geming de tongbanzhe 䴽ੑⱘৠԈ㗙) whose excessively

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national interpretation of 1917 failed to take into account the international character of the proletarian movement.179 In a July 1926 article announcing Pilnyak’s arrival in China, Jiang expressed regret that the Russian author’s visit had not met with the attention from writers and journalists that he had received in Japan. Jiang’s brief article eschewed critique in favor of a plea that Chinese intellectuals, regardless of ideological affiliation, should take this opportunity to meet Pilnyak and learn more about Soviet literature—not least because his travel notes would influence perceptions of China in the USSR.180 Through Jiang, Pilnyak also met the writer, poet, dramatist, and filmmaker Tian Han, a key figure in the interwar Chinese avant-garde. While studying in Tokyo in 1921, Tian had cofounded the Creation Society with Guo Moruo 䛁≿㢹 and Yu Dafu 䚕䘨໿, a literary group that advocated “art for art’s sake.” By 1926, Tian was back in Shanghai and turning toward more engaged forms of art, although he would not embrace Marxism until 1930. (His output in the 1930s includes the lyrics for “March of the Volunteers,” the song that became the national anthem of the People’s Republic of China.)181 “Chinese Story” describes Tian, Jiang, and Pilnyak meeting to discuss the foundation of Kitrus, a Sino-Russian Society for Cultural Relations that never got off the ground. One concrete act of collaboration did take place, however. Tian Han enlisted Pilnyak for a cameo appearance in his first film project, Go to the People. This title signals the significance for Tian Han and his intellectual milieu of Russian radical precedent, in this case the Russian Populists (narodniki) of the 1870s and their mission of “going to the people” (khozhdenie v narod). Russian Populist ideas had entered the Chinese intellectual sphere from 1919, interweaving with and shaping the reception of the Bolshevik Revolution. Li Dazhao, one of the first Chinese intellectuals to embrace Marxism, wrote in 1919 that young intellectuals should “go to the villages, adopting the spirit of the Russian youth in the Russian village propaganda movement of those years, and beginning without delay the work of developing those villages.”182 Over the next few years, variations on the slogan “go to the people” appeared frequently in articles that advocated saving the nation by overcoming the cultural divide between intellectuals and the peasantry.183 In an account of his film’s genesis from 1928, Tian Han scatters Russian terms through his description of Russian Populism, which he characterizes as an idealistic and “romantic” movement

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of young people: “This generation of young Russians experienced a kind of yearning toward this abstract concept of ‘the people’ (narod), similar to the feeling of a lover in love for the first time.”184 As with many instances of Russian-Chinese cultural contact in this period, this influence also was mediated through Japan. Tian claimed inspiration from a poem he heard while studying in Tokyo, written by the late-Meiji poet Takuboku Ishikawa (⷇Ꮁଘ᳼), that contained the refrain “go to the people!” (“ࠄ⇥䭧 এ!”)185 Go to the People encapsulated the cosmopolitan nationalism that shaped May Fourth culture: a film whose title proclaims that revolution must be sought within the popular national masses took shape through the mediation of transnational cultural networks and an explicit sense of international comparison.186 The film was never completed because of financial difficulties, and the footage has been lost. Surviving synopses, however, show Tian Han deploying his sense of the “romantic” character of Russian Populism to create a revolutionary love triangle that links social transformation to questions of romantic love and marriage—a combination that preoccupied the May Fourth generation of writers.187 Two idealistic Shanghai students both fall for a waitress from the countryside who works in the café they frequent. Seeing a chance to put their talk of “going to the people” into action, they accompany her back to her village. The more confident student marries the girl, but gradually loses his idealism and becomes a capitalist and speculator. Meanwhile, his rival, affected by his experiences in the countryside and later among the urban poor of Shanghai, sets up a new village commune and eventually wins over the waitress. At the end of the film the capitalist, his business bankrupted by foreign competition, commits suicide. The surviving couple choreograph a “modern folk dance” at his grave.188 This triumph of populism over capitalism makes Go to the People, for Jay Leyda, “the only film of the period that seems to welcome the revolution rather than resist or ignore it.”189 Pilnyak’s role is not included in this synopsis, but a description of it appears in a “self-criticism” written by Tian Han in 1930, following his turn to Marxism. According to that text, Pilnyak played a “Russian revolutionary poet” traveling through the Far East, who meets a group of students in the opening café scene and recounts his impressions from his journey. The students discuss the best way to transform China: some advocate construction of a socialist state through class war, others suggest

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that Communism can best be achieved by “going to the people.” Rather than adjudicate between these options, the Russian writer takes the waitress by the hand and declares: “Whichever one of you truly manages to change China shall win this girl!”190 Pilnyak’s own description of his role, in “Chinese Story,” plays down the marriage plot that was so central to May Fourth thematics. Instead, he describes himself presiding over a symbolic union free of sexual competition: “I put the hands of the students in the hands of the maids—European fashion—as a symbol of the alliance of science and democracy, the alliance of labor and learning! So it was conceived by Tian Han.”191 The connection between romance and revolution, so crucial for both Tian and Jiang, did not register with Pilnyak, but he grasped his own symbolic significance as a Russian visitor who endorses China’s social transformation. Tian Han’s inclusion of a Russian writer in this scene pulls together many threads linking 1920s China to Russia: the growing interest in Russian literature, the example of Russian radical youth movements from the nineteenth century, and the powerful symbolism of the Russian Revolution. Pilnyak’s role in Go to the People expresses the symbolic value of Russian revolutionary precedent for those who sought to imagine radical change in China, even though his Chinese colleagues knew his status as a revolutionary writer was ambiguous. Lu Xun, the most iconic Chinese writer of the period and an avid reader and translator of Russian literature, wrote a short note in 1926 lamenting the fact that he had learned of Pilnyak’s presence in Beijing only after the writer had left. For Lu Xun, Pilnyak’s presence in China had value because of his firsthand experience of revolution: “He witnessed and experienced revolution. He knew that in its midst could be found destruction, bloodshed, contradictions, but also construction. Thus he never despaired. This is the spirit of a living human being in a revolutionary era.”192 Lu Xun, who translated some excerpts from Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution that same year, was as aware as Jiang of Pilnyak’s definition in that text as a “fellow traveller.”193 So, too, was Tian Han, at least after the fact. In his 1930 “self-criticism,” which retrospectively condemns Go to the People for its ideological naivety, Tian draws on Trotsky to compare his past self to Pilnyak as a “fellow traveller” who did not fully understand revolution.194 Nonetheless, Pilnyak remained a significant figure for these writers because of his connection to the Russian Revolution, an event that suggested both the possibilities of China’s future and

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the limitations of China’s present. Thus, Lu Xun concludes his comment on Pilnyak’s visit by arguing that the absence of  such writers in China shows that China has not yet experienced a genuine revolution.195 In other words, Chinese intellectuals also mobilized the notion of commensurability between Russia and China as a way to think about historical development in an increasingly international age. The Russian experience of revolutionary politics modeled the possibility of radical change for writers who perceived China’s present as an unresolved and unsustainable crisis. In place of the incomprehensible “foreign world” (chuzhoi mir) described by Pilnyak, Tian Han and Jiang Guangci inhabited a highly cosmopolitan cultural field shaped by translated texts and discourses from a multiplicity of different origins, including Russia.196 When Pilnyak arrived in Shanghai to mediate China for a Soviet audience, he found himself already mediated by Trotsky, Ishikawa, and the discourse of Russian Populism. At the same time, this cosmopolitan quality of intellectual life in 1920s China coexisted with an urgent focus on questions of national sovereignty and national survival. When Tian takes advantage of Pilnyak’s symbolic capital to create a cinematic image of a Soviet Russian writer fraternally endorsing the revolutionary efforts of Chinese youth, we see a Chinese perspective on the special position that Tretyakov claimed for the Soviet eyewitness in China. His experience bestows moral authority, yet his intervention is not prescriptive: he endorses the search for China’s path to the future rather than laying down the correct path that must be followed. This image of revolutionary solidarity contrasts starkly, however, with the on-set experience Pilnyak relates in “Chinese Story”: a hellish torment of cacophony, blindness under lights, and unbearable heat. Although the film’s café scene suggested effortless intercultural communication, Pilnyak insists the shooting process “played out rather differently. A most Babylonian confusion developed!” (Stolpotvorenie tvorilos’ vavilonstvenneishee!)197 Pilnyak’s turn of phrase relies on the colloquial use of the term stolpotvorenie vavilonskoe (literally, “the creation of the tower of Babel”) to mean chaos or pandemonium. A more literal translation might be: “The tower of Babelissimus took shape!” Pilnyak invokes the Tower of Babel not to proclaim the dream of a unified world culture, as did other Soviet cultural projects of the time.198 Instead, Pilnyak’s Babelissimus suggests the confusion of tongues and the breakdown of the translation project launched earlier with the explication of mamandi.

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Pilnyak’s discomfort at this babble of foreign voices carries through into his experience of the music played on set, which is the complete opposite of the nostalgic reverie down by the river: “Although it would not be audible on the film, nonetheless a musician played the violin and a man sang; Chinese music and singing—to a European ear—seem the ultimate degeneration of hearing; my teeth began to ache from the singing and the violin just as they ache when cork is rubbed against glass.”199 In this scene, Pilnyak’s ear is not Russian or even Eurasian but staunchly European, and this music, inaudible in a silent film, seems to exist solely to cause him physical pain. Whereas the vocal song of the barge haulers could be rendered commensurable through the prism of Eurasian genealogy, an encounter with instrumentalized Chinese music has a different effect. This audial alienation also offers a striking contrast to an earlier scene in which Pilnyak attends an evening concert in Shanghai’s Jessfield Park—a space from which the Chinese residents of Shanghai were notoriously excluded. Here music soothes, while incomprehension, once a source of anxiety, now offers a form of relief: “I don’t know and I don’t understand music—but tonight I felt very good listening. The music was European. [. . .] I sat there and listened; it felt very good—to leave reality for the incomprehensible.”200 In the film studio, by contrast, political solidarity against European imperialism cannot ameliorate a sense of aural discomfort. That “European ear,” whose sufferings in the Chinese theater were acknowledged by Tretyakov and Serebryakova, alienates Pilnyak at the very moment of Sino-Soviet collaboration. Just when he is called upon to play the role of symbolic mediator, this Soviet emissary’s sensory experience becomes incapable of communicating anything to his readers that might strengthen their sense of internationalist connection. Instead, the painful music and the incomprehensible babble mingle with artificial, electric light to revive the incomprehension and sensory alienation with which this travelogue began: The director yells at Jiang. Jiang yells at me. Everyone yells. Can’t understand anything. And I stand there weeping, tears flow from the light and the pain in my eyes. Music howls. [. . .] Music plays, the singer sings, the sun incinerates, sweat pours, everyone yells in Chinese; there’s no understanding anything. The director yells at Jiang. Jiang yells at me. I am blind and deaf.201

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Sight and sound, the two modes through which Tretyakov sought to mediate China for his Soviet audience, abandon Pilnyak as sources of understanding. And translation collapses as well: the “yelling” Pilnyak hears from Jiang are the Chinese writer’s attempts to serve as an interpreter. Whereas Tretyakov yelled on behalf of suffering, sweating Chinese laborers, Pilnyak can only sweat, weep, and be yelled at. Although the shared process of filmmaking might seem to offer vivid proof that Pilnyak, Jiang, and Tian Han all inhabit the same technologized modernity, the Russian writer describes becoming the object of his collaborator’s cinematic gaze as the ultimate instance of alienation. By representing his climactic collaboration with leftist Chinese artists as a Babelian hell, Pilnyak conclusively undermines the narrative of revolutionary solidarity that he appears elsewhere to endorse. The historical similarities between Russia and China unearthed by Pilnyak’s translation practices fail to be projected into revolutionary convergence in the future. Instead, the position of Pilnyak’s observer is unstable and fluctuating, immersed in the elements of China he can domesticate to a common “Eurasian” paradigm, but alienated at the very moment when the two cultures might seem to be converging in a common technological and political present. Tretyakov, Pilnyak, and Tian Han all turned to the Sino-Russian relationship in the mid-1920s to address questions about the relationship between the particular and the general, the national and the international. Tretyakov’s materialist mediations confidently place the experienced data of Chinese everyday life into an explanatory temporal framework of revolutionary developmentalism. China becomes understandable as subject to the same historical laws of uneven development that have shaped Russia. The notion of the exotic, suggestive of absolute difference, cedes place to a model that identifies cultural distinctiveness but insists nonetheless on historical convergence. In this respect, Tretyakov hews close to Tian, who deploys Russian revolutionary precedent as an inspirational example of future possibilities, yet insists upon the particular challenges of China’s search for modernity. Both the narrative and the production history of Go to the People show transnational networks of cultural circulation and political comparison framing the search for national salvation. Pilnyak, by contrast, finds in China a host of similarities with Russia and, at the same time, a contradictory strangeness that he cannot overcome. China for Pilnyak is uncanny, both unsettlingly familiar and insurmountably foreign.

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His engagement with contemporary China leads him back to the deep Russian past, an imagined and secure childhood. We might see a variant on the modernist nostalgia described by Svetlana Boym, a longing for the accelerated time of modernity to cease its relentless forward movement.202 Linking this nostalgia to a Romantic longing for the nation, Pilnyak voices the fear that this globalizing modernity will be defined by homelessness: the relentless nature of historical change produces confused orphans cut loose from the stable meanings of the past. This nostalgia represents a major threat to the logic of Comintern internationalism, which seeks to position national consciousness and international solidarity as complementary forces. In “Chinese Story,” the nation disrupts the demands of the international, insisting on a return to itself as the true home. Pilnyak fails to fulfil the public role of his onscreen double: he cannot embrace the Chinese Revolution because it does not belong to him. The encounters described in this chapter set up the central dynamics that will run through this book. The search for an internationalist aesthetics will be shaped by a recurrent tension between the authority of the Soviet perspective and the necessity for certain forms of collaboration, translation, and mediation. The conceptualization of the Sino-Soviet relationship, formed under competing visions of internationalism, must constantly negotiate the impetus to convey China’s specificity alongside the need to establish China’s commensurability. Tretyakov’s experiences in Beijing drove him to develop new ways of connecting the Soviet public to China after he returned to Moscow in August 1925. As we shall see in the next chapter, he turned first to the theater, reusing the title of his poem “Roar, China” to name a play that would become perhaps the most prominent statement on anti-imperialism and internationalism of the Soviet 1920s. His contact with Chinese students in Beijing, meanwhile, would lead to the composition of Den Shi-khua, a collaborative autobiography of one of those students that began to appear in 1927 (see chapter 4). Tian Han’s film, by contrast, was never completed, although the encounter with Pilnyak produced a different cinematic outcome. Through Pilnyak, Tian became acquainted with the Soviet consul in Shanghai, F. V. Linde, who arranged for a private screening to the Southern Society of Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin.203 Thus, Pilnyak’s visit acted as a catalyst for what may have been the first screening of Battleship Potemkin—or any Soviet feature film for that matter—in China.204 Tian’s Marxist “self-criticism,”

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penned in 1930, positions the encounter with Eisenstein as illuminating the shortcomings of Go to the People. Confronted with Potemkin’s radical promotion of a collective, mass hero, he comes to understand that his film lost its way by focusing on the emotional lives of its bourgeois students, rather than bringing the people into the center of the picture.205 Tian could not have known while watching Potemkin that Eisenstein, in collaboration with Tretyakov, had recently tried (and failed) to make a film about China. As we shall learn in chapter 3, Tian’s cinematic collaboration with Pilnyak coincided with a concerted effort to capture China in the emergent medium of Soviet cinema. Although these films sought to enlighten Soviet audiences about China, they also were made with an eye toward exposing Chinese spectators, like Tian Han, to the ideological power of Soviet film.

2 TRANSLATING CHINA ONSTAGE Roar, China! and The Red Poppy

O

n his return to Moscow in August 1925, Sergei Tretyakov set about looking for new ways that he might use his experiences in Beijing to connect Soviet audiences to the seemingly imminent revolution in China. He turned first to the theater, where he had done groundbreaking work before his trip in collaboration with Vsevolod Meyerhold (The Earth Upturned, 1923) and Sergei Eisenstein (Enough Simplicity for Every Wise Man, 1923; Gas Masks, 1924).1 Tretyakov resumed his association with Meyerhold’s theater and reused the title of his poem “Roar China” to name a new play that debuted there in January 1926. Roar, China! (Rychi, Kitai!) was Tretyakov’s manifesto for an internationalist form of theater. At its core was a recent historical event: an act of British imperialist violence that had taken place in the city of Wanxian, Sichuan, in 1924, while Tretyakov was living in Beijing. Roar, China! explored how a play might give its audience a sense of connection to a distant social reality far beyond the bounds of the theater, intervening in the process in the key aesthetic conflict of early twentieth-century Russian drama: the conflict between naturalism and conventionality (uslovnost’). It became Tretyakov’s most successful work, with a remarkable international career that included productions in Germany, the United States, Japan, and China. Beyond its impact on audiences, Roar, China! had another important historical consequence: it stimulated the Bolshoi Theater’s production of The Red Poppy (Krasnyi mak, 1927), the first Soviet ballet on a

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contemporary revolutionary theme. This chapter juxtaposes these two high-profile productions as offering two different aesthetic responses to the task of connecting Soviet theatrical audiences to contemporary China, a difference grounded in divergent approaches to the relationship between the foreign and the domestic. Tretyakov envisioned Roar, China! as the next step in his ongoing campaign to de-exoticize and decommodify the Soviet public’s relationship to China. As he noted in a retrospective account, Roar, China! appeared in a theatrical field saturated with images of China—for Tretyakov, the wrong images: “ ‘Reality is more grey than fantastic exoticism,’ cry the devotees of a particular China, the one that has now crawled out onto the stages of our theatres in all these plays with princesses, courtesans, and kings’ sons (The Bronze Idol, Chu-Iun-Vai, The Chalk Circle, The Yellow Jacket), which I tried to counter with Roar, China!, the only play-article on our stage.”2 All of the productions Tretyakov names debuted in 1926, the same year as Roar, China! Most were imports from Western Europe. The 1926 season at Leningrad’s Maly Opera Theater saw the premiere of Franz Lehar’s The Yellow Jacket (Zheltaia Kofta—Die gelbe Jacke), a 1923 operetta centered around a transethnic romance between a Viennese countess and a Chinese prince.3 Chu-Iun-Vai, at the Moscow Art Theater’s Fourth Studio, was a translation of Julius Berstl’s The Lascivious Mr. Chu (Der lasterhafte Herr Tschu), a satirical fairy-tale set in China’s imperial past.4 The Chalk Circle, which played in Moscow and Leningrad under the title ChangGai-Tang, adapted the German poet Klabund’s 1924 version of the Yuan dynasty classic Hui lan ji (♄䮠㿬) by Li Quanfu ᴢ┯໿—the same play that would later inspire Bertolt Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle.5 The exception to the import rule, Georgy Pavlov’s The Bronze Idol at the Maly Theater Studio, was a homegrown piece of Chinese exoticism: an “overloaded melodrama” whose “spicy, exotic sauce” included an opium den, a gang of pirates, and a man-eating bronze statue.6 Tretyakov’s reference to “princesses” also evokes one of the most famous spectacles of the 1920s Soviet stage: the Vakhtangov Theater’s 1922 production of Carlo Gozzi’s Princess Turandot, a commedia dell’arte classic set in a fairy-tale Beijing. These productions reflected the Russian stage’s ongoing connection to a broader fascination with East Asia in the European and North American theater of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, itself a response to the rise of Japan and China’s turbulent entry into modernity.

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British musical theater’s taste for Japan reached Russia in the late nineteenth century: Konstantin Stanislavsky played the role of Nanki-Poo in an 1887 amateur production of The Mikado, and Sidney Jones’s popular operetta The Geisha appeared in Moscow in 1897, a year after its London premiere.7 The glut of “Chinese” plays on Soviet stages in the 1920s echoed the popular enthusiasm for exotic East Asian spectacle among audiences across Europe and North America.8 Klabund’s Chalk Circle played in Berlin and Vienna in 1925; a London production in 1929 featured Anna May Wong and Laurence Olivier.9 A stage play named The Yellow Jacket, based on scenes from Cantonese opera, debuted in New York in 1912 and played in London, Madrid, Berlin, Vienna, Budapest, and St. Petersburg. The 1914 Moscow production was directed by Alexander Tairov.10 This play and Lehar’s operetta had nothing in common beyond the titular yellow jacket or huang magua (咗侀㻖), an honorific piece of attire worn by high-ranking ministers and officers of the imperial bodyguard under the Qing dynasty.11 Yet the decision to fetishize a luxurious item of clothing from a fallen imperial dynasty suggests the degree to which a certain form of theatrical chinoiserie had become an international style. In some cases, this involved drawing on Chinese theater for models, such as  The Chalk Circle, or the Chinese theatrical techniques incorporated into the play The Yellow Jacket.12 More broadly, the common elements among these productions suggest the emergence of a European theatrical chinoiserie aesthetic that represented China primarily as aesthetic: exotic, fantastical, sensorially captivating.13 Narratives privileged the ancient, the supernatural, and the erotic. The Bronze Idol and The Yellow Jacket both employed the well-worn trope of the troubled transethnic romance, explored most iconically in Giacomo Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly (1904; Russian debut 1908).14 Production design emphasized sumptuous decoration and ornament. Alexandre Benois created the sets and costumes for Igor Stravinsky’s opera The Nightingale (Le Rossignol/Solovei), staged by the Ballets Russes in 1914, in explicit homage to eighteenthcentury chinoiserie.15 Tairov’s production of The Yellow Jacket, as remembered by his wife Alisa Koonen, had “the atmosphere of a charming, naïve fairytale. The set design looked very beautiful, the costumes astonished with the richness of their colors . . . Everything was authentic: expensive silks, hand-made embroideries.”16 Roles, meanwhile, were largely played by European actors in varying degrees of yellowface.17

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If China offered a setting for exotic escapism, it also provided the grounds for modernist experimentation. Iconic in this regard was Princess Turandot. The final directorial work of Evgeny Vakhtangov cast a long shadow over the decade, playing more than six hundred times between 1922 and 1929.18 Vakhtangov staged Gozzi’s eighteenth-century fable— about a Chinese princess who asks her suitors impossible riddles—as a spectacle of theater coming into being. The China of Princess Turandot was openly artificial. Vakhtangov’s cast did not even pretend to inhabit a fantastic, fairy-tale Beijing; instead, they portrayed Italian actors attempting to improvise their way through Gozzi’s text.19 These actors emerged from the audience to don their costumes onstage, used seemingly random objects for props, and signified China as their location by simply holding up a sign that read “Peking.”20 Such decisions highlight the antagonism between mimetic realism and self-conscious theatricality that shaped the theory and practice of Russian theater in the early twentieth century. An established, if perhaps reductive, critical binary associates the realist impulse with Stanislavsky and the Moscow Art Theater, while positioning Meyerhold as the champion of theater’s artificial, conventional nature (uslovnost’).21 Vakhtangov, a student of Stanislavsky, had moved away from psychological realism to embrace theatrical artifice: “Who cares,” he remarked, “whether Turandot will fall in love with Calaf or not?”22 Princess Turandot combined a venerable European tradition of deploying the East as a distant, allegorical space with a modernist concern for masquerade and artistic convention. The attitudes of the audience toward China as a historical or contemporary reality were simply irrelevant to such ironic, playful investigations of theatricality. Neither exotic escapism nor the celebration of theater’s disconnect from reality could serve Tretyakov’s factographic ambition to connect his audience to contemporary China. Instead, Tretyakov based Roar, China! around a documented event that occurred while he was in Beijing. On June 17, 1924, in Wanxian, Sichuan, an American businessman named Edwin C. Hawley was killed during a dispute with Chinese boatmen. In response, the captain of the Cockchafer, a British battleship moored at Wanxian, demanded that the city’s officials follow Hawley’s funeral procession and insisted that the leaders of the boatmen be executed. Failure to comply was to result in the bombardment of the city.23 Tretyakov’s staging of a recent historical event tapped into another important trend in

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postrevolutionary theater: an avant-garde assault on the division between theatrical performance and historical reality. Most famously, Nikolai Evreinov’s Storming of the Winter Palace (Vziatie zimnego dvortsa, 1920) replayed the pivotal moments of the October Revolution on the site of the actual historical events, to an audience of more than one hundred thousand people, with real cars, armored vehicles, and the Aurora battleship serving as participants in the drama.24 Eisenstein’s staging of Tretyakov’s play Gas Masks (Protivogazy) within a working gas plant displayed a similar ambition to merge art with life.25 In the case of Roar, China! the use of “real” locations was not an option. Instead, as we shall see, the Meyerhold Theater’s production of Tretyakov’s play introduced various “authentic” elements from Chinese everyday life onto the stage, from props and costumes to forms of Chinese speech. This aesthetic of ethnographic authenticity, which encountered significant critical resistance, sought to remind spectators of the existence of a social reality named China beyond the walls of the theater. Tretyakov called Roar, China! a “play-article,” invoking the form of connection to distant spaces offered by the medium of the newspaper. Nor was this the only production to draw on China’s presence on the front pages. A “political operetta” from 1925 entitled Forty Canes or Love in China (Sorok palok ili liubov’ v Kitae) staged the story of Li Yiyuan, a Chinese soldier who was arrested in April 1924 for fighting with a British businessman on a section of the Beijing city wall reserved for foreigners.26 Even the productions that Tretyakov condemned as exotic made certain stabs at topicality, with revolutionary subplots inserted into the Soviet versions of The Yellow Jacket and The Chalk Circle.27 The production that most closely followed Roar, China!’s lead, however, was The Red Poppy. By the mid-1920s, ballet faced critical condemnation as an anachronistic hangover of the Imperial past: tainted by the trappings of court culture, focused on private love intrigues, mired in fantasy and exotica. A 1925 article in Zhizn’ iskusstva (The Life of Art) titled “What Is to be Done with Ballet?” summarizes the sense of crisis: “We need a decisive shift out of the deadlock of the repertoire, otherwise our ballet theatre, being nothing but a depository for various fossils, will lose any right to existence and will be closed down.”28 The Bolshoi Theater’s staging of The Red Poppy aimed to revive a theatrical form facing a precarious future by tapping into the topicality of contemporary China.

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The myth of The Red Poppy’s genesis tells us that the ballet was born at a meeting of the Bolshoi directorate in February 1926, a month after Roar, China!’s Moscow debut. The Bolshoi was looking for a credible ballet on a revolutionary theme. The theater’s directors expressed lukewarm feelings toward a libretto by Mikhail Galperin set in revolutionary France, for which the composer Reinhold Glière had begun to write some music.29 (Glière also wrote the music for The Chalk Circle, which debuted that year.)30 According to his memoirs, theater artist Mikhail Ivanovich Kurilko made a decisive intervention by reaching for a fragment of contemporary reality: In answer to the question of where to look for a theme, I picked up the latest copy of Pravda and read out a report on the detention of the Soviet steamer Lenin in a Chinese port. There and then, in the midst of an intense debate, I sketched the contours of the plot for the future ballet. It was recorded by the stenographer. The next day I recounted this plot to E. V. Geltser. She liked it, and at her request I worked out the script in greater detail. Thus work began on the creation of the ballet The Red Poppy, for which I acted as librettist.31

From this journalistic detail—a Soviet ship causing tension in a Chinese port—Kurilko spun the story of Tao Hua, a Chinese dancer forced to choose between loyalty to her corrupt Chinese fiancé and her newfound attraction to the Captain of the Soviet ship. We may doubt the neatness of this account. Pravda in February 1926 offered no such story, although similar facts floated across its pages in this period.32 The record of the meeting suggests that Kurilko had already worked up the libretto with Ekaterina Geltser, who was to dance the lead role, and her husband Vasily Tikhomirov, who choreographed the second act.33 (Geltser had danced in the Imperial Ballet of Marius Petipa and remained one of Russian ballet’s major stars in the 1920s. The Red Poppy debuted not long after her fiftieth birthday.)34 Glière, who transferred some of his music from the earlier libretto to this new project, remembers the theme being suggested by the directorate of the Bolshoi.35 Nonetheless, Kurilko’s story emphasizes the novel aspect of the new ballet: its composition around a contemporary theme, bringing ballet into the same temporality as the newspaper.

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Yet the questions posed by Vakhtangov’s baring of theatrical artifice endure. How can an audience accept that a performance by actors, set apart from everyday life by a series of theatrical conventions, gives them access to a historical reality? When that historical reality is also a foreign reality, this becomes even more complex: Chinese characters will be played by Russian actors, will speak Russian, and will pretend to inhabit a space located many thousands of miles away. Vakhtangov’s Turandot mocked the idea of even attempting such an illusion of access to the foreign: the sign the actors held up that read “China” also effectively signified “this is not really China.” In the case of The Red Poppy, we are dealing with a theatrical form that does not even try to conceal its conventional nature behind an illusion of mimetic transparency. Put simply, how can theatrical performance meet the task of mediating contemporary China? How can a performance convey contemporary China as urgent and simultaneous, while also accounting for the conventional nature of theatrical representation? Can performance serve as a medium for internationalism, on the same order as the newspaper? This chapter analyzes the two most prominent China-themed performances of the 1920s—Roar, China! and The Red Poppy—as different responses to this challenge. My comparative reading of these historically connected productions will suggest that their strategies of performative mediation were closely intertwined with another form of mediation: translation. Theories of translation often negotiate the same tension between transparent immediacy and awareness of artifice that shaped Soviet debates on theater in the 1920s. Indeed, translation theorist Jiří Levý calls on an analogy with theater to distinguish between “illusionist” translations, which offer their audience a sense of unmediated access to an authentic original, and “anti-illusionist” translations that produce a sustained awareness of artificiality and dependence on convention.36 Correspondingly, the dynamics of translation in Roar, China! and The Red Poppy enabled and supported the complex acts of mediation these plays sought to perform. In comparing them, we uncover the recurring tension of internationalist aesthetics: between centrifugal and centripetal forces, between the autonomy of the foreign and the primacy of the domestic. Roar, China! and The Red Poppy were not just similar because they both claimed their origins from newspaper reports. Their fundamental performative structure rested on the same climatic ritual act: a moment

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of self-sacrifice that affirmed and sanctified both the progress of China’s revolution and the bond between the Russian and Chinese revolutionary masses. Self-sacrifice has long been noted as a central element in Soviet culture.37 But these productions also demand consideration alongside the broader exploration, in the theory and practice of early twentieth-century European theater, of the deep connections between theatrical performance and sacrificial ritual as performative acts that create or affirm communities.38 Tretyakov’s play and the Bolshoi’s ballet took up this sacrificial structure to bring performatively into being a collective devoted to the cause of international revolution. The contours of that collective, however, were shaped in very different ways by the two productions, a difference that finds its most acute expression in their divergent approaches to translation. Roar, China! offered what I call a performance of translation. Just as the staging at the Meyerhold Theater juxtaposed authentic Chinese props and costumes with openly conventional elements, so, too, did Tretyakov’s script contain a linguistic mishmash of Russian, Chinese, and Chinese Pidgin Russian, a historical contact language that developed in zones of Sino-Russian contact in northeast Asia. This repeated juxtaposition of foreign and domestic, naturalist and artificial, gestured toward the existence of a foreign social reality with a distinct yet commensurable historical experience, while simultaneously admitting that this reality was not actually present onstage. The Red Poppy, by contrast, reworked the well-worn narrative of the doomed transethnic romance into a tale of a Chinese dancer who awakens to revolutionary consciousness through her love for a Soviet naval captain. The symbolic mediator in this exchange is the red poppy, which passes back and forth between them, transforming its meaning from a token of semicolonial vice to a banner of internationalist solidarity. The ballet’s attribution of meaning to this symbol rested on a productive act of mistranslation, which attached the poppy to the heroine and her redemptive trajectory. Chinese Communist spectators of the ballet, however, insisted that the poppy retained for them a different meaning: a direct association with the opium wars. These contrasting translation strategies led these productions to different historical fates. Roar, China!, with its centrifugal affirmation of the foreign, had a remarkable international career, playing in Western Europe, North America, Japan, and China. The Red Poppy became a major hit in the Soviet Union, but its centripetal indifference to foreign meanings blocked any positive reception by Chinese audiences.

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ROAR, CHINA! BETWEEN FAC T A N D RI T UA L

It is not clear what sources Tretyakov used to learn about the 1924 Wanxian incident, which occurred a few months into his stay in China. One of his students at Beijing University remembers him “collecting a large amount of material on the Wanxian atrocity.”39 The outlines of the incident were reported in Pravda through the Soviet telegraph agency, Rosta.40 Tretyakov may have consulted English-language newspapers in China, such as the Peking and Tientsin Times, the North China Daily News, and the China Weekly Review, or may have asked others to translate Chinese press accounts for him.41 Western, Soviet, and Chinese reports of the incident differ in tone and interpretation, but they concur in framing Hawley’s death within a wider tension over trade along the Yangzi.42 Local operators of junks or sampans faced increasing competition from foreign steamers for their business of transporting raw materials, such as salt, sugar, and tung oil (Chinese wood oil), along the river. When Hawley decided to load a shipment of tung oil onto a British steamer, the Wanliu, a group of boatmen tried to stop him and claim the cargo for themselves. Some accounts of the ensuing fight on the quayside have Hawley striking the first blow.43 Hawley in turn was struck on the head and fell into the river, where he drowned. His body was taken onto the Cockchafer, but he could not be revived. In response, the captain of the Cockchafer compelled the town’s senior officials to follow Hawley’s funeral and insisted that two of the responsible boatmen must be executed in retribution for Hawley’s death. Threatened with bombardment, the local authorities complied. Tretyakov’s version follows the broad outline of these events, although he acknowledged that he changed a few things. “These are the facts,” he declares in his introduction to the text of Roar, China! “I barely had to change them at all.”44 He admits to shortening the action of the play, reducing the captain’s two-day ultimatum to a single day.45 He does not mention that he changed the name of Hawley’s employer, from the British firm Arnhold Brothers and Co. to the more expressively named U.S. firm Robert Dollar, nor that he altered Hawley’s trade from wood oil to animal pelts.46 Besides making Hawley’s mercenary nature explicit, this change also alters the captain’s motivation for demanding retribution. Instead of avenging the death of an employee of a British firm, in Tretyakov’s play,

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he avenges an affront against the white race.47 Tretyakov does acknowledge, however, that he altered the crucial scene of Hawley’s death. His introduction describes a confrontation with a group of boatmen over trade: “The fact is that a conflict occurred between Hawley and the boatmen, the conflict escalated into a fight, and consequently the corpse of the Robert Dollar & Co. agent was fished out of the Yangzi.”48 In Roar, China!, however, Hawley drowns after a fight with a single boatman, Chi, who is ferrying him across the river. There is no collective conflict over business, only an individual dispute over pay. One major effect of Tretyakov’s changes is to increase the passivity and victimhood of the Chinese boatmen. Newspaper accounts present the boatmen as active agents who sought to protect their business from the encroachment of foreign competition. In Tretyakov’s play, by contrast, their conflict with foreign steamers turns into a contest between Hawley and Chinese merchants over who can pay the boatmen less. The boatmen, in turn, are transformed by Tretyakov’s stage directions into load-bearing “coolies,” the standard Soviet symbol of exploited Chinese labor. The 1926 production opened with a sequence, reportedly ten to fifteen minutes long, in which the boatmen dragged chests of tea off the stage, “to the sounds of a Chinese work song and the rhythmic shouts of the overseer.”49 (The opening of The Red Poppy, seventeen months later, was strikingly similar.) When Hawley lowers the pay he is giving his porters, they protest, but when he throws the money into the crowd, they fight one another to get their hands on it. A riot breaks out but is quelled by police, and Chi, one of the most vocal protestors, is fired. Later, Hawley visits the Cockchafer and is ferried back across the river by Chi.50 Hawley’s death, in the play’s version of events, occurs when he will not pay the fare Chi requests. Chi refuses to row any further; Hawley punches him in the face but misses with the second swing and falls into the river. An earlier scene has established the convenient detail that Hawley cannot swim.51 Relocating Hawley’s death from the shore to a boat in the middle of the river certainly served the purposes of dramatic staging. For the 1926 production, the stage of the Meyerhold Theater was split into three areas. The Chinese quayside occupied the proscenium, nearest the audience, while the mechanized construction of the battleship Cockchafer loomed at the back. Separating them was a channel of real water across the stage.52 Hawley’s confrontation with Chi took place in a single boat floating in this

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stream of water, the mediating zone between the two enemy camps. Moreover, this reimagining of Hawley’s death maximized Western aggression and Chinese passivity, the dynamic already established in their economic relationship. Hawley strikes, but he is not struck in return. Chi merely tries to avoid the blows aimed at him; Hawley’s violence causes his own demise. In order to sharpen the play’s appeal for anti-imperial solidarity, Tretyakov’s alterations increased the debasement of his Chinese characters. Perhaps Tretyakov’s most significant alteration to the newspaper reports concerns the identity of the executed men. Soviet, Western, and Chinese newspapers all concur that the captain of the Cockchafer demanded the execution of the leaders of the boatmen.53 In Tretyakov’s version, the Captain simply proposes that “two members of the boatmen’s union” be executed if Chi cannot be located.54 The boatmen do not at first accept this distribution of guilt. Instead, they fall back on older notions of collective responsibility, which in Imperial China was distributed in terms of family and hierarchy.55 Although this system of collective responsibility was formally abolished in 1905, it may have lived on in the case of the Wanxian incident: the Shanghai newspaper Shen Bao reported that one of the executed men was Xiang Bikui (৥ᖙ儕), the father of the head of the boatmen’s union.56 One boatman shouts that the daoyin (䘧ል, the head of the city) should die; another claims that Chi is the guilty one, and if he cannot be found, his family should be punished in his place.57 The Second Boatman is inconsolable, repeatedly insisting “We’re not guilty” and “I didn’t kill anyone.”58 The one proletarian in the group, the Stoker, tries to bring the others round by translating the story of the Russian Revolution into a recognizable idiom: “poor coolies, just like us, drove out their masters. [. . .] They starved and died for you, Wanxian coolie. Learn from them. Learn to die for all the boatmen who are beaten by the English in towns everywhere.”59 This translation asserts a commensurability in class position across national borders: Russian workers and peasants are also “coolies,” and they have already sacrificed themselves for the sake of the Wanxian boatmen. A new model of class-based collective responsibility enters the play. After an old boatman who believes in resurrection offers to be the first victim, their leader, Fei, offers himself as the second. Both are struck down by the First Boatman, who insists “we are all equal” and proposes instead that they draw lots.60 The lots fall to the old boatman and the Second Boatman,

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the one who most protested his innocence. Tretyakov’s alterations allow the boatmen to come to a new form of class consciousness as a direct result of the Captain’s excessive reparatory demands, an ideological victory that makes their apparent defeat in the play acceptable. Alongside this awakening to transnational class consciousness through Soviet example, the production’s musical choices affirmed that this scene should be taken as a pivotal moment in the boatmen’s collective journey toward national consciousness. Working scripts from the production indicate that a huqin, a two-stringed Chinese instrument, sounded as the boatmen drew lots to decide who would submit to be executed.61 Indeed, these two forms of awakening, to class and nation, run in parallel throughout Roar, China! The boatmen begin the play as disorganized and even antagonistic individuals, fighting each other for the money Hawley throws to them. As the play progresses, however, they start to act and speak more or less as a group.62 In the final scene, after the executions, they merge with the other residents of the town to form a single Chinese crowd, facing off with the armed British sailors and chanting in unison: “Away! Away! Away!” (Von! Von! Von!). The imperative of the title is achieved: China becomes a single subject and learns to roar. This coming to national consciousness in tandem with a sense of transnational class responsibility stages the dynamics of both Comintern revolutionary strategy and Soviet nationalities policy, both of which affirmed national identity as a necessary stage in the chain of development that would lead to sublation into a socialist-internationalist community.63 The Japanese proletarian critic Kurahara Korehito 㮣ॳᚳҎ, who saw Roar, China! in Moscow, compared the boatmen’s voluntary sacrifice to save their city with the story of the burghers of Calais, as recently staged in Georg Kaiser’s 1913 Expressionist play.64 We might trace the paradigm still further back. Roar, China! reinscribes the documented events of the Wanxian incident into perhaps the central mythologeme of Soviet culture: a secularized version of the Christian narrative of self-sacrifice that presents voluntary submission to violent death as an essential moment in the progress of both history and collective self-consciousness.65 Indeed, another of Tretyakov’s alterations explicitly positions the play’s model of collectivist self-sacrifice as a dialectical overcoming of Christianity. Various reports of the Wanxian incident suggest that the condemned men were executed by shooting.66

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FIGURE 2.1  The final scene of Roar, China! in the Meyerhold Theater, 1926. The cross on

the right bears the words Ne ubii (Thou Shalt Not Kill). Source: Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, f. 2886 op. 1 ed. khr. 46 l. 1. Reproduced with permission.

Tretyakov, however, has them asphyxiated against posts. These posts offered a visual rhyme with another invented detail: the cross that Tretyakov’s Captain insists must decorate Hawley’s grave, at the city’s expense.67 Thus, the play’s climactic scene (figure 2.1) saw the two boatmen publicly asphyxiated on a stage dominated by a cross emblazoned with the words “Ne ubii” (“Thou Shalt Not Kill”). Several moments within this scene bluntly reinforce the distance between Christian ethics and practice: the recently baptized wife of the Second Boatman throws her cross away, and the Student tries to invoke Christian principles of mercy to the Captain, who replies that the British Navy operates under different rules. Tretyakov’s climactic scene shows a bankrupt Christian universalism, polluted by its connection to imperial power, giving way to a new universal salvation narrative founded on self-sacrifice for the sake of a new community, at once national and international.

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This climatic scene in fact constitutes the second instance of self-sacrifice in the play. The first involves an entirely invented character: the “Boy,” a Chinese servant on the English ship, who commits suicide in protest at the injustice of the Captain’s demands. The play frames this suicide as an expression of national culture: a traditional gesture made by subordinates against illegitimate officials.68 For the bulk of the play, the Boy, a Chinese character with a degrading English colonial name, functions as a symbolic crosser of the border between the two hostile groups. To add to the sense of transgression, the Boy was played by Maria Babanova, a rising star of the Meyerhold Theater (figure 2.2). Babanova’s transvestite performance became one of the most acclaimed aspects of the production: a typical review praised the way she “created an exceptionally expressive and tender artistic miniature out of the lyrical role of the Chinese boy-servant.”69 Feminized by Babanova’s performance, the Boy is also the object of the play’s only flicker of transethnic romance, as the spoilt French daughter Cordelia fixates on his “charming lips” and “exquisite head shape.”70 Thus, the Boy, played by a woman, offered a variation on the Madame Butterfly narrative: an object of Western lust who ultimately commits suicide in defense of offended native honor, thereby reasserting the absolute division of East and West threatened by this transethnic relationship.71 The impact of the Boy’s suicide was sealed for Moscow audiences by the song that Babanova sang as she prepared for death. According to Babanova’s biographer, this was an “authentic Chinese folk song” that Tretyakov had brought with him from Beijing.72 (Contemporary press reports mention that gramophone recordings of Peking opera were used to put music to the play.)73 Babanova and Tretyakov consulted with Chinese students in Moscow to help her master the song, which contained “two melodies, one higher than the other,” and ended on a note at the very top of her range.74 Contemporary reviewers generally agreed this song was the most powerful moment in the play. Nikolai Bukharin found the scene “devastating”: as he wrote in Pravda, “this pitiful song, sung by a mortally offended boy, and this quiet and uncomplaining preparation for death, are unforgettable.”75 Pavel Novitsky experienced the Boy’s suicide as “the terrible and profound tragedy of a people [narod]. The song lingers in the memory for life.”76 Although we do not know exactly what the Boy sang, his Chinese song sealed the national significance of his self-sacrifice, affirming his belonging to the Chinese nation and rejecting

FIGURE 2.2  Maria

Babanova as the Boy in Roar, China! at the Meyerhold Theater, 1926.

Source: Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, f. 2886 op. 2 ed. khr. 85 l. 4. Reproduced with permission.

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any identification with the Europeans who sought to rename and claim him. As the liminal character who crosses the divide between the two worlds of the play, the Boy dies to assert the total separation of those two worlds. At the same time, however, the impact of this death on audience members, generated by the affective power of the musical choice and Babanova’s performance, affirms the second performative function of this sacrifice: to strengthen the sense of community between this Chinese character and the Moscow audience. Once more, the ritual element of sacrifice in Roar, China! strengthened the bonds within two intersecting communities: the national community of the Chinese onstage and the international community formed between them and the Soviet audience.

ET H NOGRA PHIC NATURAL I SM A N D T HE PERFORMANCE OF TRA N SLAT I ON

This use of the huqin and the Boy’s song as markers of national identity indicates a central feature of the Meyerhold Theater’s production of Roar, China! The production deployed what might be called an aesthetic of ethnographic naturalism to characterize the Chinese side in the play. This involved the introduction onto the stage of certain elements—props, costumes, music, and (sometimes) language—that could be claimed as authentically Chinese. The Soviet press confirmed that costumes and musical instruments for the play were imported from China.77 Some instruments were reported as making the journey across the Gobi Desert by car, since the ongoing revolutionary turmoil in China made the journey by rail impossible: their presence in itself a synecdoche for internationalist struggle.78 Surviving cast lists suggest that the stage was filled with typical figures from Chinese everyday life: a fan vendor, a barber, a chiropodist, a puppeteer, and a knife grinder appeared alongside the larger groups of porters, boatmen, and police.79 Chinese students studying in Moscow were reportedly invited to rehearsals to confirm the authenticity of the “China” presented on the Meyerhold Theater’s stage.80 Their efforts received a diplomatic endorsement from the prominent Guomindang politician Hu Hanmin 㚵⓶⇥, who saw Roar, China! during a visit to Moscow and declared it “a living, vivid reflection of our Chinese reality.”81

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An important component in this aesthetic of ethnographic authenticity was the naturalistic style of acting adopted by the actors playing the Chinese characters. This was a controversial choice, as naturalist acting— presaged on the possibility of psychological empathy with a character’s inner life—was typically associated with Meyerhold’s rival Stanislavsky and his Moscow Art Theater. Meyerhold explained that the naturalist acting of the Chinese characters situated them in a believable social reality, thus rendering them the play’s only feasible objects of sympathy: “Genuine human feeling, which [the Europeans] lack, belongs entirely to the Chinese, which is why the Chinese scenes were staged within the framework of everyday life.”82 This deployment of ethnographic naturalism to generate psychological empathy seems to have worked on the critic Pavel Markov, who praised what he called the play’s “internal justification of ethnography”: “Ethnography was not taken for theatrical decoration; instead, through it, and sometimes thanks to it, the psychological kernel of the various images made its way to the spectator. Hence the Boy, singing a melancholy song as he hangs himself, or the leader of the Chinese town, down on one knee before a foreign sailor, linger so long in the memory.”83 For Markov, ethnographic naturalism was essential to the play’s generation of political sympathy between the Chinese characters and the Soviet audience. By contrast, the European characters inhabiting the artificial, quasi-Constructivist structure of the Cockchafer upstage were played in the caricatured, overtly theatrical style of Soviet satire: as fox-trotting, cocktail-swilling sociopaths.84 Markov aside, many critics reacted with hostility to Roar, China!’s embrace of ethnographic naturalism. Or to be more precise, it was the production’s combination of naturalist authenticity with theatrical artifice that raised critical hackles. Meyerhold was commonly viewed as the champion of theatricality and artifice in early twentieth-century Russian theater. His early essays and iconic productions such as The Magnanimous Cuckold (Velikodushnyi rogonosets, 1922) promoted a “conventionalized” or “stylized” theater (uslovnyi teatr), wherein realist mimesis is forestalled by the spectator’s constant awareness of the conventional nature of theatrical performance.85 Roar, China! was not officially directed by Meyerhold: he delegated directorial responsibility to his protégé Vasily Fedorov, although Meyerhold remained artistic supervisor and was seen by some cast members as decisively shaping certain aspects of the production.86

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In any case, Roar, China!’s combination of authenticity and artificiality actually echoed other recent productions at the Meyerhold Theater. Lyubov Popova’s set design for Earth Upturned (Zemlia dybom, 1923), Meyerhold’s first collaboration with Tretyakov, filled the stage with real objects from the world outside the theater, including guns, motorcycles, automobiles, telephones, stretchers, and a crane.87 A 1925 production of Nikolai Erdman’s satire The Warrant (Mandat) combined realistic props, costumes, and makeup with a highly unrealistic rotating stage design.88 But still, something about the distribution of naturalism and artifice in Roar, China! unsettled critics. Advocates of conventional theater typically turned to East Asia to praise the conventionality of its theatrical traditions, in distinction to the European pursuit of realism.89 In Roar, China!, however, the balance was flipped: the Chinese characters represented psychological naturalism, whereas the Europeans openly performed theatrical artifice. Even those Chinese theatrical techniques that did appear in Roar, China! served an ethnographic function, expressing a rigid “ceremoniality” in Chinese social relations.90 Contemporary reviewers dwelt incessantly on these questions of naturalism, artifice, and the role of ethnography. A. A. Tsenovsky, writing in Trud (Labor), denounced the production’s naturalism as a “pale photographing, copying of reality.” The attempts at ethnographic authenticity, for Tsenovsky, only heightened the sense of theatrical falsehood: “There are real Chinese tombs, musical instruments, acrobats, even real Chinese people among the participants. There is no real play.”91 Three different critics—Mikhail Zagorsky in Zhizn’ iskusstva, K. Famarin (pseudonym of Emmanuil Beskin) in Vecherniaia Moskva (Evening Moscow), and Sergei Gorodetsky in Iskusstvo trudiashchimsia (Art for the Workers)—noted the jarring contrast between the constructivist shape of the battleship and the naturalist detail of a real stream of water running across the stage. Zagorsky and Gorodetsky both pointed out the limits of the stream’s naturalism, noting that Hawley supposedly fell into it, yet he was brought back onstage completely dry.92 As to the production’s use of ethnographic detail, Zagorsky denounced it as а “sham naturalism”: “It is very good that this play has none of the proverbial saccharine chinoiserie, but very sad that ‘real things’ have begun to acquire such a dominant meaning in the Meyerhold Theater.”93 Famarin suggested that ethnographic objects should be kept in their proper place, drawing a firm distinction between

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performance and exhibition: “[T]he theater had the opportunity to display individual, authentically Chinese objects, and did not want to turn it down. Though perhaps different ways could have been found to achieve this. An exhibition in the foyer, for example.”94 Gorodetsky, who knew Meyerhold from the prerevolutionary days and had worked with his theater in the past, rejected the production’s “excursion into ethnography” as a violation of the principles of theatricality: “[T]he use of ethnography on the stage does not achieve its effect for this simple reason: real, everyday things are simply not visible, they are anti-theatrical.”95 For Gorodetsky, the play’s use of ethnography to connect to a reality outside the theater could not overcome the fundamental division between theatrical and nontheatrical space. These critical anxieties over the blending of naturalism and theatricality extended into the sphere of language. The director Sergei Radlov, who worked in Meyerhold’s studio before the revolution, also lamented the decision to “overload the production with naturalistic details from Chinese life.” Radlov found the dangers of this approach expressed most clearly in the play’s linguistic choices: It has also been tempting to convey the sound of Chinese speech. For a few seconds it seems that you are hearing authentic Chinese, but here is the dead-end of naturalism: the very next words, spoken in Russian, sound somehow especially greasy and Muscovite, and for a split second these Chinese recall Ostrovsky’s merchants. There is something awkward about this: right after mangling his speech (“You pay, me row”) with the American, the same boatman expresses himself with perfect grammatical correctness to his comrades, while the coolie-stoker, as supposedly the most conscious character, talks and moves throughout like the purest Russian, without the slightest connection to the other Chinese.96

Radlov spots that the Chinese characters in Roar, China! use multiple different forms of language. Tretyakov does insert some phrases in Mandarin Chinese. The Ama (䰓ჸ, nurse or old woman), a trafficker in young women, responds to the Journalist’s complaints about his new bride with the affirmative shi (ᰃ, equivalent to “yes”).97 The Hoshen (heshang, ੠ᇮ, Buddhist monk) announces his appearance with the exclamation “o Mei to fu!”—Tretyakov’s rendering of Amituofo (䰓ᔠ䰔ԯ,

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Amitabha Buddha). The monk advocates a form of magical invulnerability to violence that he inherits from the Boxer Uprising of 1900, and sings in Chinese a song associated with the Boxers.98 In these cases, Chinese phrases alienate the audience from characters with negative associations: sex trafficking, religion, and superstition. More common in the play is what Radlov calls “mangling”: his example is tvoia plati, moia vozi (“you pay, me row”). Recent critics have also regarded such phrases as instances of a “butchered Russian” that limits the Chinese characters to stereotyped and inferior modes of speech.99 As Mark Gamsa points out, however, such phrases in fact represent Tretyakov’s attempt to reproduce Chinese Pidgin Russian, a contact language that developed along the Russian-Chinese border.100 Colloquially known as moia-tvoia, Chinese Pidgin Russian first appeared at the border trading post of Kyakhta in Mongolia.101 Other variants of Chinese Pidgin Russian developed later in Manchuria and among the indigenous Manchu-Tungus tribes of the Amur and Ussuri river basins.102 Tretyakov had spent the Civil War in Vladivostok and also visited Harbin, both places where Chinese Pidgin Russian was still in use in the early twentieth century. He also may have heard it among Chinese migrants in Moscow in the 1920s.103 The pidgin in Roar, China!, with its combination of Chinese and Russian lexemes, seems closest to the variant spoken in Manchuria.104 Pidgin serves in Roar, China! as a language of communication in interactions between the Chinese and European characters, essentially translating the Chinese Pidgin English that would have served this purpose in Sichuan. In the opening disputes between Hawley and the boatmen over wages, the latter speak a pidgin mix of Chinese and Russian.105 A more extended deployment of Chinese Pidgin Russian comes in the pivotal river scene between Hawley and Chi. When Hawley tries to put off paying Chi until he has rowed him to the shore, Chi protests in pidgin: “Tvoia ezdi parokhoda, tvoia denga davai” (“You sail the steamboat, you should give me the money”). Hawley threatens to call the police, to which Chi responds: “Tvoia militsiia zovi, moia denga davai” (“You can call the police, but give me my money”). Both statements follow the basic grammatical rules of Chinese Pidgin Russian, which uses nominative feminine possessive pronouns (moia, tvoia) for first- and second-person singular pronouns and imperatives for most verb forms.106 Enraged, Hawley shouts in Chinese: “Tsuba!” (zouba, 䍄৻, “Go!”). Chi replies: “Moia berega

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khodi net” (“I won’t go to the riverbank”), reflecting the use of the imperative form khodi in Chinese Pidgin Russian to cover almost all verbs of motion.107 When Hawley moves to attack him, Chi says, “Tvoia ne mogu. Tvoia ne smei! Tvoia mashinka iu” (“You can’t. You don’t dare! You are a swindler”). Tretyakov captures the fact that mogu (can) is one of the few verbs in Chinese Pidgin Russian that always appears in the first-person singular, not the imperative.108 An earlier scene has already established that mashinka, which a Russian speaker might mistake for a diminutive of mashina (machine, automobile), is Chinese Pidgin Russian’s version of moshennik (swindler оr scoundrel).109 Finally, “iu” (you, ᳝) is a Chinese verb used in pidgin in its constative sense: “there is,” “you are.”110 In this scene, Tretyakov uses Chinese Pidgin Russian not only as the language of commercial interaction between Europeans and Chinese, but also to voice the unequal, exploitative nature of that relationship. Аmong themselves, by contrast, the boatmen talk in grammatically correct, if somewhat laconic, Russian. This is not an attempt to make their speech appear more primitive. Rather, it echoes the language of the proletarian characters in Tretyakov’s other plays, including Moscow, Do You Hear? (Slyshish’, Moskva?) and Gas Masks from 1924: stripped down to bullet points for maximum impact. Tretyakov described this form of dialogue as “semaphoric speech: we found poster phrases analogous to textual posters; they were conveyed in a rhythmically expressive form.”111 In other words, a highly stylized form of language deliberately designed for theatrical effect. Once more, we find artificial, openly theatrical elements coexisting with fragments of authentic ethnographic material. But this formal device also has meaning within the play’s translational dynamic. It suggests a universal proletarian idiom that happens to be expressed in Russian. For Radlov, this constant switching between linguistic modes ruptures the naturalist aspirations of the play. It reminds the audience that these Chinese boatmen, although surrounded by authentic Chinese costumes and instruments, are nonetheless Russian actors playing roles. I suggest, however, that this effect may in fact be central to the particular form of internationalist aesthetics that Roar, China! sought to perform. The Meyerhold Theater’s production encouraged its audience to hesitate between a sense of connection to a foreign cultural reality and an awareness of the constructed nature of the spectacle. Tretyakov’s translation choices played a central role in producing this effect. The field of

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translation studies has its own version of the naturalism/uslovnost’ debate, focused around the twin poles of “domestication” or “foreignization” as two opposed modes through which translations mediate between the “double context” of source and target cultures.112 Some scholars, including Kwame Anthony Appiah, Emily Apter, and Lawrence Venuti, voice a suspicion of “domesticating” translations as hegemonic operations whose fluency and transparency can mask heterogeneity and efface the translation process.113 Fluency, warns Venuti, “is assimilationist, presenting to domestic readers a realistic representation inflected with their own codes and ideologies as if it were an immediate encounter with a foreign text and culture.”114 Instead, Venuti advocates for historically specific strategies to estrange translations and “signify the autonomous existence of [the foreign] text behind (yet by means of) the assimilative process of the translation.”115 Venuti insists that readers should not be allowed to forget that what they are reading is a translation, behind which stands a foreign culture with its own values and modes of expression. Granted, Roar, China! is not sensu stricto a translation. Robert Crane calls it a pseudotranslation, simulating a translation that has in fact not taken place.116 I suggest we might more profitably regard the play’s mixture of Chinese, Russian, and Chinese Pidgin Russian as a performance of translation, and one whose deliberate lack of smoothness indexes an absent foreign context. Fragments of untranslated Chinese gesture toward the existence of a Chinese-speaking world, much as the authentic Chinese objects gesture to the existence of a real social space from which they have been transferred to the theater. In addition, certain lines in the play read like undomesticated, literal translations from Chinese. For example, the opening line of the play finds the Comprador, Hawley’s local agent, addressing a Chinese merchant: “Vy uzhe izvolili pokushat’ segodnia, vysokouvazhaemyi gospodin Tai-li?” (“Have you already deigned to eat today, most respected Mr. Tai-Li?”). Tretyakov offers a translation in formal register of the common Chinese greeting Ni chi le ma? (Դৗ њ஢, Have you eaten?), the function of which is approximately Kak vy pozhivaete? (How are you?). Elsewhere, however, the Chinese characters express themselves in clear, colloquial Russian. These choices suggest the existence of a heterogeneous linguistic reality that lies behind the text of the play, while also assuring the audience that this foreign reality is translatable and comprehensible.

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Within this model of performing unsmoothed translation, the use of Chinese Pidgin Russian occupies a complex position. Technically speaking, Chinese Pidgin Russian should be seen here as standing in for Chinese Pidgin English, a necessary convention given the play’s audience. But pidgin also offers an alternative model of mediation within the play: it performs the relation between the Chinese and European characters. In this regard, it is crucial that Tretyakov seeks to reproduce an actually existing pidgin language. To illustrate the significance of this choice, we might compare the language of the Chinese characters in Mikhail Bulgakov’s comedy, Zoya’s Apartment (Zoikina kvartira), which began rehearsals in January 1926 and premiered at the Vakhtangov Theater in October. Bulgakov’s play offers a satire of New Economic Policy–era vice: Zoya’s titular apartment houses a dressmaker’s shop that serves as a front for a brothel. Within this criminal world, the most criminal characters are two Chinese migrants with comic names, Gan-Dza-Lin (a.k.a. Gazolin) and Sen-Dzin-Po (a.k.a. Kheruvim), who run a Moscow laundry and also sell narcotics. In the course of supplying opium to Zoya’s husband, Kheruvim murders one of her key clients and elopes with her maid.117 The speech of these Chinese migrants contains some nods toward Chinese Pidgin Russian, most notably the adverbial phrases malo-malo (little-littlе, mangled into mal-mala) and shibko shango (very good).118 But whereas Tretyakov sought to reproduce the grammatical rules of this pidgin, Bulgakov’s characters speak a broken yet recognizable Russian filled with grammatical mistakes and distorted by accentual shifts (s for sh, ts for ch, z for zh). The very fact that “Gasoline” and “Cherubim” speak to each other in this broken Russian indicates that the prime intention is comic foreigner talk rather than a representation of actual sociohistorical dynamics.119 This is the speech of stage Chinamen, marking them as aliens within the Moscow world of the play—and threatening aliens at that. Audience members for Roar, China! may not have picked up on this distinction between authentic pidgin and broken Russian: Gorodetsky, like Radlov, experienced the pidgin speech of the Chinese characters as an “unbearable mutilation of language.”120 And, indeed, there is something here that Tretyakov wants his audience to find unbearable. In historical situations defined by unequal relations of power, the social value of pidgin is typically regarded by both sides as negative.121 The Chinese characters use pidgin in precisely this circumstance, when seeking employment

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from foreigners, whereas the Stoker, the most “conscious” of the Chinese characters, never once uses pidgin to communicate. Like the multiple social languages that Bakhtin identifies within novelistic discourse, pidgin in Roar, China! is not socially neutral: it is “ideologically saturated,” it voices a “worldview.”122 Its jarring, unsmoothed effect gives voice to a concrete experience of economic exploitation. Tretyakov’s attempt to approximate an authentic pidgin gestures toward the fact that Chinese Pidgin Russian, like Chinese Pidgin English and most other pidgins, developed through a material history of contact and trade. From the perspective of the play, this is a history shaped by colonial aggression and an imbalance of power.123 If pidgin language estranges, then it is an estrangement produced by history. This estrangement reaches its height with the speech of the Boy, who speaks a pidgin marked in Tretyakov’s script by heavy accentual distortions. When a missionary on board the Cockchafer orders the Boy to recite the Lord’s Prayer—another moment when Tretyakov hammers home the connection between Christianity and imperialism—his performance mangles Old Church Slavonic into gibberish: “Otche nash, izhe esi na nebesakh, da sviatitsia imia Tvoe” (Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name) becomes the phonetic scramble “Ochi nashi, zhisibisi, dastnitsa mit’e.” The line “Give us this day our daily bread” (Khleb nash nasushchnyi dazhd’ nam dnes’) is comically rendered in the low register of Chinese Pidgin Russian as “Chifan dai mala-mala segodnia” (literally “eat food give little-little today”), indicating the one line in the prayer that has practical meaning for the speaker.124 This is a mangling, to be sure, and a form of linguistic dehumanization. Tretyakov uses this grotesque performance, however, to emphasize the Boy’s entrapment within the unequal social relations of the port, so estranged by these semicolonial conditions that he takes his own life. As the play progresses toward its conclusion, by contrast, the other Chinese characters gradually abandon the use of pidgin. In the final scene, they address their European enemies in Russian and are clearly understood: “Ukhodi, krovavaia sobaka! Von, von ot nas! [. . .] Von! Von! Von!” (“Leave, you bloody dog! Away, away from us! [. . .] Away, away, away!”)125 This final “roar” of protest, demanded by the play’s title and produced by the play’s action, experiences no distortion and requires no translation. It represents a universal expression of uprising that happens to be voiced in Russian.

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Roar, China!’s performance of translation thus expresses a particular understanding of the “double context” of domestic and foreign. The foreign context that the play affirms as existing beyond its imperfect rendering onstage is itself doubled: both a distinct national culture and a specific instantiation of a global dynamic that emerges in situations of unequal exchange and colonial power. This doubling enabled the boatmen of Wanxian to perform Chineseness while also finding a common language with the audience of the Meyerhold Theater. Pidgin languages ultimately affirm the linguistic and cultural separation of the groups that use them to communicate: as one researcher concludes, “Speaking pidgin is to be considered an act of non-identity with regard to the interlocutor.”126 By contrast, the boatmen’s ability to sound authentically Chinese but also “greasy and Muscovite” suggests that their experiences are translatable in a manner that would affirm a deeper commonality with their audience. A device inserted into a performance of Roar, China! on March 21, 1926, three days after the March 18 Massacre of student protestors in Beijing, sought to make this dynamic explicit. At this performance, the actor playing the student interpreter read out a telegram announcing the massacre to the assembled boatmen, followed by some excerpts from an article by Karl Radek, at that time the rector of Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow.127 This device not only ruptured the border between theatrical performance and the ongoing present but also broke down any division between the boatmen and their audience. The 1926 Moscow audience saw characters with all the ethnic signs of Chineseness, listening to an article by Radek, in Russian: tangible Others behaving just as they themselves were supposed to behave. Once more we find internationalist aesthetics shaped by a competing tension between centripetal and centrifugal forces. China is both irreducibly itself and translatable into an international idiom of national struggle whose source the play locates in Moscow. Indeed, we might wonder whether this sense of Roar, China! as a performance of translation, as “born translated,” did not contribute to the play’s remarkable translatability and international appeal over the next few decades.128 Between 1927 and 1937, in addition to Soviet performances in Moscow, Kiev, Odessa, Leningrad, Baku, Kursk, Vladivostok, and Uzbekistan, Roar, China! played in Germany, Austria, England, Estonia, Poland, Norway, the United States, Argentina, and Canada.129 A Japanese translation of the Russian

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text served as the script for a 1929 production in Tokyo and then was retranslated for the first two versions to appear in Chinese in 1929–1930. Two more Chinese translations based on an English version appeared in 1935–1936.130 The first Chinese productions of Roar, China! took place in Guangzhou in 1930 and in Shanghai in 1933. The next two decades saw at least eleven more productions of the play in mainland China, culminating in a performance in Communist-occupied Shanghai in September and October 1949, which coincided with the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).131 Through these various translations and stagings, Roar, China! displayed remarkable malleability. A 1942 production in India adapted the play to represent the growth of revolutionary sentiment in Japanese-occupied China.132 That same year, a production in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, retitled The Tears and Blood of River Boats (Jiangzhou qixue ji, ∳㟳⊷ 㸔㿬), mobilized the play’s anti-imperialism to position Japan as China’s necessary ally against the West at the outbreak of the Pacific War.133 A 1944 performance in Yiddish took place at the Tzchenstochev concentration camp in Poland.134 Roar, China! also moved into other media, providing the title for a woodblock by Li Hua, one of the most famous examples of the Chinese woodblock movement of the 1930s, and a poem by Langston Hughes.135 As it traveled, Roar, China! was able to shed the Soviet-centric elements of Tretyakov’s original treatment. At the same time, its very translatability affirmed the original production’s vision of nationally specific materials rendered meaningful for an international audience. In this sense, the play’s afterlife was its culmination, offering a vision of an internationalist culture wherein the circulation of a performance can generate new, local meanings in different contexts. As we shall see, the other prominent China-themed production of the 1920s Soviet stage, The Red Poppy, displayed a different translational dynamic and experienced a different fate with international audiences.

T H E R E D P O P PY : NEW WIN E IN OLD B OT T LES

On first glance, we find several basic elements in The Red Poppy that are strikingly reminiscent of Roar, China! Indeed, the Bolshoi directorate’s

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decision in February 1926 to jettison Galperin’s libretto on the French Revolution in favor of Kurilko’s on the Chinese may have been influenced by the success of Roar, China!, which had premiered on January 23.136 The ballet, like the play, presents China as a place where the two opposing sides in the global class struggle are pitted against one another across a single stage, their opposition driven toward confrontation by an act of violence committed in the shadow of a huge steel ship. The spectacle opens with an extended sequence in which Chinese porters, described in the ballet as “coolies,” unload this ship. At the conclusion of the drama, a climactic act of self-sacrifice completes the movement of the Chinese masses toward revolutionary consciousness. These similarities were not lost on contemporary audiences. A comic sketch in the theatrical press on reactions to the ballet’s debut notes the echoes of Roar, China! alongside one crucial difference: When the lights went down and the giant Soviet ship appeared on the stage, someone said quietly: “Just like Roar, China!” “Only the other way around,” said another voice. “In Tretyakov’s play the ship was English, a symbol of the oppression and enslavement of the Chinese people. In The Red Poppy the boat is Soviet!”137

The ballet’s first act takes place in the shadow of this Soviet vessel, which plays a key role in shifting the balance of power between the two opposed groups that inhabit the port.138 The juxtaposition of these two sides proceeds through a classically Marxist opposition of labor and leisure. While the porters unload the ship under the whips of their overseers, Europeans relax in a neighboring restaurant. When a Chinese worker collapses and is beaten by the overseers, a tense standoff ensues between the workers and the authorities. The Captain of the Soviet ship reacts to this situation by sending his men to help with the unloading. The opening of the ballet defines these various agents through different dances and musical motifs. The porters work to a heavy, slow, dragging refrain, the “Dance of the Coolies,” while the Europeans enjoy the spectacle of exotic dances in the restaurant. The Captain’s appearance, which disrupts this static opposition of labor and leisure and places the two sides on a path to confrontation, is announced by the first few bars of the Internationale.

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The dancer Tao Hua (variously spelt Tai-Khua, Tai-Khoa, Taia-Khoa, оr Taia-Khua; I will return to the issue of her name) begins the ballet caught, like Babanova’s Boy, between these two opposing camps. She dances for the pleasure of the Europeans, her Fan Dance forming part of their exotic entertainment in the restaurant. The poet Xiao San (known in Russian as Emi Siao) protested that Tao Hua’s status as a dancer implied, from a Chinese perspective, that she was a prostitute; and indeed, an early summary of the libretto published in March 1926 refers to the central character as a hetaera.139 Such an association between dancers and prostitution was not uncommon in the social history of ballet.140 Even if this implication is not made explicit, Tao Hua begins the ballet as the servant of the imperialist camp, paid to provide them pleasure. She is also engaged to Li Shangfu, a villainous comprador and cipher for the Chinese bourgeoisie, who is close friends with the British master of the port, Sir Hips. The Captain’s gesture of solidarity has a transformative effect on Tao Hua, who “has never seen such people. Slavish fear and forced labour have been the law of life for her.”141 Running up to the Captain, she showers him with flowers and places a single red poppy in his hand.142 Li Shangfu reacts with fury. The workers of the port celebrate with a series of dances by sailors of various nationalities, culminating in the ballet’s most iconic moment, the Soviet sailors’ Yablochko (Little Apple) dance. Tao Hua’s trajectory through this microcosm of global conflict draws her out of subservience to one side and toward solidarity with the other. In the second act, set in an opium den, she witnesses a botched assassination attempt on the Captain. Traumatized, Tao Hua smokes opium, initiating a dream sequence of exotic and fantastical dances that move through a Buddhist temple into a magical garden filled with dancing flowers. The third act opens with a party at the home of Sir Hips, which provided an opportunity for the ballet to display Western dances, including the Charleston and the Boston. Li Shangfu and Sir Hips try to co-opt Tao Hua into delivering a poisoned cup of tea to the Captain. Tao Hua runs to the Captain, confesses her love, and begs him to leave and take her with him. He replies that he must choose public duty over private happiness and returns the red poppy to her. Next, Tao Hua dances for the Captain with the poisoned cup in her hand, but she knocks it away as he raises it to his lips. The plot is foiled, and the Soviet sailors depart. In the final scene, Tao Hua stands on the quayside bidding goodbye to the Soviet ship.

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As she gazes into the distance, Li approaches and stabs her with a dagger. The dying Tao Hua passes the red poppy to a group of children that surround her, as a workers’ uprising storms the stage. At a time when the future of ballet seemed uncertain, The Red Poppy offered proof that a production with a revolutionary theme could be a hit. In the 1927–1928 season it played more than sixty times; by December 1928 it had reached its one-hundredth performance. (Typically, ballets on the Bolshoi’s repertoire were performed fifteen to twenty times a season.)143 In all, the original production played more than three hundred times on the Bolshoi’s stage between 1927 and 1937.144 Red poppy–themed perfume, soap, and confectionary appeared in the autumn of 1927, capitalizing on the show’s popularity.145 A production at Leningrad’s State Academic Theater of Opera and Ballet (the renamed Mariinsky Theater) notched up seventy-one performances between January 1929 and December 1930, including a May Day show and a special performance for the Red Army and Navy.146 Soviet histories of dance would subsequently canonize The Red Poppy as the “first Soviet ballet.”147 Contemporary critical reactions were more ambivalent. Many regarded The Red Poppy as a flawed piece, an incomplete but necessary step away from the traditions of classical ballet and toward something acceptably new. For these critics, this production served as a flashpoint for a broader debate about how to balance the conventions of ballet as an established art form with the demand that ballet should in some fashion represent or give access to historical reality. Nikolai Volkov’s review of the June 1927 premiere, published in Izvestiia, typifies the assessment of The Red Poppy as a halfway house: “The Red Poppy seemingly embodies all the contradictions of ballet as an art form: one moment it surges forward, raising the battle-cry of realism, the next it retreats to classical positions; one moment it triumphs, demonstrating that а theme from reality can still engender vivid form, the next, frightened by its own boldness, it turns instead to a reverential review of the ballet archive.”148 The key term, for Volkov, is realism. The Red Poppy raises but does not quite fulfill the possibility that a “realistic” theme taken from contemporary reality can provide the content for ballet. These critical demands for realism anticipated the rise of the drambalet as the dominant mode of Soviet ballet from the 1930s, a form whose insistence on mimetic narrative coincided with the institutionalization of Socialist Realism as the sole approved method of Soviet art.149

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Like many critics, Volkov found the ballet’s positive achievements to be concentrated in the first act. The exploration of labor through dance, alongside rousing images of internationalist solidarity, suggested that “a ballet of this kind, realistic in theme and movement, could be theatre for the masses, accessible, relevant and emotionally exciting.”150 Commenting on the Leningrad production, Aleksei Gvozdev likewise applauded the first act’s “mass pantomime” as “socially meaningful and dramatically stimulating.”151 For these realistically minded critics, however, any progress was squandered by the opium dream sequence that dominated the second act. The dream seemed to abandon realist ambitions and revert to fantastical exotica and pure sensory pleasure. Moreover, the device of the symbolic dream linked The Red Poppy to such stalwarts of the prerevolutionary repertoire as La Bayadère and The Pharoah’s Daughter, both staged by Marius Petipa at the Imperial Ballet.152 Gvozdev dismissed the dream as theatrical chinoiserie, failing to overcome “the traditional interpretation of China on western stages as an outlandish, fantastical country, full of exotic ‘wonders.’  ”153 Emmanuil Beskin, writing in Vecherniaia Moskva, lamented the second act’s return to classical dances, after the first act had introduced everyday clothes and the energetic movements of fizkul’tura (physical education).154 The divided production that these critics describe emerged from a Bolshoi company that was fundamentally split on the question of how to reconcile ballet with the urge for topical relevance and internationalist connection. The jarring contrast between the first two acts, for example, stemmed in part from the fact that they were choreographed by different ballet masters. For the 1927 Bolshoi production, Lev Lashchilin choreographed the first and third acts, whereas the second was choreographed by Geltser’s husband, Vasily Tikhomirov.155 It was Tikhomirov, supported by Geltser, who insisted on the dream sequence, which was absent from earlier versions of the libretto.156 The realist tendencies of the first act may also be traced to the involvement of the theater director Aleksei Dikii, who outlined the first act but grew frustrated with the project and ultimately refused to direct the later scenes.157 For all their divisions, however, the ballet’s creators shared an awareness that ballet could become “Soviet” only by offering ideologically clear narratives that could appeal to a mass audience. During rehearsals, Kurilko, Geltser, Glière, Tikhomirov, and Lashchilin made a point of visiting a factory to test some of the numbers

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on workers and find out “what does not get through to the viewer and what needs to be corrected.”158 With the symbolic abstractions of the dream, they risked losing their implied audience. Tikhomirov and Geltser defended Tao Hua’s dream as an attempt to reconcile classical ballet with revolutionary thematics. The dream, they explained, expressed Tao Hua’s internal psychological struggle between the allure of the Captain’s revolutionary example and the weight of tradition and superstition.159 The dream began with Tao Hua trapped in a procession to a Buddhist temple, signifying the hold of religion. Next the dancer escaped to a “Chinese heaven” in the shape of a magical garden. The fantastical dancing inhabitants of this garden retained definite ideological significations, according to Tikhomirov and Geltser: butterflies, lotuses, and dandelions stood for old China, whereas the red poppies represented the revolutionary future.160 At the climax of the dream, Tao Hua saw a red boat appear on the horizon—bearing, at the premiere at least, the Guomindang flag.161 In a contemporary interview, Geltser acknowledged that the depiction of the heroine’s inner life was “extremely unrealistic,” with her “psychology hidden behind symbols.” She insisted, however, that inner psychological experience in ballet simply “cannot be transmitted realistically. The means at ballet’s disposal are necessarily limited. Gesture and mime can only express generally comprehensible feelings and emotions. Abstract thought cannot be communicated.”162 The only recourse was symbolism. This symbolic interpretation of the dream sequence could be found in the copy of the libretto distributed to audiences of the first Bolshoi production. Nonetheless, critics questioned whether this symbolic meaning actually came through in performance. “For a spectator who is not familiar with the libretto,” wrote a reviewer in Pravda, “it says nothing at all.”163 The use of an opium dream sequence to symbolize an awakening to revolutionary consciousness encapsulates the dilemma that Tikhomirov and Geltser sought to resolve. They wanted to show that recognizable elements of the prerevolutionary ballet tradition could be used to express revolutionary themes. This dynamic of new wine poured into old bottles meant that The Red Poppy, for all its anti-imperialist messaging, directly inherited the Orientalism that had become a prominent feature of ballet over the previous century. The outlines of Tao Hua’s story can clearly be discerned in Deborah Jowitt’s generic description of nineteenth-century

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Orientalist ballet: “For almost a century, the stages of opera houses and popular theatres—in America as well as Europe—teemed with enslaved heroines, treacherous rivals, disguises, fateful talismans, lovers offering to sacrifice their lives or their purity for each other, intrigues, threats of hideous punishment, opium dreams, spectacular scenic effects, and, of course, dances galore.”164 These are also the elements of The Red Poppy that rhymed with its Orientalist predecessors on the Russian ballet stage. In The Pharaoh’s Daughter, staged by Petipa in 1862 and revived in Leningrad in 1925, an English noble traveling in Egypt falls asleep under the influence of opium. He dreams that he is an ancient Egyptian in love with the pharaoh’s daughter, a union hindered by the jealous rivalry of the King of Nubia.165 A love triangle between a dancer, a warrior and a priest shaped La Bayadère, first performed in St. Petersburg in 1877, which also assigned a pivotal plot function to a basket of flowers.166 The garden of dancing flowers in Tao Hua’s dream invoked “Le jardin animé” in Le Corsaire, one of the Imperial Ballet’s most iconic productions, which also featured Oriental enslavement and a romantic gift of flowers from female to male lead. Indeed, Aleksandr Gorsky’s revival at the Bolshoi in 1912 had featured Geltser and Tikhomirov in the lead roles.167 A red flower, a dancing garden, and an Oriental journey all feature in The Little Red Flower (Alen’kii tsvetochek), a ballet adaptation of Sergei Aksakov’s popular skazka. Once again, Gorsky’s version for the Bolshoi in 1911 starred Geltser and Tikhomirov.168 Alongside this Orientalist inheritance from the balletic canon, Tikhomirov and Geltser’s treatment of their Chinese material also aligned them with the transnational taste for theatrical chinoiserie outlined at the start of this chapter. As with The Chalk Circle, this involved drawing on the cultural heritage of China’s own past. Writing retrospectively twentyfive years later, Tikhomirov defended the staging of the second act as an approximation of what he considered to be authentic Chinese aesthetics: For the fantastical scenes of Tao Hua’s dream I began from the stories of the Chinese writer Liao Chzhao, and tried to reconstruct on the stage, through the language of choreographical dance, everything I knew about China and her centuries-old culture. A series of movements close to the Chinese plastic arts were used in staging the dances. We also introduced acrobatic movements into the ballet that are found in Chinese folk dances.169

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“Liao Chzhao” refers here to Liaozhai zhiyi 㘞唟䁠⭄, a collection of stories by Pu Songling 㪆ᵒ唵 (1640–1715), in which everyday life is constantly interrupted by various encounters with the supernatural. A popular Russian translation by prominent Sinologist Vasily Alekseev had been published in Petrograd in 1922.170 Tikhomirov’s sense of aesthetic authenticity was oriented toward the past, to China’s “centuries-old” culture. Geltser, in turn, drew for her performance on the fabrics, fans, and carvings she had acquired on a tour to Harbin and Beijing during the First World War.171 For Geltser, the fundamental features of Chinese art were “ornateness, patterning, decorativeness, precisely crafted details.” Rehearsing The Red Poppy, she said, she came definitively to understand how the rococo style and “affected gestures” of eighteenth-century Europe had flowed there from China.172 Geltser’s comments evoke the high age of chinoiserie as a style, and it was the China of chinoiserie—aestheticized, refined, exquisitely detailed—that Tikhomirov and Geltser sought to capture. Such an aesthetic jarred strongly with the brutal, ugly China of toiling “coolies” and colonial violence that took shape in the ballet’s first act. Here The Red Poppy hewed much closer to its contemporaries in the field of internationalist aesthetics. Scenes of exploited dockside labor contrasted to European leisure had opened Roar, China! and would shape the opening sequence to the film Shanghai Document, released in 1928 (see chapter 3). But the first act also drew on and reworked the resources of ballet’s past. National dances had played a central role in ballet during the Romantic era; in the time of Petipa, they had been used chiefly as divertissements.173 The first act of The Red Poppy closed with a sequence of national dances by various groups inhabiting the port, performing internationalism as a unified celebration of diversity. First a group of Malay women, freed from dancing for Europeans in the restaurant, danced with the “coolies.” Next a series of sailors from different nations each performed an individual dance: according to one account, a Malayan, Indian, Japanese, Australian, and U.S. sailor each danced in turn.174 Finally, the Soviet sailors’ Yablochko dance brought this display of internationalist diversity to a close, affirming the primacy of Soviet Russia in the new postimperialist order. The tune for Yablochko came from “Ekh, iablochko, da kuda katish’sia?” (Hey, little apple, where are you rolling to?), a chastushka that was popular among soldiers and sailors on both sides during the Russian Civil War.175 The sailors’ dance that accompanied it was a Russified version of the

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British-Irish hornpipe.176 Emerging from the popular culture of the revolutionary period, Yablochko was a significant departure from the ballet tradition defended by Geltser and Tikhomirov. The Bolshoi orchestra initially refused to play such a “street song.”177 The group male dance as a climactic moment also departed from the days of Petipa, when the ballerina ruled supreme. It suited, however, the context of the Soviet 1920s, with its cult of physical culture, Meyerholdian biomechanics, and heroicization of the Civil War.178 Indeed, Yablochko was to prove the most popular and enduring moment in The Red Poppy, concluding the ballet’s first act with a patriotic vision of an internationalist order firmly led by collective, male Soviet example.179 If the close of the first act offered one way to reconcile ballet with the postrevolutionary present, the figure of Tao Hua, at first sight, seems more fundamentally trapped within the paradigms of the past. Tao Hua embodied the production’s most visible examples of a chinoiserie aesthetic. Geltser’s own description of her performance emphasized antiquity and refinement: “In every turn of her head, in the movement of her hands, in her clothing, in her refined manners, in her ceremonial behaviour, one should sense the refinement of an ancient race whose culture reached full flower when our Europe was still settled by unknown savages.”180 One reviewer noted that Geltser’s “refined, conventional gestures” and “small, coquettish movements” gave Tao Hua the air of a “porcelain Chinese doll.”181 We sense an established stereotype of East Asian femininity: Pierre Loti, for example, consistently describes Madame Chrysanthème, the prototype for Madame Butterfly, as a “doll.”182 Tao Hua also has the most recognizably “Chinese” theme in Glière’s score, a high, elegant pentatonic melody that introduces her in the first act and recurs throughout the ballet. Even Soviet critics did not try to claim this was anything other than musical chinoiserie, a hazy second-order signifier for China.183 In terms of narrative, Tao Hua’s story clearly tapped into a longstanding tradition, both within and beyond ballet, of treating the Orient as a space of erotic adventure.184 Aspects of her character recalled the dangerous Oriental temptresses familiar from Ballets Russes productions, such as Cleopatra and Firebird.185 Tao Hua’s entrapment by Li Shangfu echoes the nineteenth-century trope of the enslaved Oriental ballet heroine, a figure whose “aura of glamour and intimations of promiscuity” appealed to audiences alongside her “bravery and resourcefulness.”186

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The trajectory of this particular heroine, however, reveals how The Red Poppy sought to transform the conventions it inherited. The ballerina of the nineteenth century was preoccupied with the search for love, and the enslaved Oriental heroine typically fought and even died for the freedom to select her own romantic partner.187 Kurilko’s libretto euphemistically confirms Xiao’s intuition that Tao Hua’s entrapment should be understood as prostitution: “Tao Hua has absorbed China’s thousand-year-old culture into herself. At the same time she, a child of the street, has been poisoned by corrupt European ‘civilization’ and knows all the dark sides of life.” Li Shangfu first appears on the scene as both fiancé and pimp: “The life of the street has joined them together since childhood. For some time he has been Tao Hua’s fiancé, and the larger part of her earnings goes into his pocket.”188 Doubly trapped in her engagement to Li and her performance for the pleasure of foreigners, Tao Hua turns to the Captain as an expression of free sexual choice. The task of the ballet, however, is to shift this erotic narrative into a political one, substituting for the generic trope of the desirable foreign prince the salvational narrative of Soviet Russia’s transformative influence on semicolonial China. The Red Poppy, then, sought to mobilize enough of the dramatic conventions of the genre’s past to be recognizable as ballet, while simultaneously reworking this inherited material to give it new social meaning. This revalorizing of convention finds its most succinct expression in the trajectory of the titular red poppy, whose symbolic meaning transforms as it moves through the ballet. As mentioned earlier, flowers served as symbols and plot devices in several of The Red Poppy’s predecessors. At the beginning of the drama, flowers express Tao Hua’s sexual availability to foreign men: in the libretto’s description of the restaurant scene, Tao Hua, “happy as a butterfly, goes from guest to guest and hands out flowers.”189 This same signification can be traced in her gift of the red poppy to the Captain, which signals a shift in her erotic orientation toward a different type of foreigner. Yet once it reaches the Captain’s hands, the meaning of the red poppy begins to transform. From a symbol of sexual availability, it becomes a symbol of internationalist solidarity and revolutionary struggle. In parallel, Tao Hua’s path also deviates from that of her nineteenth-century ancestor. She dies, but not for love: she dies for the revolution. Her movement along the trajectory of the enslaved Oriental heroine is interrupted by the Captain, who insists that private romantic fulfillment

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must be superseded by commitment to the revolutionary cause. Erotic desire is sublimated into revolutionary self-sacrifice. Once more we find a narrative about transformation through self-sacrifice underpinning a theatrical performance based on events in contemporary China. What makes The Red Poppy distinctive, however, is the particular relationship established between the sacrificial heroine and the titular red flower. To understand this relationship, a historical digression may prove useful.

RESIGNIF YING THE RED P OP PY: TRANSL ATION, HISTORY, MY T H

In 1949, The Red Poppy was restaged in honor of two historical events: the founding of the PRC on October 1 and Joseph Stalin’s seventieth birthday on December 18. The Bolshoi Theater’s new production, which opened on December 30, differed in significant ways from its 1920s predecessor. An article in Sovetskii artist on November 25 by Viktor Tsaplin, one of the group responsible for reworking the libretto, outlined these changes.190 Tsaplin identified several problems in the original libretto. The Chinese people were too passive, and Tao Hua was too much of a stereotyped “dancer-geisha.” Her love for the Captain distorted the nature of Soviet ideological influence on the Chinese Revolution. Tsaplin also condemned the opium den as a setting for the second act, and judged the dream sequence too confusing. Sure enough, no trace of a romantic attraction between Tao Hua and the Captain remains in the 1949 production. The red poppy loses its erotic connotations and travels in reverse, a gift of solidarity from the Captain to Tao Hua in the first act. Instead, the ballet introduces a Chinese male hero as love interest: Ma Licheng, the revolutionary leader of the dock workers. Tao Hua is no longer a prostitute but a dancing teacher who hosts underground revolutionary meetings in her home. The second act takes place in this home rather than in an opium den, and although the dream remains, opium is not involved: Tao Hua simply falls asleep from exhaustion after the assassination attempt. The dream sequence now features the same characters (Ma Licheng, Li Shangfu) as the main narrative, and the dancing flowers disappear. Finally, the dancer’s death explicitly serves the cause of

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national liberation: in the ballet’s concluding moments, Li Shangfu shoots her while aiming at Ma Licheng.191 These changes reflect the standardization of Soviet drambalet over the course of the 1930s and 1940s into a form that emphasized ideologically coherent dramatic narrative and reduced pure dance divertissements to a minimum.192 They also suggest, however, a conscious attempt, in the wake of the Chinese Communist Revolution, to reduce exoticism, erase the traces of the Oriental temptress, and increase Chinese agency. Perhaps the Bolshoi hoped to attract Chinese spectators or even export the ballet in this new era of Sino-Soviet friendship. If so, this plan failed. In December 1949, Mao Zedong traveled to Moscow in search of a formal alliance treaty with the Soviet Union. On the eve of signing the treaty in February 1950, Mao visited the Bolshoi to watch a performance of Swan Lake.193 He declined, however, an invitation to see The Red Poppy. China’s ambassador to the Soviet Union, Wang Jiaxiang⥟【⼹, advised against it after his wife, Zhu Zhongli ᴅӆ呫, attended a dress rehearsal. Her account of the production suggests the alterations of 1949 did not achieve their desired effect. Zhu condemned the ballet for distorting the role of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the revolution, replacing its decades of struggle with an account of Marxism-Leninism entering China through an exchange between a Soviet sailor and a Chinese prostitute.194 In Mao’s place, his close associate Chen Boda 䱇ԃ䘨 attended a performance together with Mao’s interpreter, the Sinologist and diplomat Nikolai Fedorenko. Fedorenko’s memoir records Chen’s protests during the performance: the images of Chinese people presented onstage struck him as “distorted” and “monstrous.” But Chen also raised the problem of the ballet’s name and central symbol. At a meeting with the Bolshoi directorate after the show, Chen insisted that the red poppy was not an appropriate symbol for anti-imperialist alliance: “the very name Red Poppy causes us some discomfort. The thing is, for us Chinese, the poppy plant is understood as a symbol of opium. Perhaps you do not know, but opium is our greatest enemy, because for centuries it has laid waste to our people.”195 The historical horizon for Chen’s protest extends back to the Opium Wars of the nineteenth century (1839–1842, 1857–1860), fought in part to dispute the right of British traders to sell opium in China.196 Defeat in these wars forced the Chinese Empire to conclude unequal treaties

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with foreign powers that led to ever greater losses of sovereignty. Indeed, Chinese Communist historiography would present the CCP’s victory in 1949 as bringing to an end the “century of humiliation” at the hands of foreign powers that began with the First Opium War.197 Within this historical narrative, opium symbolized subjugation to foreign political and economic power—for some, it represented a deliberate attempt to “poison” the Chinese nation.198 Chinese Communists had sought to eradicate opium use in areas under their control since the late 1920s, although they also made strategic use of the financial benefits of opium production during the war with Japan.199 When they came to power, the CCP would tie the suppression of opium to their wider claims of liberating China from its semifeudal and semicolonial past. In February 1950—the same month that Chen Boda watched The Red Poppy in Moscow—the government of the PRC launched an unprecedented mass campaign that effectively eradicated opium consumption in China by 1952.200 When read within these historical horizons, the choice of the red poppy as a symbol of anti-imperial alliance looks like a remarkable faux pas. The Russian Empire may not have participated in the opium trade, but it certainly benefited from China’s loss of sovereignty as a result of the Opium Wars. Although not a combatant in the Second Opium War, Russia intervened in the peace negotiations to claim the border territories that became the Amur and Ussuri regions.201 These concessions set the stage for Russian expansion into Manchuria at the end of the nineteenth century. The Soviet government insisted that these imperialist ambitions had been inverted in the age of socialist internationalism, but Chinese Communists had good reasons to remain suspicious of Soviet aspirations for hegemony in the socialist world.202 Chen’s protests against The Red Poppy asserted the CCP’s authority to write the history of China’s revolution and recovery of sovereignty, with itself in the central role. Seen from within that history, the ballet’s central symbol began to look dangerously ambiguous. Instead of affirming the replacement of imperialist exploitation with socialist solidarity, the poppy symbolically equated the Soviet intervention in China with the imperialist aggressions of the previous century. Through the early 1950s, voices connected with the CCP continued to protest against the presence of the poppy in The Red Poppy. In March 1951, the poet Xiao San discussed The Red Poppy with an agent of the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Abroad (Vsesoiuznoe

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obshchestvo kul’turnoi sviazi s zagranitsei). Xiao had become an important intermediary between the Soviet cultural establishment and the CCP in the 1930s. In his speech at the First Soviet Writers’ Congress in 1934, the poet condemned The Red Poppy’s anachronisms and stereotypes: the men wore queues, the women had tiny bound feet, and “all the Chinese inevitably smoke opium.”203 Two decades later, after seeing the revived ballet in Bulgaria, Xiao insisted that the name should be changed, in view of “the hatred of the Chinese for the poppy, as the raw material from which opium is made.”204 In October 1953 Leonid Lavrovsky, artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet and director of the 1949 revival, met with Zeng Xiufu, a graduate student at the Academy of Social Sciences. Zeng had recently seen the new production and praised the production’s artistic qualities. He then went on to offer several pointed criticisms. Zeng advocated changing the Chinese hero’s name from “Ma” (a Muslim surname) to “Wang,” and suggested he be made Tao Hua’s husband to clarify their relationship. Zeng also criticized the ballet’s name and central symbol. Reproducing the standard narrative about the “century of humiliation,” Zeng affirmed that the struggle of the Chinese people against imperialism began with opium. For a spectator who makes the connection between poppies and opium, Zeng suggested, the symbolism of the ballet becomes dangerously confused: “Opium is a social evil, а source of oppression, yet in the ballet the Soviet captain gives [Tao Hua] a red poppy. Of course, he gives her the flower as a sign of friendship, but here you have to understand the mentality of the Chinese people.”205 Lavrovsky’s response amounted to a plea of ignorance: “When we named the ballet, we thought of the red poppy as a color and a flower, and did not think at all about the national significance of this flower. For us the main thing is the color. We will have to give this some thought.”206 Indeed, it seems these protests hit their mark. When the 1949 production was revived in 1957, it carried the name The Red Flower (Krasnyi tsvetok)—and the Chinese hero was named Wang Licheng.207 Lavrovsky, however, was  not involved in the original production of 1927. Can the original creators of The Red Poppy truly have been ignorant of the poppy’s associations with opium? This seems a stretch for a ballet that features an extended opium dream sequence in which giant red poppies dance across the stage. Perhaps they did not know about the connection between opium and the imperialist Opium Wars?

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Yet the Soviet press was hardly silent on the connections between opium and British imperialism in China. In an article published in Rabochaia Moskva on May 21, 1927, about a month before the premiere of The Red Poppy, Tretyakov condemned the colonial novel’s glamorization of opium dens, pointing out that “the feted delights of opium smoking represent one of the most terrible crimes of the British against the Chinese people.”208 Did the ballet’s creators simply ignore this historical aspect of China’s experience? The precise reasons for this selective blindness may resist retrieval, but some light can be thrown on the question by turning to the issue of Tao Hua’s name. The form of her name in documents connected to the ballet shows considerable variation. Newspaper articles, draft librettos, and programs for the 1927 production fluctuate between three different spellings of this name: “Tai-Khua, “Taia-Khua,” and “Taia-Khoa.”209 The Leningrad production of 1929 calls her “Tao-Khoa,” and she remains “Tao-Khoa” for the 1949 revival in Moscow and Leningrad and for the renamed Red Flower in 1957.210 We thus have fluctuations in both parts of the name: Tai/ Taia/Tao for the first part and Khua/Khoa for the second. It seems the creators and stagers of The Red Poppy were not quite sure what the name of their heroine should be. What might this name mean, and where might it come from? Any attempt to trace its origins must contend with the fact that the Bolshoi collective did not know Chinese, and they probably were not familiar with the Palladius system for rendering Chinese phonemes in Cyrillic. In his 1953 interview with Lavrovsky, Zeng Xiufu suggested changing the name from Tao-Khoa to Tao-Khua: “Then there is the name Tao-Khoa. It’s hard to pronounce, you probably sense that yourselves. Much better would be Khua: it means flower, and it will be more correct and easier to pronounce.”211 Zeng offers a resolution that the Bolshoi never quite reached, combining the “Khua” option from the earlier versions with the “Tao” of the later productions. Zeng’s proposed name, “Tao Khua,” does in fact correspond to a Chinese word: tao hua (ḗ㢅), meaning “peach blossom.” By contrast, “taia” corresponds to no Chinese phoneme, and although “tai” does, there is no semantic unit “tai hua” in Chinese. “Khoa” may be a Cyrillicization of “houa,” the form equivalent to “hua” produced by the Romanization system of the École française d’Extrême-Orient. (Tikhomirov’s production notes suggest he consulted a French translation

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of Chinese Art by British Sinologist Stephen W. Bushell, and the work of French scholar George Soulié de Morant.)212 We might even speculate that the Bolshoi group preferred “khoa” to “khua” because the latter runs too close to a well-known Russian expletive. If Zeng’s suggestion of Tao Hua (ḗ㢅, Peach Blossom) in fact reflects the original intention of the ballet’s creators, it would seem a suitable name for our heroine. According to traditional Chinese flower symbolism, peach blossoms, emblematic of spring, are connected with romance and sexual attraction. We might also wonder about an explicit evocation of a famous utopian text, “The Peach Blossom Spring” (Taohua Yuan Ji, ḗ㢅⑤㿬) by Tao Yuanming 䱊⏉ᯢ (365–427). Tao’s fable in prose and verse describes a fisherman’s discovery of a grove of blossoming peach trees at the source of a stream. Beyond the grove lies a hidden land, whose inhabitants live an egalitarian life of communal labor free from political or economic domination.213 Such a name would suit a heroine whose trajectory begins with sexual attraction and moves toward the utopian promise of a better world. All the more strange, then, that the creators of The Red Poppy do not seem to have thought that their heroine’s name meant “peach blossom.” Instead, they seem to have identified it with a different flower. The sources connected to the ballet repeatedly insist that this name, in all its various spellings, meant “poppy” (mak) or “red poppy” (krasnyi mak). In a 1927 interview, Geltser explains that her character’s “name is Taia-Khoa (the Red Poppy).”214 Kurilko’s 1927 libretto provides a translation when the dancer first appears: “Khon Taia-Khoa—po-kitaiski—tsvetok Krasnyi mak” (Hong Taia-Khoa—in Chinese—the Red Poppy flower).215 “Khon” here renders hong (㋙), the Chinese word for “red.” But the translation of “Taia-Khoa” as “poppy” is hard to justify. “Poppy” in Chinese is yingsu (㔠㉳) or yingsu hua (㔠㉳㢅). The name of the ballet in Chinese sources is Hong Yingsu Hua (㋙㔠㉳㢅).216 In fact, to make things even stranger, several of Kurilko’s sketches for the ballet show the Chinese characters for “red poppy” (hong yingsu hua ㋙㔠㉳㢅) decorating the stage. In a sketch of the set for the first act (figure 2.3), these four characters appear (in the wrong order) on a banner in the top left-hand corner and are partially scattered on banners and lanterns across the stage. The same four characters adorn the front of the opium den in Kurilko’s sketch for the opening of the second act (figure 2.4).

FIGURE 2.3  Mikhail

Kurilko, stage design sketch for act 1 of The Red Poppy, Bolshoi

Theater, 1927. Source: Courtesy of the Bolshoi Theater Museum. Reproduced with permission.

FIGURE 2.4  Mikhail Kurilko, stage design sketch for act 2 of The Red Poppy, Bolshoi Theater, 1927.

Source: Courtesy of the A. A. Bakhrushin Central State Theater Museum, Moscow. Reproduced with permission.

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The Bolshoi’s records suggest that Kurilko may have obtained these characters from Chinese students studying in Moscow. In June 1927, the theater wrote to Sun Yat-sen University, asking the students to translate several terms from Russian into Chinese for the stage decorations of The Red Poppy. The last term on the list is Krasnyi mak.217 So perhaps the Bolshoi collective obtained the correct characters from Chinese students in Moscow, but did not know how they were pronounced? Instead, the equation of Taia-Khua/Taia-Khoa/Tao-Khoa with “red poppy” endured. As late as 1952, we find Kurilko speaking of “Tao-Khoa, which in translation means ‘Red Poppy.’ ”218 How much can be said to account for this persistent attachment to a mistranslation? Kurilko claimed that the title “Red Poppy” was his idea, even suggesting that the others in the group resisted it.219 The confusion of “Tao Hua” with “Red Poppy,” in turn, may have come from Tikhomirov’s French copy of Bushell’s Chinese Art. Tikhomirov’s production notes contain information from a page that describes decorative flowers on a lacquered screen, among them “Peach Blossom. T’ao hua” and “Poppy. Ying Su.”220 But regardless of the source of this mistranslation, what matters is its productive force: what it allowed the Bolshoi production to do. Lydia Liu’s work on translation suggests we move beyond questions of accuracy or inaccuracy and instead consider how semantic value is produced through historically situated encounters between signs: “[t]he circumstantial encounter of one sign with another (in a sentence) or another language (in translation) decides the manner in which the actualization or sabotage of meaning takes place.”221 In the case of The Red Poppy, an encounter between “Tao Hua” and “Krasnyi mak” enabled the ballet’s creators to bind together their heroine and central symbol as tracing parallel trajectories through the production. As Tao Hua is transformed through her encounter with the Soviet Captain, so the red poppy undergoes a resignification at his hands. The original librettos from 1927 make it clear that the ballet’s creators were well aware of the poppy’s associations with opium. What their ballet attempted was more symbolically ambitious than simply denying these associations. The Red Poppy stages the power of Soviet art to transform the meaning of symbols, just as the power of Soviet example transforms the character of Tao Hua. The 1927 production actually depends for its full effect on invoking the poppy’s associations with semicolonial degradation and corruption. This is precisely the image

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of China the ballet seeks to present at the outset, in order to posit its transformation as a consequence of Soviet intervention. Tao Hua’s initial gift of the red poppy to the Captain, as described in the libretto, leaves no doubt that Kurilko understood this symbol as an opium flower: “Ecstatic, she runs up to him and showers him with flowers. One of the flowers, a large red poppy, she places in his hands. The red poppy is a symbol of intoxicating passion, the opium flower, filled with sweetness and poison. Thus Taia Khua loves the Captain. The Captain looks at her indulgently. He does not understand her ardour.”222 The red poppy is explicitly linked on first appearance to opium, even though the ballet makes no explicit reference to the opium trade or the Opium Wars, beyond the presence of a villainous British capitalist controlling this Chinese port. Instead, the opium association connects to a generalized sense of Tao Hua (the “red poppy”) as sensual, corrupted, even dangerous: filled with “intoxicating passion,” “sweetness and poison.” This red poppy, then, combines longstanding clichés of the Orient as a place of destabilizing sensuality with a contemporary image of semicolonial China as oppressive and corrupt. The Soviet Captain, however, does not understand the poppy’s sensual implications. He accepts the flower and pins it on his jacket, interpreting it purely as a token of Tao Hua’s gratitude on behalf of the “coolies.” Thus begins the red poppy’s journey from opium flower to symbol of internationalist solidarity. This journey continues in the opium dream of the second act. Opium smoking is negatively marked in The Red Poppy, a palliative for trauma rather than a sensual indulgence: Tao Hua smokes it to overcome her fear after the attack on the Captain. Although the trope of the opium dream can be traced to nineteenth-century ballet, it serves a new ideological purpose here, dramatizing Tao Hua’s struggle against religion—Marx’s “opium of the people.”223 Strikingly, however, the red poppies in the opium dream side with the revolutionary future. Tao Hua flees a Buddhist procession pursued by a group of phoenixes, who chase her into the magical garden. “Dancing among them, Taia-Khoa flutters like a butterfly; she seeks truth in the world of dreams. Some dancing red poppies appear—the first heralds of the truth.”224 When the phoenixes pursue Tao Hua, the poppies droop their heads. At the climax of the dream, however, a red boat appears in the distance. Now the other flowers in the garden droop, but the poppies raise their heads toward the boat, following Tao Hua’s gaze.225

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“The red poppies are victorious,” states the libretto at the conclusion of the dream; victorious because they have detached themselves from opium and shifted their meaning toward the revolutionary associations of the color red.226 The third act completes the transformation of Tao Hua alongside the resignification of her namesake, the red poppy. Tao Hua warns the Captain of a conspiracy to poison him, confesses her love, and begs him to take her with him back to Russia. Tao Hua has chosen the right side, but for the wrong reasons; she retains her connection to sensuality. The Captain, not her lover but her teacher, responds that he must place duty above any desire for personal, private happiness. He first tries to symbolize this idea by pointing to the red star on his sleeve.227 When Tao Hua fails to understand, he fetches the red poppy and reinterprets it as a “red banner”: “The Captain does not know how to explain to her the idea which he serves. He walks up to the vase, takes from it a red poppy, and places it in her hands, raising them up high. ‘Learn to fight for this red banner. It contains the happiness of China and of all humanity. This is my vow to you.’ ”228 The Captain’s resignification of the red poppy completes Tao Hua’s ideological education. Production notes describe her ensuing dance as expressing “the transformation of her private love into love for humanity.”229 Tao Hua affirms her transformation with an act of self-sacrifice, dying at the hands of Li Shangfu after foiling the plot to kill the Captain. As she dies, Tao Hua bequeaths the red poppy to a group of Chinese children: “She remembers about the red poppy, finds it, calls the children to her, strokes their heads, and explains to them the meaning of the red poppy. As she dies, she passes it to them.”230 As with Roar, China!, an act of self-sacrifice brings the Chinese masses to internationalist revolutionary consciousness. Indeeed, these were not the only examples in 1920s Soviet culture of a Chinese self-sacrifice for the sake of a Soviet-led revolution. In Vsevolod Ivanov’s 1922 Civil War novella Armoured Train 14–69 (Bronepoezd 14–69), the Chinese partisan Sin-Bin-U places his body on the railway tracks to stop a White army train and save his Red partisan comrades. (The Moscow Art Theater’s popular stage adaptation opened in November 1927, just months after The Red Poppy.) Roy Chan reads the death of Sin-Bin-U as a Soviet variation on what Gina Marchetti calls the “Butterfly myth”: “a longstanding narrative by which the subordinate Asian is granted acceptance by White society, but only

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through sacrifice.”231 If Madame Butterfly, in Marchetti’s reading, dies to prove the dominance of the “Western religion of love,” then Sin-Bin-U’s self-sacrifice affirms the power of internationalist solidarity under Soviet leadership.232 Tao Hua’s narrative hews even closer to the Butterfly prototype: her transethnic romance with a white sailor culminates in a sacrificial death that validates his transformative political influence. Indeed, spectators in Leningrad could compare a production of Madame Butterfly that ran at the Maly Opera Theater in parallel with The Red Poppy through 1929, sometimes playing on the same day.233 Whereas Madame Butterfly’s suicide ensures that the son she bore her lover can become American, the Red Butterfly’s maternal role is asexual and purely ideological. At her death, she passes the red poppy to China’s next generation as a seed invested with new meanings by the Soviet Captain, who controls, in Lacanian fashion, the paternal realm of the Symbolic. Biological filiation cedes priority to ideological affiliation: Tao Hua’s sacrifice ensures that the Captain’s ideological inheritance can pass to these children without the need for her biological reproductive capacities.234 Thus, the red poppy’s movement from opium and sensuality toward revolutionary solidarity is also a move away from the concrete and embodied—coded here as feminine and Chinese—toward the abstract and symbolic realms associated with Soviet masculinity.235 Only through this resignification, the ballet suggests, can China escape its exotic specificity and enter the universal sphere of revolutionary modernity. The libretto imagined a final apotheosis in which a rain of poppies descends and a huge red poppy appears in the form of a banner.236 A review of the 1927 production describes the realization of this scene: “The spotlight beam transfers from Taia-Khoa to a large, bright red flower, raised up high in the hands of a child, leaving the rest of the stage and even the figure of the child in darkness.”237 The opium flower, scourge of China’s past, becomes the best hope for China’s future. To understand this act of resignification, it may help to employ the language of semiotics. The resignification of the red poppy benefits from that flower’s functioning as a sign within multiple overlapping cultural languages or codes. As a sign, from the start, it is multiply encoded.238 The initial association with opium operates within a cultural code we might designate as the language of European colonial exoticism. Within this code, the poppy represents the depravity and sensual corruption of the

TRANS LATING C H INA O NSTAGE1 31

intoxicating East, echoing the Orientalist traditions of ballet and the erotically charged colonial fiction of Loti, but steering clear of a sober sociohistorical discourse that might explicitly link opium consumption to a history of imperialist intervention. Conversely, within the inherited codes of Russian and Eastern Slavic culture, krasnyi mak summoned different associations. The Russian word mak has no historical connection to the opium trade and possesses positive, even festive overtones. A makovka can be a church’s onion dome or a pastry treat studded with poppy seeds. In Ukraine, red maki regularly appear on traditional embroidered shirts (vyshivanki). The red color of the mak suggests a healthy glow: “Litso tvoe kak makov tsvet” (Your face is poppy-colored), says the Nurse to a blushing Tatyana in chapter 3 of Eugene Onegin.239 The magical “little red flower” in Aksakov’s popular skazka, a variant of the Beauty and the Beast myth, brings together a cursed prince with the loving woman who releases him.240 Soviet culture overlaid these inherited associations of red flowers with the newly charged valency of red as the color of international socialism. Even before the ballet’s debut, the poppy’s festive red color tied it to revolutionary imagery. In Vladimir Nabokov’s short story “Russian Spoken Here,” published in 1923, a Russian émigré in Berlin visits a Soviet bookstore and buys “a hammer adorned with poppies and emblazoned with an inscription typical for a Bolshevik hammer.” He also buys a small plaster bust of Lenin and uses the poppy-adorned hammer to smash the bust to pieces.241 The success of The Red Poppy brought poppy-themed perfume and makeup into the sphere of Soviet everyday life, adding overtones of Oriental intoxication and feminine allure to the symbol’s existing associations (figure 2.5). Krasnyi mak perfume, in particular, remained popular into the postwar period, with a deluxe version released for the ballet’s revival in 1949. But the poppy also continued to circulate beyond a direct association with The Red Poppy. The cigarette brand Mak, which predated the revolution, displayed a large red poppy on its packet. Poppies appeared on confectionary, clothing, embroidery, porcelain, and postcards celebrating Labor Day on May 1.242 The ballet overlays these multiple codes in dynamic fashion within its central symbol. The poppy’s positive associations in Slavic culture combine with the revolutionary coding of the color red to enable the flower to act as an affirmative symbol of internationalist sympathy and alliance.

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FIGURE 2.5  Advertisement for Red Poppy powder and lipstick, Maksim Mikhailovich Litvak-Maksimov, 1938.

Source: From the holdings of the Russian State Library.

At the same time, the opium associations are an important part of the symbol’s effect. They retain their exotic, tantalizing allure, even as the action of the ballet suggests that this cluster of meanings can be evacuated by an infusion with positive, Soviet significance. The resignification of the poppy, then, serves to affirm the power of Soviet culture to override other systems of meaning with its own symbolic interpretations.

TRANS LATING CH INA O NSTAGE1 33

This resignification overlooks, however, the accumulated meanings of this symbol in the codes of Chinese historical consciousness. In contrast to Roar, China!, which sought to present itself as a translation of contemporary Chinese reality, the creators of The Red Poppy proved ultimately indifferent to the historical context behind their images. They had no interest in confirming the translation of Tao Hua as krasnyi mak; what mattered was that the translation fit the ballet’s drama of symbolic transformation. In this regard, their deployment of the poppy turned their image of China into a myth, in the sense that Roland Barthes describes myth: a “hazy” approximation of historical knowledge without any commitment to concrete specificity.243 Small wonder, then, that Chinese Communist spectators rejected the ballet’s staging of Soviet symbolic power. For them, the red poppy remained a sign that signified a particular historical experience of imperialism, and its deployment in a Soviet ballet did not invert the imperialist past so much as imply its continuation.

3 THROUGH AN INTERNATIONALIST LENS China in Early Soviet Cinema

I

n September 1925, Sergei Tretyakov found himself in Odessa, collaborating with his erstwhile theatrical colleague Sergei Eisenstein on the intertitles for one of the masterpieces of early Soviet cinema: Battleship Potemkin.1 Tretyakov had been appointed deputy president of the Artistic Council at Goskino’s First Film Factory on his return from Beijing, joining the film industry just as the emergent theory and practice of Soviet film were beginning to stake their claim for cinema as the art form best placed to mediate the masses’ relationship with the world.2 His involvement with Potemkin may have gone beyond intertitles: Lars Kleberg has noted the striking similarities between this revolutionary drama set on a battleship and Roar, China!, which Eisenstein was originally slated to direct.3 But Tretyakov also pushed for Eisenstein’s next film project to be a cinematic sequel to Roar, China!, recruiting the director and his cinematographer Eduard Tisse to make a trilogy of films set in China titled Dzhungo. Sadly, the films were never shot; but Tretyakov’s grandiose project, considered in this chapter, displays his ambition to extend the work of internationalist aesthetics into the medium of cinema. The outlines of this ambition for cinema as the mediator of a new relationship between China and Soviet Russia can be glimpsed in an article called “Cinema and China,” which Tretyakov published in the newspaper Kino in September 1925:

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We are drawn to this China, even though we still do not know China. But we must get to know China, we must get to know it well, and we must get to know it quickly, because the tempo of history has sped up to an unusual degree. And so the screen must come promptly, quickly, urgently to the help of the newspaper and the book, so that the USSR can not only hear about its revolutionary brother, but also see him face to face.4

In this era of historical acceleration, Tretyakov claims, the cinematic medium can offer a direct, “face to face” encounter with China that supplements the mediation supplied by the printed word. Film promises to fulfill the task of internationalist aesthetics through a redistribution of the visible that enables a sense of international community to emerge. This chapter argues that the corpus of early Soviet films devoted to China offers the period’s most sustained experiment in rethinking cinema as a medium for internationalist connection. This experiment ranged across different cinematic genres, from revolutionary melodrama (the Dzhungo trilogy) to expedition film (The Great Flight, Shanghai Document), animated agitprop (China on Fire), and comedy (The Chinese Mill). Uniting these formally distinct films, however, is the search for a response to Tretyakov’s demand: how can cinema provide a face-toface encounter with a distant land and people that might enable a new political relationship to emerge? What kinds of connection can cinema engender across international space? Emma Widdis has noted the fundamental role of early Soviet cinema in shaping the imagined geography of the new Soviet identity, mapping out a decentered network model of the new state in the 1920s, and affirming a hierarchical, radial structure of center-periphery relations in the Stalinist 1930s.5 This process of cinematic remapping relied on film’s capacity to both record real space photographically and rearrange spatial relations through montage—a process Lev Kuleshov called “created geography” (tvorimaia geografiia).6 As Dziga Vertov wrote in 1923, speaking in the voice of the cine-eye: “I juxtapose any points in the universe, regardless of where I fixed them.”7 Early Soviet films about China sought to deploy this art of fixation and juxtaposition to create new connections with a space located beyond the borders of the Soviet state. Cinematic montage—the joining together of

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distinct shots to produce new meanings—offers both an analogy and a method for this political and aesthetic project of linking two heterogeneous spaces with different historical trajectories within a single, global imaginary geography of internationalism. This search for internationalist connection through cinema raises major questions about the kinds of mediation the cinematic apparatus affords. Cinema was a transnational medium practically from its inception: the Lumière brothers’ new technology was first displayed in both Shanghai and St. Petersburg in 1896, just months after its debut in Paris the previous year.8 By the 1920s, both the Soviet and Chinese film industries were developing within a global system of film production and distribution unevenly weighted toward the dominance of Hollywood and Western Europe. These transnational dynamics of distribution and reception opened the possibility that Soviet films could reach Chinese audiences, and several of the films considered in this chapter were made with this goal in mind. Yet Tretyakov’s call for a face-to-face encounter seems to obviate the cinematic medium itself, conceptualizing the camera and screen as open windows through which both sides can see each other. Other accounts of cinematic vision emphasize the imbalance of seer and seen. For example, Peter Wollen offers a historical excavation of cinematic gaze theory that emphasizes the one-sided nature of cinema’s visual dynamic: the audience sees the objects and human subjects onscreen but is not seen reciprocally by them. Drawing on Alexandre Kojève’s reading of Hegel, Wollen suggests that this imbalance makes social recognition impossible: the cinematic spectator “lacks the embodiment which makes perception of others a social tie in the Hegelian sense.”9 Yet this socialized perception of others is precisely the goal of Tretyakov’s call for a face-to-face encounter. Indeed, we might see social recognition across distance, both spatial and cultural, as the fundamental challenge of internationalism. Tretyakov envisions a cinematic internationalism through which spectators can recognize the people they see onscreen as equal subjects. But can the extraction of the photographic image resist reducing the subject to an object? Can this power imbalance of the seer over the seen be overcome? The first Soviet film about China, China on Fire (Kitai v ogne, 1925), places these problems of vision and power at the center of its agitational

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imagery.10 One of the earliest Soviet animated films, China on Fire deploys a combination of cardboard-doll animation and hand-drawing techniques to map contemporary China as a semicolonial space defined by rural inequality, imperialist exploitation, and growing popular resistance. Indeed, the figuration of China as a map forms a central component of the film’s visual imagery. Cinema and cartography were closely intertwined in the visual imagination of the early Soviet period, when both maps and films played a key role in defining the spatial identity of the new Soviet state.11 Furthermore, as a visual technology, cartography is inescapably bound up with questions of visuality and power. The human geographer Brian Harley reads maps as a form of knowledge production that assists the operations of power by abstracting the social content of geographical space, thereby forestalling precisely the direct human encounters that Tretyakov demands from cinema: “Maps as an impersonal type of knowledge tend to ‘desocialise’ the territory they represent. They foster the notion of a socially empty space. The abstract quality of the map [.  .  .] lessens the burden of conscience about people in the landscape. Decisions about the exercise of power are removed from the realm of immediate face-to-face contacts.”12 China on Fire acknowledges the map as a form of visual power, but ascribes cartographic domination to a capitalist, imperialist mode of seeing defined by objectification and commodifying desire. For the Soviet viewer, by contrast, maps of China transform from abstract representations of geographical space into sites of embodied suffering. In the film’s opening sequence, the “Ruler of the World” (Vladyka mira), a disembodied head with enormous cheeks, fanged jaws, and a star-spangled hat, lurks by the spinning globe. As the planet rotates, this grotesque image of imperialism as global capitalism darts out its tongue to gobble up India, Australia, Java, and the decapitated German Kaiser. When the globe revolves to reveal China, the ruler develops an electrically enhanced form of perception. Search beams shoot from his eyes toward written signs that announce this territory’s natural resources—coal, gold, silver, kerosene—in Russian and Chinese (figure 3.1). In a later sequence, a monstrous black spider with bulging eyes, wearing a top hat with “Capital” inscribed upon it, crawls across a map of China. Grasping greedily at bags of raw material, the spider squats

FIGURE 3.1  China

on Fire. The Ruler of the World catches sight of China.

Source: From the holdings of Gosfilmofond, Moscow. Reproduced with permission.

THROUGH AN INTERNATIONALIST LENS139

FIGURE 3.2  China

on Fire. The spider of Capital wrapped around China.

Source: Screenshot from the DVD Animated Soviet Propaganda

on top of a soft-featured human face at the center of the map, its eyes closed in sleep or fear. Capital sees; China is blind (figure 3.2). We may notice that this capitalist arachnid, like the Ruler of the World, has a pronounced hooked nose, suggesting the persistence into the Soviet 1920s of anti-Semitic notions of global capitalism as a Jewish conspiracy.13 This appeal to ethnic stereotype sits uncomfortably alongside the film’s avowed project of transethnic sympathy. Furthermore, this faceto-face encounter with China is complicated by the passivity and blindness of the face in the map. China figures primarily as a suffering victim in need of salvation. Later in the film, a scene inside Beijing’s Diplomatic Compound illustrates the specifically semicolonial character of China’s domination by global capital. Four monstrous representatives of the Great Powers— the United States, Britain, Japan, and France—sit around a table with the passive Chinese president (in 1925, this was Duan Qirui ↉⽎⨲).

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A map of China is spread out on the table. The diplomats, their fangs bared, set about measuring out spheres of influence. Above the map appears the image of a Chinese man, his ethnic identity signaled by his Mandarin hat and long queue. (Both were anachronistic symbols of the Qing dynasty by 1925—the film itself acknowledges in an earlier title that the queue was no longer worn after 1911.) The map becomes the body of the nation, greedily dismembered from four directions (figure 3.3). The next sequence shows a different map drawn from scratch, gradually taking the shape of Russia. Three animal-headed figures in military uniforms surround the map and shoot lightning bolts from their eyes at Moscow, now overlaid with the hammer and sickle (figure 3.4). Once more the film equates electric vision with imperialist violence. As these monsters reach out to grasp the hammer and sickle, however, it changes into a cannon and shoots back. The map transforms from a technology

FIGURE 3.3  China

on Fire. Carving up and dismembering China.

Source: Screenshots from the DVD Animated Soviet Propaganda

FIGURE 3.3  (Continued)

FIGURE 3.4  China

on Fire. Imperialist encirclement of the USSR.

Source: Screenshot from the DVD Animated Soviet Propaganda

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for imperialist domination into a site of anti-imperial resistance. Victorious Moscow expands into a star that reveals the Moscow–Beijing train bringing ambassador Lev Karakhan to China. Cartographic parallelism and trans-Eurasian connection suggest that Russian revolutionary precedent and Sino-Soviet alliance are the solutions to China’s objectification by global capital. China on Fire humanizes the map, although the film’s allegorical figures of the Chinese nation remain primarily objects rather than subjects of perception. Saved from the reifying gaze of capitalist power, China is reinscribed into a vision of global space that is also a vision of history developing inexorably through imperial capitalism toward revolution. The cinematic remappings of space considered in this chapter are inseparably intertwined with a claim to a certain temporality, what Tretyakov calls the quickening of the tempo of history. I illuminate this conjunction of spatial and temporal concerns by returning to Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, which also structured the discussion of the travelogues in chapter 1. The chronotope, for Bakhtin, names the way that a particular historical experience of space and time becomes embodied in artistic form.14 Although Bakhtin limits his discussion of the chronotope to the novel, the concept has proved productive in the field of film studies. Indeed, Michael Flanagan claims that cinema’s privileged “ability to show spatial changes through time” and “capacity to represent motion figuratively” make it “the artform which most thoroughly expresses chronotopic activity.”15 As time and space take on concrete form in the work of art, Bakhtin suggests, they become perceptible and acquire distinct values: “Time here thickens, fleshes out, becomes artistically visible, while space becomes intensified and is drawn into the movement of time, plot, and history.”16 The final claim has particular resonance for the films considered in this chapter, which seek to draw Chinese spaces into a particular understanding of revolutionary historical development under semicolonial conditions. Indeed, these films offer a practical investigation into the meaning of the term semicolonial, introduced by Lenin to describe the positions of China, Turkey, and Persia within global imperialism.17 What is it about China’s “semicolonial” condition that makes this a tangibly different space to the USSR, yet also allows it to be understood within the framework of a single historical theory of world revolution? These are

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the questions about the relationship between space and history that these silent films address through visual means: as Bakhtin says of Balzac, they attempt “to ‘see’ time in space.”18 Bakhtin considered the chronotope to be an essential factor in the distinctions between genres, and the films considered in this chapter deploy a range of generic strategies in their attempts to convey a new spatial and temporal relationship between China and revolutionary Russia. Common to them all, however, is an abiding tension between recognition and mastery, community and hierarchy. The Great Flight (Velikii perelet, 1926), an expedition film about a pioneering aviation expedition from Moscow to Beijing, celebrates the dual power of Soviet aviation and Soviet cinema to traverse, perceive, and give meaning to Eurasian space. China becomes legibly semicolonial through spatial juxtaposition with Russia and Mongolia. The film also records, however, a range of local responses to the Soviet cinematic apparatus and its project of spatial hegemony. Tretyakov’s unrealized Dzhungo project, a trilogy of fiction films slated for production with Eisenstein in 1926, sought to produce a cinematic epic of contemporary China shot on location with Chinese actors. Tretyakov’s scripts combine newspaper facts with invented, typical characters to assert a totalizing spatial vision of the Chinese nation and its development toward revolution. At the same time, the trilogy was envisioned as a spectacle that could be shown to Chinese audiences: instead of a face-toface encounter with their Soviet kin, Chinese spectators would encounter themselves on the screen as mediated through Soviet film. Shanghai Document (Shankhaiskii dokument, 1928), a generic hybrid of expedition film and city symphony, uses parallel montage to decode the urban space of Shanghai as a microcosm of global class dynamics. The film’s deployment of parallel montage claims a unique authority to traverse the disparate spaces of the city and reveal the meaning of their juxtaposition, a capacity it denies to its Chinese subjects. Lastly, Isaac Babel’s script for The Chinese Mill (Kitaiskaia mel’nitsa, 1928) comically undermines the aspirations for a cinematic internationalist aesthetics. The affective power of visual media to provoke internationalist solidarity, visualized through a face-toface encounter, becomes a form of Quixotic madness that must cede its place to the primacy of local concerns and the sober business of building socialism in one country.

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THE CONQUEST OF S PAC E: THE GREAT F L IGHT (1925 –1 926 ) China should rightfully become as well-known and dear to us as America. China must be carefully and comprehensively squeezed into the consciousness of the masses through their pupils. —SERGEI TRETYAKOV, IN A REVIEW OF THE GREAT FLIGHT, 15 DECEMBER 1925

At the turn of the century, cinema and aviation seemed to form a single moment. By 1914, aviation was ceasing to be strictly a means of flying and breaking records [. . .]; it was becoming one way, or perhaps even the ultimate way, of seeing. —PAUL VIRILIO, WAR AND CINEMA

On June 10, 1925, six airplanes took off from the L. D. Trotsky aerodrome in Moscow, bound for China. Organized by the society for Aviation and Chemical Defense and Industry (Aviakhim), this “Great Flight” aimed to reach Beijing and Shanghai by way of Baikal, Mongolia, and the Gobi Desert—the latter never before crossed by air.19 In an interview published in Pravda on the day the planes departed, the head of Aviakhim, A. I. Rykov, described the Great Flight as performing two fundamental tasks. The expedition would serve as “a sign of the strengthening of the fraternal link between the workers of the Soviet Union and the peoples of Mongolia and China,” while also providing “excellent training for our flight personnel and a demonstrative test of the achievements of our aviation industry.” In conclusion, Rykov asserts that “the entire Soviet country should follow the progress of this flight.”20 Rykov’s language of observation and signification alerts us to the fact that aviation feats in the 1920s functioned as representations laden with symbolic meaning. Scott Palmer’s study of Russian aviation culture argues that the airplane served as “the quintessential marker of twentieth-century progress” and hence a key signifier of state power and prestige.21 By contrast, Anindita Banerjee identifies an ambiguity in the symbolic functions of mechanical flight in modern Russian culture, oscillating between affirmations of the power of the state and appraisals of a future borderless humanity.22 The Great Flight inherited this ambiguity as its defining symbolic

T H RO U GH AN INTERNATIO NALIST LEN S1 45

feature: a declaration of the USSR’s military power, it also served as a statement of internationalist solidarity with neighboring China in opposition to European and Japanese imperialism. This symbolic performance was directed to three audiences: the peoples of Mongolia and China, the USSR’s rivals in the West and Japan, and the Soviet public. To achieve this symbolic status, the Great Flight had to pass into representation through the mass media technologies of print and film. With cinema in particular, the aviation expedition found a close partner for its combination of technological prowess, spatial assertion, and internationalist sentiment. By the end of the Civil War, aviation had practically ceased to exist in Russia.23 Beginning in 1923, the Bolshevik government launched a concerted campaign to generate public interest in the renaissance of the aviation industry. Organizations such as Aviakhim and Dobrolet (Dobrovol’nyi vozdushnyi flot, the Voluntary Air Fleet) were created to channel public support for aviation.24 This campaign soon sought to harness the symbolic power of arduous flights over impressive distances, in conscious rivalry with Western competitors. In the summer of 1924, a U.S. aviation expedition led by Lowell Herbert Smith had completed the first aerial circumnavigation of the globe, passing through Shanghai en route.25 The following year, the Soviet “Committee on Big Flights” proposed a flight to China as their first major project. The four-thousand-mile route linked Moscow to Beijing through Sarapul, Sverdlovsk, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, and Ulaanbaatar.26 From Beijing, one branch of the Flight squadron flew on to Shanghai, while another flew to Tokyo at the invitation of the Japanese government. Japan had recognized the USSR in January 1925, less than three years after Japanese troops withdrew from Vladivostok. Russia’s historic rival in East Asia was also keen to demonstrate its aviation capabilities: the first Japanese flight from Tokyo to Beijing took place in late May 1925, and a Japanese flight from Tokyo to Europe reached Moscow in late August, almost concurrently with the Soviet planes’ arrival in Tokyo.27 The Great Flight squadron consisted of six planes: four of Soviet construction, and two foreign-made Junkers. The six pilots included Mikhail Mikhailovich Gromov, who was to become one of the most famous Soviet aviators of the 1930s. Six engineers and expedition leader Isai Pavlovich Shmidt completed the active expedition crew. The Junker passenger planes transported the sizeable media team that accompanied the expedition. Four correspondents from various press organs filed daily telegrams

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updating readers on the Flight’s progress along its route.28 In addition, a two-man film crew from Proletkino, cameraman Georgy Blium and director Vladimir Shneiderov, traveled with the planes and captured the expedition on film. This was the first time that a film crew had participated in a long-distance aviation expedition of this kind.29 The Great Flight became a media event that happened multiple times: reported in newspapers through the summer of 1925, it was replayed in the film The Great Flight, which ran in Moscow and Leningrad from December 1925 to January 1926.30 The timing of a symbolic flight to China could not have been more auspicious. Although Comintern agents had been working to direct China’s political development since 1920, Soviet press coverage on China increased considerably following the establishment of formal diplomatic ties in 1924.31 Soviet newspapers reported the death of Sun Yat-sen in March 1925 as the loss of a great anti-imperial revolutionary leader and Comintern ally whose career proved the validity of Lenin’s colonial strategy.32 Yet it was the shooting of demonstrators by British police in Shanghai on May 30, 1925, that really catapulted China to the top of the Soviet news agenda. That day, a large crowd gathered at a police station in Shanghai’s International Settlement to demand the release of six students, who had been arrested en route to the funeral of a worker shot by Japanese factory guards in a dispute over a strike. When the crowd refused to disperse, the British police opened fire, killing twelve people and wounding seventeen more. Outrage at the May Thirtieth massacre led to major strikes in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Guangzhou (Canton). Another fifty or so protestors were killed on June 23 when British and French troops fired on a demonstration in Guangzhou.33 In the Soviet Union, the May Thirtieth massacre and subsequent strikes made China the center of press attention in the runup to and throughout the Great Flight. China was on the front page of every issue of Pravda for the first week of June 1925. Inside the newspaper, Tretyakov’s “letters from Beijing” sat alongside articles by Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, and Karl Radek, greeting the events in Shanghai as harbingers of the next stage of global revolution.34 Just eleven days after the shootings in Shanghai, the Great Flight set off to collapse any lingering notions of China as distant. The film produced by the expedition belonged to a genre just beginning to emerge in Soviet cinema. Expedition films, a subset of the educational

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film category of kul’turfil’my (culture films), offered audiences factual knowledge about distant places while simulating the excitement and novelty of travel. The 1920s and 1930s saw a sizeable number of expedition films devoted to the peripheral spaces of the Soviet Union, “mapping” the new state in the collective consciousness of viewers as a multinational entity both coterminous with and distinct from the old Tsarist Empire.35 These films, however, did not just contribute to the imagining of the Soviet state as a spatial unity. They also transgressed the boundaries of the new state to represent global space to a Soviet audience. The career of Vladimir Shneiderov, the twenty-five-year-old director of The Great Flight, was symptomatic in this regard. Before the flight to China, Shneiderov had already made Around Uzbekistan (Po Uzbekistanu, 1925). He would go on to direct a film about the Pamir Mountains in Tajikistan (1928), five films about Yemen (1930), and a polar expedition film (1933).36 The Great Flight literally overcame the division between Soviet and foreign space: the film’s first two reels showed European and Siberian Russia to its viewers; a third reel displayed Mongolia; and the fourth, fifth, and sixth reels covered Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. Aviation and cinema coincide in their capacity to cross international borders. At the same time, both expedition and film positioned the Great Flight as an act of war. Ever-present military overtones situated the Great Flight within a global geopolitical conflict between the socialist USSR and its capitalist enemies, with China as the frontline. The mapping of an unprecedented air route across Mongolia to China sent a clear global signal about the reach of Soviet aerial capabilities. The coverage in Vecherniaia Moskva included a series of front-page map images showing the current position of the Flight along its route from Moscow to Beijing, each bearing the instruction “follow this map.” Altering with each day’s progress, this newspaper map became a slow-moving form of animation. One redaction of this map personifies the antagonists in this global war, the smiling proletarians of Soviet Moscow facing off against the panicking Western and East Asian bourgeoisie (figure 3.5). This image juxtaposes two gazes that are “watching” the Flight: a capitalist gaze alarmed at the expedition’s progress and a benevolent, sympathetic gaze extending from Moscow (and implicitly shared by the viewer). Moreover, the spatial arrangement of this map, which ignores north-south orientation and frames the Moscow–Beijing route almost as a straight line within these rectangular

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FIGURE 3.5  “They

are watching . . .” Vecherniaia Moskva, June 15, 1925.

Source: From the holdings of the Russian State Library.

contours, confounds any notion of China as distant with a stark assertion of contiguity. Natural and political borders alike pose no obstacles to the Flight’s progress: the border separating Mongolia and China from the USSR is scarcely distinguishable from the Siberian rivers that punctuate the route. The plotting of the Flight’s stops along its route also produces a visual echo of the Trans-Siberian Railway, built in the 1890s to support Tsarist imperial ambitions in Northeast Asia.37 Indeed, the Flight followed the railway on its journey through Siberia, while its route through Mongolia to Beijing traced the old tea trade route between Russia and China.38 Thus, the Flight’s assertion of internationalist connection across Eurasian space also echoed the longer tradition of the Russian state’s expansion into East Asia. War features prominently in The Great Flight, which was subtitled “Civil War in China” and includes extensive footage of the armies of Soviet allies Feng Yuxiang and the Guomindang. Newspaper advertisements for the film promised “military action” and “bloody battles for Canton.”39 Content aside, the film’s aerial footage offered a mode of cinematic perception

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intimately connected to recent developments in aviation as a technology of war. Paul Virilio notes that photographic perception became a crucial form of military power during World War I, when reconnaissance planes used serial photography to record the movements of enemy lines.40 Cinema placed before a general audience the breakthroughs in mediated perception achieved by the development of reconnaissance aviation: “While war footage or aerial chronophotography remained under lock and key or was simply shrugged aside [. . .], film-makers served up the technological effects to the public as a novel spectacle, a continuation of the war’s destruction of form.”41 The Great Flight invited its audience to share this new (and implicitly military) aerial perspective as a source of sensory excitement as well as knowledge. An article in the newspaper Kino praised the film crew for playing their part in aviation’s “conquest of space”: “The cinema eye [glaz kino] has followed the eye of the pilot, and vast spaces have automatically been transferred onto film. Questions of the conquest of space, which are being objectively resolved by aviation technology, will, alongside other resources, have cinema at their disposal.”42 A review of the film by Viktor Osipovich Pertsov, a member of the LEF group, connected cinema and aviation as modern technologies that expand perceptual experience: “Cinema is the prototype for the brazen daring of the modern innovator. The radius of ordinary human perception is expanding beyond measure. Cinema’s only competitor in this regard is another great force of modernity that is pushing outwards the radius of our possibilities: aviation.”43 Thanks to the Great Flight’s combination of these quintessential modern technologies of vision, Pertsov declared, “the multi-million masses of the population now participate in the aerial expedition Moscow–Beijing.”44 The Great Flight offered its audience the opportunity to share the privileged perspective on geopolitical space enabled by militarized aviation technology. The Great Flight opens with the scene of departure at the L. D. Trotsky airfield in Moscow. Alongside shots of the planes prepared for takeoff and excited crowds, we see a series of portrait shots that establish the heroes of this adventure: the six pilots and six flight mechanics plus their leader, Shmidt.45 Press coverage of the Flight repeatedly emphasized the heroic qualities of these men: single-minded, fearless, humble, inexhaustible, self-sacrificing.46 Shots of the journalists and Proletkino crew complete the expedition collective. The end of the film’s first reel and the entirety of

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the second reel (which has been lost) record the Flight’s progress across European Russia and Siberia. Тhe aerial footage was acquired under difficult conditions and often in bad weather. The crew could shoot only through the windows of their plane, and moving the camera from one side of the plane to the other disrupted the aircraft’s balance.47 Blium’s tripod was removed from the plane because of weight restrictions, and the cameraman frequently resorted to using Shneiderov’s back as a steadying device for his Askania camera.48 When they landed along the way, according to Shneiderov’s account of the lost second reel, the crew sought to shoot “the most varied local details possible, to avoid monotony when editing the film together. We try to choose the most characteristic types of people, costumes, decorations.” This ethnographic imperative led to the capture of Tatar peasants in Kazan, “typical Siberians” in Novosibirsk, and a railway workers’ delegation in Irkutsk.49 The Great Flight’s Siberia is a space where technological advancements in rail and air travel coexist with backwardness: in a newspaper interview in China, Shneiderov noted the response of “the more primitive Siberian peoples,” who “scattered in terror” at the sight of the plane.50 Upon crossing the border into Mongolia in reel 3, the film increases the ethnographic attention to backwardness already glimpsed in Siberia. Soviet political influence was strong in the People’s Republic of Mongolia, which had been established under Soviet sponsorship (and in defiance of China’s claims to Mongolia) the previous year.51 The Great Flight records Russian-language signs in Ulaanbaatar, foregrounds the presence of Soviet ambassador Aleksei Vasiliev, and shows the expedition meeting with Choibalsan, who would become the “Mongolian Stalin” in the 1930s. But if Mongolia appears in some senses to be a Soviet periphery, its backwardness is also linked to its exclusion from Soviet space. A pair of shots contrasts the regimented order of the Soviet border post, with soldiers marching in straight lines, to the solitary guard standing at the Mongolian border post, while another man relaxes on a carpet in the shade nearby. The ethnographic search for primitive exotica comes increasingly to the fore in Mongolia: we see men on horseback, markets, Buddhist temples and monks, and camel caravans plodding through the Gobi Desert. The sequence that attracted the most attention was Blium’s footage of dogs eating corpses, a traditional method for disposing of the dead. Lebedenko’s report suggests the team’s excitement at capturing such exotic material:

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“What a segment! Now there’s a film! Women will be fainting in the cinemas of Moscow and Leningrad!”52 One reviewer’s reaction affirmed the shock value of this spine-tingling primitivism: “There was no need, really, to show corpses. They are ‘conveyed’ too lovingly: flies eat them, worms squirm and dogs chew.”53 This chronotope of a journey away from Moscow as a journey into the past echoes an Orientalizing dynamic found in many early Soviet films devoted to the internal, Soviet East, which emphasize the backwardness of the peripheries to affirm the modernizing force of the Soviet civilizing mission.54 Indeed, for Blium the camera’s very presence in Mongolia testified to a developmental gulf: “We visited a famous temple, in which the leg of a tripod had never before set foot.”55 This spatiotemporal map of technologized modernity spreading out from Moscow to redeem increasingly backward hinterlands becomes more complex once the planes reach China. The scenes of arrival at Beijing’s Nanyuan airfield suggest a complex, modernizing society, in contrast to the solitary Mongolian border post. According to Chinese newspaper reports, around thirty thousand people gathered to welcome the Soviet planes, including representatives of the Beijing government, the Guomindang, and the Beijing Student Union.56 Blium’s camera captures a group of students holding a banner that reads “Long Live the Alliance of the Chinese and Russian Peoples.” The film emphasizes the lavish greeting the expedition received, with ceremonial gifts presented to the crew members, a banquet hosted by the Ministry of Aviation, and a meeting with President Duan Qirui.57 The next segment, entitled “Two Beijings,” shows a city shaped by an unevenness linked to semicolonial conditions. Shneiderov describes this sequence as “constructed on contrasts: the cleanliness and order of the European quarter, against the poverty and dirt of the Chinese quarters.”58 We see the Diplomatic Quarter with its automobile traffic and U.S. radio tower, intercut with naked children playing in mud and dogs and humans competing for scraps. At the Soviet periphery, the tension between backwardness and technology anticipated a benevolent, developmental resolution; in this sequence, the two sides are presented as mutually exclusive. Next the film moves to semicolonial Shanghai, the quintessential modern Chinese city, further disrupting the chronotope of a move East as a move into the past. Although the city’s International Settlement constituted

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FIGURE 3.6  Shanghai

modernity in The Great Flight.

Source: From the holdings of the Russian State Archive of Film and Photographic Documents, Krasnogorsk. Reproduced with permission.

the operational center for foreign capital in China, 1920s Shanghai was also home to a rising Chinese capitalist class alongside a developing consumer culture.59 Shanghai offered an image of an alternative, capitalist modernity in East Asia: the journalist Vladimir Mikhels reported with awe that Shanghai contained more cars (some fourteen thousand) than the entire USSR.60 The Shanghai sequences of The Great Flight focus once more on contradictions to imply that this city has been captured by the wrong kind of modernity. Cars and trams are contrasted to laborers, dubbed “human horses” by the titles, pulling huge loads along the streets, or collapsing old and exhausted in the sun. On the river, great hulking foreign cargo ships are juxtaposed to small wooden Chinese junks and skiffs. The titles announce that the cargo ships are sitting unloaded, because the Chinese labor force has gone on strike. Perhaps the most arresting shot in the film elegantly illustrates the presentation of Shanghai as a space of uneven development (figure 3.6).

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Two Chinese men, naked to the waist, stand beneath a clock on a traffic island in the middle of a busy main street, as trams and automobiles pass by on either side. Other pedestrians cross with determination, but these two men stand still, as if stunned by the passage of time. Shots like these reconfigure the salvational dynamic of early Soviet expedition films. These men need saving not simply from backwardness but from a pernicious form of unevenness, from their entrapment in a negative, semicolonial modernity. The Great Flight suggests that this salvation will come from local forces, with Soviet influence limited to the benevolent intervention of the film crew. The context of the May Thirtieth movement is openly acknowledged: the film’s titles describe Shanghai as the origin point for a “wave of strikes in 1925” and identify the place on Nanjing Road where demonstrators had been shot by British police. Shneiderov recalls that he and Blium were pursued by International Settlement police and briefly arrested by the soldiers of warlord Zhang Xueliang ᔉᅌ㡃, but received assistance from Chinese workers and union members, who helped them film strikes, pickets, and demonstrations.61 The film’s Shanghai reel ends with this footage, a series of bright and dynamic shots of workers organizing strikes and holding demonstrations: a strong visual contrast to the dusty back streets of the city’s Chinese quarter. From Shanghai, the film crew took a boat south to Guangzhou, which was also gripped by strikes and demonstrations in the wake of the May Thirtieth incident. Here they met with Wang Jingwei, head of the Guomindang government, and received permission to film in the city, wearing armbands marked with the characters eguo ren (֘೟Ҏ) to distinguish them from foreigners.62 The film’s Guangzhou sequence presents the Guomindang as a modern and well-organized revolutionary party. We see a court trying strike breakers, energetic young organizers, a village committee, and military training at the Whampoa academy. The Great Flight does not mention the prominent role of Soviet aid and advisers in setting up the Whampoa academy, although Shneiderov met with Comintern adviser-in-chief Mikhail Borodin while in Guangzhou.63 Yet the film’s closing shots of Guomindang troops at war with rival warlords present a modern army mastering the latest military technology, from machine guns and artillery to field hospitals. The imbalance found in Shanghai finds a potential resolution in the rise of a Chinese modernizing agent engaged in a revolution that a Soviet audience can recognize.

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FIGURE 3.7  The

Great Flight: Peasant family in northern China.

Source: From the holdings of the Russian State Archive of Film and Photographic Documents, Krasnogorsk. Reproduced with permission.

The Great Flight emphasizes the positive welcome that the Flight and film crew received. But how is the “face-to-face” encounter between Chinese and Soviet subjects staged in the film? One stock component of the film’s style is the staged portrait shot, in which an individual or a group stand still and look into the camera, as if posing for a photograph. As with many early Soviet expedition films, the presence of the camera is openly acknowledged as part of the expedition.64 The film uses this technique to capture a range of subjects, including Soviet pilots, Mongolian and Chinese politicians, Buddhist lamas, peasants in northern China (figure 3.7), and Sikh police officers in Shanghai. The portrait shot draws attention to what Ariella Azoulay calls the “event of photography”: we see these subjects preparing to be filmed, standing still, fidgeting, smiling uncertainly, looking awkwardly around. Azoulay offers an ontology of photography that resists a focus on the photographer as hegemonic

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subject, arguing that the contingency of photographic capture and the diffuse agency of the different participants involved in the event of photography render problematic the reduction of the photograph to an image authored by a photographer.65 Instead, for Azoulay, the photograph captures the traces of the encounter between those involved in the situation of photography, and “even when these traces express cultural and social hierarchies that organize the power relations between photographer, camera, and photographed person, they never simply echo such relations nor do they necessarily reflect the point of view of the most powerful figure present in the arena at the time the photograph was captured.”66 In the context of The Great Flight, Azoulay’s model of photography offers a way of reading these portrait shots that does not reduce them to a hierarchical model of unidirectional vision. At the moment of their capture by Blium’s camera, these subjects also display a form of agency, as the operator of the camera does not fully control the way they appear. By contrast, Shneiderov’s use of montage and intertitles seeks to fix the ambivalent meanings of these individual portrait shots. One particular sequence aims to convince us that the film’s Chinese subjects recognize and welcome both the aviation expedition and the film camera as ambassadors of Soviet society. At the beginning of Part Four, as titles announce “Miaotian. First landing in China,” we see people on the ground watching the skies through binoculars (figure 3.8). In the next shot, a woman holding a pair of binoculars to her eyes turns, trains them on the camera, and smiles. Although this shot in isolation might suggest a playful inversion of the camera’s technological gaze upon her, when placed within this sequence, it takes on a different meaning. Her technologically assisted look and her smile now suggest an equation of the camera with the arriving planes, and a welcome to both. We next cut to a shot of one of the planes landing, running in from a distance toward the camera and past it to the right. From here, Shneiderov cuts to a series of group shots, showing old and young people all looking directly and attentively into the camera. The sequence suggests that they, too, are looking at the plane in welcome and expectation as it lands. A later sequence offers a different reaction to the camera’s presence in China. In Shanghai’s Chinese commercial district, an old man stands still amidst the bustle and covers his face with something flat and white.

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FIGURE 3.8  The

Great Flight: Greeting the plane and camera at Miaotian.

Source: From the holdings of the Russian State Archive of Film and Photographic Documents, Krasnogorsk. Reproduced with permission.

The film cuts to a shot of a man in uniform raising a stick up and backward, then cuts back to the old man, still holding the flat object in front of his face, while also pointing directly at the camera (figure 3.9). This editing sequence encourages us to take the middle shot as a point-of-view shot: the man in the street is hiding from and pointing at this uniformed oppressor and the illegitimate imperial power he represents. The film as a whole, however, constantly emphasizes the presence of Blium’s camera in China and the adventures it has undergone to get there. The camera’s subjects standing in awkward stillness before it testify to its presence. Thus it becomes hard not to read this image separately from its montage sequence, as an expression of this man’s agency in the face of the cinematic apparatus. By both identifying and hiding from the camera, he resists inscription as an object into The Great Flight’s remapping of Eurasian space.

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FIGURE 3.9  The

Great Flight: Hiding from the camera in Shanghai.

Source: From the holdings of the Russian State Archive of Film and Photographic Documents, Krasnogorsk. Reproduced with permission.

FIL MING CHINA, F IL MS TO C HI N A : THE DZHUNGO PROJ EC T

The Great Flight was hailed in the Soviet press as an unprecedented opportunity to see and thus know China, a step forward in global perception. “The expedition has dispersed the newspaper fog,” declared a front-page review in the cinema newspaper Kino. “We have seen with our own eyes Feng Yuxiang and the Canton revolutionaries. Shanghai on strike has gazed out at us from the screen.”67 Viktor Shklovsky’s review in Kino dubbed The Great Flight “an avalanche of China” (obval Kitaia).68 Yet doubts remained over the effectiveness of the film’s structure—or, in Bakhtinian terms, its chronotope. Tretyakov’s own review in Kino, titled “Undershooting—Overshooting—Hitting the Target” (“Nedolet— Perelet—Popadanie”), punned on the word perelet in the film’s title,

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which signifies a long-distance flight but also carries the military meaning of “overshoot.” The film “overshot,” for Tretyakov, by failing to organize its material coherently. The Soviet audience, he claimed, wanted to see China “from all angles—spatial, temporal, causal.” Instead, “they see a film in which China is ‘cobbled together’ hurriedly, feverishly and unsystematically. As if climbing over a fence and tearing up bouquets from forbidden flower-beds.”69 This critique amounts to an attack on the explanatory limits of the expedition film chronotope, a sequence of landscape and portrait shots linked by succession in space across time. The only causality in the film is spatial: its organizing principle is provided by the movement of the Flight. Even this drops away once the film enters China, not least because the film crew now traveled by train and boat instead of by plane.70 In the concluding Guangzhou sequence, demonstrations, scenes from country life, and war footage follow one another without any sense of connection or causality. Tretyakov was not alone in criticizing The Great Flight’s structural limitations. The critic Khrisanf Khersonsky noted the film’s “haphazard and superficial selection” of material.71 At a screening attended by Tretyakov, Shklovsky, the Novyi Vostok editor Mikhail Pavlovich, and his brother Solomon Veltman, Pavlovich wondered whether the film might prove boring to a mass audience that preferred narrative films (siuzhetnye kartiny).72 Tretyakov’s own review suggests the cinematic target of China can be hit by combining the informational effect of the documentary with the typicality and temporality of fictional narrative: “It is time for culture films (kul’turfil’my) that can illuminate China scientifically. It is time for a narrative film (siuzhetnaia fil’ma) that will show how a Chinese person named x lives, walks, eats, drinks, hates, curses, grows up, dies, worships his ancestors and makes the revolution.”73 This combination of documentary and fictional films formed the kernel of the film expedition to China that Tretyakov proposed to Goskino in late 1925. Their combined effect, Tretyakov argued, could capture the “stormy processes of [China’s] transformation from medieval autocracy towards industrialism and socialism.”74 When it comes to cinema, the factographer still finds a need for the fictional siuzhet. Tretyakov’s proposed project was immense. An expedition of nine to ten months was to produce three long feature films (boeviki) under the general title Dzhungo (i.e., zhongguo, China); a short feature in the style

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of a Chinese slapstick comedy (buffoonada); a continuous newsreel (kinokhronika) shot throughout the duration of the expedition; and up to ten lecture films on such topics as the Chinese countryside, the Chinese factory, crafts, trade, China at war, family life, theater, foreigners in China, the revolutionary movement, religion, and science. (This list of topics suggests these short films were envisioned as filmic equivalents to Tretyakov’s journalistic sketches.) The lecture films were not to be shot separately, but instead would be assembled from the footage shot for the feature films and the newsreel. Tretyakov insisted that the expedition must produce multiple films, because a single film would not justify the expense and furthermore “could not even get close to exhausting the fundamental aspects of contemporary Chinese life that require disclosure.”75 A team of no more than sixteen people, including two directors and two cameramen, was to be dispatched from the Soviet Union; actors and additional crew would be recruited within China. Tretyakov estimated that the expedition would cost some 500,000 rubles, perhaps less in view of the cheapness of Chinese labor and the willingness of worker and youth groups to help.76 Tretyakov’s proposal was accepted, and Dzhungo was on course to become one of the film events of the 1920s. Eisenstein and Tisse, fresh from their work on Battleship Potemkin, were recruited as director and cameraman. Tretyakov drew up librettos for the three fiction films: The Yellow Peril (Zheltaia opasnost’), set in Beijing; The Blue Express (Goluboi ekspress), set in the countryside; and The Pearl River (Zhemchuzhnaia reka), also titled China Roars (Kitai rychit) in an earlier version, set in Guangzhou. Documents from early 1926 suggest that The Blue Express was dropped, limiting the sites for filming to Beijing and Guangzhou, reducing the size of the expedition team to ten people, and cutting the cost to 250,000 rubles.77 The Dzhungo project took shape while interest in China was at its height: on his return from Beijing to Moscow in the autumn of 1925, Tretyakov noted that the film studios had already commissioned numerous film scripts dealing with China.78 The Great Flight appeared on screens in January 1926, the same month that Roar, China! premiered at the Meyerhold Theater. Two months later, anticipatory announcements about the Dzhungo expedition began to appear in the Soviet press.79 The Dzhungo project illuminates an important reflexive dimension to the internationalist aesthetics of Soviet cinema: the aspiration to show

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China to the Soviet public coexisted with the aspiration to show China to China. Silent cinema in the 1920s was already a thoroughly transnational medium in terms of production, distribution, and reception. The predominance of the image in silent film offered a form of communication that could reach diverse national audiences with the simple translation of intertitles.80 The success of Battleship Potemkin abroad had opened up the possibility of exporting Soviet films to international audiences.81 The mid-1920s saw a particularly active campaign in the USSR to promote both the making of films about and the distribution of films to “the East.” On September 1, 1925, Kino published a cluster of articles devoted to this theme on its front page. In a contribution titled “What to Give to the East?,” Mikhail Pavlovich argued that widespread illiteracy meant film was the optimal medium for penetrating the East with Soviet culture, dispelling religious illusions, and combating U.S. influence.82 In 1926, the “Vostochnoe kino” or “Vostokkino” (Eastern Cinema) studio was founded to make films suitable for Eastern audiences as well as films about the East.83 The designation “East” in these discussions was capacious enough to encompass the areas of Asia both within and beyond Soviet borders; indeed, a contemporary account of Vostokkino’s mission specifically envisions “the release of special films designated for export to foreign eastern countries.”84 China became a focal point in this cinematic struggle for a broadly defined East. Beginning in 1925, calls for more films about China were joined by calls for more films to be sold to China. This campaign took place in the context of a transnational system of film production and distribution in which the Soviet cinema industry had to contend, both domestically and internationally, with the hegemony of the West. Soviet articles about film production and consumption in China constantly lamented the dominance of the American cinematic model.85 By 1926, as Weihong Bao notes, around seventy-five percent of films shown in China came from the United States.86 The 1920s, however, also saw the formation of a domestic Chinese cinema industry that sought to emancipate itself from the dominance of foreign films and foreign ownership of film theaters.87 Tretyakov, writing in Kino, argued that the nationalist sympathies of the emerging Chinese film world could work to the advantage of a Soviet cinema promoting an anti-imperial message. He also noted the negative reaction to some American films, most notably the 1924

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FIGURE 3.10  China

on Fire: “Down with Imperialism!” in Russian and Chinese (the second line in Chinese, untranslated, reads “Long Live the Third International!”)

Source: Screenshot from the DVD Animated Soviet Propaganda

Douglass Fairbanks vehicle The Thief of Baghdad (a major smash with Soviet audiences), for their portrayal of China and Chinese characters.88 By contrast, the screening of Cecil B. de Mille’s film The Volga Boatman in Shanghai in 1926, to the accompaniment of a Russian orchestra, suggested that Soviet revolutionary films could find an audience in China. The victory of the Russian revolutionaries in the film was met with applause, shouts of joy, singing, and money thrown onto the theater stage.89 An orientation toward a putative Chinese spectator can already be sensed in China on Fire, which contains text in both Russian and Chinese, suggesting it was made with an eye toward distribution in China (figure 3.10). Shneiderov met with film industry representatives in Shanghai who insisted that Soviet films would play “with great success” in China. He also held discussions with Chinese film companies about

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the possibility of coproducing “three to four revolutionary feature films” directed at both Soviet and Chinese audiences.90 In Guangzhou, Shneiderov promised to provide Borodin with two copies of The Great Flight— with intertitles, if possible, in Chinese.91 Soviet films were on display at the Sino-Soviet Exhibition in Harbin in the summer of 1925, and a report from April 1926 claims that the Soviet trade mission to China possessed a copy of The Great Flight.92 Although we have no evidence that the film reached Chinese audiences, it was part of the same Soviet push for cinematic expansion that led Tian Han to watch Battleship Potemkin (through the assistance of Boris Pilnyak and the Soviet chargé d’affaires) in Shanghai in 1926 (see chapter 1).93 Tretyakov explicitly conceived his Dzhungo project as reaching both Soviet and Chinese audiences, providing direct access to undistorted reality for the former and serving as a model of agitational art for the latter: “Only film footage, with its all-encompassing method of fixation, was capable of showing China as it truly is. And, finally, arising China itself needed a form of film production capable of satisfying the demands of revolutionary agitation.”94 The scripts Tretyakov read at Goskino, which showed a clear ignorance of Chinese politics, culture, and geography, were hardly up to this task.95 But he also insisted that the cinematic opinions of “Chinese comrades” should be ignored. The fantastic element in Chinese theater inclined Chinese spectators to accept the fantastic in cinema, and “as for our interest in small, everyday details, this interest has not yet been developed in many Chinese comrades.”96 Such comments reveal the pedagogical aspirations behind Tretyakov’s project. Even Chinese revolutionaries must be retrained to see the world and themselves through a Soviet lens. Dzhungo, its very name the name of the nation, sought to introduce Chinese audiences to their own national self, as mediated through Soviet film technique and ideological perspectives. According to Eisenstein, the need to enlighten Soviet audiences about China was even a secondary motivation: “What was needed, first of all, was concrete agitational material as a real weapon of war for China itself. [. . .] For us. About China. In parallel. For China.”97 This doubly directed logic of production sought an internationalist form of cinema, enabled by transnational collaborations and directed at multiple national audiences, that would globalize the reach of Soviet film. In this regard, the Dzhungo project stands at the beginning of a tradition of Soviet international film collaborations that includes Eisenstein’s Que Viva Mexico and Mikhail Kalatozov’s Soy Cuba.98

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Yet the expedition did not happen. According to Eisenstein, Goskino’s indecisiveness scuppered the project: “The myopia and spinelessness of Goskino with its indecisiveness overturned all the deadlines. The advantageous political situation in the Far East passed. We entered into a phase of restrictions on the export of currency.”99 The change in political circumstance to which Eisenstein refers was the Anti-Fengtian War, which ended in defeat for the Soviet-backed National Army (Guominjun) of Feng Yuxiang at the hands of the combined forces of Wu Peifu ਇԽᄮ and Zhang Zuolin. By April 1926, the Beijing government was under the control of Zhang, the warlord of Manchuria and a committed enemy of the USSR. Relations between Beijing and Moscow rapidly deteriorated; Zhang even asked that ambassador Karakhan be withdrawn, though this demand was later retracted.100 Tretyakov’s original report had argued that the present moment was auspicious precisely because the Soviet-allied National Armies of Feng and the Guomindang controlled both Beijing and Guangzhou.101 Goskino’s update on the situation from 1926 acknowledges the difficulties produced by the National Army’s defeat, but argues that the expedition should still be pursued. The only thing the expedition is waiting for, in this second report, is the opening of a line of credit at the Beijing branch of the Far Eastern Bank (Dal’nevostochnyi bank).102 As Eisenstein suggests, it seems that the failure to acquire a working credit line, linked very probably to the worsening in diplomatic relations, sank the Dzhungo expedition. Although the films were never made, Tretyakov’s extant scenarios for the Dzhungo trilogy give some insight into how the writer sought to perform this double task of educating Soviet viewers about contemporary China while also showing Chinese spectators to themselves.103 As with Eisenstein’s Potemkin, these plot summaries interweave factual events and historical personages with fictional characters and invented storylines. For all his advocacy of a “literature of fact,” when it came to cinema, Tretyakov did not believe the necessary “emotionalization” of the audience could be delivered by factual material alone.104 Instead, his Dzhungo project followed the model of agitational cinema pioneered in Eisenstein’s early films: a narrative drama based on recent history that delivers its ideological messages through emotional engagement and affective shock. The grounding in historical reality preserves a commitment to fact over fiction, but this historical material must be dynamized through the affective power of both narrative and imagery:

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in Tretyakov’s own words, the “kino-illusorium” must be transformed into a “kino-affectorium,” a place where “people are loaded with social gunpowder.”105 Dzhungo sought to combine this Eisenstinian model with the spatial authenticity of the expedition film, filming in China with Chinese actors.106 At the same time, Tretyakov’s prose summaries for each film reimagine China’s recent history as a heroic, teleological revolutionary narrative. The first film, The Yellow Peril, redeploys the anxieties about East Asian modernization that coalesced around this term in Europe, Russia, and North America at the turn of the twentieth century. Whereas the Yellow Peril discourse gave racial form to fears about East Asia’s potential threat to Western hegemony, Tretyakov’s scenario positions the Chinese national revolution as a welcome threat to Western (and Japanese) imperial power. The film’s plot constitutes a sequel of sorts to the events of Roar, China! In the play, the boatman Chi flees the scene after accidentally causing the death of Hawley, although not before agreeing to sell his daughter into prostitution. In The Yellow Peril, Chi becomes a soldier in the army of one of China’s warlords. He is also renamed Li Yiyuan after the Chinese soldier who, in April 1924, was arrested for attacking a British businessman on a section of the Beijing city wall reserved for foreigners. Li’s story appeared in the Soviet press and was highlighted by Trotsky as an example of imperialist injustice in his 1924 May Day speech.107 Tretyakov follows newspaper accounts of this incident close enough to include the detail that Li used a bag of copper coins as a weapon in the attack.108 At the same time, Tretyakov integrates this factual detail into a highly convoluted fictional story that touches tangentially on recent historical events. Li received these coins in exchange for selling his daughter to the Chinese finance minister, a stooge of the imperial powers. He in turn gives her as a concubine to the Chinese president in an attempt to distract him from signing the 1924 Sino-Soviet accord. Next she is transferred to the harem of the deposed emperor, Pu Yi ⑹‫۔‬, whom the president is plotting to restore. These plans are foiled when the National Army marches into Beijing, led by a “fat general”—a cipher for Feng Yuxiang, the sometime Soviet ally whose 1924 coup led to Pu Yi’s expulsion from the Forbidden City.109 Li, now a soldier in Feng’s army, enters the palace, but the emperor has fled and Li’s daughter has been murdered. One version of the script ends with

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the discovery that the captain of the Cockchafer, a historical figure who played a key role in Roar, China!, is hiding in the emperor’s palace.110 The second scenario in the trilogy extends this convoluted interweaving of historical events and figures with fictional characters and revolutionary melodrama. The Blue Express took its name from a luxury train running on the Tianjin–Pukou railway, which was held up in the most famous Chinese bandit attack of the 1920s. On May  6, 1923, the Blue Express was attacked and derailed by bandits at Lincheng in Shandong. Around three hundred passengers, including thirty or so Westerners, were captured and taken into the mountains. Two months of negotiations secured the release of the captives for a considerable sum of money and other concessions.111 Tretyakov had discussed writing a play based on the Lincheng incident with Eisenstein as early as 1923 and took the idea with him to Beijing.112 His scenario presents the widespread banditry in Republican China as a socioeconomic problem: floods force peasants off the land and into foreign-owned mines, where exploitation drives them into bandit gangs. Once again, historical and fictional figures are intertwined. The historical leader of the Lincheng bandits, Sun Meiyao ᄭ㕢⩊, appears as a heroic figure driven to banditry by economic necessity. His opponent for leadership over the bandits is a devious professional criminal called simply Tu-Fei, the Chinese word for “bandit” (ೳࣾ). Among the captives is the niece of the U.S. billionaire who owns the mines—a nod to John D. Rockefeller’s sister-in-law, Lucy Aldrich, who was captured in the historical Lincheng incident.113 A scene at a station shows this U.S. philanthropist throwing coins to Chinese children, who can reach them only by crawling through barbed wire. In contrast, Tretyakov inserts a Soviet officer among the passengers, who advises the bandits to direct their energies toward revolution. The third film, called in different versions The Pearl River or China Roars, was based around the strikes and demonstrations that convulsed Guangzhou in the wake of the May Thirtieth massacre in Shanghai. The strikes began in June 1925 in the British colony of Hong Kong, at the mouth of the Pearl River, before spreading to the foreign concession on the island of Shamian. On June  23, British and French soldiers opened fire on a demonstration heading from Guangzhou toward the island, killing fifty-two people. This massacre led to a complete embargo on trade with Hong Kong and a boycott of British firms across south China.114

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Tretyakov uses these strikes as the backdrop to a plot structured around two families, one rich, one poor, whose lives are intertwined within these larger social forces. The father of the rich family runs a foreign-owned factory where the poor family works. His student son rebels and leads a strike at the factory. The poor father joins the “paper tigers,” Canton’s merchant militia, whose instructors are White Russian soldiers. The militiamen seize a boatload of weapons and attack a peaceful demonstration, echoing a historical conflict between the militia and graduates of the Guomindang’s Whampoa military academy, set up in 1924 with the help of Comintern advisers.115 Indeed, Tretyakov’s scenario hints at the presence of Comintern agents in Guangzhou. In one scene, the Guomindang president asks a “Russian friend”: “The gun barrels are directed at us. Is it worth risking the city? How would you proceed?” The friend replies: “The gun barrels of the whole world were directed at us, but we risked it and won.”116 In a dramatic finale, Soviet and British battleships face off in the river; the British withdraw, and the film ends with a shot of the Guomindang star intertwined with the hammer and sickle.117 The conclusion of Tretyakov’s trilogy places Soviet influence firmly at the center of China’s contemporary transformation. This final scenario’s celebration of the Guomindang as a heroic revolutionary force shows the dangers of applying the method of Potemkin to the very recent past: within two years, the Guomindang was to become the USSR’s bitter enemy. But political expediency aside, we can only speculate how Chinese audiences would have responded to seeing their recent history mediated through a Soviet gaze. Dzhungo’s presentation of Chinese modernity as debased by semicolonial conditions could have found sympathetic audiences among those galvanized into anti-imperialist sentiment by the May Thirtieth movement. Tretyakov’s trilogy also mounts an attack on “backwardness” that chimes with the critiques of traditional culture then current among the May Fourth generation of Chinese writers and intellectuals: fortune telling, polygamy, concubinage, and arranged marriages all feature in these plot summaries as deplorable vestiges of the feudal past. In this regard, Dzhungo would have offered a cinematic model for the readings of Chinese modernity as “semifeudal and semicolonial” that Mao Zedong and other Chinese Marxists developed from the late 1920s.118 Conversely, the scenarios’ overloading of historical and ethnographic detail, often with only tangential relevance for plot development,

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suggests a primary orientation toward an audience with little knowledge of China. Tretyakov himself described Dzhungo as hampered by a conflict between story (fabula) and material: “The Chinese material in itself is so idiosyncratic and new, that any strengthening of the story could divert the spectator’s attention away from the material, preventing him from examining China.”119 This description of the Chinese material as “new” suggests that the film’s putative Chinese audience would have been obliged to inhabit a spectatorial position created with the Soviet viewer as its primary concern. They would have seen their national self onscreen as seen by others, recognizing themselves through Soviet eyes. Rey Chow has written about the way that national self-consciousness emerged in semicolonial China through encounters with the spectacle of the national self as mediated onscreen through modern “technologized visuality.” Her key example is Lu Xun’s encounter in a Japanese lecture hall with a lantern slide showing the execution of a Chinese prisoner during the Russo-Japanese War, as a crowd of Chinese men watch passively. For Chow, Lu Xun’s identification with both the executed prisoner and the passive Chinese spectators coexists with the awareness that this image of the national self has already become a spectacle, including for the Japanese students surrounding him in the auditorium. National self-consciousness in this scene, she writes, is “not only a matter of watching ‘China’ being represented on the screen; it is, more precisely, watching oneself—as a film, as a spectacle, as something always already watched.”120 Dzhungo would have offered Chinese audiences a similar cinematic experience of the national self being split between the seer and the seen, even as it promised that the nation’s path to redemption and sovereignty was being facilitated by the same dynamic of Sino-Soviet collaboration that produced the film trilogy. Soviet cinema would have to wait until the early 1930s to reach Chinese audiences on a large scale. After the Soviet and Guomindang governments reestablished diplomatic relations in 1932, Soviet films such as Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Storm over Asia (Potomok Chinghiz-khana, 1928) and Mother (Mat’, 1926), Nikolai Ekk’s Road to Life (Putevka v zhizn’, 1931), and the Vasiliev Brothers’ Chapaev (1934) played in China to sizeable audiences and significant acclaim. These films, alongside contemporaneous translations of Soviet film theory (particularly Pudovkin), exercised an important influence on the developing left-wing Chinese

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cinema movement of those years, especially its use of montage.121 The Soviet film that most successfully applied the theory of montage to China, however, did not reach Chinese audiences until much later.122 This was Shanghai Document, a documentary that captured Shanghai in the pivotal year of 1927. Shanghai Document jettisoned the invented scenario of Dzhungo and replaced the spatial contiguity of The Great Flight with a spatial concentration that allows rhetorical argument to emerge. Yakov Bliokh and V.  L. Stepanov’s film seeks to present Shanghai as a place where the class contradictions of a global struggle are concentrated and exemplified. Historical causality finds expression in this film not through the lives of invented characters, but through the contradictions made manifest in the divided life of a single city.

S HANGHAI DOCUMEN T: REA DING THE SEMICOLON I A L C I T Y

After the failure of the Dzhungo project, Tretyakov notes that widespread interest in filming China flared up once more in the winter of 1926, in reaction to the early successes of the Northern Expedition.123 Supported by Soviet arms and military training, the Guomindang’s army marched northward in a bid to defeat the Beiyang government and other regional warlords and to reunite China under Nationalist rule. As the Nationalists turned against their Communist allies over the course of 1927, however, filming in China became increasingly impossible. Some films on Chinese themes were still made using “internal resources”: domestic locations and studios. Vostokkino teamed up with Belgoskino to produce 400 Million (Dzhou-de-shen), a 1929 revolutionary melodrama set during the Canton uprising of December 1927, with exteriors shot in Leningrad.124 Also in 1929, the Leningrad film factory of Soiuzkino released The Blue Express, a loose adaptation of Tretyakov’s second scenario, written by Leonid Yerokhonov and directed by Ilya Trauberg. Trauberg and Yerokhonov’s film departs even further from historical reality than Tretyakov’s blend of fact and invention. Not filmed in China, it makes no explicit reference to the Lincheng incident and contains no historical figures or Chinese place names (although the Chinese roles were largely played, as Tretyakov

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and Eisenstein intended, by Chinese actors). Instead, an uprising on a train occurs when the workers and peasants in third class turn against the generals and foreign businessmen in first class. Any orientation toward Chinese spectators is abandoned: when Chinese writing appears in the film, it takes the form of generic shapes on a fluttering banner, moving too quickly to pick out any discernable message.125 Although a range of film expeditions were planned for dispatch to China in 1926–1927, only one seems to have taken place.126 In June 1927 a two-man Sovkino team consisting of cameraman Stepanov and director Bliokh (who had worked as a production manager on Battleship Potemkin) set off for China. Like Tretyakov and Eisenstein, they had planned a trilogy of films that would portray the Chinese revolution within three contexts: the city (originally intended to be Beijing), the countryside, and the army. The political turmoil of China in 1927, however, restricted their activity to Shanghai. Even there, Bliokh and Stepanov obtained permission to film only with the assistance of Western film companies and only by concealing the true intentions of their work.127 Surviving the loss of five suitcases of negatives at the border, the film they produced was released on May 1, 1928, as Shanghai Document.128 Viktor Pertsov, whose review of The Great Flight was discussed earlier, wrote the intertitles. Although the expedition shot its original footage in the summer of 1927, the final film used newsreel footage of demonstrations and executions from April 1927 to position the Guomindang’s turn against the workers and Communists as the culmination of its narrative.129 Previous analyses of Shanghai Document concur in reading the film as a sustained exercise in visual parallelism.130 As these readings demonstrate, Shanghai Document deploys the juxtapositional aesthetics of 1920s Soviet montage to present the life of Shanghai as the contradictory yet interrelated experiences of two classes: the exploiting bourgeoisie (both foreign and Chinese) and the exploited Chinese workers.131 For example, the opening sequence in the docks deploys a dizzying array of shots from every angle to show Chinese workers loading and unloading cargo ships. These constantly shifting, multiple lines of movement recall contemporary cinematic celebrations of vigorous Soviet labor, such as Vertov’s Eleventh Year (Odinnadtsatyi); except, in this case, our attention is drawn to the workers’ poverty, their ragged clothes, their meager wages.132 Next, scenes of gentle leisure on European yachts interrupt these strenuous work sequences.

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An old Chinese woman and her family row a junk through the port; on a different vessel, a stout European man reclines in a wicker chair with a cigarette in his mouth. These shots establish a juxtaposition between labor and leisure that recurs throughout the film. Footage of the rushing feet of a rickshaw driver gives way to shots of horses racing in the hippodrome for the pleasure of the assembled European and Chinese bourgeoisie. A group of Chinese boys pull a cart along the street, sweating in the sun, while young Europeans relax and drink cocktails beside a private pool. Laughing European children spin on a carousel pushed by a Chinese man, while Chinese children work in factories.133 This cumulative visual parallelism suggests a causality that never needs to be expressed in words: the labor of the Chinese workers enables the leisure of the Europeans and the Chinese bourgeoisie. Shanghai Document thus belongs to that strain of 1920s Soviet film, exemplified in different and sometimes conflicting ways by the theory and practice of Eisenstein and Vertov, which sought to use montage not simply to facilitate narrative. Rather, this model of montage assumed that the work of linking juxtaposed shots would generate conceptual insights in the spectator’s mind.134 In the case of Shanghai Document, the implied connection between the shots is causal. By joining the shots, the spectator should come to recognize that Shanghai’s social division of labor illustrates Marx’s theory concerning the production of surplus value through the exploitation of labor power: “In capitalist society, free time is produced for one class by the conversion of the whole lifetime of the masses into labour-time.”135 Indeed, Emilian Yaroslavsky greeted Shanghai Document on its release as “Volume One of Marx’s Capital on film.”136 This constant juxtaposition of labor and leisure allows the film to imply a second causality: these inequitable conditions of production will lead inevitably to uprising. Shanghai Document thus offers a response to Tretyakov’s criticisms of The Great Flight, replacing the purely spatial sequencing of the expedition film with an analytical accumulation of contrasts that produces an awareness of causality. As Soviet film historian Sergei Drobashenko notes, this marks a shift in the genre of the expedition film, away from the “primitive registration of real-life facts” and toward “associative thinking in images.”137 Shanghai Document was the product of a film expedition, but it was not an expedition film as the genre had developed up to that point. The journey of the expedition, the active presence of the camera, and the

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process of staging shots are central elements in The Great Flight, as they were for most expedition films of the 1920s.138 Shanghai Document still relied on staging scenes for the camera: at a postscreening discussion in Moscow, Bliokh admitted that “all his material was organized in advance, and that the film contains no ‘life caught unawares.’ ” Foreign residents of Shanghai agreed to be filmed on the promise that they would be able to see themselves in the next newsreel screening at their local cinema.139 The staging of shots and the presence of the camera, however, are never openly acknowledged in the film. Likewise, the actual process of the expedition largely disappears from view. The film’s opening titles acknowledge its origins in an expedition: “This film was shot by a Sovkino expedition in Shanghai in 1927.” The opening shot that follows this title expresses arrival, moving down the Huangpu River by boat toward the city. Yet once we arrive at the Shanghai docks, the journey of the camera and its two-man crew is no longer part of the film’s internal narrative. Instead of connecting China and the USSR through the spatial movement of a journey, Shanghai Document seeks to produce this connection through the movement of thought in the mind of the viewer. An audience who can recognize the Marxist analysis of labor exploitation as the implicit logic connecting the film’s juxtaposed shots will discern in Shanghai Document, beneath the superstructure of cultural difference, the familiar underlying shape of a class struggle between a bourgeoisie and a proletariat. The specifics may differ from the social conflicts that shaped prerevolutionary Russia, but the recognizable exploitation of one class by another allows a Soviet audience to understand Shanghai as participating in the same revolutionary modernity as Russia. Thus, Shanghai Document offers a fundamentally different mode for perceiving the historical meaning of space, a new chronotope formed at the intersection of two film genres. Whereas The Great Flight juxtaposes and joins adjacent geographic spaces that experience disparate and uneven temporalities, Shanghai Document focuses on Shanghai as a single city, a complex urban totality that contains multiple social spaces inhabited by conflicting groups. This deployment of montage to capture the complexities of the modern city links Shanghai Document to another important 1920s film genre, the city symphony. Representatives of this genre include Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand’s Manhatta (1921), Alberto Cavalcanti’s Nothing but the Hours (Rien que les heures, 1926), Walter Ruttmann’s

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Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt, 1927), Joris Ivens’s Rain (Regen, 1929), and such prominent Soviet examples as Mikhail Kaufman’s Moscow (Moskva, 1927) and Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (Chelovek s kinoapparatom, 1929). City symphonies moved away from the documentary recording of specific events to present a composite image of modern urban life driven by a particular experience of space and time. In so doing, they introduced a chronotope that was quite different from the journey structure of the expedition film. City symphonies commonly take the form of a typical day in the life of a city, using rhythmic montage and associative editing to represent the modern city as an accumulation of heterogeneous elements in simultaneous movement.140 This urban chronotope replaces the travel film’s series of extraordinary encounters along a single movement through space with a multiplicity of typical events, all happening simultaneously at coexisting sites across the city. As in Shanghai Document, these juxtaposed social spaces are frequently inhabited by opposing classes. The disparate spaces of Ruttmann’s Berlin represent “all the divisions characteristic of Weimar Germany more generally, particularly divisions of class.”141 Vertov fills Man with a Movie Camera with juxtapositions that critique abiding class antagonisms in New Economic Policy–era Soviet society: elegant ladies arrive home in a carriage while their maids wait in the street to carry their bags; scenes of drinking and revelry in a bar are contrasted with sober relaxation in a workers’ club.142 Alongside spatial heterogeneity, the city symphony also expresses what Dilip Gaonkar has described as the quintessential modern form of temporality, shaped by a tension between routine and transformation.143 On the one hand, the structure of a typical day suggests repetition, joining the cyclicality of natural time to the work and leisure routines of everyday life. On the other hand, the speed and dynamism of city life as captured in these films present urban modernity as an experience of constant change, movement, and acceleration. For an example of how Soviet cinema sought to reconcile the city symphony’s combination of sociospatial contradiction, repetition, and development, we might turn to Kaufman’s Moscow (1927), a Sovkino production released just a year before Shanghai Document. As Bliokh would later do in Shanghai, Moscow dwells insistently on the simultaneous existence of different developmental stages in the Soviet capital. An elevated shot early

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in the film shows several repetitions of the same sequence: a tram moving along its tracks and then a horse-and-cart crossing those same tracks in the opposite direction. Later, Kaufman cuts from images of bast shoes and singing gypsies at the marketplace to the regimented, productive movements of the telephone exchange and the cigarette factory. Moscow, however, seeks to present these social contradictions of the modern city in the process of disappearing through socialist modernization. Kaufman’s film follows a two-day structure. Тhe first day presents a typical working day, from morning commute through work to evening leisure activities. The contradictions of uneven development are subsumed within a cumulative impression of the Soviet capital as a smoothly functioning circuit of productive activity. Тhe second day shows (and names) government figures and diplomats as they meet, work, and administrate, offering a humanized, stable image of authority. The film’s concluding, low-angle shots of the Bolshoi Comintern radio station—one of 1920s Moscow’s most iconically modern structures—affirm that the city’s spatiotemporal contradictions are being resolved through a process of benevolent forward movement. City symphonies like Moscow make a case for cinema as the form of representation best suited to capture the constant movement and sociospatial heterogeneity of modern urban life. Cinematic montage can express the fragmentation of modern urban experience, the sense of shock engendered by the multiple shifting visual impressions of the city dweller, while subordinating these fragments to rhythmic orchestration and organizing them into meaningful sequences.144 Thus the city film imitates the experience of a city resident, while at the same time offering a composite perspective on the city that could not be achieved through direct experience by any individual inhabitant. Vertov’s famous comments in 1923 on the superiority of the mechanical “cine-eye” to the human eye implicitly assume modern urban experience as their sphere of action. Whereas the human eye finds itself immersed in the “chaos of movements rushing past, away, towards you and colliding,” the combination of the camera’s mobility with skillful montage enables the cine-eye to impose order on the chaotic flux of impressions, to “show you the world as only I can see it.”145 The city symphony thus offers one answer to what Michel de Certeau calls the longstanding “desire to see the city,” the desire to transform a divided and chaotic social reality into “a text that lies before one’s eyes.”146

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But whereas de Certeau finds this desire fulfilled by the single perspective from above, the city symphony’s fixation of multiple discrete perspectives mimics the fragmentation of individual urban experience, while its use of montage transcends that experience by identifying the underlying connections between these ephemeral fragments. Montage transforms the random into the typical. Shanghai Document engages both of these elements of the city symphony: the chronotope of heterogeneous spaces experienced through a temporality both repetitive and transformative; and the cinematic perspective that both imitates and transcends the perspective of the city dweller. The specific manner of their appearance, however, distinguishes Shanghai Document from its peers in the city symphony genre. Whereas the classical city symphony depicts urban life through the prism of a single typical day, mitigating acceleration with a sense of repetition and regularity, Shanghai Document presents a semicolonial city whose uneven and unsustainable order is ruptured by the violent events of April 1927. Furthermore, the film asserts its own privileged capacity, enabled by the combined technologies of traveling camera and parallel montage, to perceive the city’s uneven development and the revolutionary dynamic it engenders. This privileged perspective is affirmed above all by contrast with the perceptual experiences of the city’s residents, which are consistently presented as limited. Shanghai Document quickly sheds the vestiges of the expedition film contained in its opening shots and moves toward the “day in the life” chronotope of the city symphony, juxtaposing multiple typical events within a single urban whole. In fact, like Moscow, Shanghai Document gives us two days, and the relationship between them suggests a form of temporal progression. The first day begins with labor and leisure at the docks, where Chinese porters exhaust their muscles unloading boats while Europeans relax and recline. Next, the film moves into the city’s Chinese quarter, where shots of street theater, craftsmen, fortune-tellers, and funerals express what Weihong Bao calls an “ethnographic fascination with Chinese everyday life.”147 Exotic curiosity coincides with a typical early Soviet fixation on labor processes: we see blacksmiths hammering metal to make knives, two men weaving chairs, and young boys on a scaffold plaiting the covering for a roof. At the same time, the film draws attention to imbalances of power in this traditional world. Beggars are recruited as

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attendants to bolster the splendor of a rich man’s funeral. Worshippers prostrate themselves before imposing statues in a Buddhist temple, while a close-up draws attention to their threadbare shoes. By contrast, the next reel travels past a barbed wire fence into the foreign concessions, where we meet a Chinese bourgeoisie that combines traditional culture with an embrace of modern, Westernized behavior. A shot of a leisurely game of mahjong is followed by students bent over microscopes at the University of Shanghai (Hujiang daxue Ⓚ∳໻ᅌ), an institution founded by U.S. Baptists. Extensive footage of a Beijing opera performance gives way to shots of couples dancing the foxtrot, “the latest conquest of European culture.” At the close of the day, while the bourgeoisie revel in their hybrid culture, workers from the docks trudge home along the riverbank. Next a new day dawns, opening with shots of the foreign banks and trade houses on the Bund, before cutting to the factories they control and the workers employed there. In place of the traditional handicrafts of the Chinese quarter, we now see detailed footage of production processes at a match factory. Labor proceeds under the direction of foreign overseers, and Pertsov’s intertitles emphasize the exploitative conditions: “In an atmosphere poisoned by white phosphorous, women and children work fifteen hours a day.” The temporal progression between the two days suggests that historical forces are pulling the Chinese poor out of their traditional world and into the factories, transforming them into a proletariat and a rising revolutionary force. The metal workers are dubbed the “avant-garde of the Shanghai proletariat,” and the textile workers its “mightiest brigade.” Even the exploitation of child labor at a silk factory means that “Around the machines, / little proletarians are growing up.” Thus, the structure of Shanghai Document seeks to present the events of the film’s final ten minutes—the workers’ uprisings of March 1927 and their suppression in April—as the inevitable outcome of the exploitative dynamic that defines the city. This rupture of a “day in the life” by violent historical events distinguishes Shanghai Document from the other city symphonies of the period. If contradictions in Moscow are smoothed over by a general sense of benevolent progress, here they lead inevitably to crisis. Likewise, both Moscow and Man with a Movie Camera juxtapose labor and leisure, but successively, and both are performed by the same people: the same workers that rode the trams to work and operated machinery earlier in the day

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ride bicycles and perform gymnastics for recreation after the workday is done. In the socialist city, collective labor enables collective leisure. In the semicolonial city, the unequal distribution of labor and leisure leads to the violent disruption of the city’s order. This sense of violent rupture is conveyed to the spectator through a shift in the film’s aesthetics in its final ten minutes, as Bliokh’s organized material gives way to newsreel footage of events that preceded the Sovkino crew’s arrival in Shanghai. Suddenly we are given our first specific date: “in March 1927” the city falls into the hands of the proletariat. Crowds of banner-waving protestors are intercut with marching soldiers carrying ominous rifles. Shots of Chiang Kai-shek at a podium, demanding “immediate reprisals,” give way to more shots of walking crowds, now described as “unarmed workers led to execution.” This rupturing of the film’s established order disorients the viewer, who has become acquainted to a steady narrative organized by typicality and parallelism. Disorientation gives way to shock with the violence of the execution scenes. In newsreel footage of markedly different quality, we watch from a midrange wide angle as prisoners kneeling in a field are shot in the back of the head. The roughness of these shots, which make no attempt at compositional complexity or ingenious montage, jars with the carefully structured parallelisms of Bliokh’s “organized material.” This sequence shifts the dominant style of Shanghai Document’s internationalist aesthetics, from a cognitive argument about structural exploitation made through visual juxtaposition, to the generation of political sympathy through affective shock. This violent jolting of the spectator, so close to the way that Eisenstein and Tretyakov understood the organizational capacities of cinematic affect, finds its dialectical compensation in the film’s final sequence of shots. A worker draws from a furnace a piece of glowing iron that three men proceed to beat rhythmically with hammers: a title draws the metaphoric inference that the “heroic” Shanghai proletariat has retained its “iron will for victory.” This image of workers beating hot metal with hammers rhymes with the knife-making scene in the second reel, when the camera was exploring the traditional productive processes of the Chinese part of the city. Its repetition at the end offers a final claim for a dialectical historical movement within the temporal structure of the film: some link to the traditional past is preserved, yet transformed into a symbol of proletarian awakening that chimes in its abstract symbolism with the industrial imagery of revolutionary Russia.

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Shanghai Document, then, departs from the city symphony chronotope in showing the everyday life of the semicolonial city developing through violent crisis. When we turn to the second characteristic of the city symphony—the simultaneous inhabiting and transcending of the city dweller’s perspective—we will find that once again Shanghai Document offers a variant on this generic feature specific to a semicolonial city seen through a Soviet lens. As Xinyu Dong points out, the fact that Shanghai Document is an expedition film made by outsiders distinguishes it from other city symphonies, which tend to position the filmmakers, their subjects, and their audience as inhabitants of the same city.148 Furthermore, Shanghai Document represents its own outsider perspective as uniquely empowered to cross the borders of this divided city and perceive every facet of its social contradictions. Its camera can penetrate the Chinese quarters of the city, where no European faces are to be seen. It can cross the barbed wire into the international settlement. It can foxtrot with the bourgeoisie and later travel home to the outskirts with exhausted workers. This is not to deny that the film’s perspective on Shanghai is, in its own way, highly partial. The focus on a binary class conflict erases the specific historical actors involved in the events of 1927, including the Comintern, and elides the rise in 1920s Shanghai of an aspirational class of Chinese petty urbanites or xiaoshimin (ᇣᏖ⇥), invested in a modern consumer culture of window shopping, amusement halls, and cinema.149 The film’s rhetorical claim, however, is that the Soviet cinematic apparatus can produce a vision of the whole city that its residents cannot share. Moreover, the absence of the camera or the film crew within the film itself gives the impression that this perceptual superiority comes about purely through the movement of montage-assisted cognition. It is not spatial assertion but the power of a theoretical lens that enables this privileged vision. As if to prove this point, Shanghai Document is filled with scenes of spectatorship, all limited by comparison with the visual work of the film. In the Chinese quarter, static crowds watch with rapt attention as puppeteers, swordsmen, acrobats, and monkeys perform in front of them. Their gaze is focused entirely on the spectacle; these attractions are distractions. They do not see some of the things the camera sees, such as the tram that passes by while the swordsman is spinning his swords, reminding us of the city’s uneven development. These spectacles, in turn, are invisible to the rich Chinese bourgeoisie mingling with foreigners at the racetrack. A visually rich recording of a Beijing Opera performance reminds us that

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“the same plays are being performed in the Chinese theatre as 300–400 years ago.” This title suggests that the theatrical spectacle offers its audiences an escape into the past rather than turning their attention to the present. Perhaps most explicit is the sequence at a puppet theater, which cuts between the puppets entertaining spectators and the puppeteers pulling the strings behind the scenes. The film can reveal forces at work that these Chinese spectators cannot themselves perceive. This idea receives its fullest exposition in the film’s most complex sequence, which begins with a group of boys pulling a cart slowly along a street. When they pause to drink water from a bucket beside the road, one boy peeks through a fence, and the film cuts to shots of Europeans drinking cocktails beside a pool (figure 3.11). This sequence employs a point-of-view structure more commonly found in fiction film: a shot of the boy peeking through the fence is followed by a shot of what lies beyond the fence, encouraging the spectator to view the second shot as

FIGURE 3.11  Shanghai

Document: The two sides of the fence.

Source: From the holdings of the Russian State Archive of Film and Photographic Documents, Krasnogorsk. Reproduced with permission.

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FIGURE 3.11  (Continued)

the boy’s perspective. Dong notes that the insertion of this device into the documentary disrupts the structure of arbitrary, conceptual spatial oppositions that has defined Shanghai Document. In this sequence, the opposing sides are linked not by the work of parallel montage, but rather by a form of eyeline match, a key component of continuity editing in fiction film. At this moment, for Dong, the boy repurposes the boundary that excludes him into a window that grants the fulfillment of his voyeuristic desire.150 Additionally, the spectator vicariously shares the gaze of the boy, who hereby achieves a scopic agency otherwise denied to the passive Chinese subjects in the film.151 This shift in the film’s spatial order is undeniably striking. Equally striking, however, is the limited nature of the boy’s spectatorship. The boy realizes his scopic desire, but the fence remains between him and European bourgeois space, a barrier that affords him only a partial perspective on this opposing world. Only the first shot in the sequence beyond the fence can feasibly be interpreted as the boy’s point of view. By contrast, the Sovkino camera invisibly enters the European world on the other side of the fence

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and films it from every angle: portrait shots of laughing girls, closeups of cocktails, gramophones, and dancing legs. This mobile perspective even climbs onto a slide to capture a group of happy swimmers cascading down into the water, a perspective the boy cannot occupy. Crucially, the film’s montage continues its juxtapositions even after the boy has left his position at the fence and returned to work. As the boys pull their cart along the road, we cut between the spinning wheel and a spinning record on a gramophone, between the dancing legs of the Europeans and the sweating bodies of the boys (figure 3.12). It is the film’s parallel montage, not the boy’s static viewpoint, that makes the connections between the stirred cocktail and the water the laborers drink from a trough, or between the spinning wheel and the spinning record. The boy’s fixed, partial perspective fulfils a voyeuristic desire for pleasure and titillation, but it cannot go beyond this to grasp the conceptual links that explain why Shanghai is organized the way that it is and why he works while they play. Only by watching the film

FIGURE 3.12  Shanghai

Document: Parallel montage.

Source: From the holdings of the Russian State Archive of Film and Photographic Documents, Krasnogorsk. Reproduced with permission.

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FIGURE 3.12  (Continued)

and participating in its montage-assisted cognition could he move from this partial, situated perspective on the city to a vision of his social reality that includes causal forces. Empathy for the boy is thus combined with his enduring need for assistance. Shanghai Document seeks to recognize the position of the boy at the fence by sharing his gaze, by granting him a kind of sight, rather than simply reducing him to an object for documentary fixation. At the same time, it limits his capacity for sight relative to the film’s own combination of Marxist theory and conceptual montage.

THE CHINES E M ILL: L AU G HI N G AT IN TERN ATION A L ISM

Although it never reached China, Shanghai Document achieved a certain international resonance: it played in Germany and the United States, and it influenced the Japanese documentary filmmaker Fumio Kamei.152

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Nonetheless, there is considerable historical irony to Shanghai Document’s assertion of an authoritative perspective on contemporary China at the very moment when Soviet policy in China was experiencing comprehensive defeat. The connection between Russia and China proclaimed in the film was stretched to breaking point in 1927. Although the USSR remained a source of inspiration and material assistance for Chinese leftists, the Chinese Communist Party would go on to build a revolution that emerged from peasant support and guerilla warfare, rather than the urban proletariat positioned as the prime historical force in Bliokh’s film.153 As an epilogue to this chapter, we might turn to a different cinematic response to the defeat of 1927. The Chinese Mill—A Mobilization Drill (Kitaiskaia mel’nitsa—probnaia mobilizatsiia) was a 1928 film comedy written by Isaac Babel and directed by A. Levshin. The film does not survive and was not well received.154 Nonetheless, Babel’s surviving screenplay, which offers a shot-by-shot description of the film plus intertitles, reveals a satirical take on the goals of internationalist connection and recognition that drove the other films considered in this chapter. Whereas Shanghai Document seeks to invoke the abiding commonality of the Russian and Chinese Revolutions in the wake of the catastrophe of 1927, The Chinese Mill pushes emphatically away from the idea that connection should lead to action (and abandons the idea of a transnational audience). Instead, solidarity with Chinese suffering appears as a sort of Quixotic madness that must make way for the more pressing task—in this first year of the First Five-Year Plan—of building socialism in one country. Emotion and cognition, yoked together for maximum effect in Shanghai Document, are separated in Babel’s script. Emotional engagement through the affective power of mediated images appears in this comedy as a form of delusion. The rational thing to do is to resist their pull toward internationalist connection and return to local concerns. In keeping with the documentary impulses of the time, it seems Babel took his subject from an article in the newspaper Komsomol’skaia Pravda.155 The screenplay begins with Yegor Zhivtsov, secretary of his village’s Komsomol cell, attending a meeting at the Bolshoi Theater, where members of Moscow’s Chinese community have gathered to protest English atrocities in China. Zhivtsov befriends the Chinese student sitting beside him; they meet again on a train out of Moscow, and the student, bound for Hankou, tells Zhivtsov about the situation in contemporary China.

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Bringing a newfound sense of solidarity with the Chinese people back to his sleepy village, Zhivtsov gives a rousing speech exhorting his fellow komsomol’tsy to mobilize for military action “in defence of the Chinese Revolution.”156 The mobilization point is to be the broken mill at the edge of the village. Seized with enthusiasm, the villagers prepare for war in a comic fashion straight out of Cervantes: spurs are attached to bast shoes and a rooster’s leg; the infantry report for duty wielding rifles and accordions; a cavalry is formed from five forest wardens wearing German helmets that date back to the First World War.157 Seeing that the mobilization and accompanying war frenzy have disrupted the less heroic work of reconstructing the village, Zhivtsov, bedecked with medals, makes a second speech to his assembled troops at the broken mill: Citizens! Volunteers! Last night I was in touch with the all-union central executive committee of the Party . . . Our Chinese brothers are managing by themselves . . . The all-union committee definitely suggests that we take care of our current business—namely repair the mill to do our job one hundred percent.158

The party has redirected enthusiasm toward internal reconstruction, and the Komsomol members turn their energies to fixing the mill. Rifles are replaced by spades and hammers; the script ends in a flurry of joyous labor, as the mill is prepared and the water wheel begins to turn. Central to the film is the affective power of images that Zhivtsov experiences through modern media. In particular, the film stages several encounters between Zhivtsov and a photographic image of a rickshaw driver, a stock synecdoche for oppressed Chinese labor in this period. When the student tells Zhivtsov on the train about the situation in China, his description is not conveyed through titles. Instead, Babel’s script describes a sequence of shots that connect the distant spaces of Russia and China through montage. Idyllic scenes of the train rushing through the Russian countryside at night are intercut with shots of a rickshaw puller dragging his vehicle up a hill. His passengers are “an Englishman and a bulldog.”159 Later, as Zhivtsov prepares for his mobilization speech, he leafs through an issue of Prozhektor devoted to China.160 The photographs in the journal recall the images summoned by the student’s tale on the train, but now, the implied use of an eyeline match emphasizes that this

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is Zhivtsov’s point-of-view, producing a mediated face-to-face encounter: “Zhivtsov’s distorted face bent over a photograph. A detail: the face of the rickshaw driver bathed in sweat.”161 The ensuing sequence juxtaposes Zhivtsov’s point of view, consumed with photographic images of Chinese oppression, to pastoral scenes of the villagers sitting down to dinner: The woman doing the cooking sets out a big bowl of cabbage soup. A rainbow circle of sunshine floats in the middle of the bowl, in the greasy soup. A detail—the upward journey of the rickshaw driver. Zhivtsov’s face bent over the photograph. Through the network of his dishevelled hair can be seen a page of a magazine with a picture of Chinese workers killed in a shootout with foreign troops. The merry meal of the komsomol’tsy, mouths chewing, eyes laughing, shining drops dripping from spoons.162

Babel’s script uses montage to collapse spatial distance and bring the contemporaneous realities of two separate spaces into a jarring contiguity. If Shanghai Document used the point-of-view shot to emphasize the limits of the boy’s perspective at the fence, Babel’s use of the same shot structure emphasizes the power of modern media to overcome spatial separation and produce a sense of emotional connection with distant others. This face-to-face encounter with the rickshaw driver returns to Zhivtsov as he delivers his mobilization speech, through the use of three point-of-view shots. After his opening words, we see a neutral shot of the rickshaw driver’s face: this image in Zhivtsov’s mind now becomes the image he seeks to conjure in the minds of his audience. When Zhivtsov proclaims “our Chinese brothers are being drenched in blood,” a more disturbing shot flashes up: “The face of the rickshaw driver— terrible, naked, black, round—like a polished cast-iron sphere from which stream sun and sweat.”163 This image seeks affective power by presenting a symbolic Chinese figure as dehumanized, alien, and frightening, reduced by suffering almost to monstrosity. In a final intercut shot, “the rickshaw driver has fallen and crawls straight towards Zhivtsov on all fours”:164 given the setup of the point-of-view shot, the implication is that this terrible round face is crawling directly toward the camera and thus toward the audience. This sequence understands internationalist aesthetics as

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producing a sense of horror bordering on terror that provokes the call for mobilization to save China. This internationalist sense of affective connection, however, is constantly undermined by the film’s humor, which depends on the gap between these dreams of solidarity and what is actually achievable. Khrisanf Khersonsky noted the jarring incongruity of the film’s tone in a contemporary review, which offers a rare glimpse of how Babel’s script was realized onscreen: “The eccentric jollity of Babel’s comedy and the jokey levity of its characters’ thoughts are incongruous with the shocking footage of executions and the Chinese workers’ bitter struggle, taken from authentic newsreel, that is edited into The Chinese Mill.”165 This authentic newsreel footage sounds a lot like the closing reel of Shanghai Document, which came out a few months earlier. Such documentary evidence of Chinese suffering, Khersonsky implies, should evoke sentiments more elevated than laughter. And indeed, Babel’s script works constantly to forestall elevation. The heroism of Zhivtsov’s call to arms is patently absurd: his rousing mobilization speech is delivered atop a haystack into which he gradually sinks up to his waist.166 The emotional solidarity that these images of Chinese suffering produce, moreover, does not coexist with any practical understanding of China as a social and spatial reality. When a group gathers to study a map of China, one peasant proposes they attack Beijing via the southwestern province of Sichuan—a route that suggests a limited ability to read their own spatial relation to China from this map. The map as a site of emotional connection (China on Fire) or technological conquest (The Great Flight) here makes way for the map as an illustration of the gap between internationalist feeling and knowledge of the foreign. Internationalist sentiment, fired by the affective power of mass-media images, becomes in Babel’s script a kind of delusion, an excess of enthusiasm that must be tempered with a call to practical, local work. In any case, the script assures us, there is nothing to be done: as Zhivtsov insists, “our Chinese brothers are managing by themselves.” Although the positive references to the Guomindang in Babel’s script suggest that it was written before Chiang turned on his Communist allies, this line remained, according to Khersonsky, in the final film of 1928.167 Such a statement seems remarkable after the events of 1927, with the Chinese Communists persecuted and their Soviet allies expelled. The evocation of

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internationalist solidarity, of China’s war as our war, is no longer, it seems, to be taken seriously. Instead, The Chinese Mill suggests a turn away from internationalist intervention toward a policy of internal consolidation and construction. The villagers’ decision to abandon the march on China and instead reconstruct their broken water mill anticipates the imperatives of the First Five-Year Plan and serves as an implicit endorsement of Stalin’s policy of socialism in one country. The Chinese Mill stages the face-to-face encounter between Soviet and Chinese publics that Tretyakov saw as the task of cinema, only to reject it as a delusion and a diversion. Furthermore, in contrast to all the films considered previously, The Chinese Mill shows no interest in the possibility of reaching a Chinese audience. The ambitions for a cinematic internationalist aesthetics, capable of connecting the Soviet public with their Chinese neighbors on both cognitive and emotional terms, are discarded in this film as a youthful fantasy.

4 CONFESSIONS AND COLLABORATIONS Authority, Agency, and Factographic Internationalism in Den Shi-khua

L

et us begin with the facts. In the winter of 1926–1927, Sergei Tretyakov sat down for a series of interviews with a Chinese student from Moscow’s Sun Yat-sen University for the Workers of China. The student’s name was Gao Shihua 催Ϫ㧃.1 Gao was born in 1903 in Fuling, Sichuan province. His father, Gao Yaheng 催Ѳ㸵, participated in the 1911 Xinhai Revolution as a member of Sun Yat-sen’s Revolutionary Alliance (Tongmenghui). In 1920, Gao entered the Russian Department at Beijing University, where he studied with Tretyakov and Aleksei Ivin and first encountered Russian literature. After a brief period working as a translator for Soviet advisers to General Feng Yuxiang, Gao traveled to Moscow in 1926 to study at Sun Yat-sen University, enrolling on September 6.2 During his time at the university, he used the Russian name Mironov.3 While in Moscow, Gao renewed his acquaintance with Tretyakov and began a collaboration with his former teacher. The pair met almost daily over a period of six months, conducting a series of interviews from which Tretyakov fashioned a narrative account of Gao’s life.4 Their collaboration ended abruptly: Gao returned to China after Chiang Kai-shek’s April 1927 attack on the Chinese Communists in Shanghai ruptured the alliance between the Comintern and the Guomindang.5 When Tretyakov published the first extract from Gao Shihua’s life story in the July 1927 issue of Novyi Lef, he changed the protagonist’s family name to Deng, seeking to protect Gao’s identity in a Nationalist China newly hostile to the Soviet Union.6

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Den Shi-khua (in pinyin, Deng Shihua), published serially before appearing in full-length editions in 1930, 1933 and 1935, became the longest work of the “literature of fact” movement and the most complex early Soviet publication on China.7 Tretyakov called Den Shi-khua a “bio-interview,” a neologistic classification that pitches the text somewhere between biography and autobiography. Compiled by Tretyakov on the basis of his interviews with Gao, the text proceeds in the first person and the present tense, as if it were Gao’s direct autobiographical account. That account offers a narrative of political education: from his traditional rural childhood in Sichuan, Deng awakens to political consciousness through his experiences at school and at Beijing University, eventually traveling to Moscow to study at the recently founded Sun Yat-sen University. In the process, Den Shi-khua provides extensive ethnographic portrayals of traditional Chinese life and accounts of crucial political events of the early twentieth century, including the 1911 Xinhai Revolution and the May Fourth movement of 1919. As discussed in the introduction to this book, Tretyakov prefaced the first published extract from Den Shi-khua with jarring corporeal metaphors about the urgent need for this information: “Our previous knowledge of China is like a crippled arm. It must first be broken, and then re-set correctly.”8 This healing knowledge about China can come only from factual material. Fictional texts cannot heal the body politic; they merely reduce China to a “mysterious and indeterminable precious stone,” beautiful but useless.9 Instead, these metaphors of corporeal connection pave the way for a text whose genesis and production result from direct human contact. In some ways, Den Shi-khua suffered from bad timing. Begun in the heat of excitement over China’s imminent anti-imperial revolution, it came out in the wake of the Shanghai catastrophe of 1927. Furthermore, by the time it appeared in book form, Novyi Lef had closed down, paving the way for the eclipse of the literature of fact by the rising orthodoxy of Socialist Realism.10 Consequently, Den Shi-khua did not achieve the social impact of Roar, China! and, notably, has never been translated into Chinese. Nonetheless, Gao’s own account of his collaboration with Tretyakov provides anecdotal evidence that the text they created did play a mediating role in the relationship between Russia and China. Following his return to China in 1927, Gao went back to working for General Feng Yuxiang, whom he served in a number of administrative roles through

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the 1930s. He also made yet another name change, henceforth going by his courtesy name, Gao Xingya 催㟜Ѳ.11 It was under this name that he published his account of an event in February 1933, when Feng was seeking Soviet support against the invading Japanese army. Gao used the name “Deng Shihua” to get an audience with the Soviet chargé d’affaires in Tianjin: When I studied in Moscow, I collaborated with Professor Tie Jieke [Tretyakov’s Chinese name], who had previously taught at Beijing University. Using the material I supplied him with, he wrote the life of a Chinese student with my autobiography as the content. Professor Tie originally intended to publish it under both our names. But since my narrative included statements against Jiang’s betrayal, I worried that I could come to harm on returning to China, and I did not give my consent. So Tie used the false name of a Chinese student, “Deng Shihua,” as the name of the book, and stated in his preface that the material came from this “Deng Shihua.” Thus most of the Soviet people who came to China at this time knew this name, but didn’t know who or where this person was. I used this name and got a meeting straight away. First we discussed Professor Tie Jieke’s situation a little, then he told me Den Shi-khua had already gone through four editions and had been translated into English. Then I turned to Feng’s anti-Japan movement.12

From a military perspective, Gao’s meeting was not a success. The chargé d’affaires insisted that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) could not risk provoking war by directly supplying someone who was fighting Japan. Nonetheless, Gao’s anecdote presents Den Shi-khua actively mediating the relationship between Chinese and Soviet political actors, realizing Tretyakov’s aspiration for the literature of fact to intervene in historical reality. Tretyakov’s generic designation of Den Shi-khua as a “bio-interview” announced a deliberate push against existing genres of life narration. To understand the work of the bio-interview, this chapter begins by reading Den Shi-khua alongside two contemporary forms of bio-narrative against which Tretyakov explicitly defined his text: the revolutionary Bildungsroman and the confessional autobiography. Tretyakov’s bio-interview appeared at the same time as a host of fictional texts set in China—directed

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predominantly at younger readers—that combined adventure narratives and ethnographic detail with the outline of the “road-to-consciousness” narrative identified by Katerina Clark as the master plot of the Soviet novel.13 At the core of these texts lies a protagonist’s journey toward political consciousness, culminating, in a manner familiar from chapter 2, with an act of violent self-sacrifice. This use of a life story to trace the development of political consciousness also shaped Soviet practices of autobiography, the focus of recent work in Soviet subjectivity studies. From its inception, the Soviet state demanded accounts of the self from individuals—through questionnaires, autobiographies, and police confessions—as a hermeneutic technique to assess their internal dispositions toward the revolution. In the words of Jochen Hellbeck, “the Soviet state attached particular significance to the practice of autobiographical writing and speaking, both as a manifestation of the state of consciousness a given individual had achieved, and as a tool for raising this consciousness further.”14 For Igal Halfin, the Bolsheviks’ use of autobiography amounted to a “Communist hermeneutics of the soul” that enabled the party to distinguish true revolutionaries from imposters.15 Autobiography became a tool for producing revolutionary selfhood and for uncovering its absence. These two strands of early Soviet culture, the fictional road-toconsciousness narrative and the confessional account of the self, coincide in a basic structural element. They both mold an individual biography to a standardized narrative template that charts the development of political consciousness. This journey toward enlightenment can in turn be read as an allegory for the progressive movement of history. According to Clark’s analysis of the Socialist–Realist master plot, the biography of an individual hero offers a microcosmic staging of the dialectical confrontation between spontaneity and consciousness, the force that ultimately drives historical development.16 A similar staging of the drama of history within each individual informs contemporary practices of autobiography. Halfin reads Soviet autobiographies as conversion narratives, recounting the individual soul’s adherence to the grand trajectory of human history out of the darkness of exploitation and toward the light of Communism.17 Cristina Vatulescu has identified standardized patterns of deviation in the biographical narratives contained in confessions obtained by the secret police, which stray from the road to consciousness to descend into corruption and betrayal.18

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In both cases, the bio-interview Den Shi-khua echoes certain aspects of its generic predecessors, only to affirm that it is doing something different. Central to this difference is the text’s presentation of the collaboration between Tretyakov and Deng/Gao and its dynamics of authority. Tretyakov’s framing introduction suggests that his erstwhile pupil is unable to formulate his own life story. The expert mediation of his former teacher, Tretyakov, is required to turn Deng’s life into useful knowledge. The echoes of the Comintern’s relationship with the Guomindang should be clear: if Soviet Russia needs improved knowledge of China to play its nurturing role in the global revolutionary process, it seems young, revolutionary China needs the guidance and supervision of its predecessor to attain self-awareness and enter political adulthood. The bio-interview’s conclusion, however, neglects to finalize a story whose ending Tretyakov does not know. Instead, at the moment when the Comintern alliance with the Guomindang collapsed, the narrative ends in uncertainty. Deng returns to China without saying goodbye, and an interview with a different student implies that Deng may have concealed or distorted information to present himself to Tretyakov in a certain light. Rather than conclude the protagonist’s political journey with unambiguous triumph or disaster, Den Shi-khua ends with a list of possible endings, none of which can be affirmed. Yet alongside this allegory for the political defeat of Comintern internationalism in China, Den Shi-khua also makes the case for a form of internationalist knowledge production shaped through transnational and translingual collaboration. We are not given a conclusive judgment on Deng’s character—one that would valorize the bio-interview as a technique for producing and judging revolutionary selves. Instead, the reader is led to understand that this text has been generated from the intersection of multiple partial perspectives, none of which can lay claim to conclusive epistemological authority. Tretyakov’s authority to mediate between contemporary China and a general theory of history collapses as his own reliance on the mediation of others is revealed. Furthermore, rather than erase the complexities of translation and mediation that arise in the process of collaboration, this factographic experiment renders those complexities the message of the medium itself. In addition to supplying useful knowledge about China, the bio-interview provides a lesson for the reader—and for the collaborators—on the contingent, partial, and

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mediated nature of transcultural knowledge production. The culmination of Tretyakov’s experiments in internationalist aesthetics, Den Shi-khua offers a glimpse of a collaborative mode of transnational authorship that decenters Soviet authority over the global revolutionary process.

FACTS A N D FICTIO N S

Den Shi-khua appeared at a moment when the future of novelistic fiction was the subject of intense debate within Soviet literary circles. The leaders of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP) maintained that the novel form could best serve “proletarian literature” by focusing on the portrayal of a figure they called the “living person” (zhivoi chelovek): a fictional individual whose “complex human psyche, with all its contradictions,” could reflect the complexities and contradictions of historical development.19 This position met with stiff opposition from the proponents of a “literature of fact” grouped around the journal Novyi Lef. The faktoviki asserted that the “realism” of psychological realism depended on a toolkit of historically defunct devices borrowed from bourgeois or prerevolutionary writers.20 Moreover, they insisted that this focus on an individual’s interior experiences and emotions risked distorting the very social and historical reality that the RAPP writers supposedly sought to express.21 Tretyakov’s introduction to the first installment of Den Shi-khua stated bluntly: “The invented story and the composed novel are hateful.”22 The bio-interview was intended to prove that the life story of what Tretyakov called a “living ‘living’ person” offered a superior form of literary truth to the fictional “living person.”23 Nonetheless, Den Shi-khua shows striking overlaps with a number of contemporaneous fictional texts that combine a journey to consciousness with the excitement of adventure and the educational value of ethnographic material. Aimed predominantly at younger readers and the newly literate—prime targets for the formation of a revolutionary consciousness—these adventure stories deploy biographical narratives as educational allegories to represent China’s progress out of the ignorance of tradition and into revolutionary modernity.24 Although these tales are fictional, they echo Den Shi-khua in using the protagonist’s life story to

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provide detailed historical, ethnographic, and political information about contemporary China. Most contain extensive footnotes; some include a glossary of Chinese terms to aid the reader’s acquaintance with this foreign reality. At the same time, the underlying structure of the narrative tells a familiar tale about revolutionary modernization in conditions of uneven development. This pattern can be found, with slight variations, in such titles as A Coolie’s Revenge, Some Remarkable Episodes from the Life of Li-Siao, A Head in a Cage, The Boy from Nan-fu, The Death of Li-Chan, Li Sin’s Fourth Bullet, and Rickshaw Driver, all published between 1927 and 1931.25 As a form of ideologically saturated genre fiction, these texts submit productively to the structuralist mode of morphological analysis that Clark’s reading of the Soviet novel borrows from Propp.26 Their “master plot” goes roughly as follows: a male child from the country is compelled by poverty or rebellion to leave the limited world of Chinese tradition and enter the world of the town. Through a series of mishaps, he finds himself forced into industrial or servile labor. In this process of proletarianization, our hero encounters a revolutionary who explains to him the true nature of things in China and the world. Before 1927, this is often a member of the Guomindang; after 1927, it is typically a Communist, although this function can be performed by a newspaper article or a slogan on a banner.27 This socialist teacher replaces the false teachers of his past, associated with Confucianism, Daoism, or some other aspect of Chinese tradition.28 Our hero typically dies in the process of fulfilling the work of the revolution, granting a higher meaning to his life (as in Roar, China! and The Red Poppy) through self-sacrificial death. The “coolie’s revenge” is the organization of a strike, for which the hero is executed by police; “Li-Siao” is shot carrying news of the 1911 Xinhai Revolution against the Manchus; the “Rickshaw Driver” is mown down by police bullets when he finally joins a protest; “Lu Sin” uses his fourth and final bullet to shoot down an enemy plane and protect his Red partisan comrades, thus ensuring his own death. For all that it stakes a claim to a different form of referential truth, Den Shi-khua shares many of the typological features of these adventure tales. A summary of its plot reveals the distinct outlines of a revolutionary Bildungsroman, through which we learn of the historical transformations of the first decades of China’s twentieth century. The book’s early chapters describe Deng’s childhood in a scholarly family in rural Sichuan.

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The hold of traditional culture over the young protagonist finds expression through an abundance of ethnographic detail. Deng describes his home and family, their work in the fields, festival rituals, and his early experiences of traditional education. Such non-narrative material as farming techniques, folk songs, and Tang poems make their way into the text. Negative teachers include a violent Confucian schoolmaster and Deng’s uncle, a traditional scholar who writes verses, smokes opium, and despises the Nationalist Revolution that abolished the system of scholarly ranks.29 Modernity is introduced into this rural world by Deng’s father, Deng Yapo (Gao Yaheng), who returns from his studies in Japan to startle the assembled villagers with his European clothes and the gramophone he produces from his luggage. Deng senior is also politically modern, a member of the Nationalist Tongmenghui (ৠⲳ᳗), the revolutionary alliance founded by Sun Yat-sen in Tokyo in 1905. Deng Yapo participates in the planning and execution of the 1911 Xinhai Revolution in Sichuan, intersecting with such historical figures as Zhang Peijue ᔉ෍⠉, a postrevolutionary governor of Sichuan executed in 1915, and Xiong Kewu ❞‫℺ܟ‬, one of the prominent Sichuan military leaders of the period.30 The death of Deng’s mother, meanwhile, severs a key emotional link with the traditional world of childhood. The narrative comes closest to an adventure tale in the years following the 1911 revolution. Deng’s father repeatedly flees from capture by his political enemies, donning various disguises and hiding at one point beneath the water in a rice paddy.31 While his father is in hiding, Deng is sent for his own protection to a monastery. Living with the monks exposes their Buddhism as a lazy and mendacious charade, and also offers Deng his “first lesson in socialism.”32 Put to work by the monks, he comes to appreciate the hardships of peasant life and understands for the first time that the food he has always enjoyed without thinking is produced by human labor. When he emerges from the monastery, Deng submits to an arranged marriage. Alienated now from the forms of traditional life, he narrates the wedding ceremony as a physical ordeal and personal humiliation. The student and worker protests that spread across China on and after May 4, 1919, in response to the transfer of Germany’s colonies in China to Japan at the Versailles Peace Conference, galvanize Deng’s growing political consciousness. Our protagonist heads to Beijing University, determined to study literature despite his father’s insistence that

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he choose engineering. Widespread student enthusiasm for anarchism, in particular, the writings of Peter Kropotkin and Lev Tolstoy, encourages Deng to enroll in the Russian section. There, his teachers include Ivin and Tretyakov. Under their influence, and through his participation in Li Dazhao’s Marxism reading group, Deng turns away from anarchism and toward Marxism.33 After the violent suppression of demonstrations in Shanghai (May 1925) and Beijing (March 1926), Deng travels to Moscow to study at Sun Yat-sen University. He returns to China in the wake of Chiang Kai-shek’s Shanghai coup in April 1927. The narrative ends midflow: Tretyakov admits that he does not know where Deng is or what has become of him. Although closure is withheld, the shape and direction of this allegorical Chinese life clearly echo the road-to-consciousness narratives cited earlier. Deng’s education takes him out of the childhood of traditional rural innocence—China’s past—into the dynamic, transforming present of China’s semicolonial modernity. Pernicious traditional teachers give way to the modernizing political influence of Deng’s father and his Soviet professors. The details of Deng’s life story, meanwhile, provide ethnographic and historical knowledge about China to the Soviet reader. What are we to make of these formal and thematic echoes between Den Shikhua and the fictional road-to-consciousness adventure narratives? If the narrative structure of Den Shi-khua traces this same road to revolutionary consciousness, does this trouble Tretyakov’s adamant separation of his text from fictional invention? In a seminal contribution to the question of referentiality in autobiography studies, Philippe Lejeune concludes that the difference between autobiographical and fictional narratives cannot be deduced from the text itself. The symbolic and mimetic qualities of writing are the same in both cases. Thus, any text that claims to refer to an external reality—be it scientific, historical, biographical, or autobiographical—must conclude what Lejeune calls a “referential pact” with its readers. The conclusion of this pact takes place outside the main body of the text and offers “a definition of the field of the real that is involved and a statement of the modes and the degree of resemblance to which the text lays claim.”34 Tretyakov concludes such a pact with his readers in the introduction to Den Shi-khua, which stakes a claim to referential truth by describing the collaborative interview process that produced the book. This introduction seeks to distinguish the text that follows from fiction by

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rendering the reader aware of its origins in a concrete encounter between two individuals. Tretyakov wrote multiple introductions to Den Shi-khua. The introduction to the first extract, published in Novyi Lef in 1927, was revised for the book edition of 1930. A newly revised introduction opened the second edition of 1933; this was revised yet again for the third edition of 1935. Even across this brief span of time, the “facts” of history begin to change in ways that reframe Deng’s account.35 Most strikingly, the split between the Comintern and the Guomindang after 1927 means that Tretyakov’s original description of Deng as a “revolutionary” must be qualified in the introduction to the 1930 edition, dated November 15, 1928. Now Tretyakov acknowledges that Deng never became a Communist and remained committed to the Guomindang, the party of his father and class. At the same time, a new paragraph insists on the typicality of Deng’s biography for his generation of Chinese intellectuals, including the Communists: “Chinese Communists who have heard excerpts from the bio-interview have said: ‘Why this is our childhood, our school days, our life.’ ”36 Despite these changes in emphasis, certain elements of the introduction remain the same throughout the various editions from 1927 to 1935. Tretyakov consistently defines the working relationship that produced the book as a production process shaped by a particular division of labor. Тhe original introduction from 1927 describes their collaboration in terms that echo the Russian Formalists’ distinction between “material” and “form” as well as industrial processes of production: “The book Den Shi-khua was made by two people. Deng Shihua was the provider of the raw material of facts [syrev’shchik faktov]; I was their moulder [formovshchik].”37 The revised introductions of the 1930s rephrase the second half of the sentence: “I constructed the book out of this material.”38 Either way, we have a clear hierarchy: Deng supplies inert, passive material, to which Tretyakov applies his constructive expertise. This metaphor of Deng as a reserve of material that his former teacher exploits develops into a mining analogy: “He nobly offered to me the immense depths of his memory. I burrowed into him like a miner, sounding, blasting, chipping, sifting, precipitating.”39 Elsewhere, Tretyakov describes his work as “deep drilling” (glubokoe burenie), supplementing the surface overview of articles and sketches.40 This mining metaphor starkly defines the active and passive roles in the relationship. Deng features as rich but inert material,

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whose only action is to open himself to Tretyakov’s busy, expert penetration. Such a power dynamic echoes the imperialist systems of economic exploitation whose application to China Tretyakov so keenly opposed. Tretyakov’s expertise transforms Deng’s underdeveloped resources into a product his Soviet audience can use. This notion of Deng as passive material is offset by the suggestion that he may yet complete this unfinished account of his life himself. Tretyakov introduces his interlocutor as an aspiring revolutionary writer, sealing the portrait with an intertextual echo of Vladimir Mayakovsky: “He considered the writer’s brush equal to the soldier’s bayonet.”41 Gao Shihua was indeed a published author by the time he collaborated with  Tretyakov. His short story “Sinking Their Own Ship” (“Chen ziji de chuan” ≜㞾Ꮕ ⱘ㠍) had appeared in the Qiancao (Low Grass) quarterly in December 1923, and he had published several translations of Russian authors, including Anton Chekhov and Mikhail Lermontov.42 Nonetheless, Tretyakov insists that Deng cannot yet write the narrative of his own life because he lacks the ability “to perceive one’s own life in detail,” an ability that only comes with lengthy journalistic training.43 Tretyakov’s expert mediation remains essential. The introductions of 1927, 1928, and 1932, however, all end by expressing the hope that Deng himself will write the continuation of his own life story: “This book is only a few chapters from an authentic human life. It breaks off with the words: to be continued. I hope that continuation will be written by Deng Shihua himself.”44 The production process is also a process of training. This passive, underdeveloped raw material may one day become an active shaper of material. The question of language, discussed explicitly for the first time in the 1932 introduction, only increases our sense of authorial mediation. Tretyakov informs us that Deng “spoke Russian with great difficulty.”45 There is no suggestion that Chinese could have served as an alternative means of communication: the text of Den Shi-khua notes that Tretyakov spoke “not a word” of Chinese when he arrived in Beijing in 1924, and while he peppers his writings with Chinese phrases, there is no evidence that he acquired any significant fluency in the language.46 Thus, the interlocutors resorted to drawing. “Not letting the pencil out of his hand, he drew as he narrated— a hearth, a bed, a net, a pattern, a flute, a nut. Often his sketch would lead to further consultations of experts or dictionaries to find out the object’s name in Russian.”47 In an unpublished description of his bio-interview

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method—revealingly entitled “How I Wrote Deng”—Tretyakov admits that he also played the sketch artist, drawing various shapes and asking Deng to choose the image that best suited the object he was trying to describe.48 Yet this interview process, characterized by broken language and intersemiotic translation, produces a first-person account of Deng’s life that proceeds in smooth literary Russian. Contemporary defenders of literary realism were quick to question whether Tretyakov’s claim to supply objective knowledge in Den Shi-khua could accommodate this clear degree of authorial mediation and control. A review of the 1930 edition in the RAPP journal Oktiabr’ (October) suggested Den Shi-khua should be read as a “double ‘translation’: from Chinese into bad conversational Russian, and from the latter into literary Russian.”49 This implied that the language of the text, “which one might expect to characterize Den-Shi-Khua, [. . .] actually constitutes the free creation of Tretyakov, hiding with excessive and harmful modesty behind the back of his documentary object.”50 Writing in 1932, Georg Lukács included Den Shi-khua in his attack on “reportage” as a flawed method incapable of doing the work of literary “portrayal” (Gestaltung). Lukács argues that reportage operates under the methods of science, gathering facts as examples for an argument about social reality. The typicality of these facts only emerges, for Lukács, in the synthesizing act of the author, who draws connections and suggests conclusions. (By contrast, for Lukács, literary realism’s portrayal of typical characters and their interrelations can offer a concrete representation of the social totality.) Thus, Lukács insists that the application of reportage method to biographical narrative simply displaces subjectivity from hero to author: “the subjective factor they push aside appears in their work as the unportrayed subjectivity of the author, as a moralizing commentary that is superfluous and accidental, an attribute of the characters that has no organic connection with the plot.”51 In the case of Den Shi-khua, Lukács cites a scene in which Deng, age five or six, overhears his father discussing Chinese politics and revolutionary strategy. This speech reaches the reader in perfectly formed political language: the language of Tretyakov, not of Deng as a young child.52 More recent readings of the book cite scenes from childhood that Deng could not possibly remember, alongside the skillful use of narrative devices, such as flashbacks and dramatic dialogue, as evidence of Tretyakov’s distorting authorial mediation.53 Rather than see such elements as

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proof of Tretyakov’s slide into fiction, however, I suggest that Den Shikhua foregrounds questions about its own factuality and production process as a central part of its work as a factographic text. Den Shi-khua asks its readers constantly to think about the nature of factual evidence and their own relationship to that evidence. To illustrate this dynamic, we might consider a photograph of Gao Shihua that has been preserved in Tretyakov’s archive. This photograph appears to be a kind of “bio-photograph”: a montage of three photographs that represent three stages in the life of a Chinese man. A teenager stands in the center, with the image of a young child overlaid in the top left corner, and the image of a young man’s face overlaid bottom right (figure 4.1). On the back of the photograph is written, in penciled Cyrillic script, “Den Shi-khua.”54 Within the text of Den Shi-khua, we find an account of Deng’s visit to a photography studio in Beijing that appears to describe the central image of this photograph: “I enter the photography studio and expose myself to the lens. My gown falls to my feet in taut vertical folds. My glasses glitter. With one arm I lean graciously, but without excessive femininity, against a decorative stone, from whose nostrils protrude clumps of grass.”55 The gown, the gracious lean, and the clumps of grass are all here, and the photograph faintly registers the outline of a pair of glasses on the young man’s face.56 The fragments within this montage also show up in different places. The image of the child is reproduced in Tretyakov’s 1927 collection of China sketches, Chzhungo. It appears in the chapter “Fathers and Sons” (“Ottsy i deti”) with the caption: “Bogatyi kitaichenok” (“A rich Chinese child”)—but with no indication that this child is Deng.57 The photograph of the teenager appears (without the overlaid child and man’s face) at the head of Agnes Smedley’s review of A Chinese Testament, the English-language translation of Den Shi-khua published in the United States in 1934.58 The form of this bio-photograph forces us to think about the relationship between the capture and combination of factual material. On the one hand, an understanding of photography as a technology that captures historical reality encourages us to see this photograph as evidence of Deng’s existence—as a fact, or a series of facts spliced together. On the other hand, the montage composition of the photograph, producing the ghostly effect of the younger and older Deng appearing in the air around the teenaged portrait-subject, alerts us to the artificiality of the

FIGURE 4.1  Den

Shi-khua.

Source: Russian State Archive of Literature and Art f. 2886 op. 2 ed. khr. 89 l. 1. Reproduced with permission.

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image, its constructedness. Our awareness of this constructedness raises a series of questions that our scattered fragments of historical evidence do not enable us to answer: who put these photographs together? Who took the separate photographs? Are they all photographs of the same person? Just as we are unable to answer these questions, so the original readers of Den Shi-khua had no way to verify the existence of Deng’s historical prototype or to assess the convergence between his account of himself and the narrative account of his life presented in the book. Tretyakov’s description of their collaboration in his introduction offered the only grounds for accepting the text’s referential relation to a historical reality. At the same time, however, this introduction reveals the multiple layers of mediation that stand between historical event and textual representation. Far from being a flaw or a moment when the astute reader can catch Tretyakov out, this contradiction exemplifies the way that the bio-interview asks to be read and received. The factographers operated with a fundamentally different understanding of the reception process to Lukács. What he called portrayal, Gestaltung (formedness), they understood as a form of mimetic illusionism that insisted on the discrete reality of invented human beings and events.59 Against this theory of formal integrity and closure, the factographers subscribed to a montage principle whereby fragments of varying provenance must be linked together by the active work of a reader, who thus comes to participate in the production process. Finnish semiotician Tomi Huttunen identifies this reintegration of heterogeneous fragments by an active reader as the fundamental dynamic of Russian postrevolutionary montage culture: “Fragmentariness, heterogeneity and process would therefore be the basic conditions defining a montage text.”60 As we shall see, Den Shi-khua presents an apparently smooth and homogenous literary narrative that is constantly disrupted by a sequence of heterogeneous elements: an introduction and conclusion that are at odds with each other; drawings, photographs, and folk songs; interruptive footnotes; and switches of narrator. The active reader who pieces these fragments together consciously completes the text’s production of meaning. From this perspective, Tretyakov’s description of himself in his introduction as the giver of form to Deng’s raw materials alerts us to the contingent relationship between form and material. We are made aware that the text has been assembled through a specific and situated process of

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production. This material could well have received a different form; historical reality exceeds its textual representation. The distinction between fiction and factography, then, rests not only on a claim to referentiality but also on a certain mode of reading. The factographic reader does not seek absorption in the aesthetic pleasure of the narrative, but rather reads with an awareness of the production process that lies behind a text and the disparity between a dynamic, developing historical reality and its constructed, textualized mediation. In the context of Den Shi-khua, this means we read with a constant awareness of the collaborative, dialogical situation that stands behind the text Tretyakov has shaped.

CO NFESSION A N D THE PRODUC T I ON OF T RU T H

There are other ways to conceive of the power dynamics in that dialogic situation, however. In addition to the extractive metaphors already mentioned, Tretyakov’s introduction offers a set of discursive analogies to describe his collaboration with Gao. These analogies identify Tretyakov’s role in the interview process with a range of discourse scenarios in which the listener is invested with power: “I was by turns investigator, priest, form-filler, interviewer, interlocutor, psychoanalyst” (Ia byl poperemenno sledovatelem, dukhovnikom, anketshchikom, interv’iuerom, sobesednikom, psikhoanalitikom).61 With the exception of “interlocuter” (sobesednik), which suggests a dialogic situation that grants equal authority and involvement to both sides, all of these roles imply a balance of power weighted institutionally toward the listener. In a series of social scenarios, including criminal justice (investigator/sledovatel’), religious confession (priest/dukhovnik), state monitoring (form-filler/anketshchik), and psychoanalytic treatment (psychoanalyst/psikhoanalitik), Tretyakov occupies the role of an authority figure who demands that the speaker produce the truth about themselves. At the same time, in these discourse situations, the speaker has to externalize their internal truth themselves; in contrast to the preceding mining analogy, the listener, for all his superior power, cannot simply go in and get it. Tretyakov’s list hews uncannily close to Michel Foucault’s analysis of the confession, a “technology of the self ” that spread through Western culture

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from religious practice into such diverse areas of social life as “justice, medicine, education, family relations, and love relations.”62 For Foucault, confession expresses the power of the listener, an authority figure who both demands and judges the speaker’s account of themselves. At the same time, confession produces “intrinsic modifications” within the speaking subject. Confession constitutes a technique of power that relies on the agency of the speaker, an operation that individuals perform “on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves.”63 Several scholars have sought to apply Foucault’s model for the production of subjectivity through the operations of power to the autobiographical practices of the early Soviet period. For example, Halfin reads autobiographies composed by applicants for party membership in the 1920s and 1930s as attempts to align their personal biographies with a salvational master narrative of history that Soviet Marxism inherited from Christianity.64 This technology of confessional autobiography extended beyond party membership applications to permeate Soviet society, including institutions of higher education.65 Indeed, Halfin sees students as prime targets for the hermeneutic technology of confession, because they were regarded as “undecided souls,” divorced from the healthy influence of concrete labor and prone to the corruptions of abstraction.66 Gao directly encountered these techniques for political assessment during his time at Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow. The university had been founded in November 1925, under the auspices of the Comintern, to train young Chinese Nationalists and Communists in Marxism-Leninism. China was the only nation granted its own university in Moscow, a mark of its importance to Soviet and Comintern strategy at the time.67 Sun Yat-sen University kept detailed files on its students, including autobiographies and questionnaires, to determine their political affiliations and assess their aptitude for political work. According to the university’s files, Gao never joined the Bolshevik Party or the Komsomol—one of only three students in his student group (kruzhok) of twenty-one not to join either organization.68 There is also no record of Gao joining the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) at this stage in his life. The university’s files consistently define him as one of the Guomindang students, which may explain why no detailed biography of Gao survives in these files: the biographies and personal assessments (kharakteristiki) contained therein are mostly intended to determine students’ suitability for CCP work.69

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Nonetheless, the Guomindang students’ political affiliations and tendencies remained a matter for concern and evaluation. One document assigns Gao to the “centrist group” of Guomindang students (in between the “left” and “right” groups), and in answer to the question “connections to political leaders or social groups in China,” records “unknown.”70 After Chiang Kai-shek turned against the Comintern and CCP in April 1927, the university conducted an assessment of its students’ attitudes toward Chiang. Gao/Mironov appears twice in these forms. On first appearance, his attitude to Chiang is listed as neither “supports” (zan 䋞) nor “opposes” (fan ড) but “skeptical” (huai ់, for huaiyi ់⭥).71 On another form, his “attitude to Chiang’s betrayal” is recorded as “opposed” (fandui ডᇡ), and his “attitude to the USSR” as “believes in” (xinyang ֵӄ). His attitude to the CCP, according to this form, is “neutral” (zhongli Ёゟ). Under “suitability for work,” the form notes: “not suited for political work, suited for literary work” (wu nengli neng wenxue ⛵㛑࡯㛑᭛ᅌ).72 Gao, then, was no stranger to Soviet techniques for assessment and surveillance, although it seems he did not fill out a more detailed biographical form at Sun Yat-sen University because he was never under consideration for party membership. What the biographies in the university’s archive allow us to see, however, is the striking similarity between the material they contain and the narrative shape of Den Shi-khua. Autobiographies and autobiographical forms from 1926 and 1927 demanded such information as place of birth, social status, and social origin (i.e., social status of parents); education, general and political; personal experiences and changes in thought; marital status and number of children; experience of joining organizations and service; and reasons for coming to Moscow to study.73 These same key elements of biographical information structure the narrative of Deng’s life in Den Shi-khua, tracing a movement away from tradition and toward modernity, socialism, and Moscow. The book’s early chapters describe the “social status and social origin” of Deng’s family among the rural scholar-gentry of Sichuan. The return of Deng’s father from Japan provokes important “personal experiences and changes in thought”: Deng listens in on his father’s revolutionary meetings to receive lessons in China’s contemporary political situation.74 Changes in thought continue with Deng’s gradual disenchantment with religion, first through his rejection of Buddhist ritual at his mother’s funeral and later with his experience at the monastery.75 His alienation from traditional culture culminates with “marital status and number of children.” Deng describes the

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ceremony for his arranged marriage as a brutal physical ordeal: his clothing feels like chain mail; “frenzied” drummers “mutilate” their drums; the celebratory fireworks sound like machine-gun fire.76 An endless succession of ceremonial bows causes Deng to remark with bitter humor: “you have to be a good athlete to survive a game as gruelling as a Chinese wedding.”77 For the rest of the book, he treats his wife with unremitting hostility and his daughter with indifference. As these personal experiences produce changes in thought that alienate Deng from traditional culture, so they guide him toward nationalism and socialism as alternative explanatory lenses for his social world. Several early sequences emphasize young Deng’s separation from the working masses. Traveling home with his classmates by boat, Deng describes his indifference to the boatmen: “We do not notice them, and they interest us very little. After all, there is not one son of a coolie among us.”78 His first “experience of joining organizations and service” is nationalist in orientation: following the anti-Japanese protests of May 4, 1919, Deng becomes secretary of his school’s newly formed student union and calls for the destruction of Japanese goods. Next, without his family’s knowledge, Deng departs for Beijing University, the center of the radical student movement. The “education, general and political” that began with rural Confucian rigidity and developed through nationalism now finds it completion with anarchism and Marxism. Turned away from his initial enthusiasm for Kropotkin and Tolstoy by Ivin, who dismisses Tolstoy as a “utopian,” Deng enlists instead in Li Dazhao’s Marxism reading group.79 Tretyakov appears in an estranged form under his Chinese name, Te Ti-ko, lecturing his students on the role of art in class struggle.80 Deng joins the Chinese Socialist Youth League, although he leaves in fury when his fellow activists oversleep and miss their meeting with some railway workers.81 When a protest against the government’s capitulation to foreign demands is violently dispersed in March 1926, Deng and his classmates ask their new Russian professor to put literature aside and “explain to us Marxism, Leninism, dialectical materialism.”82 Shortly afterwards, Deng learns of the possibility to study at Sun Yat-sen University. The repressive violence of the Chinese government combines with Deng’s cumulative turn toward socialism to constitute his “reasons for coming to Moscow to study.” Read this way, Den Shi-khua starts to look like Gao’s missing institutional autobiography, a life narrative intended to prove his progressive embrace of first nationalism and then socialism. Indeed, Tretyakov’s own

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choice of wording reveals an awareness of his text’s affinity to contemporary technologies of the self. One of the roles Tretyakov ascribes to himself in the introduction, “form-filler” (anketshchik), names the official who supervised the completion of this kind of biographical form. Appended to each form in the Sun Yat-sen University archives is the anketshchik’s character assessment (kharakteristika) of the student. This gives an evaluation of the individual’s degree of “Marxist preparation” and offers one of a limited range of character descriptions: “disciplined and self-possessed,” “active,” “has a strong character.”83 Thus, the role of anketshchik places Tretyakov in the position of the official who both gathers biographical information and passes judgment on an individual’s suitability for party membership and party work. We find just such a judgment on Deng in the revised introduction of 1930, written in the wake of the Guomindang’s turn against the Comintern. Tretyakov, in anketshchik mode, explains his interviewee’s ultimate failure to become a Communist as the legacy of parental and class influence: “he was not a Communist. The Guomindangism of his father was passed down to him hereditarily, as it were. Poisoned by the pleasures of art and the self-importance of an intellectual, he could not imagine himself and his distinguished estate of shenshi— the owners of knowledge, land, and official positions—as the servants of the rising masses.”84 This kharakteristika creates a jarring dissonance with the narrative told in Deng’s voice, suggesting that its trajectory of progressive socialist enlightenment was ultimately forestalled. What are we to make of these similarities between Tretyakov’s text and contemporary technologies of the self? At the very least, the correspondence suggests a certain standardization of norms for narrating life stories in this period, norms that cross any putative divide between “literary” and “factual” texts. As Halfin’s autobiographies can be judged for their alignment with or deviance from the teleological plot of history, so too can the prototypes of the Socialist–Realist positive hero—and so too, perhaps, can Deng. We can assume that both Tretyakov and Gao had some familiarity with these norms of life narration. We may wonder whether one or the other, or possibly both, composed this life story of a Chinese student to fit the standard road-to-consciousness template. Above all, we may sense that the hierarchy of power implicit in the confessional scenario applies also to the production of Den Shi-khua. From a Foucauldian perspective, the anketshchik, interviewer, psychoanalyst and priest all

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stand in positions of power. Their demand for a narrative of the self produces a narrative shaped by that demand. Tretyakov’s introduction sets out his multifaceted authority over the book’s production process. He is the teacher, the expert, the miner and molder. He speaks in his native language, he is at home in Moscow, he demands the interview and prescribes its shape. Can we read the resulting narrative as anything other than a form of truth produced by that authoritative demand? Perhaps not; but ultimately, the Foucauldian power dynamic set up at the start of Den Shi-khua becomes complicated and qualified by what follows. As with the echoes of novelistic narrative, the invocation of these confessional relationships serves as a comparative move that illustrates the specificity of the bio-interview. For one thing, the material conveyed by the bio-interview is not predominantly psychological but rather ethnographic and historical. Indeed, Tretyakov’s theoretical writings on the literature of fact denounced the focus on interiority in realist literature as an idealist subjectivization of social reality that elevates irrational emotion “over human intellect, knowledge, and technical-organizational experience.”85 Tretyakov wanted the literature of fact to decenter the hero’s subjective experience, shifting attention away from the “world of emotions and experiences” and onto the “world of things and processes.”86 Sure enough, in place of detailed explorations of Deng’s thought processes, Den Shi-khua gives us pages and pages of rituals, festivals, historical sketches, and accounts of everyday life.87 Indeed, precisely this lack of attention to internal psychology drew criticism from factography’s literary rivals. The aforementioned October review lambasted Tretyakov for “paying completely insignificant attention to the intellectual and emotional life of his hero,” thereby continuing “the typical LEFist tendency of not seeing the person behind the things.”88 This anonymous critic understands interiority as the seat of truth, the very model of subjectivity that Halfin borrows from Foucault and that Tretyakov seeks to overturn. Tretyakov’s truth is located externally, in objective social relations and processes. In this materialist conception of the confession, Deng is not an interiority in need of expression, but rather a kind of recording device, whose memory impressions of social life are the raw material from which Tretyakov’s editing produces “truth” (i.e., socially useful knowledge). A second divergence concerns the kinds of transformations that the interview process produces. In contrast to Foucault’s model of the

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confession, Tretyakov’s bio-interview technique is not directed at the transformation of Deng’s inner soul. It can be understood, however, as a technique, and one that is directed at both Deng/Gao and the reader. The bio-interview serves—for interviewee, reader, and perhaps even interviewer—as a mode of education and factographic training, specifically adapted to a transnational situation. For the interviewee, it offers training in how to narrate their own life, enabled by the distanced perspective that Tretyakov occupies and can help Deng to occupy. For the reader, it offers information on China, presented in a manner that deliberately eschews exoticism and aims to create a sense of both difference and commensurability. Both processes undeniably express Tretyakov’s pedagogical intent to shape both Deng and the reader. These processes of training, however, also produce forms of agency. Deng develops as a writer with an understanding of the bio-interview genre, while the reader learns to read with an awareness for the constructedness of the text and its origins in a transcultural collaboration. In the book’s final section, Tretyakov’s awareness of his own text’s constructedness indicates a form of retraining for the interviewer, who realizes the limits of his own control over this technique of knowledge production. At all these stages of training, the task is complicated by the transnational, multilinguistic nature of the situation. Den Shi-khua serves both as a technique for producing internationalist knowledge and connection, and as a guide to the obstacles and limits to its own technique. In contrast to the confession, which reshapes the confessant under the controlling authority of the confessor, this collaborative, factographic bio-interview reshapes everyone involved: interviewer, interviewee, and reader.

T RAINING DEN G AS A FAC TOG RA P HER

Gao was already a published writer when he sat down to work with Tretyakov. Den Shi-khua describes him writing “stories for the newspaper Sunday supplements, stories that recall Chekhov, or Gorky, or Tolstoy. [. . .] I am not the only one writing stories; there are several other comrades from Sichuan who dream of becoming Chinese bellettrists, as famous as Gorky or Tolstoy.”89 This passage most likely refers to the Low Grass Society (Qiancao she ⌙㤝⼒), a group of young writers largely of

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Sichuan origin. Gao published his short story “Sinking Their Own Ship” in the Low Grass quarterly in December 1923.90 The story tells of a group of sailors on the Yangtze whose ship is forcibly requisitioned by Beiyang government soldiers. The captain, badly beaten by the soldiers, directs his crew to row into the rocks, reasoning that it is better to “die and take them with us” (tong gui yu jin ৠ⅌ᮐⲵ) rather than submit to violence and exploitation.91 We see much of the soldiers’ violence from the perspective of the captain’s uncomprehending young son, Qiu’er. Echoing Deng’s assessment of his own literary work, one scholar suggests that the story’s use of this estranged perspective betrays the influence of Chekhov and other Russian writers.92 We recall that Gao was also publishing translations from Chekhov around the time his story appeared, a common conduit for literary influence in this period.93 In other words, Gao’s early work as a writer and translator exemplifies the major influence that nineteenth-century Russian realism exerted on the developing Chinese realism of the May Fourth period.94 Indeed, Gao’s story became part of one seminal attempt to canonize the forms of the new realist literature. In 1935, Lu Xun included “Sinking Their Own Ship” in the volume of short stories he edited for Zhao Jiabi’s ten-volume canonical anthology of May Fourth literature, A Compendium of Modern Chinese Literature (Zhongguo xin wenxue daxi Ё೟ᮄ᭛ᅌ໻㋏).95 In his introduction to the volume, Lu Xun praised Gao’s story for evading the sense of hopelessness that characterized the output of the Low Grass society, instead “seeking life in the midst of despair” (juechu qiusheng 㒱໘∖⫳).96 Den Shi-khua does not name this story, but it does describe Deng writing stories and other texts. He composes a eulogistic poem for a Chinese student who committed suicide in France, interweaving classical citations with his own lines.97 He also writes an agitational play about the Nanjing Road massacre of May 30, 1925. Tretyakov, however, disapproves of the play’s lengthy speeches, arguing that “short agitki are better: emotionally charged, explanatory or satirical.”98 For Tretyakov, it seems, Deng is not (yet) the right kind of writer. Indeed, there is considerable irony to the fact that Gao, as a member of the May Fourth generation, turned to nineteenth-century Russian realism as a source of aesthetic modernism and renewal at the very moment when his Russian teacher Tretyakov sought to overturn psychological realism and install the literature of fact in its place.99 Gao’s literary aspirations must be redirected; he must be retrained as a factographer. This dynamic perhaps offers the text’s clearest

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analogy for the Comintern’s relationship with the Guomindang: suspected of pursuing an outmoded form of revolution, yet also seen as redirectable through expert training onto the correct path. Tretyakov devotes considerable space in his introduction to explaining Deng’s inability to write his own life story. This is not merely a question of the ability to write; it is also a question of perception. “To see what surrounds you, to describe one’s own life in detail—this is аn advanced skill (umen’ie vysokoi marki),” he insists in 1927.100 The 1932 introduction adds an additional comment explaining this difficulty: “Things we have grown accustomed to are often invisible (Privychnye veshchi chasto nevidimye).” Fifteen years earlier, in “Art as Device,” Viktor Shklovsky had presented the automatized, habitual behavior of everyday life as leading to an inability to perceive the world: “Automatization consumes objects, clothes, furniture, your wife and your fear of war.”101 Shklovsky argued that art can save us from this state of automatized being by renewing our perception of familiar objects. Tretyakov politicized Shklovsky’s concept of automatization with his 1923 article “Whence and Whither,” which condemns everyday life (byt) as a “deeply reactionary force,” a “structure of feelings and actions that have been automatized through repetition in connection with a specific socio-economic base, entering into habit and attaining remarkable durability.” For Tretyakov, the automatizing force of byt, objectified in “the form of the things with which man surrounds himself,” expresses the power of a particular cultural superstructure to appear natural and immutable.102 From this perspective, Deng’s inability to perceive the everyday life around him becomes a sign of the reactionary hold of tradition and custom, as culturally enshrined forms of habit. Tretyakov’s introduction to Den Shi-khua suggests that this automatization can be overcome through practical experience as a factographic writer. The skill of seeing one’s own life “is acquired through extensive training. Journalism and reportage are the best teachers.”103 Factography also seeks to transform our experience of the world, but does so through the expert perception, selection, and combination of facts. At the time of writing, however, “Deng Shihua did not possess this skill (he will have it once he has written out many pounds of paper).”104 Thus, Deng requires Tretyakov’s help to perceive and narrate his life for a foreign, Soviet audience. Deng/Gao needs to become not merely a factographer, but a factographer who operates effectively across the transcultural networks of internationalism. Tretyakov, in turn, presents himself as

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a mentor whose own experience puts him in a position to help his student acquire this skill. Tretyakov’s introduction offers an example to illustrate Deng’s inability to select the right facts: “He greeted my suggestion to write an accurate biography of a Chinese student with enthusiasm. But alas, the first words that he uttered were: ‘Our family is intelligentsia and petty-bourgeois.’ ”105 Deng’s use of Marxist class categories in his response suggests he already has learned something about Soviet conventions of life narration: indeed, this sounds like a stock answer to the key question of “social status and social origin” found on the forms at Sun Yat-sen University. But Tretyakov’s response to this first statement suggests that he has a different conception of the kind of information the bio-interview should produce. He rejects Deng’s response with a despairing “alas” (uvy); in the later introductions, he explains that such a beginning is “lacking in detail and specificity” (nepodrobno i nekonkretno).106 These standardized class categories are too abstract, too lacking in detail, to tell us anything useful about Deng’s life and world. This response suggests the limits of applying a Marxist lens developed in the USSR as a universal explanatory system that can function across all cultures and societies. What kind of detail and specificity, then, does Tretyakov require from Deng? For an answer, we might turn to the actual beginning of Deng’s narrative. The first chapter, “I,” begins with a translation and analysis of our protagonist’s proper name: Меня зовут Дэн Ши-xуа. Я—Ши-хуа из рода Дэн, что в сычуанской деревне Дэн Цзя-чжень на реке Янцзы. Имя Ши-хуа дал мне при рождении старший дядя, вечно пьяненький философ и неудавшийся мандарин. Ши-хуа значит «Мир Китая». Одновременно это обозначает «Светлый цветок». «Мир Китая», «Светлый цветок»—стрaнные это имена в наши дни, когда в Китае война.107 [My name is Deng Shihua. I am Shihua from the Deng family, which hails from the Sichuan village of Deng Jiazhen on the Yangtze River. The name Shihua was given to me at birth by my uncle, an eternally drunken philosopher and failed mandarin. Shihua means “China’s peace.” At the same time, it means “Bright flower.” “China’s peace,” “Bright flower”—these are strange names in our days, when there is war in China.]

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Rather than begin with class categories familiar to the Soviet reader, the Deng “shaped” by Tretyakov begins by explicating something the book’s audience would almost certainly have experienced as foreign and unreadable: his proper name. Soviet discourse on China in the 1920s often used Chinese names as a synecdoche for the difficulties involved in trying to understand China.108 Den Shi-khua announces its intention to dispel this ignorance by tackling the Chinese name first, rendering it understandable through translation. This opening offers a microcosm for the ethnographic work of the book as a whole: Deng as cultural insider will explain various elements of Chinese culture in terms of how they function, without sacrificing their specificity and difference. A Soviet reader, for example, might wonder at the name’s apparent ability to mean two things, a consequence of the high number of homophones in the Chinese language.109 Next Deng, as narrator, continues his analysis of his own name: we learn that “hua” is his personal name, while “shi” is his generational name, given also to his sister and male cousins, just as “pu” is the generational name of his father and uncles. This juxtaposition of a false start and a true beginning suggests that Tretyakov must teach Deng to offer information about his life that is culturally specific. Knowing that Deng’s family are “intelligentsia and petty bourgeois” will give readers none of the genuine knowledge about China they so vitally need. To produce useful internationalist knowledge, Tretyakov insists, Deng must learn to occupy something like the position of the reader, reviewing his life from an estranged perspective to discern the details that an outsider would want or need to know. At present, he can attain this perspective only through the process of the interview. The unpublished note on “How I Wrote Deng” humorously describes Tretyakov asking Deng an exhausting number of questions to elucidate details that for Deng are invisible because familiar: When he said: “After eating dinner, I went to my room and went to bed.” I would interrupt him with questions: “Did you wash beforehand? Was the water cold or warm, did it come from a basin or a tap? Did you cup your hands, or use a damp flannel? What did you wash? Your face? Head? Neck? Shoulders? In what order did you remove your clothes? Where did you put them? Were the bedclothes already folded back or did you fold them back yourself?

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How is the bed made? How many mattresses? Stuffed with what? How many sheets? What kind of blanket? A down blanket? A quilt? A flannel blanket? Did you pull the covers over your head? Did you sleep peacefully or restlessly? Did you fall out of bed? Did you wake up during the night?110

This list suggests that the bio-interview’s exhaustive quantities of detail on various aspects of home life, farming, ritual, and routine express the textualized outcome of a lengthy process of questioning. Deng never thinks to mention the ceiling on his childhood bed, nor the ink flowers that his mother drew on his palm so that she could check later whether he had been swimming in the river.111 These are precisely the kind of details that appear ordinary to an inhabitant of a culture, but that illustrate its difference to a foreign audience. Although Tretyakov includes “psychoanalyst” among his list of roles, the hidden material he seeks to extract from Deng’s psyche consists less of repressed desires than automatized memories of objects. Thus, Den Shi-khua contains two processes of education, divided, to use the terminology of Émile Benveniste, between the level of utterance and the level of enunciation.112 At the level of utterance, in the text, we have a narrative of Deng’s progressive enlightenment out of the mists of tradition toward modern, and ultimately Marxist, forms of social knowledge. At the level of enunciation, in the series of oral interviews that generate the book, Deng receives practical training from Tretyakov in the modes of perception and narration necessary to produce factual literature. These two processes appear to mirror one another. Just as the interviews train Deng to de-automatize, to see what surrounds him as another would see it, so the educational narrative of his life grants Deng a new perspective on the traditional culture that as a child he accepted without question as the only reality. In addition, these parallel narratives of education suggest parallel allegorical readings. Deng’s educational trajectory through life is presented to us as an ethnographic allegory: a metonymic exemplar of the Chinese intelligentsia’s passage into intellectual and political modernity. Deng’s training as a factographic writer through his work with Tretyakov, meanwhile, offers a political allegory for the Comintern’s relationship with the Guomindang. As we shall see, however, both of these allegories are compromised by the text’s inconclusive conclusion. At the end of the book, we encounter the possibility that Deng/Gao may be exercising a

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different kind of skill: the ability to select and conceal information in order to present Tretyakov with the right kind of narrative. His experience with revolutionary models of life narration may have enabled Gao to develop forms of discursive agency that exceed his teacher’s control.

TRA IN IN G THE ACTIVE REA DER: T RANS LATION, AL IEN ATION , P ER SP EC T I V ES

A combination of control and agency also characterizes the way that Den Shi-khua seeks to work on its readers. The reader must be trained to read in a certain way. At the same time, that very training equips the reader to read the text in a way that questions its claims to truth. This training of the active reader emerges with particular clarity through the peculiar translational dynamic that shapes Den Shi-khua. The bio-interview partially endorses the prescriptions of contemporary translation theorists, such as Venuti: the reader remains constantly aware that this Russian text has emerged through a process of translation and that behind it there stands a foreign context with a different linguistic and cultural life. Tretyakov’s aversion to exoticism, however, leads the text to embrace certain forms of domestication that suggest commensurabilities at the level of everyday life. By shifting between translatability and untranslatability, Den Shi-khua obliges the reader to relate to China through a complex combination of similarity and difference. We must not see China as exotic, but nor should we go all the way to seeing China as Russia in repeat. We have to find a balance between the two, commensurability yet singularity. The very unevenness of this translational tactic points toward the second key task in the training of the text’s reader. Readers must not be allowed to lapse into pure absorption in the text, as they might when reading a fictional narrative. Instead, they must always remain aware of the contingencies of truth production and the constructedness of the text in front of them. Russian and Soviet discussions of translation, in line with the wider discourse on translation in European intellectual history, coalesced around the twin poles of literal, “word for word” translation versus a “free,” “artistic” mode of translation that captures the “sense” of the original.113 When the review in Oktiabr’ condemned Den Shi-khua as an excessively

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free translation, it echoed Kornei Chukovsky’s warnings in The Art of Translation (1930) on the dangers of otsebiatina (literally “something from oneself ”)—a translation style that engulfs the voice of the source text in the translator’s own idiom.114 In his own note “On Translation” (“O perevode”), published while work was in progress on Den Shi-khua, Tretyakov triangulates this binary to fit the fact that he approaches translation not as a relationship of greater or lesser fidelity between two literary texts, but rather as a relationship between two living social contexts. Tretyakov suggests that translating between differing cultural practices of everyday life (byt) tends to produce an exotic, distancing effect by estranging the word from its contextual function. “Exoticism,” he argues, “is precisely the transmission of the everyday as something unusual, its estrangement [ostranenie].”115 This is the inverse of the technique of estrangement invoked earlier to help Deng narrate his own life. Although Deng must be estranged from byt to narrate it properly, the reader must not experience estrangement when receiving these same accounts of byt. To avoid this exoticization, the translator should try to translate in terms of concrete social function, not abstract correlations of meaning: “Not ‘word for word’ [doslovnost’] and not semantic ‘sense for sense’ [dosmyslennost’] but social-everyday ‘significance for significance’ [doznachnost’]—that is where the value of a translation lies.” By pursuing the factographic reformulation of the form-content binary as a triad of form-material-function, Tretyakov arrives at something like the notion of “functional equivalence” formulated for contemporary translation studies by Eugene Nida. This translation strategy seeks to ensure that a text produces the same social response in both source and target cultures.116 Wherever possible, Tretyakov argues, translation should match standard everyday terms (bytovye standarty) from the foreign language to equivalent standards in the target language. “Spasibo,” for example, should not be translated into Chinese as “may God save you,” but simply as “thank you”—it is the term’s communicative function, not its literal semantic content, that needs to be translated. Some terms, however, cannot be translated by a functional equivalent. A Chinese person would have no functional equivalent for the Russian term bublik and instead would have to resort to a description of the unknown object: “dry rings of unfermented dough covered with salt crystals.” These untranslatable terms express the reality of cultural difference: “The unconvertible

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remainder will then be that specificity that distinguishes the cultures.”117 This remainder is especially great when the socioeconomic structures of the two cultures differ radically, for example when dealing with different stages of development: “Council of workers’ deputies” cannot be translated by “guild.”118 This example suggests that cultural difference can be understood as temporal distance within a unifying model of historical development. Two cultures that have passed through the same developmental stages, by this logic, will be more “translatable” to each other. In the terms set out by this short note, the translation practice deployed in Den Shi-khua positions China as both different and commensurable, shuttling constantly between the two poles of domestication and foreignness. In the early chapters, a large number of Chinese terms describing the world of Deng’s childhood are given in the original with Russian translations. Although these translations are straightforward, the retention of the Chinese word in the text asserts a degree of residual specificity. So when Deng describes his childhood home, we learn that litan (litang ⾂ූ) means “prayer hall” (molitvennyi zal), and the shen’-kan (shenkan ⼲啩) is the family altar or household shrine.119 Other translations engage in the mode of explanatory description that Tretyakov’s note recommends for moments of genuine cultural difference: thus a ma-gua (侀㻖) is a “shiny black satin vest with long sleeves that cover the hands.”120 When Deng’s grandmother tells a fairy-tale, however, we read an entirely Russian skazka: Baba-Yaga lures disobedient children into bed and eats them. Not a word in this skazka is conveyed in Chinese.121 Yet a page later, when the same grandmother teaches young Deng a song, we are given the text of the song in transliterated Chinese, with a parallel translation in Russian.122 These various translation strategies alternate throughout the text. Sometimes we receive the Chinese word or phrase in the original with a Russian translation; sometimes a Russian term appears as equivalent to an absent Chinese original. When Deng witnesses an execution, the victims are named as tu-fei (ೳࣾ), translated as “bandits”—but their leader is an ataman, calling into comparison the Russian image of the Cossacks.123 Later, during Deng’s stay in the Buddhist monastery, several Chinese terms are offered with Russian translations: si-fu (shifu ᏿⠊, translated as nastavnik, spiritual mentor), ho-shen (heshang ੠ᇮ, equated to monakh, monk). Other terms, however, are imported directly from the Russian

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Orthodox tradition, including molitva (prayer), bogomol’tsy (pilgrims), nastoiatel’ (senior priest), bibliia (bible), and monastyr’ (monastery).124 The critical intention is clear: at the very moment that Deng is experiencing his “first lesson in socialism,” these lazy, venal Buddhist monks are to be identified with the degenerate priests of Bolshevik propaganda. This translation strategy has multiple effects. On the one hand, the presence of Chinese terms disrupts the Russian language of the text with these tangible reminders of cultural difference. On the other hand, when Chinese byt can be seamlessly translated into the everyday language of prerevolutionary Russia, the sense grows that China, for all its cultural distinctiveness, has embarked on the same historical path as Russia. At these moments, absolute cultural difference is translated into relative developmental distance. By maintaining this double translation strategy, Den Shi-khua grants its reader a heightened awareness of both the possibilities and limitations of intercultural translation. Besides this constant interplay between commensurability and difference, this fluctuating translation practice constantly calls attention to the text as a translation. Who performed these acts of translation? Where does the agency for translation lie? Tretyakov claims that Deng’s knowledge of Russian was weak. We know, however, that Gao Shihua worked as a translator for Soviet advisers to Feng Yuxiang in 1925 and also published several translations from Russian. Some sources suggest that he served as a translator for other students at Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow.125 Conversely, Tretyakov’s note on translation acknowledges his own limitations in that role: “I am currently writing a ‘bio-interview’— the life of a Chinese person, my student, a really existing human being. It is very difficult for me, as I do not know Chinese everyday life well. Consequently: 1) it is difficult for me to correct my student’s responses, and 2) it is difficult to establish that a translation from Chinese everyday life into our own matches ‘significance for significance’ [doznachnost’].”126 Translation, then, would seem to be an area in which we must assume a high degree of collaboration. Perhaps the translation principles expressed in “On Translation” should be seen as emerging from the collaboration between Gao and Tretyakov, rather than ascribing them to a single author. Indeed, Deng regularly steps forward as translator within the text. When Deng is hauled up before a judge for causing trouble at school,

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he tries to translate the judge’s clothes into familiar terms: “The judge is wearing a black silk ma-gua and a grey robe underneath. Translated into the language of European clothing this means a black morning coat with striped trousers.”127 Here Deng echoes “On Translation,” seeking out equivalent “everyday standards” in parallel clothing cultures that fulfill the same function of signifying formality and social rank. When the parents of a prospective bride reject Deng as fiancé with the words “Our daughter is used to eating every day,” Deng feels the need to offer a functional translation of this colloquial phrase: “In your language, in Russian, this phrase should be translated as: ‘Here is God, and there is the door [Vot Bog, a vot porog].’ ”128 Again this fits with the advice in “On Translation” for minimizing exoticism. But can we accept that an interlocutor with limited Russian could readily produce such colloquial equivalents? Or should we see these statements in Deng’s narratorial voice as the outcome of a collaborative process of translation enacted together by Gao and Tretyakov, a process whose precise parameters we as readers are unable to reconstruct?129 This is just one way in which the process of reading the biointerview constantly pushes the reader to think about the multiple layers of mediation that stand between Deng’s “real” voice and the textual voice recounting the story we read. Tretyakov deploys a range of literary techniques identified by the Russian Formalists to pursue his factographic ends. If ostranenie serves to grant Deng an estranged perspective on his own life, the constant laying-bare of the device of the text (obnazhenie priema) reminds its readers of the complex process of its production. Moreover, the confusion of voices and even temporalities creates moments of narrative difficulty (zatrudnenie) that prevent the reader from fully engaging with the text as a source of emotional or aesthetic pleasure. Instead, various examples of what Bertold Brecht was to call “alienation effects” jolt the reader back into a conscious awareness that we are reading a narrative constructed by Tretyakov from a series of unrecoverable interviews.130 Take the fact that Deng’s narrative proceeds entirely in the present tense. This might seem to be an example of a stylistic choice that strives for maximum transparency and immediacy. Rather than situating Deng as narrator in the moment of enunciation in 1926, recounting his past

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life to Tretyakov in the past tense, the use of the present tense locates both narrator and protagonist within the time and space of the past he is recounting. The reader experiences Deng’s life as he lives it. Certain moments break this totality of present experience, however, to remind the reader of the interview situation and the artificiality of the present tense. For example, in the second chapter, Deng describes his home life in Sichuan: Вот сейчас май, у вас в Москве холодно, над Чистыми прудами идет снег, а у нас в Сычуане хозяйки рвут с желтых гряд и кладут на стол свежие огурцы.131 [Now it is May. In your Moscow it is cold, snow is falling on Chistye prudy. But in our Sichuan the farmers are tearing fresh cucumbers from their yellow beds and setting them on the table.]

The present tense, the deictic vot and the temporal marker seichas indicate the narrative time as Deng’s childhood and the place as Sichuan. But u vas refers to the direct speech situation of 1926, indicating Tretyakov and, by extension, the reader, who in reading the text steps into the position of listener. Deng also deploys knowledge of Moscow, its geography and its weather, that his childhood self could not possibly have possessed. Later, Deng compares the process of learning to write Chinese characters to a steam engine dragging itself along a railway one sleeper at a time. He admits, however, that the comparison is an interpellation from later experience: “I had never seen steam engines at that time and I knew nothing about them. I say ‘steam engine’ and ‘sleeper’ just for the sake of imagery.”132 Such moments prevent the present-tense narrative of Deng’s life from creating the impression of total immediacy. We shuttle instead between two present times, both designated by the present tense: the present of the unfolding life story (the time of utterance) and the present of the interview (the time of enunciation). The footnotes that Tretyakov occasionally inserts into the course of Deng’s narrative also maintain our awareness of the text’s mediation. Often these affirm the legitimacy of the bio-interview technique precisely by casting doubt on the reliability of Deng’s narrative. When Deng

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describes an essay that he wrote in school, Tretyakov interjects that Deng’s memory may have been affected by the passage of time, as the theme and exposition do not seem to coincide.133 Elsewhere, Tretyakov corrects Deng’s dating of a protest to the summer, insisting that other sources put it in January.134 Tretyakov is also capable of criticizing his interviewee’s objectivity, as when he notes that Deng’s hatred for the man who sought to execute his father allows him to quote an unrealistic figure for the productivity of that man’s land.135 Other footnotes support statements that may seem incredible. When Deng reports protestors in the post–May Fourth boycotts “crying with rage” beside bonfires of Japanese goods, Tretyakov feels obliged to footnote that several other young Chinese people have told him of such tears.136 When Deng gives the number of guests at his wedding as 1,600, Tretyakov intervenes to confirm that this figure’s credibility has been verified, adding: “I draw attention to this as an aesthetically dangerous instance that induces thoughts about fabrication [vydumka].”137 Some footnotes directly invoke the interview scene: when Deng mentions his recently deceased mother, a footnote tells us that at this moment in his account, the narrator’s eyes glistened with tears.138 These footnotes prevent the reader from entering into Deng’s narrative as an absorbing fictional world. We must not forget the multiple stages through which the narrative has been composed, from the original interviews to Tretyakov’s process of shaping and editing. Tretyakov’s most arresting alienation effect, however, comes with his own appearance in the narrative. Deng has reached his third year in the Russian section. The students are awaiting the appearance of their new professor, “Te Ti-ko,” recently arrived from Moscow. They are nervous; they know he speaks “not a word of Chinese,” and they worry they will not be able to understand his lectures. Eventually, an “unusually tall bald man” appears in the classroom and, after an overly fast start, finds a speaking speed that his students can understand.139 Soon they warm to him, nicknaming him “Te Chzhu-gan’,” “Te Bamboo Pole,” in honor of his height.140 How long does it take for the reader to realize that “Te Ti-ko” is Tretyakov? If they do not decode his Chinese name straight away, perhaps they will guess by the time he starts telling his students about the Wanxian incident of 1924—the event dramatized in Roar, China!, which had played in Moscow by the time Den Shi-khua appeared. Or perhaps

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they will recognize the LEF positions on art that he recites to his students in comically delayed classroom Russian: Рассказывая, Тэ часто начинает торопиться, но тут же, заметив морщины напряжения между нашими бровями, одергивает себя. —Ни о-дно про-из-ве-де-ние ис-кус-ства не бы-вает бес-партий-ным. Каж-дая ме-ло-дия . . . непонятно? Песня . . . музыка . . . каждый актер, каждая стро-ка, всякая кар-ти-на про-де-лы-ва-ет ра-бо-ту . . . непонятно? Действует. . .  служит. В интересах . . . на пользу . . . ка-кого ни-будь клас-са.141 [When talking, Te often begins to speed up, but as soon as he notices the frowns of concentration between our eyebrows, he restrains himself. “No ar-tis-tic work can be without party af-fil-i-a-tion. Ev-ery me-lo-dy . . . you don’t understand? Songs . . . music . . . every ac-tor, every line, any pain-ting con-ducts its work . . . you don’t understand? acts . . . serves. In the interests. . . . to the ad-van-tage . . . of some class or o-ther.”]

The advocate of the literature of fact who spoke to us in the introduction and reminds us of his presence in the footnotes appears from a different angle, filtered through the perspective of Deng. Two chapters later, the alienation effect deepens when Tretyakov takes over the narration. Deng is credited with the initiative for this move, remarking that Tretyakov can narrate the 1925 segment of the story because he observed Deng’s life up close during this time. This staged transfer of narratorial power, however, has something of the quality of a wink to the audience. Because we were told at the start that Tretyakov has given form and shape to Deng’s narrative, we may read ironically statements such as, “Let Deng himself be silent, and let Professor Te Ti-ko tell Deng’s story.”142 Indeed, there follows a parodic reenactment of the beginning of Deng’s narrative: an explanation of how Tretyakov’s name was translated into Chinese. Tretyakov explains that his surname rendered phonetically in Chinese would require eight hieroglyphs and would fail the test of nonestranged translation, becoming “cumbersome, pretentious, incomprehensible, like the name of a joint-stock company.”143 Instead, three characters are chosen that approximate phonetically his

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surname while keeping within the standard form of Han Chinese names (typically two or three characters): Мне опытный китайский книжник подобрал Тэ Ти-ко. В переводе это значит—«железо, острый, победить», благозвучно, поэтично, подходяще. Ти-ко—мои имена, Тэ—моя фамилия. Обращаясь ко мне, зовут— Тэ сянь-шен (мистер Тэ) или Лао Тэ (господин Тэ).144 [An experienced Chinese book-lover chose Te Ti-ko for me. In translation, it means “iron, sharp, conquer”: harmonious, poetic, appropriate. Ti-ko is my given name, Te my surname. When people address me, they say Te sian’-shen (Mr Te) or Lao Te (Te, sir).]

This clearly echoes the translational act that began Deng’s narrative, only in reverse: the Russian writer, whose project as a whole is to translate Deng into Russian, explains how he was translated (by yet another translator) into Chinese. Furthermore, this rendering overlaps but does not quite coincide with the Sinified version of Tretyakov’s name used by Gao and other Chinese sources, which is Tie Jieke (䨉᥋‫)ܟ‬.145 The first character, tie (䨉), means “iron,” and the third, ke (‫)ܟ‬, can mean “to subdue” or “to overthrow.” The second is more troublesome: jie (᥋) means “quick” or “nimble,” which is perhaps not too far from ostryi in the sense of lively or acute, although phonetically ti and jie are quite different. Does this represent a different rendering of the name by the anonymous bibliophile? Did Tretyakov misremember, or change the name to sound more “harmonious, poetic, appropriate”—and, to a Russian reader, closer to the original? Such questions cannot be answered, but they serve to remind us of the complex processes of translation and mediation that lie behind the creation of this text. These switches of narrator also remind us that the bio-interview has been shaped by two people who do not have identical perspectives on the world. We experience Tretyakov as the character “Te Ti-ko,” filtered through Deng’s narratorial perspective. Moments later, Tretyakov becomes a narrator whose perspective presents Deng, our erstwhile narrator, as a character. Deng did not catch his eye at first, we are told; he “holds himself aloof, a little cool, completely unobtrusive.”146 When Tretyakov visits

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Deng’s dormitory in the company of some Russian women who examine and touch all his things, Tretyakov senses in Deng’s smile “restrained pity, perhaps semi-contemptuous, towards a breed of people who have not been brought up properly.”147 Exposing once more the problematics of cross-cultural interaction, these hints of aristocratic hauteur also recall earlier intimations of Deng’s class-based pride, long since submerged in his own narrative beneath nationalist outrage and revolutionary enthusiasm. They disrupt the book’s linear progress from traditional child to revolutionary adult, interrupting the master plot with residual complications of class allegiance and cultural difference. These problems return in the text’s epilogue, where the question of perspective forestalls any attempt to reach a finalized portrayal of Deng.

THE L IMITS OF AUTH ORI T Y

Our perspectives on Deng multiply in a “postscript” to the text, which first appeared in the 1930 edition, dated January 17, 1929. Immediately before this postscript, Deng’s final chapter gives his impressions of Moscow in rushed, note-like form. “My time is running out,” Deng explains: horrified by Chiang Kai-shek’s turn against the workers and Communists in the Shanghai massacre of April 1927, he must return to China to consult with his father.148 Deng’s narrative ends with uncertainty: waiting to depart for China, he “cannot name the date nor hour of departure.”149 Tretyakov returns as narrator in the postscript to tell us that Deng has gone: “One day Shihua did not come. Nor the next day, nor the day after that, nor even a week later. I began to understand that he had left.”150 Deng slips out of the narrative in the chapter break between these two utterances. As Tretyakov remarks in the 1927 introduction, “He left Moscow for China unnoticed and without a sound, just as he used to enter my room in Beijing without a sound, stepping softly on his cloth shoes.”151 A last reported comment from Deng presents our departing protagonist as a committed, if naïve, revolutionary who hopes to salvage the alliance between Soviet Russia and the Chinese Nationalist Revolution: “Chiang Kai-shek has betrayed us, but there is one person who will never betray the revolution or Moscow. That person is Wang Jingwei.”152

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Tretyakov adds laconically that Wang betrayed the revolution sixty days after Deng left Moscow. This will not be our final impression of Deng, however. Instead, the postscript abruptly switches to an interview conducted after Deng’s departure with a different interlocutor, named Tin Iuin-pin (in pinyin, probably Ding Yunping). Tin first appeared in the chapters narrated from Tretyakov’s perspective, as another of his students from Beijing. The name “Tin Iuin-pin,” however, does not appear on the list of Beijing students preserved in Tretyakov’s archive, although “Gao Shi-khua” and all the other students named in Den Shi-khua are present.153 Gao does mention a fellow student named Ding Wen’an (ϕ᭛ᅝ) who followed him to Moscow, and it may be that Tretyakov once again changed the name to protect his source.154 Whether invented or disguised, Tin’s story provides the Communist conversion narrative that Deng cannot ultimately supply. Tin first appears in the Beijing chapters narrated from Tretyakov’s perspective. A shy, nervous student, terrified of his professor, he nevertheless approaches Tretyakov one day to share “his greatest joy”: he has joined the Communist Party. Driven into hysterical fever at Sun Yat-sen’s funeral, Tin becomes an uncompromising anti-imperialist, banging a large pole on the table at a meeting to reject the notion of any compromise with foreign powers.155 He reappears in the postscript as a “reforged” socialist hero: “This is Tin Iuin-pin. His story is a complex tale of campaigns, camps, escapes, conspiracies. A man who has been thoroughly flattened out in the rollers of wars and uprisings. He is calm, his shoulders have broadened, his speech is assured.”156 In a brief interview, Tin describes the raid on the Soviet Embassy in Beijing, the execution of Li Dazhao, and the current situation in his home province of Hunan. Deng’s status as the sole provider of “raw material,” the only prism through which to view China, is thus disrupted by the appearance of an alternative source. Indeed, the credits to the 1930 edition list “Tin Iuin-pin” below “Den Shikhua” as responsible for “factual material” (fakticheskii material).157 Most strikingly, Tin’s testimony outlines a very different version of our protagonist to the committed revolutionary who left for China. Tin’s first recollection of his friend disparages his political credentials: “He had no interest in politics. He loved art. He set up a dance group and danced very well himself.”158 This charge is not entirely new: Deng earlier reported that the “political” students at Sun Yat-sen University would mock him

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and his fellow “literati” for turning to the cultural sections of the newspaper before the section on foreign affairs.159 Tretyakov’s reaction, however, directs our attention to the limitations of his bio-interview technique: “But why didn’t he say a word to me about this?” Tin replies: “He was ashamed to admit to such trifling pursuits: a revolutionary, and suddenly, dancing?”160 Back in the Beijing chapters, we read a letter from Deng in broken Russian asking Tretyakov to find the students a Russian dance instructor. There, Deng claimed he was not a dance enthusiast and was merely asking on behalf of some female students. One of Tretyakov’s editorial footnotes, however, warns the reader that “here Deng Shihua sinned against truth, as the reader will see in due course.”161 This revelation of Deng’s capacity for lies and concealment may appear more comic than catastrophic. Nonetheless, at the very end of this long text, we are returned to the question of how exactly these “facts” have been produced. What else might Deng have lied about to convince Tretyakov of his credibility as a typical Chinese “revolutionary”? Next, Tin steps into the role of anketshchik to provide his own assessment (kharakteristika) of his friend: “Deng is an anarchist intellectual. Modest. Generous. Blunt. Direct. Short-tempered. Unmercenary. For him, the person is more important than the deed. Anyone grubby getting into the party can spoil the whole party in his eyes.”162 This judgment seems to undermine the road to political consciousness described in Deng’s narrative, which saw his naïve enthusiasm for anarchism overturned by Marxist instruction at Beijing University. In place of the militant defender of the revolution who returned to China in outrage at Chiang’s coup, Tin portrays Deng as an intellectual idealist, closer to the aloof figure described through Tretyakov’s classroom eyes. This figure may not turn against the Communists, but he is “likely to stand to one side.”163 Critics of Den Shikhua have suspected Tretyakov of fashioning Deng into the Communist he wanted him to be.164 Tin’s assessment, however, opens up an inverted reading. Perhaps Deng was simply parroting Tretyakov’s own lectures back to him, turning his textual self into the Communist he never was? Seeking to reassert some authority by proving his insight into Deng’s psychology, Tretyakov suggests this aloofness may have biographical origins: “But perhaps this mistrust was formed by personal experience. Deng is lonely. He loves nobody.” “Not true,” Tin shoots back. “He has a fiancée, his second cousin. . . an artist. . . wealthy. . . in Beijing. . .

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She used to stay in his room, and on those occasions, he would not unbolt the door straight away when you knocked.”165 Who is this cousin-bride? Not, it seems, the woman he was forced to marry and later divorced; nor the childhood sweetheart whom he lost because his father disapproved of her family.166 This seems to be a relationship that took place while Deng was a student in Beijing: a period he recounts in detail without ever mentioning a new fiancée. Indeed, in the chapter entitled “Wife,” the voice of Deng as present narrator flatly claims that “even now it seems to me that I have never loved any woman, nor has any woman ever loved me.”167 The revelation of this concealed relationship changes our sense of the power dynamic between Tretyakov and Deng, suggesting an alternative account of the text’s creation. Perhaps this aspiring writer has consciously composed his life story to fit the standard template of a road to consciousness? Indeed, Tretyakov’s note on “How I Wrote Deng” accuses his interlocutor of inventing himself as the hero of his own life story: “Deng heroicized himself by portraying a man whose capacity to love had been mercilessly stamped out by his environment. But this was not true.”168 Tretyakov also concedes that Deng retained areas of interior life that the bio-interview method could not directly access, forcing his interviewer to consult other sources on “a whole range of questions concerning the intimate sides (personal psychology) of his biography.”169 The symbol for these realms of “personal psychology” becomes the locked door, behind which Gao Shihua conceals the parts of his life he does not want ascribed to his literary alter ego, Deng. Tin Iuin-pin’s contribution stages a familiar contemporary scenario of judgment: an unmasking. Halfin describes how autobiographies were reviewed before a panel of judges, who often supplemented the information contained in the autobiography with the testimony of acquaintances. Such testimony could undermine an individual’s attempts at self-presentation, revealing a sinister nontransparency.170 Tretyakov frames Tin’s assessment of Deng as that of “a party member [talking] about a nonparty member,” thereby placing Tin in a position of judgment over Deng’s inner purity.171 Clearly, we can read Tin’s appearance as a compensatory gesture of sorts, leaving the reader with the sense that the Communist cause in China is not lost even if Deng and the Guomindang may be. A difference remains, however, between the bio-interview and the confessional process described by Halfin. Although this final scene resembles

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an unmasking, it leads to no final judgment on the trajectory of Deng’s life story. Instead, the narrative ends with a series of speculations on Deng’s fate, offered from a position of ignorance. Tretyakov has heard nothing from Deng for two years, does not know where he is, and can only offer suggestions. Perhaps he is publishing, perhaps teaching, perhaps working as a clerk for Feng Yuxiang. Perhaps he has given his road-to-consciousness narrative a suitable ending of conversion or sacrifice: Maybe he has looked directly into the cleft face of the Guomindang and has become a Communist. Perhaps, like his father, who once roamed the countryside with his insurgent divisions, he is waging partisan warfare around the populous villages of Hunan and Jiangxi. Or maybe his shaven head looks with unblinking gaze through the bars of a bamboo cage above one of China’s market squares.172

The concluding image of the shaven head with unblinking eyes suggests the custom (then still current in China) of displaying the heads of executed criminals in hanging cages. This grisly end to Deng’s participation in China’s internal politics echoes the sacrificial endings of contemporary adventure narratives, but it does so as only one of many possibilities. Likewise, the suggestion that Deng may have become a Communist sounds strange alongside the revised introduction to the 1930 edition, which states bluntly (as noted) that Deng “was not a Communist” and ascribes this to the poisonous hereditary influence of his father’s “Guomindangism.”173 By the time we reach the postscript of the same edition—dated January  17, 1929, two months after the introduction’s date of November 15, 1928—Deng’s father serves not as the source of some ineradicable Nationalist taint, but rather as the model for Deng’s partisan activity as a reborn Communist. Deng could not imagine himself as the servant of the masses, so Tretyakov imagines it for him. Besides the conflicting perspectives offered by his interviewees, Tretyakov’s own authorial voice produces contradictions and multiple possibilities for the world outside the narrative. As it turns out, one of Tretyakov’s guesses about Gao’s fate proved correct: he spent the 1930s working for Feng Yuxiang in various administrative capacities.174 Although his biographers emphasize his hostility to Chiang Kai-shek and his attempts to facilitate alliances between Feng and

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the Chinese Communists, it seems clear that he never joined the CCP before 1949. After the Communist victory, Gao transitioned into the administrative structures of the new state, becoming deputy secretary of the South-West Military-Political Committee in 1950. He continued to publish in the 1950s, but as a translator rather than a literary realist: his translations from Russian included volumes on Belarus (1954), kolkhoz property law (1956), and Soviet Azerbaijan (1957).175 His past caught up with him, however. During the anti-Rightist campaign of 1957, a cluster of articles appeared in Sichuan ribao (Sichuan Daily) highlighting Gao’s background in the landowner class and accusing him of conspiring to incite discord between the party and intellectuals.176 Gao published a “self-criticism,” admitting his guilt with an echo of Tretyakov’s kharakteristika: “Although I was educated by Soviet professors,” he wrote, “I was limited by my class essence, and I did not join the practical revolutionary struggle.”177 He was punished with demotion and loss of salary. He appears to have suffered worse during the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966–1976): his biography states only that he experienced “severe persecution” during this period.178 The party issued a resolution on his political rehabilitation in 1979, and Gao Xingya died the following year, in December 1980. It seems unlikely that he knew of the execution of his erstwhile collaborator, Sergei Tretyakov, in 1937, or his rehabilitation in the 1950s. He did continue to write, although he does not seem to have written the continuation of his own life story that Tretyakov had hoped for. Instead, he became a biographer: Gao’s biography of Feng Yuxiang was published posthumously by Beijing Publishing House in 1982.179 Gao remained subject, in other words, to the kinds of “unmasking” that Tin’s evidence performs. Within Den Shi-khua, however, this final moment of doubt serves not a moral but an epistemological function. Tin’s intervention suggests facts are not fixed, that they are subject to revision and confirmation—as Leona Toker puts it, deniability is a feature that distinguishes documentary prose from fiction.180 What Tin’s evidence actually unmasks, then, is the constructed nature of Deng’s road-to-consciousness narrative. The interview scenario, so redolent of contemporary technologies of the self and their demand for paradigmatic autobiographies, has produced a life narrative that fits the dominant norms of the times. We are given no assurance, however, that this process of self-narration has actually transformed the subject. Instead, we are presented with the possibility

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that Deng has spun Tretyakov a story by manipulating his acquired sense of the genre. Clearly, we can read this as an allegory for the failure of Soviet influence to shape the Guomindang into an obedient internationalist subject. However, the refusal of final judgment places the reader in a more complex position. By declining to privilege Tin’s testimony as the ultimate arbiter, Tretyakov ensures that any attempt to form a final reading of Deng’s character must end with the same uncertainties as the text. We cannot make any conclusive judgments about Deng’s psychology, nor about whether Deng or Tretyakov is the “real” author of the text. The introduction and conclusion contradict each other; the voices of Deng, Tin, and Tretyakov contradict each other, too. No single authorial intention comes through that might communicate the “meaning” of the bio-narrative to the reader, in the sense of a conclusive judgment on the biographical subject. Instead, the message must be found in this contradictory, fragmented form, and the device that it lays bare. Den Shi-khua asks its reader to understand the bio-interview as a process of truth production that must remain openended, always subject to skepticism and revision. This process depends on the intersubjective relationship between individuals, who possess their own agendas and their own agency. But we cannot access any truth about interiority from the text: “personal psychology” exists, but it is not the business of factographic literature to express it. It remains behind the locked door, inaccessible to the clichés of psychological fiction and distinct from the learned narratives of consciousness imposed by Soviet institutions. Den Shi-khua begins as an expression of the hegemonic ambitions of the Soviet project in China. Tretyakov’s introduction asserts the authority to shape Deng’s fragmented evidence into a life story that will give his readers vital knowledge of China while training Deng as a factographic writer. The book ends with Tretyakov’s own retraining, as his method reveals to him the limits of his authority. The poet-ethnographer who once yelled on behalf of the Chinese is reduced to confused ignorance as his Chinese informants take over the narration of their own and each other’s lives. None of the tools that earlier guaranteed the authority of Tretyakov’s perspective on China—his periods of presence and observation in Beijing, his firsthand bodily experience of revolution, his sympathy, his grasp of Marxist doctrine—can help to fix Deng as an object of knowledge. Meanwhile, the writer who once advocated for artists to

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become “psycho-engineers” proves unable to shape his former student’s soul, or to direct how he will use the life-writing skills he develops during their encounter.181 This is not to deny that Tretyakov understood writing as a tendentious, politically engaged, “operative” intervention into social reality. His own statement to his students in Den Shi-khua affirms that any text operates “in the interests of some class or other.” Yet the collaborative dynamic of Den Shi-khua, rendered explicit to the reader through its montage composition, reveals Tretyakov’s position as a position, one that his collaborators do not necessarily share. China’s journey to socialist consciousness is not the inevitable truth of history: it may be the truth that Tretyakov endorses, but in the wake of the 1927 crisis, it is no longer a truth that can be exclusively and unambiguously affirmed. The centripetal authority of a hegemonic, Soviet-centric narrative of historical development becomes fragmented in a text that remains stubbornly insistent on its collaborative, dialogic origins. Ironically, Den Shi-khua exhibits many of the qualities that Tretyakov’s contemporary Mikhail Bakhtin defined as essentially novelistic: a multiplicity of voices operating in a “zone of maximal contact with the present (with contemporary reality) in all its open-endedness [nezavershennosti].”182 The difference lies in the fact that Tretyakov’s factographic antinovel affirms its status as the imperfect trace of a dialogical encounter between concrete human beings. Through its adherence to the principles of its own construction, Den Shi-khua offers a glimpse of a pluralist model of internationalism involving encounters between individuals who see the world from different perspectives; through different historical, cultural, and linguistic lenses; and with different intentions. Tretyakov and Gao’s bio-interview suggests that a truly internationalist aesthetics, one founded on dialogue across cultures rather than the decisive authority of the Soviet position, must necessarily be open-ended and incomplete, a competing interplay of perspectives and narratives instead of a decisive master plot.

EPILOGUE International Literature, National Form, and Missed Connections

I

n 1929, the Comintern activist Oskar Tarkhanov published Chinese Novellas (Kitaiskie novelly), an account of his experiences in China. Tarkhanov, whose real name was Sergei Petrovich Razumov, had worked on the staff of Mikhail Borodin, the Comintern’s chief agent in Guangzhou during the alliance with the Guomindang. Tarkhanov conducted research on rural life in Guanxi province, wrote a number of articles on contemporary China, and traveled north to Wuhan with the Guomindang’s Northern Expedition of 1926–1927. In the summer of 1927, when it became clear that the Guomindang’s turn against the Comintern was permanent, Tarkhanov escaped with Borodin back to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), crossing the Gobi Desert by car.1 His Chinese Novellas, published under yet another pseudonym, Oskar Erdberg, went through three editions in Russian from 1929 to 1932; was translated into German, English, and Esperanto; and earned a mention by Karl Radek at the First Soviet Writers’ Congress in 1934.2 Based on personal experience—each “novella” ends with a precise location and date—Chinese Novellas performs several familiar moves. The book’s opening scene derides the blinkered vision of a group of Western Orientalists sitting in the smoking room of a plush Beijing hotel. These men “speak of resurrections, transformations and metamorphoses in the myths of Buddhist and Daoist legend, so as not to see those

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transformations that are happening in front of their eyes in China.”3 By contrast, the Comintern agent’s vision—fortified by a reading of Lenin’s “Awakening of Asia”—sets off on a picaresque journey through contemporary China, unmasking at every turn the oppressed semicolonial reality that lies behind exotic stereotype.4 Writing in the wake of the Guomindang’s turn against the Communists, however, gives Tarkhanov’s account a new double task: to expose the villainy of the Nationalists and to salvage the prospects of revolutionary hope from the jaws of defeat. The final story in Chinese Novellas, “The Red Scarf ” (“Krasnyi sharf ”), charts the flight of Borodin and his companions out of China. The story enacts a symbolic mourning for the catastrophic loss of 1927. The defeated revolutionaries journey north past the melancholy ruins of decayed empires: the fragments of the Great Wall, the vanished splendor of Mongol palaces. In the depths of the Gobi Desert, the “kingdom of death,” they bury Adolphe, a French Communist and wireless operator killed in an accident with one of the cars. Adolphe’s internationalist revolutionary biography offers a catalogue of defeats, from the Marseilles docks through the Hamburg uprising to the 1927 disaster in China. As the sand falls on Adolphe’s grave, however, a caravan approaches across the dunes: a group of Chinese students returning from the Communist University for the Workers of the East (KUTV) and Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow. (Gao Shihua made the journey back to China that same summer.) Their excitement to hear one another’s news transcends linguistic barriers: “We all mix up Chinese, Russian and English words and understand each other as well as if we had spent our whole lives together.”5 One female student, whose leather jacket and man’s cap remind Erdberg of “a genuine Russian komsomolka from 1919,” removes her red scarf and ties it to the white stone above Adolphe’s grave. As in The Great Flight, the purely physical obstacle of the desert proves incapable of halting a revolution that travels from Moscow to China. These sands that have buried empires, Erdberg reflects, “are powerless to prevent this girl in a leather jacket with slanted eyes and coarse black hair, these young people from KUTV and Sunovka, from coming to China and awakening its millions of sons.”6 The transformation of ethnic other into komsomolka offers redemptive hope in the face of disaster. Mourning the revolutionary loss of 1927 becomes a rousing affirmation of the power of the revolutionary networks produced by Soviet-centric institutions to overcome both geography and history.7

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Chinese Novellas stands at the end of a line of Soviet cultural works produced by the generation that traveled to China during the period of the Comintern-sponsored united front between the Guomindang and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). With the defeat of 1927, China lost the central position it had briefly occupied in Soviet culture’s search for new forms, just at the moment when that search was becoming increasingly constrained by state control. The 1930s saw no major Soviet works on China that achieved the social impact of Roar, China! or The Red Poppy. But nor did China disappear in the 1930s. Political hostility to the Guomindang kept Soviet writers out of China for much of the decade, but the rising Japanese encroachment on Chinese territory, culminating in all-out war from 1937, made China once again a crucial flashpoint in the Soviet vision of geopolitics. In place of Soviet emissaries, then, this epilogue highlights the roles of two high-profile Chinese intermediaries who shouldered the responsibility for mediating China for a Soviet audience in the 1930s: the Communist poet Xiao San (known in Russian as Emi Siao) and the famous actor Mei Lanfang. Their activities as translators and mediators offer two models for how the internationalism of the Stalinist 1930s resolved questions of transcultural exchange through the prism of Stalin’s formulation “national in form, socialist in content.”8 This formula established translation as a key mode for Stalinist universalism, affirming discrete historical and cultural identities while positing a universal socialism as a stable, transferrable “content.” Developed primarily to manage multinational difference within the USSR, the concept of national form also became a key element in the Maoist, anti-imperial socialism that guided the foundation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Within a decade, however, the Chinese form of state socialism would split from its Soviet predecessor, rejecting the latter’s claims to hegemonic control over socialist content. Erdberg’s scene of meeting in the desert stages a passing of the baton: the defeated Soviet advisers hand responsibility for China’s revolution to the newly Sovietized young revolutionaries heading the other way. And indeed, returnees from Moscow did play a key role in the growing dissemination of Soviet literature and Soviet Marxism in China, just as several played key political roles in the CCP. Qu Qiubai, who published pioneering reportage from Soviet Russia in 1921–1922 and also worked as a translator at KUTV, lectured and published on Marxist philosophy on

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his return to China, and briefly became CCP leader in 1927–1928.9 Qu’s survey of prerevolutionary Russian literature appeared in 1927, alongside a companion piece on literature after 1917 by Jiang Guangci, Boris Pilnyak’s erstwhile translator in Shanghai.10 Cao Jinghua, the future head of Beijing University’s Russian department and his generation’s most prominent translator of Soviet literature into Chinese, had studied at KUTV in 1921 before sitting alongside Gao Shihua in Tretyakov’s Beijing courses. He returned to the USSR in 1927 to teach in Moscow and Leningrad, and he dispatched a steady stream of books and translations to his friend Lu Xun, himself a major translator and advocate of Soviet literature in China.11 The irony of history lies in the fact that Soviet cultural influence in China took off just as Soviet political influence declined. Alongside the growing translation of Soviet literature, the late 1920s saw a vigorous debate around the question of “revolutionary literature” (geming wenxue 䴽ੑ᭛ᅌ) that led in the early 1930s to the formation of the League of Left-Wing Writers (Zhongguo zuoyi zuojia lianmeng Ё೟Ꮊ㗐԰ᆊ㙃ⲳ). The debates and polemics of the Shanghai literary left absorbed the influence of the literary theories of Lev Trotsky, Georgy Plekhanov, and Anatoly Lunarcharsky, often mediated through the proletarian literature movement in Japan.12 The developing Chinese left-wing cinema movement of the early 1930s studied Soviet montage theory through translations of Vsevolod Pudovkin’s theoretical writings, while Soviet films, including Pudovkin’s anti-imperial Storm Over Asia and the Vasiliev brothers’ Chapaev, found great success with Chinese audiences.13 Conversely, the heightened attention paid to China in Soviet culture faded with the disappointments of 1927. China, however, did not disappear from the Soviet cultural imaginary. One forum in which Chinese literature and politics maintained a fluctuating presence was International Literature, a journal that passed through several incarnations during its publication run. Founded as Herald of World Literature in 1928, the journal was renamed Literature of the World Revolution during the height of the proletarian literature movement (1930–1932). In 1933, it became International Literature and ran under that title until 1943, with parallel editions in Russian, French, German, English, Spanish (from 1942), and briefly Chinese. Sergei Tretyakov served as editor of the Russian edition from 1933 to 1936, a period during which the

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journal published a striking quantity of Western modernist authors.14 International Literature made the case for the transnational literary journal as the medium best suited to produce an internationalist community, affirming the Soviet commitment to a reimagined Weltliteratur alongside the centrality of print culture to both Stalinism and the broader culture of the Old Left.15 Although best known for granting Soviet readers access to Western literature, the Russian edition of the journal also gave space to writers from outside the West, with China foremost among them. International Literature hosted the first large-scale translation of modern Chinese literature into Russian, publishing works by Zhang Yiping ゴ㸷㧡 (1928), Ye Shengtao 㨝㘪䱊 (1930), Tai Jingnong 㟎䴰䖆 (1931), Mao Dun (1934), Hu Lanqi 㚵㰁⬺ (1935), Rou Shi ᶨ⷇ (1937), Lu Xun (1937 and 1939), Ding Ling ϕ⦆ (1937), and Xiao Jun 㭁䒡 (1938).16 Few signs of modernism emerged from these selections, which foregrounded a post– May Fourth critical realism whose thematic concerns—the negative impact of tradition, feudal remnants in class and gender relations, social inequality—aligned with the transnational leftist realist idiom mapped by the journal.17 The Japanese invasion of 1937 gave China a new political urgency in International Literature, which published Mao’s autobiography as recounted to Edgar Snow, and a biography of Zhu De ᴅᖋ.18 An issue from mid-1940 included a whole section of stories, poems, and essays under the title “Three Years of the Heroic Struggle of the Chinese People.”19 International Literature inscribed China into a prominent position within its broader literary and political map of the globe.20 No one did more to secure China’s position in International Literature than the poet Emi Siao, the Europeanized name of Xiao San (1896–1983). Xiao was born in Xiangxiang, Hunan Province. One of his childhood classmates was Mao Zedong. In 1920, Xiao travelled to France to study, where he adopted the name Emi (in honor of Émile Zola) and joined the CCP. From 1922 to 1924, he studied at KUTV in Moscow, where he joined the Soviet Communist Party, before returning to China to participate with the Chinese Communists in the failed revolution of 1927. After the Shanghai disaster, Xiao fled to Vladivostok and subsequently took a teaching post in Moscow. His literary career began after he attended the Kharkov conference of international proletarian writers in 1930, an event that resulted in the founding of the International Organization of Revolutionary Writers (Mezhdunarodnaia organizatsiia revoliutsionnykh

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pisatelei) and the transformation of Herald of World Literature into Literature of the World Revolution. Xiao had written to Lu Xun in Shanghai asking for delegates for the conference from the League of Left-Wing Writers; when it transpired that none could come, Xiao went in their stead.21 He was to become the key intermediary for Chinese literature and the Chinese cultural and political scene in the pages of Literature of the World Revolution and its successor, International Literature. Xiao penned articles on such topics as the development of proletarian literature in China, the persecution of the Left League by the Nationalist government, a scheme for the Latinization of Chinese writing developed through Sino-Soviet collaboration, and the death of Lu Xun in 1936.22 As a member of the editorial board for the Russian edition of International Literature, Xiao oversaw the influx of contemporary leftist Chinese writers onto its pages as well as translating some texts himself and writing prefaces.23 He also edited a Chinese edition of the journal, which appeared only for two issues.24 Furthermore, Xiao’s engagement with the journal actually transformed him into a revolutionary poet. Xiao joined Literature of the World Revolution at a moment when the Stalinist “revolution from above” of the First Five-Year Plan combined with the commitment to working-class radicalization during the Comintern’s Third Period to produce a concerted emphasis on the development of a specifically proletarian literature.25 When asked to provide samples of Chinese proletarian literature for Literature of the World Revolution, Xiao, although not a professional writer before his contact with the journal, decided to write some poems of his own.26 Xiao published a dozen poems in Literature of the World Revolution and International Literature, proclaiming his joint allegiance to the Chinese and Soviet revolutions with such titles as “A Letter in Blood,” “Hoist Higher the Banner of the Comintern,” “Song of the Manchurian Partisans,” and “Red Square.”27 Several collections of Xiao’s poetry appeared in Russian as separate volumes, alongside his biographies of Mao and Zhu De, a collection of sketches and articles titled Heroic China, and a joint collection of Stories about China written with Agnes Smedley.28 Xiao’s position as the face of Chinese leftist literature in the Soviet Union was sealed when he spoke as the Chinese representative at the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934.29 In a sense, Xiao’s career fulfills the aspirations expressed by Tretyakov’s Den Shi-khua: a Chinese internationalist author steps forward to mediate

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China for a Soviet audience. Yet in the Stalinist model of mediation that Xiao performed, the possibility of multiple perspectives on history fades from view, and collaboration serves as an affirmation of the unity of socialist content. Xiao’s main translator was the poet and philologist Aleksandr Ilich Romm (the older brother of the film director Mikhail Romm), a prolific translator of foreign authors from John Reed to Louis Aragon to Gustav Flaubert.30 Xiao and Romm’s collaboration sometimes proceeded orally: Xiao would recite his poem in Chinese and offer a rough translation, and Romm would use both translation and performance as the basis for his Russian rendition. When Xiao’s collected works appeared in Chinese, some of these poems would be retranslated from the Russian, as no Chinese original could be found.31 On other occasions, Xiao would send Romm a poem together with his own interlinear crib (podstrochnik).32 Interlinear cribs became a standard element of translation practice in the Soviet period, allowing professional writers to produce translations from languages they did not know, especially from the non-Russian Soviet republics. This practice typically produced an intermediary translating agent, a “third voice” between source text and final translation.33 Xiao, however, played both author and interlinear translator: he was his own mediator.34 Xiao and Romm’s translation process produced a series of Russian-language poems with traces of Chinese national form that functioned in the pages of International Literature as fully legible specimens of revolutionary poetry. Xiao’s poems combine revolutionary thematics, including violent self-sacrifice (“Nanjing Road,” “A Letter in Blood”) and female liberation (“Auntie Chzhan-u-sao’s Decision”), with popular forms, such as folk songs and partisan chants.35 This valorization of popular forms illustrates the interpenetration of the Soviet and Chinese contexts between which Xiao operated: while the Soviet discourse on national form was taking shape, the Chinese League of Left-Wing Writers held its own debate in 1931–1932 about the “popularization” of literature and art, with Qu Qiubai in particular arguing for the importance of drawing on folk forms and vernacular language.36 In terms of translation strategies, Romm shuttles between the two poles of “literalist” and “free” translation that shaped Soviet discussions of translation in the 1930s (with the latter approach winning out by the end of the decade).37 Whereas Xiao, like many modern Chinese poets, alternates between rhyme and free verse, Romm imposes his own rhyme

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schemes, fulfilling a standard expectation of the Russian reader. He does not try to match exactly the number of syllables per line, although he often gets quite close to Xiao’s syllable count. For example, in the opening refrain to the poem “Nanjing Road” (1931), Xiao uses a seven-syllable line inherited from classical Chinese poetry, which divides into semantic clusters of two, two, and three syllables. Within this classical structure, however, his lexicon is vernacular and accessible. Romm’s translation alternates a six-syllable line (trochee, iamb, iamb) with an eight-syllable line (iamb, anapest, anapest; or anapest, anapest, iamb). Xiao’s sextet has an AABBCC rhyme scheme, whereas Romm offers ABABCC:

फҀ䏃Ϟ‫ ˈ⏙⏙ދ‬Nanjing lushang lengqingqing,

Тихо на Нанкин Род,

䳒䞠㸫♃ञᱫᯢDŽ Wuli jiedeng ban an ming.

В тумане горят фонари.

㒚䲼䳣䳣࣫亢㋻ˈ Xiyu feifei bei feng jin,

Холодно, дождь идет,

‫ދ‬䗣䔺໿偼੠ㄟDŽ Leng tou chefu gu he jin.

До костей пробирая рикш.

ಯ䴶⑓๭াথ҂DŽ Simian shi qiang zhi faliang.

Мокрые стены блестят.

໾໾㗕⠋དṺ䭓DŽ Taitai laoye hao meng chang.

Джентльмены и леди спят.38

[Nanjing Road is deserted, / Streetlamps shine half dark in the fog. / A light rain falls, the north wind presses, / The cold pierces the bone and muscle of the rickshaw driver. / On all sides the damp walls glisten. / Mistress and master are dreaming soundly.]

Romm’s translation captures the accessibility and clarity of the original, matching a distinctive Chinese national form with a comparable formal order that would not strike a Russian reader of poetry as strange. Elsewhere, however, Xiao deploys consciously modern devices, varying line length and rhyme and using more explicitly colloquial language.39 He also introduces several instances of step construction, the splitting of a single poetic line across several lines on the page—a device popularized by Vladimir Mayakovsky that became a standard symbolic marker of revolutionary poetry. When Romm translates these moments, he employs greater literalism, although he retains his own rhyme scheme.

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For example, as “Nanjing Road” unfolds, three agitators are beaten for hanging protest signs on Shanghai’s main street: ᠧ ᵾറᄤ ࠎߔDŽDŽDŽ ী৻ˈ 䖭Դᇣᄤ!

Da! Qiang bazi . . . Cidao . . . Zhao ba, zhe ni xiaozi!

Бей! Приклад . . . Штык . . . «—Ну, говори ты!»

[Beat them! / Rifle butt . . . / Bayonet . . . / Well, talk, / kid!]

Xiao’s broken line fragments the moment of violent attack into a sequence of blows and shouts. Romm matches this fragmentation while reducing Xiao’s six-syllable line to four and then five syllables, in loose trochaic trimeter. The equivalents are precise: nu performs a similar function to ba, and the second-singular familiar ty captures the derision of xiaozi (boy, kid). The violence of illegitimate authority sounds the same around the world. Likewise, Xiao’s frequent use of slogans also travels seamlessly, emphasizing their identical function within commensurable social situations: ៥ӀোীᎹҎ 㔶Ꮉˈ ៥Ӏোী‫⇥ݰ‬ ᲈࡼʽ

Women haozhao gongren bagong, Women haozhao nongmin baodong!

Призываем рабочих— Бастовать, Призываем крестьянство— Восставать!

[We call on the workers / to strike, / We call on the peasants / to rise up!]

The terminology of class categories matches precisely and even the rhymes (bagong / baodong, bastovat’ / vosstavat’) work in parallel. Throughout the 1930s, Xiao’s poems published in Russian would remain true to this model of a proletarian poetic idiom, offering a dynamic blend of national form, revolutionary form, and socialist content.40 Romm’s translations couch the “national form” of Xiao’s originals within fairly classical Russian verse forms, while conveying directly those elements already recognizable as revolutionary poetry to a Soviet reader.

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National form poses no obstacle to the transmission of socialist content. Hence, there is no estrangement effect on reading these poems—no sense of a “remainder” that might point to an irreducibly foreign context. Instead, they produce the impression that Xiao does not write from a foreign context, but rather mediates between Chinese cultural specificity and a universal (Soviet-centric) socialism. In this regard, Xiao played a comparable role in the 1930s to such figures as Abulqasim Lahuti or Dzhambul Dzhabaev: national poets of the Soviet republics who performed the task of mediating between the national forms of their own literary traditions and the universality of Stalinist socialism, and whose performance of that task depended fundamentally on the translation of their texts into Russian.41 The example of Xiao shows the Stalin-era model of multinational literature expanding beyond Soviet borders, blurring the very border between the Soviet Union and revolutionary China. Another variation on the themes of translatability, estrangement, and national form comes with perhaps the most famous moment of SinoSoviet cultural contact in the 1930s. In March 1935 Mei Lanfang, the acclaimed actor of female dan roles in Beijing Opera, arrived in the USSR. In addition to a series of public performances in Moscow and Leningrad, Mei also gave a special demonstration of his acting techniques for a gathering of theatrical workers in Moscow.42 Over the course of his visit, Mei met and performed for a who’s who of the Soviet and European theatrical elite, including Tretyakov, Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Konstantin Stanislavsky, Vladimir NemirovichDanchenko, Aleksandr Tairov, Gordon Craig, Erwin Piscator, and Bertolt Brecht. Tretyakov greeted him on arrival and published several articles in the Soviet press praising Mei’s art.43 Eisenstein filmed Mei at work (only fragments survive) and wrote an article, “The Magician of the Pear Orchard,” that offered an idiosyncratic interpretation of Chinese theater and its lessons for Soviet artistic production. Many of these figures gathered under the auspices of the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (Vsesoiuznoe obshchestvo kul’turnoi sviazi s zagranitsei, VOKS) for an extended roundtable discussion of Mei’s work and its implications for Soviet theater.44 Perhaps most famously, Brecht’s encounter with Mei led him to expound the concept of der Verfremdungseffekt (the “estrangement effect”) in his 1936 article “Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting.”45

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Much has been written about this encounter, elucidating the nonalignments and noncorrespondences involved in this moment of cultural exchange. Scholars of Chinese theater have accused Brecht of underestimating the importance of inner experience in Chinese acting, preoccupied as he was with his polemic against naturalism and Stanislavskian method.46 The Soviets also misread Mei, framing this modernizer of Beijing Opera as a quintessential representative of an ancient form. This supposedly ancient form, however, modeled for Mei’s Soviet interlocutors a kind of modernism, in contrast to the newly installed orthodoxies of Socialist Realism. Mei’s visit gave the Soviet avant-garde one last chance, just before the anti-formalism campaigns of 1936, to praise a form of art that was openly conventionalized and nonmimetic.47 In yet another instance of nonalignment, whereas Soviet modernists enlisted Mei to champion their aesthetic ideals, the New Culture movement in China had rejected the art form Mei represented in favor of a modern theater that would be realist and naturalist—precisely the trend that Meyerhold, Eisenstein, and others dismissed as outmoded.48 In the case of the Mei Lanfang encounter, translation and transcultural circulation led not to a smooth commensurability but rather to displacement and disconnection. The “estrangement effect” here lies in the estrangement of two modes of cultural modernity from one other. Yet another side to the reception of Mei in Moscow returns us to the question of national form. The conventionalism that these Soviet theater artists praise in Mei’s performance is an organic conventionalism, one that has not emerged from intellectual theorizing, but rather has developed over centuries of refinement. At the roundtable discussion, Aleksandr Tairov described Mei’s artform as a “synthetic theatre” that had developed from “folk origins” and was entirely “organic.”49 Eisenstein praised the “vivifying, organic quality” (zhivitel’nost’ i organichnost’) of Chinese theater in contrast to the more “mechanical” Japanese theater.50 Tretyakov’s reaction is particularly striking, given the unstinting antagonism toward traditional culture that runs through his texts from the mid-1920s. Tretyakov’s early articles echo the position of China’s New Culture movement, denouncing traditional Chinese theater as a form of “aesthetic narcosis” that renders the population docile while also enforcing feudal morality and class relations.51 The early Tretyakov acknowledges Mei Lanfang as a formal innovator, but he expresses the hope that these innovations are “a

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sign of the death of the national [narodnyi] theatre.”52 Although the negative class origins of Chinese theater are still acknowledged in 1935, they are now less significant for Tretyakov than its sheer mass popularity, a quality that instils this art form with national meaning. This popular power is a direct result of the antiquity of theatrical forms. Hence, Tretyakov begins one article, revealingly entitled “One and a Half Billion Spectators” (“Polmilliarda zritelei”), by enveloping his reader in the mists of time: “You are entering a theater whose untraceable sources are lost from view several millennia before our era, and whose full bloom was already in evidence ten centuries ago.”53 Through centuries of repetition, these forms have become deeply embedded in the popular consciousness; even when contemporary actors attempt a modern agitational play, Tretyakov claims, the intonations, gestures, and mise en scene of traditional theater can still be sensed. The Tretyakov of the mid-1920s wanted to de-sinify (raskitait’) Chinese theater, but he feared that its roots were too deep to be removed. His hopes lay instead with the cinema, where foreign influence (including Soviet film) could penetrate more easily.54 The Tretyakov of 1935 argues that the national forms of traditional Chinese theater can be retained, while the “poisonous” affirmation of feudal class relations can be replaced with new content: “The epochs change, the old meaning is worn away, but the form remains, and suddenly this old form can be filled in a new epoch with new meaning.”55 Mei’s achievement, meanwhile, has been to enable this ancient and deeply national art to transcend its national boundaries and enter world culture: The greatness and significance of Mei Lanfang [. . .] lies in the fact that he has been able to make Chinese theater a global phenomenon. In his person, Chinese theater has for the first time broken through its national borders and entered into the consciousness of the Euro-American theatrical spectator as something other than an “exotic” spectacle. Mei Lanfang has stepped forth onto the world stage as the delegate of a great art that half of humanity claims as its own, an old art, refined and full of meaning. Knowledge of this art constitutes a basic requirement for general cultural literacy.56

The “death sign” that Tretyakov hoped Mei’s art might be in 1927 has by 1935 become the sign of Chinese theater’s second life, its sublimation from the national to the global level of human culture.

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There are several ways to read Tretyakov’s change of heart over Chinese theater. At the simplest level, this is a question of cultural diplomacy: Mei Lanfang visited Moscow as a cultural ambassador for the Guomindang government, offering a form of rapprochement between the Soviets and the Chinese Nationalists in the context of rising Japanese aggression in the Far East.57 Tretyakov’s praise fits the requirements of diplomatic politesse as well as the vision of traditional culture that the Nationalist government pursued. More broadly, the valorization of Chinese theater’s national form and its integration into a shared heritage of venerable arts matches the moment of the antifascist Popular Front, which affirmed the preservation of a universal “world culture” in opposition to fascism and positioned Moscow as the central custodian of this global cultural heritage.58 Even if there is not much in the way of identifiable socialist content in Mei’s art, the enduring popularity of the form offers value. In this model of transcultural mediation, the quality of the popular—of narodnost’— serves the function of mediating between a particular national context and universal meaning. Just a few years after Mei’s visit, most of the individuals involved in the intensive early Soviet engagement with China would be lost in the violence of the Purges. The xenophobic atmosphere of the late 1930s proved fatal for many associated with the Soviet internationalist project.59 In 1936, Tretyakov reported that he had been working on a second “bio-interview,” focused this time on one of the participants of the Chinese Communists’ Long March (1934–1935). It is unclear whether this text was to be produced from oral interviews or written materials, but Tretyakov framed it as an overcoming of his previous bio-interview’s political limitations: “In contrast to ‘Den Shi-khua,’ the son of a Guomindang intellectual, the hero of the new book—a poor peasant, a farm labourer, who becomes a partisan and Red Army soldier—is one of the decisive figures of awakening China in that generation which follows historically after the generation of Den.”60 Tretyakov signed a contract for a volume entitled Chinese Tales (Kitaiskie povesti) with the State Publishing House in 1935.61 His wife, Olga Tretyakova, noted in a letter two decades later than this second bio-interview remained unfinished at the time of her husband’s death.62 Whatever had been written was most likely destroyed with the majority of Tretyakov’s papers following his arrest and execution in 1937.63 The charge leveled against Tretyakov, that of being a Japanese spy, stemmed directly—we might even say ironically, given the anti-imperialist tenor of

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his work—from his involvement with China and the Far East. According to his secret police file, Tretyakov confessed to being recruited into Japanese intelligence during a trip from Beijing to Harbin in June 1924.64 Espionage for Japan also constituted one of the charges brought against Boris Pilnyak, who was arrested in 1937 and executed in 1938. In addition, Pilnyak stood accused of aiding the family of Karl Radek, the former rector of Sun Yat-sen University and prominent public voice on China in the 1920s, who was himself convicted at the Second Moscow Trial in 1937 and subsequently murdered in prison.65 Other political figures connected to 1920s China met similar fates. Lev Karakhan, the former ambassador to China, was executed in 1937. Vasily Blyukher, who played a key role in reforming the Guomindang army before the Northern Expedition, suffered the same fate in 1938. Mikhail Borodin survived until after the war, dying in a prison camp in 1951.66 Aleksei Akekseevich Ivanov (a.k.a. Ivin) returned to the USSR after 1927 and was arrested in 1935 on charges of “systematic anti-Soviet agitation,” although it seems he was subsequently released.67 Oskar Tarkhanov, who accompanied Borodin through the Gobi Desert and sought to transmogrify revolutionary defeat into victory, had returned to Mongolia on diplomatic service in 1937 when he was summoned back to the USSR, arrested, and executed.68 Sinologist Boris Vasiliev, who served as a translator for Soviet advisers in China and completed the first translation of Lu Xun’s True Story of Ah Q into Russian, was arrested and shot in 1937 on charges of counterrevolutionary activity.69 Several of the peripheral figures in this study, including Vsevolod Meyerhold, whose theater first staged Roar, China!, and Isaac Babel, author of the quixotic Chinese Mill, were also arrested and killed. By the end of the 1930s, the generation of political and cultural agents who had first sought to shape the Soviet Union’s relationship with revolutionary China had been decimated. The Communist victory in China in 1949 led to a new alliance with the Soviet Union and a golden age of Sino-Soviet friendship, with Soviet influence in China swelling to previously unattained heights in the 1950s.70 One legacy of Soviet influence was the notion of national form, which played a major role in Mao’s adaptation of Marxism to Chinese conditions. In his essay “On New Democracy,” published in 1940 at the Communist base in Yan’an, Mao insisted that “the universal truth of Marxism must be combined with specific national characteristics and acquire a definite national

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form if it is to be useful.”71 Experiments in revolutionary culture at Yan’an turned to folktales and traditional folk performances, understood explicitly as “national forms” (minzu xingshi ⇥ᮣᔶᓣ) that could communicate revolutionary content to mass audiences.72 After 1949, the principle of “national form” shaped innovations in architecture and the repurposing of Beijing Opera for contemporary themes of revolution and military struggle.73 Yet by the late 1950s, the Sino-Soviet split would prize apart the national forms of socialism in these two Eurasian neighbors, as Mao and the Chinese Communists contested the universality of the Soviet model and its monopoly on socialist content.74 As a small contribution to that larger history, whose full exposition lies beyond the scope of this book, I end with the story of one Soviet mediator of China from the 1920s who carried that task into the 1950s. In 1957, Vladimir Shneiderov, director of The Great Flight, returned to China after a successful career as a maker of documentary and fiction films. He collaborated on an expedition film with a Shanghai studio and a Chinese director named Qin Zhen (㽗⦡): a travelogue of their journey across Central Asia by car from Almaty in Kazakhstan to Lanzhou in Gansu Province, the gateway into China’s historic Eastern heartland. Their expedition followed the route of the projected Almaty–Lanzhou railway, a “Road of Friendship” that would connect Soviet Central Asia to Communist China across the vast desert expanses of Xinjiang. One of several Sino-Soviet cinematic collaborations from the 1950s, this project sought to affirm the socialist modernization of both China’s western regions and China’s cinema industry under the benevolent influence of its Soviet neighbor. The different titles of the film, however, told different stories. In Chinese the film was called Almaty–Lanzhou (Alamutu–Lanzhou 䰓ᢝ᳼ ೪–㰁Ꮂ), foregrounding the planned railway as a feat of modernization and transnational connection. Its Russian title, Under Ancient Desert Skies (Pod nebom drevnikh pustyn’), invoked the same tropes of exotic backwardness that Shneiderov sought in Mongolia in 1925.75 The film’s timing, meanwhile, condemned it to historical oblivion: it appeared on Soviet and Chinese screens on October 1, 1958, just as the first stages of Mao’s Great Leap Forward were setting the wheels in motion for the Sino-Soviet Split. The Almaty–Lanzhou railway, too, fell victim to history. The Soviet branch made it from Almaty to the suitably named border town of Druzhba (“Friendship”) by 1959. But as the Sino-Soviet Split gathered

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pace and the national forms of Chinese and Soviet socialism diverged, the Chinese side stalled in Urumqi. The link would be completed only in 1990, just in time for the Soviet Union’s collapse. Today, the “Road of Friendship” constitutes a central link in China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which envisions an enhanced infrastructure corridor from China to Europe through Russia’s historical region of influence in Central Asia: a succinct illustration of the changing positions of these erstwhile socialist allies as both Russia and China have reintegrated (in different ways) into a capitalist world economy.76 Shneiderov’s expedition film promised the same conquest of the Eurasian desert by socialist internationalism celebrated three decades earlier in Erderg’s “Red Scarf.” Yet, once again, the mediation could not hold, leaving only traces of a socialist Eurasia that failed, ultimately, to connect.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION 1.

2. 3. 4.

5.

6.

Vladimir Maiakovskii, “Luchshii stikh” [“The Best Verse”], first published in Trud, March 23, 1927; cited here from Sobranie sochinenii v vos’mi tomakh [Collected Works in Eight Volumes], vol. 5 (Moscow: Ogonek, 1968), 208–10. All translations are my own unless otherwise specified. The outlines of the incident are confirmed in Severnyi rabochii, March 23, 1927. A verst is a traditional Russian unit of distance, roughly equivalent to a kilometer. Maiakovskii, “Luchshii stikh,” 209–10. Elizabeth Astrid Papazian, Manufacturing Truth: The Documentary Moment in Early Soviet Culture (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009). A term of Tamil or Hindi origin denoting a hired laborer, kuli entered Chinese as a loan word from English in the eighteenth century. Its Chinese characters carry the literal meaning of “bitter strength.” In a global context, it acquired derogatory, racialized connotations through association with the “coolie trade” in indentured Asian migrant workers in the nineteenth century. Within China, by the 1920s, it had come to designate a broad category of poor or exploited workers. Mayakovsky, like other early Soviet writers, uses the term “kuli” in this latter sense, as a shorthand for oppressed Chinese laborers within China. See Richard Jean So, “Coolie Democracy: US-China Political and Literary Exchange, 1925–1955” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2010), 5–9; Lisa Yun, The Coolie Speaks: Chinese Indentured Laborers and African Slaves in Cuba (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009), xix–xxi. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei,” Marxist Internet Archive, accessed June 9, 2021, https://www.marxists.org/deutsch/archiv/marx-engels /1848/manifest/4-stelkomm.htm. Marx’s early writings on India frame British colonization as the only way to modernize a backward Asiatic mode of production. As European colonialism expanded in the

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7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

12. 13.

14.

late nineteenth century, some members of the Second International argued that a form of socialist colonialism could be progressive. See Hélène Carrère d’Encausse and Stuart R. Schram, Marxism and Asia: An Introduction with Readings (London: Allen Lane, 1969), 8–9, 15–16. For an argument that Marx’s understanding of development in the non-West shifted in his later years from a unilinear to a multilinear perspective, see Kevin B. Anderson, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). R. Craig Nation, War on War: Lenin, the Zimmerwald Left, and the Origins of Communist Internationalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989), 109–12. Robert Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2016), 136. I borrow the language of Pierre Bourdieu, although the dynamics governing the relations between the field of power and the field of cultural production in early Soviet society are quite different from the bourgeois-capitalist social model that Bourdieu assumes. See Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 37–43, 163–64. Nonetheless, the struggle between various groups to be acknowledged as legitimate producers of Soviet art was a prominent dynamic of cultural life in the 1920s. See Evgeny Dobrenko, Aesthetics of Alienation: Reassessment of Early Soviet Cultural Theories, trans. Jesse M. Savage (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005). Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 77. See, for example, Kate A. Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters Between Black and Red, 1922–1963 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); Katerina Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Michael David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921–1941 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Steven S. Lee, The Ethnic Avant-Garde: Minority Cultures and World Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015); 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; Amelia M. Glaser and Steven S. Lee, eds., Comintern Aesthetics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020); Rossen Djagalov, From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature and Cinema Between the Second and the Third Worlds (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020); Katerina Clark, Eurasia Without Borders: The Dream of a Leftist Literary Commons (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021). Young, Postcolonialism, 129. For a classic Western Marxist account of the Comintern’s failure to overcome Soviet centralization and raison d’état, see Fernando Claudin, The Communist Movement: From Comintern to Cominform, vol. 1 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975). Vladimir Papernyi, Architecture in the Age of Stalin: Culture Two, trans. John Hill and Roann Barris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), xxiv and passim.

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15. 16.

17. 18.

19.

20. 21.

22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27.

28.

S. A. Smith, Like Cattle and Horses: Nationalism and Labor in Shanghai, 1895–1927 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 190 and passim. Mark Gamsa, The Chinese Translation of Russian Literature: Three Studies (Boston: Brill, 2008); Mark Gamsa, The Reading of Russian Literature in China: A Moral Example and Manual of Practice (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Mau-sang Ng, The Russian Hero in Modern Chinese Fiction (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1988). Arif Dirlik, The Origins of Chinese Communism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 20. These institutions’ names in Russian were Kommunisticheskii universitet trudiashchikhsia vostoka (KUTV) and Universitet trudiashchikhsia Kitaia imeni Sun iat-sena (UTK), from 1928 to its closure in 1930—Kommunisticheskii universtitet trudiashchikhsia Kitaia. On the history of Chinese students at these institutions, see Elizabeth McGuire, Red at Heart: How Chinese Communists Fell in Love with the Russian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); L. Min-ling Yu, “Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow, 1925–1930” (PhD diss., New York University, 1995). See, for example, Colin Mackerras, Western Images of China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Jonathan D. Spence, The Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Minds (New York: Norton, 1998); Alexander Lukin, The Bear Watches the Dragon: Russia’s Perceptions of China and the Evolution of Russian-Chinese Relations since the Eighteenth Century (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2003); Susanna Soojung Lim, China and Japan in the Russian Imagination, 1685–1922: To the Ends of the Orient (London: Routledge, 2013). Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978). Eric Hayot, Haun Saussy, and Steven G. Yao, “Sinographies: An Introduction,” in Sinographies: Writing China, ed. Eric Hayot, Haun Saussy, and Steven G. Yao (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), viii. Eric Hayot, The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity, and Chinese Pain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 8. Mackerras, Western Images of China, 37–38, 110–11. Sean Macdonald, “Montage as Chinese: Modernism, the Avant-garde, and the Strange Appropriation of China,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 19, no. 2 (Fall 2007): 151–99; Eric Hayot, Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel quel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004). Mark Bassin, “Russia Between Europe and Asia: The Ideological Construction of Geographical Space,” Slavic Review 50, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 1–17. Lucien Bianco, Stalin and Mao, trans. Krystyna Horko (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2018), 2. This urge to incorporate China into the same revolutionary present was not unique to Soviet culture. It shaped the work of leftist internationalists on China across the globe in this period, including Bertolt Brecht, André Malraux, Agnes Smedley, Anna Louise Strong, and Edgar Snow. For an overview, see Spence, “Radical Visions,” chap. 10 in Chan’s Great Continent, 187–205. Lewis H. Siegelbaum, “Another ‘Yellow Peril’: Chinese Migrants in the Russian Far East and the Russian Reaction Before 1917,” Modern Asian Studies 12, no. 2 (1978): 307–30;

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29.

30. 31.

32.

33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

Susanna Soojung Lim, “Between Spiritual Self and Other: Vladimir Solov’ev and the Question of East Asia,” Slavic Review 67, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 321–41. V. I. Lenin, Imperializm, kak vysshaia stadiia kapitalizma (populiarnyi ocherk) (Petrograd: Zhizn’ i znanie, 1917); V. I. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (London: Pluto Press, 1996). For the context of Lenin’s pamphlet, see Nation, War on War, 143–48. Lenin, Imperialism, 109–11; Young, Postcolonialism, 125. V. I. Lenin, “Itogi diskussii o samoopredelenii” [“Summary of the Discussion on SelfDetermination”], first published in Sbornik Sotsial-Demokrata [Social-Democrat Review] 1, 1916; translation from Marxists Internet Archive, accessed May 24, 2017, https://www .marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/jul/x01.htm. Alexander Pantsov, The Bolsheviks and the Chinese Revolution, 1919–1927 (Richmond, UK: Curzon Press, 2000), 41–44. Lenin’s theses met with dispute from the Indian Communist M. N. Roy, who advised caution over treating the national bourgeoisie in every colonized country as a reliable revolutionary partner. Young, Postcolonialism, 131–34. Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York: Norton, 1999), 164–65. Spence, The Search for Modern China, 277. Lenin, Imperialism, 81. Jürgen Osterhammel, “Semi-colonialism and Informal Empire in Twentieth-Century China: Towards a Framework of Analysis,” in Imperialism and After: Continuities and Discontinuities, ed. Jürgen Osterhammel and Wolfgang J. Mommsen (London: Allen and Unwin, 1986), 276; Shu-Mei Shih, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 30–40; Tani Barlow, “Semifeudalism, Semicolonialism,” in Afterlives of Chinese Communism: Political Concepts from Mao to Xi, ed. Christian Sorace, Ivan Franceschini, and Nicholas Loubere (Canberra: ANU Press, 2019). Theodore Huters, Bringing the World Home: Appropriating the West in Late Qing and Early Republican China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005). For an account of China’s twentieth century that identifies the May Fourth movement as a foundational moment, see Rana Mitter, A Bitter Revolution: China’s Struggle with the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). For a critique of the May Fourth paradigm as a holistic explanation of China’s entry into modernity, see Kai-wing Chow, Tze-ki Hon, Hung-yok Ip, and Don C. Price, eds., Beyond the May Fourth Paradigm: In Search of Chinese Modernity (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008). Kirk Denton, ed., Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893–1945 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 8–12; Shih, Lure of the Modern, 14. Pantsov, The Bolsheviks and the Chinese Revolution, 23–38. V. I. Lenin, “Probuzhdenie Azii” [“The Awakening of Asia”], Pravda, May 7, 1913. See also the essay “Otstalaia Evropa i peredovaia Aziia” [“Backward Europe and Advanced Asia”], Pravda, May 18, 1913. S. C. M. Paine, Imperial Rivals: China, Russia, and their Disputed Frontier (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1996). C. Martin Wilbur and Julie Lien-ying How, Missionaries of Revolution: Soviet Advisers and Nationalist China, 1920–1927 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 20–23.

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45.

46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61.

62.

The Soviet government’s actual position was more complex: for the 1924 mutual recognition treaty, the Soviet side insisted on joint Sino-Soviet administration of the Chinese Eastern Railway. Henry Wei, China and Soviet Russia (Princeton, NJ: D. Van Nostrand, 1956), 25–38. For the proceedings of these congresses, see John Riddell, ed., To See the Dawn: Baku, 1920, First Congress of the Peoples of the East (New York: Pathfinder, 1993); The First Congress of the Toilers of the Far East (London: Hammersmith Books, 1970). Pantsov, The Bolsheviks and the Chinese Revolution, 45–47, 57–58. Wilbur and How, Missionaries of Revolution, 6–9. In June 1924, there were twenty-five Comintern advisers in southern China; by the time they were forced to leave in the summer of 1927, there were more than one hundred Comintern agents in the country (Wilbur and How, Missionaries of Revolution, 7, 421). Wilbur and How, Missionaries of Revolution, 8, 10–11. Wilbur and How, Missionaries of Revolution, 87–89. Yu, “Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow,” 11–47. Wilbur and How, Missionaries of Revolution, 24–30. The two Comintern agents closely involved in the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) were Grigory Voitinsky and Hendricus Sneevleit (alias Maring). The latter played a prominent role at the First Congress of the CCP in Shanghai, June 1921. S. A. Smith, A Road Is Made: Communism in Shanghai, 1920–1927 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2000), 190–208. Wilbur and How, Missionaries of Revolution, 1, 403–4. Wilbur and How, Missionaries of Revolution, 423. Pantsov, The Bolsheviks and the Chinese Revolution, 127–60. Wilbur and How, Missionaries of Revolution, 15. Lukin, The Bear Watches the Dragon, 67. Barbara Widenor Maggs, Russia and “le rêve chinois”: China in Eighteenth-Century Russian Literature (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation at the Taylor Institution, 1984), 5, 127–28. Lim, China and Japan in the Russian Imagination, 62–64; Lukin, The Bear Watches the Dragon, 16–20. David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, Toward the Rising Sun: Russian Ideologies of Empire and the Path to War with Japan (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001); Marlène Laruelle, “ ‘The White Tsar’: Romantic Imperialism in Russia’s Legitimizing of Conquering the Far East,” Acta Slavica Iaponica 25 (2008): 113–34. V. I. Diatlov, “Sindrom ‘zheltoi opasnosti’ v dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii: Ekzotizatsiia kak mekhanizm degumanizatsii i iskliucheniia” [“ ‘Yellow Peril’ Syndrome in Pre-Revolutionary Russia: Exoticization as a Mechanism of Dehumanization and Exclusion”], in Pereselencheskoe obshchestvo Aziatskoi Rossii: Migratsii, prostranstva, soobshchestva [Migratory Society in Asiatic Russia: Migrations, Spaces, Communities], ed. V. I. Diatlov and K. V. Grigorichev (Irkutsk: Irkutskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 2013), 526–54. Lim, “Vladimir Solov’ev and the Question of East Asia,” 332–39; Hui Andy Zhang, “The Conception and Imagination of China in Russian Silver Age Literature: History, Genealogy and Meanings” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 2016), 45–71.

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63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

68. 69.

70. 71. 72.

73.

74.

75.

76. 77.

Jinyi Chu, “Patterns of the World: Chinese Fashion and Cosmopolitan Ideas in Late Imperial Russia” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2019), 127–237. Chu, “Patterns of the World,” 88–126. Chu, “Patterns of the World,” 68–87; Spence, “The French Exotic,” chap. 8 in Chan’s Great Continent, 145–64. 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). Sergei Georgievskii, Vazhnost’ izucheniia Kitaia [The Importance of Studying China] (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia I. N. Skorokhodova, 1890); Zhang, “The Conception and Imagination of China,” 30–36. Mikhail Pavlovich Vel’tman, “Zadachi vserossiiskoi nauchnoi assotsiatsii Vostokovedeniia,” Novyi Vostok 1 (1922): 6. See, for example, S.  L. Vel’tman, “Kolonial’nye romany” [“Colonial Novels”], Novyi Vostok, no. 4 (1923): 474–81; S. L. Vel’tman, “Belye i chernye (kolonial’nye romany)” [“Whites and Blacks (Colonial Novels)”], Novyi Vostok, no. 5 (1924): 443–52; S.  L. Vel’tman, “Literaturnye otkliki (kolonial’nyi byt)” [“Literary Responses (Colonial Life)], Novyi Vostok, no. 1 (1925): 302–11; S. L. Vel’tman, “Literaturnye otkliki (kolonial’nyi byt i vydumka)” [“Literary Response (Colonial Life and Fiction)”], Novyi Vostok, nos. 8–9 (1925): 324–33; S. L. Vel’tman, “Literaturnye otkliki: Vostok v nashei khudozhestvennoi literature” [“Literary Responses: The East in Our Artistic Literature”], Novyi Vostok, no. 12 (1926): 264–80. Michael Kemper, “Red Orientalism: Mikhail Pavlovich and Marxist Oriental Studies in Early Soviet Russia,” Die Welt des Islams 50 (2010): 435–76. Lev Karakhan, “Predislovie” [“Foreword”], in A. Ivin, Kitai i Sovetskii Soiuz [China and the Soviet Union] (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1924), 5. Boris Pil’niak, “Kitaiskaia povest’ ” [“Chinese Story”], in Sobranie sochinenii v 6 tomakh [Collected Works in 6 Volumes], vol. 3 (Moscow: Terra-knizhnyi klub, 2003), 131. First published in Novyi mir 6, 8 (1927). Viktor Shklovskii, “Neskol’ko slov o chetyrekhstakh millionakh (O knige S. Tret’iakova ‘Chzhungo’)” [“A Few Words About Four Hundred Million (About S. Tret’iakov’s Book Chzhungo)”], Novyi Lef 3 (1928): 41. Ivin studied Chinese in Paris with prominent French Sinologist Édouard Chavannes. For biographical details on Ivin/Ivanov, see V. N. Nikiforov, Sovetskie istoriki o problemakh Kitaia [Soviet Historians on the Problems of China] (Moscow: Nauka, 1970), 144–46; A. Saran, “Livny–Parizh–Pekin: Zhizn’ Alekseia Ivanova” [“Livny–Paris–Beijing: The Life of Aleksei Ivanov”], Na beregakh bystroi Sosny [On the Banks of the Bystraia Sosna], no. 9 (2001): 75–85. Gao Xingya, “Wusi qianhou de Beijing daxue eyu xi” [“Beijing University Russian Department Around the Time of May Fourth”], in Wenshi ziliao xuanji 135 (1999): 181–85. Wilbur and How, Missionaries of Revolution, 23; Gao, “Wusi qianhou de Beijing daxue eyu xi,” 181. Pantsov, The Bolsheviks and the Chinese Revolution, 23–38.

INTRODUCTION253

78.

79.

80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89.

90.

91. 92. 93.

Lu Xun, Lu Xun quanji [Complete Works of Lu Xun] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 2005), 7:186–87; Gamsa, Russian Literature in China, 86–87. Lu Xun adds that Ivin and Tretyakov also helped out with Ren Guozhen’s translation of Literary Debates in Soviet Russia. For example, “Anglo-saksonskii ‘blok’ i Kitai” [“The Anglo-Saxon ‘Bloc’ and China”], Pravda, September 15, 1926; “Polozhenie v Kitae” [“The Situation in China”], Pravda, March 11, 1927. Several collected volumes of Ivin’s articles appeared, including Pis’ma iz Kitaia [Letters from China] (Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1927); Ot Khankou k Shankhaiu [From Hankou to Shanghai] (Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1927); Ocherki partizanskogo dvizheniia, 1927–30 [Sketches of the Partisan Movement, 1927–30] (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1930); Bor’ba za vlast’ sovetov: Ocherki sovetskogo dvizheniia v Kitae [Struggle for the Power of the Soviets: Sketches of the Soviet Movement in China] (Moscow: Sotsekgiz, 1933). Ivin, Kitai i Sovetskii Soiuz, 29. First published as “Kitai i Sovetskaia Rossiia: Pis’mo iz Pekina” [“China and Soviet Russia: Letter from Beijing”], Krasnaia nov’ 3 (1924): 183–92. Ivin, Kitai i Sovetskii Soiuz, 20. For verst, see note 1 above. Ivin, Kitai i Sovetskii Soiuz, 21. Ivin, Kitai i Sovetskii Soiuz, 20. Ivin, Kitai i Sovetskii Soiuz, 10. Ivin, Kitai i Sovetskii Soiuz, 9. Ivin, Kitai i Sovetskii Soiuz, 10. Ivin, Kitai i Sovetskii Soiuz, 22. Ivin, Kitai i Sovetskii Soiuz, 15. For examples, see Lung-kee Sun, “The Other May Fourth: Twilight of the Old Order,” in Beyond the May Fourth Paradigm: In Search of Chinese Modernity, ed. Kai-wing Chow, Tze-ki Hon, Hung-yok Ip, and Don C. Price (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008), 278. Ivin, Kitai i Sovetskii Soiuz, 20; V. I. Lenin, “Revoliutsionnyi proletariat i pravo natsii na samoopredelenie” [“The Revolutionary Proletariat and the Rights of Nations to SelfDetermination”], in Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 55 tomakh [Complete Collected Works in 55 Volumes] (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1958–1965), 27:68; “Sotsialisticheskaia revoliutsiia i pravo natsii na samoopredelenie” [“Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination”], in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 256; “Itogi diskussii o samoopredelenii” [“Summary of the Discussion on Self-Determination”], in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 30:21, 22, 34, 36, 44. The term sblizhenie also appears in the work of the Rozen Orientologists to describe the convergence of East and West within Russia. See Tolz, Russia’s Own Orient, 56. Ivin, Kitai i Sovetskii Soiuz, 11 (my emphasis). Bruce Robbins, Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 16. My focus is on the shaping of subjectivity as an aspiration of cultural production. For influential investigations into the social history of Soviet subjectivity, see Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press,

25 4INTRO D U C TIO N

94.

95. 96.

97.

98.

99.

100.

101.

102.

103.

104.

1997), esp. chap. 5, “Speaking Bolshevik”; Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary Under Stalin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Igal Halfin, Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). Emma Widdis, Socialist Senses: Film, Feeling, and the Soviet Subject, 1917–1940 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017); Christinа Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005). Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 13. See, for example, Boris Arvatov, Iskusstvo i proizvodstvo [Art and Production] (Moscow: Proletkul’t, 1926); Sergei Tret’iakov, “B’em trevogu” [“Sounding the Alarm”], Novyi Lef 2 (1927): 1–5; Osip Brik, “Ot kartiny k foto” [“From the Painting to the Photo”], Novyi Lef 3 (1928): 29–33; Aleksandr Rodchenko, “Protiv summirovannogo portreta za momental’nyi snimok” [“Against the Summarized Portrait, for the Snapshot”], Novyi Lef 4 (1928): 14–16. Jacques Rancière, “The Distribution of the Sensible: Politics and Aesthetics,” in The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), 13. See, for example, Tret’iakov, “B’em trevogu,” 4; Tret’iakov, “Chem zhivo kino” [“What Makes Cinema Alive”], Novyi Lef 5 (1928): 25–26. Cf. Devin Fore, “ ‘All the Graphs’: Soviet and Weimar Documentary Between the Wars” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2005), 44–50. For an early statement of LEF’s program, see B. Arvatov, N. Aseev, O. Brik, B. Kushner, V. Maiakovskii, S. Tret’iakov, and N. Chuzhak, “Za chto boretsia LEF?” [“What Is LEF Fighting for?”], Lef 1 (1923): 3–7. For Benjamin’s understanding of aesthetics, see Susan Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered,” October 62 (Fall 1992): 3–41; Steven S. Lee, “Introduction. Comintern Aesthetics: Space, Form, History,” in Comintern Aesthetics, ed. Amelia M. Glaser and Steven S. Lee (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020), 33. For the influence of the Soviet avant-garde on Benjamin, see Clark, Moscow, 42–77. Nina Gur’ianova, “Avangard i ideologiia” [“The Avant-Garde and Ideology”], Avangard i ideologiia, ed. Slobodan Grubačič (Belgrade: Fililogicheskii fakul’tet belgradskogo universiteta, 2009), 16–19. Pavel Arsen’ev and Aleksei Kosykh, “Kitaiskoe puteshestvie S. Tret’iakova: Poeticheskii zakhvat deistvitel’nosti na puti k literature fakta” [“S. Tret’iakov’s Chinese Journey: The Poetic Capture of Reality on the Path to the Literature of Fact”], Translit 10–11 (2012): 15. Katerina Clark reports that Tret’iakov arrived in Beijing in late February. Clark, “Boris Pilniak and Sergei Tretiakov as Soviet Envoys to China and Japan and Forgers of New, Post-imperial Narratives (1924–1926),” Cross Currents: East Asia History and Culture Review 7, no. 2 (November 2018): 32. Russkie sovetskie pisateli—prozaiki: Bibliograficheskii ukazatel’ [Russian Soviet Writers— Prose Writers: Bibliographical Reference Guide], ed. B. M. Tolochinskaia, vol. 7, part 2 (Moscow: Kniga, 1972), 353–55, 391–93.

INTRO D U CTIO N25 5

105. 106.

107.

108.

109. 110. 111.

112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120.

121. 122. 123. 124. 125.

Sergei Tret’iakov, “Neskol’ko slov” [“A Few Words”], introduction to “Den Sy-Khua (Bio-interv’iu)” [“Den Sy-Khua (A Bio-Interview)”], Novyi Lef 7 (1927): 14. A. Bogdanov, “Puti proletarskogo tvorchestva” [“The Paths of Proletarian Creation”], Proletarskaia kul’tura 15–16 (1920), reprinted in Literaturnye manifesty: Ot simvolizma do “Oktiabria” [Literary Manifestos: From Symbolism to “October”], ed. N. L. Brodskii and N. P. Sidorov (Moscow: Agraf, 2001), 333–38. B. Arvatov, “Proizvodstvennoe iskusstvo i LEF” [“Production Art and LEF”], in Iskusstvo i proizvodstvo: Sbornik statei [Art and Production: A Collection of Articles] (Moscow: Proletkul’t, 1926), 87–93. For a comprehensive account of Bogdanov’s and Gastev’s influence on Tretyakov and the factographers, see Fore, “ ‘All the Graphs,’ ” 59–169. Tret’iakov, “Otkuda i kuda? (Perspektivy futurizma)” [“Whence and Whither? (The Perspectives of Futurism)”], 194–95. I have consulted the translation in Russian Futurism through its Manifestos, 1912–1928, ed. and trans. Anna Lawton and Herbert Eagle (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 207–08. Tret’iakov, “Otkuda i kuda?,” 194–95. For an extensive discussion of the avant-garde preoccupation with oshchushchenie and materiality, see Widdis, Socialist Senses, 27–49. Viktor Shklovskii, “Iskusstvo, kak priem” [“Art, as Device”], in O teorii prozy [On the Theory of Prose] (Moscow: Federatsiia, 1929), 13; Dziga Vertov, “Kinoki. Perevorot” [“Cine-Eyes. A Revolution”], Lef 3 (1923): 141. Sergei Tret’iakov, “Liubit’ Kitai” [“Loving China”], Shkval 25 (1925): 5; reprinted in Sergei Tret’iakov, Chzhungo (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1927), 7. Karl Marx, Capital: Volume One, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1977), 163–65. See chapter 3 for details. Tret’iakov, Chzhungo, 199; Spence, “The French Exotic,” chap. 8 in Chan’s Great Continent. V. M. Alekseev, “Ekzotika i filologicheskaia nauka” [“Exoticism and Philology”], in Nauka o Vostoke [Scholarship on the East], ed. V. M. Alekseev (Moscow: Nauka, 1982), 331. Tret’iakov, Chzhungo, 9. Tret’iakov, Chzhungo, 9–10. Hayot, The Hypothetical Mandarin, 3–35 and passim. For a similar dynamic in depictions of Chinese Red Army partisans in early Soviet literature, see Edward Tyerman, “Revolutionary Violence with Chinese Characteristics: Chinese Migrants in Early Soviet Literature,” in Red Migrations: Marxism and Transnational Mobility after 1917, ed. Philip Gleissner and Bradley Gorski (forthcoming with University of Toronto Press). Tret’iakov, Chzhungo, 10. Alexandra Kollontai, “Make Way for Winged Eros: A Letter to Working Youth,” in A. Holt, Selected Writings of A. Kollontai (Westport, CT: L. Hill, 1977), 276–92. Jacob Edmond, “Scripted Spaces: The Geopoetics of the Newspaper from Tret’iakov to Prigov,” Slavic Review 75, no. 2 (Summer 2016): 299–300. Fore, “Introduction,” October 118 (Fall 2006): 6. Ian Christie and Richard Taylor, eds., The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 57.

25 6 INTRO D U C TIO N

126.

127.

128. 129. 130. 131. 132.

Key texts include Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” in The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 19–55; Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1893); Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991). For a recent analysis of socialist internationalism through the prism of media forms, see Rossen Djagalov, “The People’s Republic of Letters: Towards a Media History of Twentieth-Century Socialist Internationalism” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2011). Evgeny Steiner, Avangard i postroenie novogo cheloveka: Iskusstvo sovetskoi detskoi knigi 1920-kh godov [The Avant-Garde and the Construction of the New Human Being: The Art of Soviet Children’s Books] (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2002), 131–42. Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 6–10. Richard So, Transpacific Community: America, China, and the Rise and Fall of a Cultural Network (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), xxiii–xxxiii. Leah Dickerman, “The Fact and the Photograph,” October 118 (Fall 2006), 132–52; Devin Fore, “The Operative Word in Soviet Factography,” October 118 (Fall 2006), 95–131. Samera Esmeir, “On Becoming Less of the World,” History of the Present 8, no. 1 (Spring 2018): 88–116. For a useful overview, see Brian James Baer and Susanna Witt, “Introduction: The Double Context of Translation,” in Translation in Russian Contexts: Culture, Politics, Identity, ed. Brian James Baer and Susanna Witt (London: Routledge, 2018), 1–16.

1. SIGHT, SOUND, AND SIMILARITY: SOVIET WRITERS TRAVEL TO CHINA 1. 2. 3.

4.

Sergei Tret’iakov, “Moskva–Pekin (Put’fil’ma)” [“Moscow–Beijing: A Journey-Film”], Lef 3 (1925): 33. Tret’iakov, “Moskva–Pekin (Put’fil’ma).” On banality and fragmentation in “Moscow–Beijing,” see Jacob Edmond, “Scripted Spaces: The Geopoetics of the Newspaper from Tret’iakov to Prigov,” Slavic Review 75, no. 2 (Summer 2016): 309–12; Devin Fore, “ ‘All the Graphs’: Soviet and Weimar Documentary Between the Wars” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2005), 171. Dalin visited China to attend youth meetings and recruit students for Moscow’s Sun Yat-sen University. See Sergei Alekseevich Dalin, V riadakh kitaiskoi revoliutsii [In the Ranks of the Chinese Revolution] (Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1926); Sergei Alekseevich Dalin, Ocherki revoliutsii v Kitae [Sketches of the Revolution in China] (Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1927). Serebryakova came to China on a diplomatic mission with her husband, the Bolshevik politician Leonid Petrovich Serebryakov. See Galina Serebriakova, Zarisovki Kitaia [Sketches of China] (Moscow: Ogonek, 1927). Kostarev spent

1. S IGH T, S O U ND, AND S IM ILAR I TY257

5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

nine months embedded with Guomindang troops in 1926–1927 as a correspondent for Rabochaia gazeta. His Kitaiskie dnevniki (Chinese Diaries) went through five editions between 1929 and 1935. See Nikolai Kostarev, Moi kitaiskie dnevniki [My Chinese Diaries] (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1931). For a discussion of Tarkhanov, who wrote Kitaiskie novelly [Chinese Novellas] (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1929) under the name of Oskar Erdberg, see this book’s epilogue. For a succinct summary of the 1920s cult of the reporter, see Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, In 1926: Living at the Edge of Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 185. John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World (New York: International Publishers, 1919); Egon Erwin Kisch, Zaren, Popen, Bolschewiken [Tsars, Popes, Bolsheviks] (Berlin: Erich Reiss, 1927); Egon Erwin Kisch, China geheim [Secret China] (Berlin: Reiss, 1933); Agnes Smedley, China’s Red Army Marches (New York: Vanguard Press, 1934); Anna Louise Strong, The First Time in History: Two Years of Russia’s New Life (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924); Anna Louise Strong, China’s Millions (New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1928); Edgar Snow, Red Star Over China (London: V. Gollancz, 1937). Charles Laughlin, Chinese Reportage: The Aesthetics of Historical Experience (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 47; Elizabeth McGuire, Red at Heart: How Chinese Communists Fell in Love with the Russian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 31–53. The phrase “documentary moment” comes from Elizabeth Astrid Papazian, Manufacturing Truth: The Documentary Moment in Early Soviet Culture (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009). Chuzhak and Tretyakov knew each other from their time in Vladivostok and Chita during the Civil War. Katerina Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 49. Nikolai Chuzhak, “Pisatel’skaia pamiatka” [“A Writers’ Handbook”], in Literatura fakta: Pervyi sbornik materialov rabotnikov LEFa [Literature of Fact: First Collection of Materials from the Workers of LEF], ed. Nikolai Chuzhak (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Federatsiia, 1929; repr. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1972), 20–21. Devin Fore, “Introduction,” October 118 (Fall 2006): 3–10. Clark, Moscow, 49–50. Jeffrey Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), xiv, 3, 33. V. Vilenskii-Sibiriakov, Kitai i Sovetskaia Rossiia: Iz voprosov nashei dal’nevostochnoi politiki [China and Soviet Russia: From Questions of Our Far Eastern Policy] (Moscow: Seriia dal’nego vostoka, 1919); Sun’ Iat-sen—Otets kitaiskoi revoliustii [Sun Yat-sen: Father of the Chinese Revolution] (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1924); Za velikoi kitaiskoi stenoi (liudi, byt i obshchestvennost’) [Behind the Great Wall of China (People, Everyday Life and Society)] (Moscow: Deviatoe ianvaria, 1923), expanded and republished as Za kitaiskoi stenoi [Behind the Chinese Wall] (Moscow: 1925); G. Voitinskii, Chto proiskhodit v Kitae? [What Is Happening in China?] (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1924). On Vilensky-Sibiryakov in China, see V.  N. Nikiforov, Sovetskie istoriki o problemakh

25 81. S IGH T, S O U ND, AND S I MI LA R I TY

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20. 21. 22.

23.

24.

Kitaia (Moscow: Nauka, 1970), 67–68. On Voitinsky’s role in founding the Chinese Communist Party, see C. Martin Wilbur and Julie Lien-ying How, Missionaries of Revolution: Soviet Advisers and Nationalist China, 1920–1927 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 6–7. Tretyakov’s subsequent missions as writer-ambassador would include a trip to Georgia in 1927; a series of stays on the Communist Lighthouse collective farm in the northern Caucasus between 1928 and 1930; a visit to Germany in 1930–1931; and a journey to Czechoslovakia in 1935. See Papazian, Manufacturing Truth, 54–62; Clark, Moscow, 32–41, 45–50. Sergei Tret’iakov, Chzhungo (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1927), 5. Confirmed by Tretyakov’s daughter in T.  S. Gomolitskaia-Tret’iakova, “O moem ottse” [“About my Father”], in Sergei Tret’iakov, Strana-perekrestok: Dokumental’naia proza [CountryCrossroads: Documentary Prose] (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1991), 557. Katerina Clark suggests that Tretyakov may have been dispatched to Beijing University in response to low enrollment in Beijing University’s Russian Department. See Clark, “Boris Pilniak and Sergei Tretiakov as Soviet Envoys to China and Japan and Forgers of New, Post-imperial Narratives (1924–1926),” Cross Currents: East Asia History and Culture Review 7, no. 2 (November 2018): 430, citing P. Vorob’ev, “Pekinskii natsional’nyi universitet” [“Beijing National University”], Vostok 4 (1925): 171–72. Gao Xingya, “Wusi qianhou de Beijing daxue eyu xi,” in Wenshi ziliao xuanji 135 (1999): 182; V. V. Vishniakova-Akimova, Dva goda v vosstavshem Kitae 1925–1927: Vospominaniia [Two Years in Insurgent China 1925–1927: Memoirs] (Moscow: Nauka, 1980), 36–37. Roman Belousov, “Sergei Tret’iakov o Kitae” [“Sergei Tret’iakov on China”], in Solntse v zenite: Vostochnyi al’manakh 10 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1982): 560; Sergei Tret’iakov, “Noch’. Pekin” [“Night. Beijing”], in Iasnysh: Stikhi, 1919–1921 [Iasnysh: Poems, 1919–1921] (Chita: Ptach, 1922), 49, reprinted in Tret’iakov, Itogo [In Total] (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1924), 41. Sergei Tretyakov, “The New Lev Tolstoy,” October 118 (2006), 49–50. I am indebted here to the discussion of the newspaper’s contradictory geopoetics in Edmond, “Scripted Spaces,” 299–308. In 1924–1925, Tretyakov’s articles on China appeared in Lef, Prozhektor, Pravda, Krasnaia gazeta, Krasnaia nov’, Krasnaia molodezh’, Krasnaia panorama, Shkval, Zhurnalist, the cinema periodicals Ekran and Kino, and the Harbin newspaper Tribuna. See B.  M. Tolochinskaia, Russkie sovetskie pisateli—prozaiki: Bibliograficheskii ukazatel’, vol. 7, part 2 (Moscow: Kniga, 1972), 348–96. Russkie sovetskie pisateli, 391–92. The series in Zaria Vostoka coincided with Tretyakov’s arrival in Georgia for his next writing project. See Tat’iana Nikol’skaia, Tat’iana Vinogradova, “Kitaisko-gruzinskie paralleli v tvorchestve S. M. Tret’iakova” [“Chinese-Georgian Parallels in the Work of S.  M. Tret’iakov”], in Natale grate numeras? Sbornik statei k 60-letiiu Georgiia Akhillovicha Levintona [Natales grate numeras? Collection of Articles for the 60th Birthday of Georgy Akhillovich Levinton] (St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Evropeiskogo universiteta v Sankt-Peterburge, 2008), 421–26. Sergei Tret’iakov, “U Zheltogo moria—Zhelt’ i sin’ ” [“By the Yellow Sea: Yellow and Blue”], Rabochaia Moskva, May 21, 1927, 3.

1. SIGHT, SOUND, AND SIMILARITY259

25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

31. 32.

33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39.

40. 41. 42.

Chuzhak, “Pisatel’skaia pamiatka,” 22; Papazian, Manufacturing Truth, 45. Tret’iakov, Chzhungo, 5–6. Sergei Tret’iakov, “Evoliutsiia zhanra” [“The Evolution of a Genre”], Nashi dostizheniia 7–8 (1934): 161. Papazian, Manufacturing Truth, 59–62. Sergei Tret’iakov, “Ot fotoserii—k dlitel’nomu fotonabliudeniiu” [“From the PhotoSeries to Prolonged Photo-Observation”], Proletarskoe foto 4 (1931): 20–43; Katherine M. H. Reischl, “ ‘Where Have I Been with My Camera’: Sergei Tret’iakov and Developing Operativity,” Russian Literature 103–105 (2019): 123–24, 132–33. Sergei Tret’iakov, “Kitai na ekran” [“China Onscreen”], Sovetskoe kino 5–6 (1927): 16; Christina Lodder, “Sergei Tret’iakov: The Writer as Photographer,” Russian Literature 103–105 (2019): 95–117. James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Authority,” Representations 2 (Spring 1983): 118–25. Clifford, “On Ethnographic Authority,” 123. Tatjana Hofmann makes a similar point about Tret’iakov’s China sketches as a form of “future-oriented ethnography” in her article “Theatrical Observation in Sergei M. Tret’jakov’s Chzhungo,” Russian Literature 103–205 (2019): 160. Tret’iakov, Chzhungo, 225. “Sunguoren” seems to be a misspelling of “Suguo ren” (㯛೟Ҏ), meaning “person from the Soviet country”—a more standard translation would be “Sulian ren” (㯛㙃Ҏ). Sergei Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua: Bio-interv’iu [Den Shi-khua: A Bio-interview] (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1930), 335. Tret’iakov, Chzhungo, 185. Tret’iakov, Chzhungo, 247. For a similar dynamic in classic works of Western ethnography, see Clifford, “On Ethnographic Authority,” 128, 132. Joseph Esherick, “How the Qing Became China,” in Empire to Nation: Historical Perspectives on the Making of the Modern World, ed. Joseph W. Esherick, Hasan Kayalı, and Eric Van Young (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), 232; Lydia Liu, The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 75–81. Tret’iakov’s rendering corresponds to the Palladius system for transcribing the Chinese language into Russian. Kitai derives from the Khitan, a Mongolic nomadic people who founded the Liao dynasty and ruled over much of northeastern Eurasia in the tenth and eleventh centuries AD; see Susanna Soojung Lim, China and Japan in the Russian Imagination, 1685–1922: To the Ends of the Orient (London: Routledge, 2013), 18. The English term “Cathay” derives from the same source. Lawrence Venuti, “Translation, Community, Utopia,” in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti (London: Taylor and Francis, 2000), 468. I am grateful to Anna Tseselsky for first drawing this possible association to my attention. The chapter in Chzhungo reworks and expands the first of Tret’iakov’s China reports to be published in Prozhektor: “Pekin” [Beijing], Prozhektor 11, no. 33 (June 20, 1924): 12–14. The Prozhektor version begins at the center of the city and works its way outwards, an

26 0 1. S IGH T, S O U ND, AND S I MI LA R I TY

43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52.

53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61.

order that is inverted in Chzhungo. The sketch was expanded still further for the revised edition of Chzhungo, published in 1930. This discussion focuses on the 1927 version. Tret’iakov, Chzhungo, 19. Tret’iakov, Chzhungo, 27. Sergei Tret’iakov, “Skvoz’ neprotertye ochki” [“Through Unwiped Glasses”], Novyi Lef 9 (1928): 20–24. Tret’iakov, “Skvoz’ neprotertye ochki,” 23. See also Sergei Tret’iakov, “Obrazoborchestvo” [Imagoclasm], Novyi Lef 12 (1928): 43. Tret’iakov, Chzhungo, 29. Tret’iakov, “Skvoz’ neprotertye ochki,” 20. Ivan Goncharov, Fregat Pallada: Ocherki puteshestviia v dvukh tomakh [The Frigate Pallada: Sketches of a Journey in Two Volumes] (Leningrad: Nauka, 1986), 8–14. Tret’iakov, “Skvoz’ neprotertye ochki,” 20. Cited by Eric Naiman, “Introduction,” in The Landscape of Stalinism: The Art and Ideology of Soviet Space, ed. Evgeny Dobrenko and Eric Naiman (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003), xii. Tret’iakov, Chzhungo, 30. Tret’iakov would later theorize the central importance of the “observation post” (nabliudatel’nyi post) for the operative writer. Maria Gough, “Radical Tourism: Sergei Tret’iakov at the Communist Lighthouse,” October 118 (Fall 2006): 166. Tret’iakov, Chzhungo, 30. Tret’iakov, Chzhungo, 30. See, for example, Ross G. Forman, “Eating Out East,” in A Century of Travels in China: Critical Essays on Travel Writing from the 1840s to the 1940s, ed. Douglas Kerr and Julia Kuehn (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2007), 65. Tret’iakov, Chzhungo, 31. Tret’iakov, Chzhungo, 38. Tret’iakov, Chzhungo, 49–50. Tret’iakov, Chzhungo, 41, 31, 37, 45, 42. For more on Tret’iakov’s use of photography in “Pekin,” see Christina Lodder, “Sergei Tret’iakov: The Writer as Photographer,” Russian Literature 103–105 (2019): 95–117. Tret’iakov, Chzhungo, 57. Trotsky’s thinking on uneven development can be traced back to his analysis of Russia’s historical development in Results and Prospects (1906), although he only introduces the term “uneven and combined development” in the first chapter of The History of the Russian Revolution (1930; Marxists Internet Archive), accessed July 20, 2017, https:// www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/hrr/ch01.htm. Lenin, meanwhile, globalized the theory of uneven development in Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism: “The uneven and spasmodic development of individual enterprises, individual branches of industry and individual countries is inevitable under the capitalist system” (1916; Marxists Internet Archive), accessed August 15, 2019, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin /works/1916/imp-hsc/ch04.htm. A history of the concept can be found in Michael Pröbsting, “Capitalism Today and the Law of Uneven Development: The Marxist Tradition and Its Application in the Present Historic Period,” Critique 44, no. 4 (2016): 381–418.

1. S IGH T, S O U ND, AND S IM ILAR I TY261

62. 63. 64. 65.

66. 67. 68.

69. 70.

71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

84.

Ernst Bloch, “Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics,” trans. Mark Ritter, New German Critique 11 (Spring 1977): 22–38. Tret’iakov, Chzhungo, 47. Tret’iakov, Chzhungo, 36; cf. David Strand, Rickshaw Beijing: City People and Politics in the 1920s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), xv. For example, the American travel writer Harry Franck lamented Beijing’s determination to “desecrate her streets with the ugliness and clamour of electric tramways.” Harry Franck, Wandering in Northern China (New York: Century Co., 1923), 200. Franck, Wandering in Northern China, 61. Franck, Wandering in Northern China, 61. Li Dazhao, Li Dazhao wenji [Collected Works of Li Dazhao] (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1984), 1:539. Quoted in S. A. Smith, Revolution and the People in Russia and China: A Comparative History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 18. Sergei Tret’iakov, Chzhungo, 2nd expanded ed. (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1930), 339. A. Ivin, “Revoliutsionnyi Pekin” [“Revolutionary Beijing”], Prozhektor 5 (Маrch 15, 1927): 18–19. Reprinted as “Pekin” [Beijing], in A. Ivin, Pis’ma iz Kitaia: ot Versal’skogo dogovora do sovetsko-kitaiskogo soglasheniia (Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1927), 68. Ivin, “Revoliutsionnyi Pekin,” 18. Ivin, “Revoliutsionnyi Pekin,” 18. Ivin, “Revoliutsionnyi Pekin,” 18. Ivin, “Revoliutsionnyi Pekin,” 19. Alexander Lukin, The Bear Watches the Dragon: Russia’s Perceptions of China and the Evolution of Russian-Chinese Relations since the Eighteenth Century (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2003), 18. Ivin, “Revoliutsionnyi Pekin,” 19. Krystyn R. Moon, Yellowface: Creating the Chinese in American Popular Music and Performance, 1850s–1920s (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 10, 12–13. Galina Serebriakova, Zarisovki Kitaia (Moscow: Ogonek, 1927), 19. Zinaida Rikhter, 7000 kilometrov po vozdukhu: Moskva—Mongoliia—Kitai [7000 Kilometres by Air: Moscow–Mongolia–China] (Moscow: Avioizdatel’stvo, 1926), 126. Tret’iakov, Chzhungo, 86. Tret’iakov, Chzhungo, 77. Tretyakov gave a markedly different account of Chinese theater during Mei Lanfang’s visit to Moscow in 1935; see Epilogue. Serebriakova, Zarisovki Kitaia, 5. Feng Yi, “The Sound of Images: Peddlers’ Calls and Tunes in Republican Peking,” Journal of Modern Chinese History 4, no. 1 (June 2010): 29–32; R. W. Swallow, Sidelights on Peking Life (Beijing: China Booksellers, 1927), 20; Samuel Victor Constant, Calls, Sounds and Merchandise of the Peking Street Peddlers (Beijing: Camel Bell, 1935), iv. Feng Yi, “The Sound of Images,” 44–45; Constant, Calls, Sounds and Merchandise, iv; Beijing Sound Museum, Beijing shengyin—Xiangqi yu ba bu yu [Beijing Sounds: Sound Instruments and the Eight Non-Talkers] (Beijing: Beijing Sound Museum, 2015). I am deeply grateful to Colin Siyuan Chinnery, the founder of the Beijing Sound Museum, for

26 21. S IGH T, S O U ND, AND S I MI LA R I TY

85.

86.

87. 88. 89. 90. 91.

92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99.

100. 101. 102.

103.

sharing with me his materials on the huosheng, including his reconstructed recordings of some of the sounds. Feng Yi, “The Sound of Images,” 47; Beijing Sound Museum, Beijing shengyin. I lean on the concept of a “soundscape” as deployed in contemporary sound studies. See R. Murray Schafer, “The Soundscape,” in The Sound Studies Reader, ed. Jonathan Sterne (London: Routledge, 2012), 95–103. Constant, Calls, Sounds and Merchandise, v; George N. Kates, The Years That Were Fat: The Last of Old China (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976), 87. For Avshalamov’s symphonic poem “Hutongs of Beijing” (1931–1932), see John Winzenburg, “Aaron Avshalamov and New Chinese Music in Shanghai,” Twentieth Century China 37, no. 1 (January 2012): 50–72. Pavel Arsen’ev and Aleksei Kosykh, “Kitaiskoe puteshestvie S. Tret’iakova: Poeticheskii zakhvat deistvitel’nosti na puti k literature fakta,” Translit 10–11 (2012): 18. Sergei Tret’iakov, “Rychi, Kitai!” [“Roar, China!”], in Chzhungo (1930), 339. Tret’iakov, Chzhungo (1927), 40. Sergei Tret’iakov, “Rychi Kitai” [“Roar China”], Lef 1 (1924): 23–32. For the Chzhungo version, see note 59 above. The Prozhektor version includes photographs of a water-carrier and some load-carriers as well as a group of woodcutters. Tret’iakov, “Pekin” (1924), 12–13. Sergei Tret’iakov, “Prislovie k poeme ‘Rychi Kitai’ ” [“Preface to the Poem ‘Roar China’ ”], Lef 1 (1924): 33. Jonathan Sterne, “Sonic Imaginations,” in The Sound Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 2012), 9. Tret’iakov, “Rychi Kitai,” 33. Tret’iakov, “Rychi Kitai,” 29. Tret’iakov, “Rychi Kitai,” 33. Constant, Calls, Sounds and Merchandise, 76. Tret’iakov, “Rychi Kitai,” 30. Tret’iakov, “Rychi Kitai,” 33. Other knife-sharpeners used a kind of rattle made from several flat pieces of metal fastened together. Constant, Calls, Sounds and Merchandise, 180–82; Swallow, Sidelights on Peking Life, 33. Colin Chinnery (private correspondence) suggests that the trumpet may have been used to distinguish a scissor sharpener from a knife sharpener. Tret’iakov, “Rychi Kitai,” 27. Constant, Calls, Sounds and Merchandise, 182; Chinnery, private correspondence. Tret’iakov, “Rychi Kitai,” 33. Other sources suggest that Tret’iakov’s aural research may have let him down here. Fruit sellers and food sellers in general would probably have used vocal cries to express the goods on offer, since their supply was not consistent throughout the year. (Swallow, Sidelights on Peking Life, 22, 28.) The rattle drum (bo lang gu ᢼ⌾哧) seems to have been associated with the charcoal seller. (Chinnery, private correspondence; Constant, Calls, Sounds and Merchandise, 28–32; 98–100.) Tret’iakov, “Prislovie k poeme ‘Rychi Kitai,’ ” 30.

1. S IGH T, S O U ND, AND S IM ILA R I TY263

104.

105. 106. 107.

108. 109. 110. 111. 112.

113. 114.

115. 116.

117. 118.

119.

Tret’iakov, “Rychi Kitai,” 30. “Kaki” are Japanese persimmons; I am grateful to Evgeny Steiner for pointing this out following a presentation of this material at the ICCEES IX World Congress in Makuhari, Japan (August 3–8, 2015). Tat’iana Nikol’skaia, “S. Tret’iakov i I.  A. Chachikov o natsional’no-osvoboditel’nom dvizhenii narodov vostoka,” in Avangard i ideologiia, 319. Filippo Marinetti, “Geometric and Mechanical Splendour and the Numerical Sensibility,” in Selected Writings, ed. R. W. Flint (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971), 101. Roman Iakobson, “Noveishaia russkaia poeziia” [“The Newest Russian Poetry”], in Selected Writings, vol. V, On Verse, Its Masters and Explorers (1919), accessed March 4, 2016, http://philologos.narod.ru/classics/jakobson-nrp.htm. I am grateful to Devin Fore for bringing Jakobson’s discussion of onomatopoeia to my attention. Sergei Tret’iakov, “Art in the Revolution and the Revolution in Art,” October 118 (Fall 2006): 18 (my emphasis). On the “low economic status” of Beijing’s street peddlers see Feng Yi, “Sound of Images,” 33. Tret’iakov, “Rychi Kitai,” 29. Tret’iakov, “Rychi Kitai,” 29. A pood is a Russian unit of weight equal to 36.11 pounds. For a succinct summary of the concept of sdvig, see Il’ia Zdanevich, “Novye shkoly russkoi poezii” [“New Schools of Russian Poetry”] (1921; Arzamas Academy), trans. Leonid Livak, accessed March 5, 2016, http://arzamas.academy/materials/566. Mark Gamsa, “Sergei Tret’iakov’s Roar, China! Between Moscow and China,” Itinerario 36, no. 12 (2012): 98. For the transnational trajectory of Tretyakov’s title, see Xiaobing Tang, “Echoes of Roar, China! On Vision and Voice in Modern Chinese Art,” positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 14, no. 2 (Fall 2006): 467–94. Tret’iakov, “Rychi Kitai,” 26. Dany Savelli, “Shest’ neizdannykh pisem’ Borisa Pil’niaka o ego pervom prebyvanii na Dal’nem Vostoke (v Kitae i v Iaponii) v 1926 god” [“Six Unpublished Letters of Boris Pilnyak About His First Trip to the Far East (China and Japan) in 1926”], Cahiers du monde russe 42, no. 1 (January–March 2001): 139. Gary Browning, Boris Pilniak: Scythian at a Typewriter (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1985), 20, 38. On Pilnyak’s fatal relationship with the Soviet state, see Vera T. Reck, Boris Pil’niak: A Soviet Writer in Conflict with the State (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1975). For Tretyakov’s arrest, see Epilogue. See, for example, “Tret’ia stolitsa” [“The Third Capital”] written after a trip to Berlin in 1922; “Staryi syr” [“Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese”], inspired by a trip to London in 1923; “Zavoloch’e,” written after a 1924 journey to the Arctic Circle; “Rossiia v polete” [“Russia in Flight”], which describes an airplane journey in provincial Russia in 1925; and “Rasskaz o kliuchakh i gline” [“A Tale of Keys and Clay”], which recreates a journey to Palestine that same year. In the early 1930s, Pilnyak would go on to publish accounts of trips to the United States (O’kei: Amerikanskii roman [Okay: An American Novel] [Moscow:

26 41. S IGH T, S O U ND, AND S I MI LA R I TY

120. 121.

122.

123.

124.

125. 126. 127. 128. 129.

130.

131. 132.

Federatsiia, 1933]) and Japan again (Kamni i korni [Stones and Roots] [Moscow: Sovetskaia literatura, 1934]). Michael David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921–1941 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 28–60. The official records of VOKS note: “Pilnyak also visited China: in Beijing we rendered him the same assistance [as in Japan]. As to the results of his trip to China, we are unable to pass judgement, since we know about it only from his own words.” In December 1926, the director of VOKS, Olga Kameneva, wrote to a Soviet diplomat in Beijing: “The writer Pilnyak, who recently visited China, informs us that in Shanghai he supposedly set up an initiative group directed towards the creation of a Chinese society for closer relations with the USSR. We have not yet managed to confirm this fact. Do you know anything about this?” Boris Pil’niak, Pis’ma [Letters] (Moscow: IMLI RAN, 2010), 2:270. Pil’niak, Pis’ma, 2:178. See also Dani Savelli, “Boris Pil’niak v Iaponii: 1926” [“Boris Pilnyak in Japan: 1926”], in Boris Pil’niak, Korni iaponskogo solntsa [Roots of the Japanese Sun] (Moscow: Tri kvadrata, 2004), 181. Georges Nivat, “Du ‘Panmongolisme’ au ‘Mouvement Eurasien’: Histoire d’un thème littéraire” [“From ‘Panmongolism’ to the ‘Eurasian Movement’: The History of a Literary Theme”], Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique 7, no. 3 (1966): 473–77; Michael Kunichika, “Our Native Antiquity”: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Culture of Russian Modernism (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2015), 204–42. On the origins of the name “Kitai-gorod,” see Mark Gamsa, “Refractions of China in Russia, and of Russia in China: Ideas and Things,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 60 (2017): 574–76. Boris Pil’niak, Sobranie sochinenii v 6 tomakh [Collected Works in 6 Volumes] (Moscow: Terra-knizhnyi klub, 2003), 1:37. Nivat, “Panmongolisme,” 475; Peter Jensen, Nature as Code: Тhe Achievement of Boris Pilnjak, 1915–1924 (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1979), 177–78; Browning, Boris Pil’niak, 121. Nikolai Sergeevich Trubetskoi, The Legacy of Genghis Khan and Other Essays on Russia’s Identity (Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1991). Tatiana Filimonova, “From Scythia to a Eurasian Empire: The Eastern Trajectory in Russian Literature, 1890–2008” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 2013), 98–104. Boris Pil’niak, “Sankt-Piter-Burkh,” in Povest’ Peterburgskaia [Petersburg Tale] (Berlin: Gelikon, 1922); Filimonova, “From Scythia to a Eurasian Empire,” 104–6; Khe Fan, “Evraziistvo i russkaia literatura 1920–1930-kh godov XX veka” [“Eurasianism and Russian Literature, 1920s–1930s”] (PhD diss., Moskovskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 2004), 121–23. Pilnyak does not name the Consulate as his address in “Chinese Story,” but he affirms it in the story “Orudiia prozivodstva” [“Instruments of Production”], in Sobranie sochinenii [Collected Works], vol. 5, Prostye rasskazy [Simple Stories] (Moscow: Gosudartvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1929), 258. Pil’niak, “Kitaiskaia povest’,” 119, 152. Pil’niak, “Kitaiskaia povest’,” 163. Translation taken from Boris Pilnyak, Chinese Story and Other Tales, trans. Vera T. Reck and Michael Green (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), 75.

1. S IGH T, S O U ND, AND S IM ILAR I TY265

133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140.

141. 142. 143.

144.

145. 146.

147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154.

155. 156. 157. 158.

Pil’niak, “Kitaiskaia povest’,” 158; Pilnyak, Chinese Story, 69. Pil’niak, “Kitaiskaia povest’,” 110. Pil’niak, “Kitaiskaia povest’,” 110. Pil’niak, “Kitaiskaia povest’,” 110. Pil’niak, “Kitaiskaia povest’,” 115. S. A. Smith, Like Cattle and Horses: Nationalism and Labor in Shanghai, 1895–1927 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 161. Pil’niak, “Kitaiskaia povest’,” 129; Pilnyak, Chinese Story, 38. The first installment of Den Shi-khua was published in the July 1927 issue of Novyi Lef; the two installments of Chinese Story appeared in Novyi mir in June and August of that same year. A few years later, Pilnyak participated in the genre of collaborative autobiography with the publication of The Chinese Fate of a Human Being (Kitaiskaia sud’ba cheloveka [Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo pisatelei v Leningrade, 1931]), an account of the life of a Russian woman (A. Rogozina) sold into marriage in northern China. Pil’niak, “Kitaiskaia povest’,” 129; Pilnyak, Chinese Story, 38. Pil’niak, “Kitaiskaia povest’,” 147. Extratextual evidence suggests some of the “documents” in the text are invented. For example, a telegram from Pilnyak’s housemate, the (fabled?) translator Krylov, to his estranged wife is strikingly similar to a telegram Pilnyak sent to his wife Olga Shcherbatskaya, who had returned to Russia rather than accompany him to China. See Pil’niak, “Kitaiskaia povest’,” 125–26; Pil’niak, Pis’ma, 267. Rachael Langford and Russell West, “Introduction: Diaries and Margins,” in Marginal Voices, Marginal Forms: Diaries in European Literature and History, ed. Rachael Langford and Russell West (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), 8. Pil’niak, “Kitaiskaia povest’,” 172; Pilnyak, Chinese Story, 85. S. Vel’tman, “Literaturnye otkliki (Vostok v izobrazhenii B. Pil’niaka, S. Tret’iakova i dr.)” [“Literary Responses (The East in the Representation of B. Pilnyak and S. Tretyakov)”], Novyi Vostok 19 (1927): 215, 219. Vel’tman, “Literaturnye otkliki,” 221. Pil’niak, “Kitaiskaia povest’,” 110. Pil’niak, “Kitaiskaia povest’,” 111. Pil’niak, “Kitaiskaia povest’,” 114. RGALI, f. 1692, o. 1, ed. khr. 32, l. 1. Olga Bakich, “Did You Speak Harbin Sino-Russian?,” Itinerario 35, no. 3 (2011): 32. Pil’niak, “Kitaiskaia povest’,” 115. Savelli, “Shest’ neizdannykh pisem’ Borisa Pil’niaka,” 154. Pilnyak’s drafts add that mamandi has “corrupted so much blood, this terrible mamandi.” RGALI, f. 1692, o. 1, ed. khr. 32, l. 2. Walter Benjamin, “Moscow,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1999), 31–32. Pil’niak, “Kitaiskaia povest’,” 115; Pilnyak, Chinese Story, 22. Pil’niak, “Kitaiskaia povest’,” 115; Pilnyak, Chinese Story, 23. Pil’niak, “Kitaiskaia povest’,” 115; translation modified from Pilnyak, Chinese Story, 23.

26 6 1. S IGH T, S O U ND, AND SI MI LA R I TY

159. 160. 161.

162. 163. 164. 165.

166. 167. 168.

169. 170. 171. 172. 173. 174. 175. 176.

177.

Pil’niak, “Kitaiskaia povest’,” 115; translation modified from Pilnyak, Chinese Story, 22–23. Pil’niak, “Kitaiskaia povest’,” 131. Nikolai Trubetskoi, “Verkhi i nizy russkoi kul’tury” [“The Upper and Lower Strata of Russian Culture”], in Iskhod k vostoku [Exodus to the East] (Sofia: Rossiisko-bolgarskoe knigoizdatel’stvo, 1921), 97–98. Quoted (and critiqued) in Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutic Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 406–7. Boris Gasparov, Five Operas and a Symphony: Word and Music in Russian Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 190. Kate Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters Between Black and Red, 1922–1963 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 215. Paul Robeson, Here I Stand (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), 115. Steven S. Lee, The Ethnic Avant-Garde: Minority Cultures and World Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015); see also Masha Salazkina, In Excess: Sergei Eisenstein’s Mexico (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Pil’niak, “Kitaiskaia povest’,” 115. Pil’niak, “Kitaiskaia povest’,” 116. For an argument that Pilnyak’s text fixes China at an unsurpassable temporal lag behind Russia, see Alexander Bukh, “National Identity and Race in Post-Revolutionary Russia: Pil’niak’s Travelogues from Japan and China,” in Race and Racism in Modern East Asia: Western and Eastern Constructions, ed. Rotem Kowner and Walter Demel (Leiden: Brill Modern East Asia in Global Historical Perspective Series, 2012), 188. While there is surely some truth to this resistance of synchronicity, to my mind it does not fully account for Pilnyak’s ambivalent relationship to the concept of Russia’s own modernity. Pil’niak, “Kitaiskaia povest’,” 149. Savelli, “Shest’ neizdannykh pisem’,” 154. Savelli dates this letter to September 17, 1926. See Introduction. Pil’niak, “Kitaiskaia povest’,” 151. Pil’niak, “Kitaiskaia povest’,” 151. Mark Gamsa, The Reading of Russian Literature in China: A Moral Example and Manual of Practice (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 76. C. T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 258; McGuire, Red at Heart, 103. Jiang Guangci, “Shiyue geming yu eluosi wenxue” [“The October Revolution and Russian Literature”], in Jiang Guangci wenji [Collected Works of Jiang Guangci], vol. 4 (Shanghai: Shanghai wen yi chu ban she, 1982), 57–134. The survey was published, alongside Qu Qiubai’s survey of prerevolutionary literature, as Eluosi wenxue [Russian Literature] in December 1927. On Jiang as one of the “agents” of Soviet Russian literature in mid-1920s China, see Gamsa, Russian Literature in China, 68–80. A Chinese translation of Trotsky’s text (from English) was published in Beijing in 1928: Teluociji [Trotskii], Wenxue yu geming [Literature and Revolution], trans. Li Jiye and Wei Suyuan (Beijing: Weiming she, 1928). Jiang would also have been able to read the Russian original.

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178.

179. 180.

181.

182. 183.

184. 185. 186.

187.

188. 189. 190. 191. 192.

193.

194. 195. 196. 197.

Leon Trotsky, “The Literary Fellow-Travellers of the Revolution,” chap. 2 in Literature and Revolution (1924; Marxists Internet Archive), accessed February 23, 2012, http:// www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/lit_revo/ch02.htm. Jiang, “Shiyue geming yu eluosi wenxue,” 102, 107, 109. Jiang Guangci, “Jieshao lai Hua youli zhi Su-E wenxuejia Pinieke” [“Welcoming the SovietRussian Writer Pilnyak on his Arrival in China”], in Jiang Guangci wenji, vol. 4, 155–57. First published in Wenxue zhoubao 232, July 4, 1926. For an overview of Tian Han’s career, see Liang Luo, The Avant-Garde and the Popular in Modern China: Tian Han and the Intersection of Performance and Politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014). On Jiang’s role as an intermediary between Tian Han and Soviet contacts in Shanghai, see Luo, The Avant-Garde and the Popular, 95. Cited in Edward X. Gu, “Populistic Themes in May Fourth Radical Thinking: A Reappraisal of the Intellectual Origins of Chinese Marxism,” East Asian History 10 (1995): 113. Gu, “Populistic Themes in May Fourth Radical Thinking,” 113–17; Chang-tai Hung, Going to the People: Chinese Intellectuals and Folk Literature, 1918–1937 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 10–12; Wang-chi Wong, Politics and Literature in Shanghai: The Chinese League of Left-Wing Writers, 1930–1936 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), 10. Tian Han, “Women de ziji pipan” [“Our Self-Criticism”], Tian Han quanji [Complete Works of Tian Han] (Shijiazhuang: Huashan wenyi chubanshe, 2000), 15:88–89. Tian Han, “Women de ziji pipan,” 89–90. On Tian Han’s sojourn in Japan, see Luo, The Avant-Garde and the Popular, 41. On the balance between nationalism and cosmopolitanism in May Fourth culture, see Kirk Denton, ed., Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893–1945 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 5–12. Haiyan Lee, Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900–1950 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 95–139; Luo, The Avant-Garde and the Popular, 84–88. Tian Han, “Dao minjian qu” [“Go to the People”], in Tian Han quanji, 10:10–17. Jay Leyda, Dianying: An Account of Films and the Film Audience in China (Boston: MIT Press, 1972), 54–55. Tian Han, “Women de ziji pipan,” 92. Pilnyak, Chinese Story, 99. Lu Xun, “Mashang riji zhi’er” [“Horseback Diary no. 2”], in Lu Xun quanji, 3:361–62. Translation modified from Lee Ou-Fan Lee, Voices from the Iron House: A Study of Lu Xun (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 153. Lu Xun read Trotsky’s text in Japanese: see Leo Ou-Fan Lee, “Literature on the Eve of Revolution: Reflections on Lu Xun’s Leftist Years, 1927–1936,” Modern China 2, no. 3 (1976): 295. Tian Han, “Women de ziji pipan,” 93–100; Luo, The Avant-Garde and the Popular, 85. Lu Xun, “Mashang riji zhi’er,” 362. Pil’niak, “Kitaiskaia povest’,” 113. Pil’niak, “Kitaiskaia povest’,” 183.

26 81. S IGH T, S O U ND, AND S I MI LA R I TY

198.

199. 200. 201. 202. 203. 204.

205.

On Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International as a reconstructed Tower of Babel, see Lee, Ethnic Avant-Garde, 5–12. For literary examples see Daniel Collins, “The Tower of Babel Undone in a Soviet Pentecost: A Linguistic Myth of the First Five-Year Plan,” Slavic and East European Journal 42, no. 3 (Autumn 1998): 423–44. Pil’niak, “Kitaiskaia povest’,” 184; translation modified from Pilnyak, Chinese Story, 98. Pil’niak, “Kitaiskaia povest’,” 154; Pilnyak, Chinese Story, 65. Pil’niak, “Kitaiskaia povest’,” 184; Pilnyak, Chinese Story, 98–99. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), xv, 10–13. Tian Han, “Women de ziji pipan,” 103. According to Cheng Jihua, this was Potemkin’s first screening in China. See Zhongguo dianying fazhan shi [A History of the Development of Chinese Cinema], ed. Cheng Jihua (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 1998), 1:139. Jay Leyda claims there was an earlier screening in Guangzhou: Leyda, Dianying: An Account of Films and the Film Audience in China (Boston: MIT Press, 1972), 56. Tian Han, “Women de ziji pipan,” 103.

2. TRANSLATING CHINA ONSTAGE: ROAR, CHINA! AND THE RED POPPY 1. 2. 3.

4.

5.

6.

Natasha Kolchevska, “From Agitation to Factography: The Plays of Sergej Tret’jakov,” Slavic and East European Journal 31, no. 3 (1987): 389–94. Sergei Tret’iakov, Chzhungo, 2nd expanded ed. (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1930), 8. Die gelbe Jacke premiered in Vienna on February 9, 1923, with a libretto by Victor Léon. Stanley Sadie, ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Opera (London: Macmillan, 1992), 1129. For the 1926 Leningrad production, see Ol’ga Grekova-Dashkovskaia, Starye mastera operetty [Old Masters of Operetta] (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1990), 193–200. Translated by P. A. Markov, directed by N. K. Markov. See “Teatry i zrelishcha” [“Theatres and Performances”], Zhizn’ iskusstva 16 (April 20, 1926): 17–18; A., “Chu-Iun-Vai,” Zhizn’ iskusstva 21 (1926): 14. Chang-Gai-Tang debuted at Leningrad’s Comedy Theater in January 1926 before opening at Moscow’s Dramatic Theater in March. Translation by Evgenia Rudolfovna Russat, directed by K. P. Khokhlov. See advertisement on back cover of Zhizn’ iskusstva 2 (1926). For Klabund and Brecht’s reworkings of Hui lan ji see Wenwei Du, “The Chalk Circle Comes Full Circle: From Yuan Drama Through the Western Stage to Peking Opera,” Asian Theatre Journal 12, no. 2 (1995): 307–25. Viktor Ermans, “Bronzovyi idol v Studii Malogo teatra” [“The Bronze Idol in the Maly Theatre Studio”], Programmy gosudarstvennykh akademicheskikh teatrov 64 (1926): 14; Pavel Markov, “Bronzovyi idol” [“The Bronze Idol”], Pravda, December 23, 1926. The Bronze Idol debuted in December 1926; the director was N. F. Kostromsky, with music by S. L. Germanov.

2. TRANS LATING CH INA O NSTAGE269

7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

Konstantin Stanislavski, My Life in Art, trans. and ed. Jean Benedetti (London: Routledge, 2008), 70–71; Rosamund Bartlett, “Japonisme and Japanophobia: The RussoJapanese War in Russian Cultural Consciousness,” Russian Review 67, no. 1 (2008): 18. Anne Witchard, England’s Yellow Peril: Sinophobia and the Great War (London: Penguin, 2014), 57–71; Michael Saffle, “Eastern Fantasies on Western Stages: Chinese-Themed Operetta and Musical Comedies in the Turn-of-the-Last-Century London and New York,” in China and the West: Music, Representation, and Reception, ed. Hon-Lun Yang and Michael Saffle (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), 87–118. Du, “Chalk Circle,” 308. Erika Fischer Lichte, “What Are the Rules of the Game? Some Remarks on The Yellow Jacket,” Theater Survey 36, no. 1 (1995): 24–25. Gary Dickinson and Linda Wrigglesworth, Imperial Wardrobe (Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed, 2000), 116–17. Du, “Chalk Circle,” 313; Lichte, “What Are the Rules of the Game?,” 25–32. On chinoiserie as a self-sustaining European fantasy of China, see Dawn Jacobson, Chinoiserie (London: Phaidon, 1999), 27; Anne Witchard, “Introduction: ‘The Lucid Atmosphere of Fine Cathay’,” in British Modernism and Chinoiserie, ed. Anne Witchard (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 2–17. On echoes of Madame Butterfly in Lehar’s Die gelbe Jacke, see Hyunseon Lee, “ ‘So wundersam exotisch dieses Lied’: Franz Lehárs Operettenmusik als Medium kultureller Identifikation” [“ ‘How Wonderfully Exotic This Song’: Franz Lehar’s Operetta Music as a Medium of Cultural Identification”], Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 36, no. 1 (March 2006): 110. Nataliia Braginskaia, “ ‘Akh, eto sovershenno po-kitaiski!’ Ob orientalizme v opere Stravinskogo ‘Solovei’ ” [“ ‘Ah, That’s Entirely Chinese!’ On Orientalism in Stravinskii’s Opera Solovei”], Nauchnye trudy Belorusskoi gosudarstvennoi akademii muzyki 23 (2010): 237; Anne Witchard, “ ‘Beautiful, Baleful Absurdity’: Chinoiserie and Modernist Ballet,” in British Modernism and Chinoiserie, 108–32. Alisa Koonen, Stranitsy zhizni [Pages of Life] (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1975), 187–88. On the role of costumes, makeup, and props in a theatrical chinoiserie aesthetic, see also Diana Yeh, “Staging China, Excising the Chinese: Lady Precious Stream and the Darker Side of Chinoiserie,” in British Modernism and Chinoiserie, 177–98. For an overview in a North American context, see Krystyn R. Moon, Yellowface: Creating the Chinese in American Popular Music and Performance, 1850s–1920s (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006). Boris Zakhava, Vakhtangov i ego studiia [Vakhtangov and his Studio], 2nd ed. (Moscow: Teakinopechat’, 1930), 155. Zakhava, Vakhtangov, 143–44. Nikolai A. Gorchakov, The Theater in Soviet Russia, trans. Edgar Lehrman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957), 254. The case of Meyerhold will be considered in more detail later in this chapter. On the complexities of Stanislavsky’s relationship to realism and naturalism, see Anna Muza, “The Organic and the Political: Stanislavsky’s Dilemma (Ibsen, Tolstoy, Gorky),” in

270 2. TRANS LATING CH INA ON STAGE

22. 23.

24.

25. 26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

The Routledge Companion to Stanislavsky, edited by R. Andrew White (London: Routledge, 2014), 37–51; Julia Listangarten, “Stanislavsky and the Avant-Garde,” The Routledge Companion, 67–81. Boris Zakhava, Vakhtangov, 130–132, 142. There is some disagreement in the sources about the date of Hawley’s death. Walter and Ruth Meserve, summarizing Western reports, date Hawley’s death to June 19, 1924. See Walter J. Meserve and Ruth I. Meserve, “The Stage History of Roar China!: Documentary Drama as Propaganda,” Theatre Survey 21 (1980): 1–2. Qiu Kunliang, whose reconstruction of the incident synthesizes English-language and Chinese-language newspaper accounts, takes June 19 to be the date of the boatmen’s execution, and dates Hawley’s death to June 17. Qiu Kunliang, Renmin nandao mei cuo ma? “Nu hou ba, Zhongguo!,” Teliejiyakefu yu Meiyehede [“Are the People Infallible? Roar, China!, Tretyakov and Meyerhold”] (Taibei: Guoli Taibei yishu daxue, 2013), 112–37. T. S. Dzhurova, “Teatralizatsiia deistvitel’nosti. ‘Vziatie Zimnego dvortsa’ Nikolaia Evreinova” [“The Theatricalization of Reality. Nikolai Evreinov’s Storming of the Winter Palace”], Izvestiia rossiiskogo gosudarstvennogo pedagogicheskogo universiteta im. A.  I. Gertsena 14, no. 43–1 (2007): 104–8. Robert Leach, Revolutionary Theatre (London: Routledge, 1994), 158–60. Sorok palok ili liubov’ v Kitae played at the Moscow Theatre of Satire, with a libretto by Glob and music by Matvei Blanter. For an account of this “politoperetta” as “ludicrous,” see V. Fedorov, “ ‘Sorok palok’ (Moskovskii teatr satiry)” [“Forty Canes (Moscow Satire Theatre)”], Zhizn’ iskusstva 11 (1925): 15. Zhizn’ iskusstva 45 (1927), “Teatry i zrelishcha” [Theatres and Performances] supplement: 9; Viktor Ermans, “ ‘Chan-Gai-Tang’ v Moskovskom Dramaticheskom teatre” [“ChanGai-Tang in the Moscow Dramatic Theatre”], Programmy gosudarstvennykh akademicheskikh teatrov 28 (1926): 9. Ermans may not have known that Klabund had already changed Li’s version to make Chang Gaitang’s brother a Nationalist anti-Mongol revolutionary. Klabund, The Circle of Chalk, trans. James Laver (London: William Heinemann, 1929), x, 39–40, 42. E. M. Liukom, ballerina at Leningrad’s State Academic Theater of Opera and Ballet, in “Chto delat’ s baletom?” [“What Is to Be Done with Ballet?”], Zhizn’ iskusstva 7 (1925): 31. In 1929, Liukom would dance the lead in the Leningrad production of The Red Poppy. For an overview of Soviet debates about the future of ballet in the 1920s, see Christina Ezrahi, Swans of the Kremlin: Ballet and Power in Soviet Russia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), 22–29. Elizabeth Souritz, Soviet Choreographers in the 1920s, trans. Lynn Visson, ed. Sally Banes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990), 231–32. Galperin went on to write the libretto for the 1929 opera Son of the Sun (Syn solntsa, music by S. N. Vasilenko), in which a transethnic romance between a Chinese monk and a U.S. general’s daughter plays out against the background of the Boxer rebellion of 1900. For a negative review, see M. Grinberg, “Syn solntsa” [“Son on the Sun”], Vecherniaia Moskva, May 28, 1929. K. Sezhenskii, R. M. Glier (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe muzykal’noe izdatel’stvo, 1940), 30.

2. TRANS LATING C H INA O NSTAGE27 1

31.

32.

33. 34.

35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44.

45. 46. 47.

M. I. Kurilko, “Rozhdenie baleta” [“Birth of a Ballet”], in Reingol’d Moritsevich Glier: Stat’i, vospominaniia, materialy [Reinhold Moritsevich Glière: Articles, Memoirs, Materials], ed. V. M. Bogdanov-Berezovskii, vol. 1 (Moscow: Muzyka, 1965), 106. On October 10, 1925, Pravda reported the detention of the Soviet ship Astrakhan in the southern Chinese port of Shantou. Cited in Natal’ia Vladimirovna Kiseleva, “Balety R. M. Gliera v istorichesko-kul’turnom kontekste” [“The Ballets of R. M. Glière in Historical-Cultural Context”] (PhD diss., Akademiia Russkogo baleta imeni A. Ia. Vaganovoi, 2016), 63. Two articles on the front page of the January 9, 1926, issue of Pravda juxtaposed the ongoing civil war in China with a police search of the Soviet steamer Ilyich in London. I am grateful to Simon Morrison for drawing this constellation of articles to my attention. RGALI f. 648 op. 2 ed. khr. 321 l. 1. Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy, “Dance as Metaphor: The Russian Ballerina and the Imperial Imagination,” in Mapping the Feminine: Russian Women and Cultural Difference, ed. Hilde Hoogenboom, Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy, and Irina Reyfman (Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2008), 203. Souritz, Soviet Choreographers, 233. Jiří Levý, The Art of Translation, trans. Patrick Corness, ed. Zuzana Jettmarová (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011), 19–20. For the central role of sacrifice in the ritual structure of the Soviet novel, see Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 177–79. For an overview, see Erika Fischer-Lichte, Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual: Exploring Forms of Political Theatre (London: Routledge, 2005). Gao, “Wusi qianhou de Beijing daxue eyu xi,” 182. “Novaia provokatsiia imperialistov v Kitae” [“New Provocation by Imperialists in China”], Pravda, June 26, 1924, 2. See, for example, Peking and Tientsin Times, July 2, 1924; Minguo ribao, July 2, 1924; and China Weekly Review, July 26, 1924. Meserve and Meserve, “The Stage History of Roar China!,” 1–2; Qiu, Renmin nandao mei cuo ma?, 112–37. “Tells How American Was Slain,” New York Times, July 1, 1924, 24; “Wanxian muchuan bang ou bi ying shang an zhenxiang” [“Wanxian Boat Gang Assaults and Kills a British Businessman: The Facts of the Case”], Shen Bao, July 2, 1924, 10. Sergei Tret’iakov, “Rychi, Kitai! Sobytie v 9 zven’iakh” [“Roar, China! An Event in Nine Links”], in Slyshish’, Moskva?! Protivogazy. Rychi, Kitai! [Do You Hear, Moscow?! Gas Masks. Roar, China!] (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1966), 67. Tret’iakov, “Rychi, Kitai!,” 68. Meserve and Meserve, “The Stage History of Roar China!,” 1; Mark Gamsa, “Sergei Tret’iakov’s Roar, China! Between Moscow and China,” Itinerario 36, no. 12 (2012): 93. According to the Washington Post (July 14, 1924), “Although the victim of the outrage was an American citizen he was employed by a British firm and was therefore under the protection of the British flag.” Tretyakov’s version, however, echoes other British and American reactions that praised the Cockchafer’s response as an expression of racial solidarity.

2722. TRANS LATING C H INA ON STAGE

48.

49.

50.

51. 52.

53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

64. 65.

See, for example, “The Murder of Mr. Hawley—Official Responsibility,” China Weekly Review 29, no. 8 (July 26, 1924): 250–51. Tret’iakov, “Rychi, Kitai!,” 66. This wording is very similar to contemporary newspaper reports; see for example, “The Murder of Mr. Hawley,” North China Daily News, July 10, 1924. A. Gvozdev, “Tragediia massy (‘Rychi, Kitai!’ v teatre im. Vs. Meierkhol’da)” [“Tragedy of the Masses: Roar, China! in the Meyerhold Theater”], Krasnaia gazeta, January 29, 1926; reprinted in Meierkhol’d v russkoi teatral’noi kritike [Meyerhold in Russian Theatrical Criticism], ed. T. V. Lanina (Moscow: Artist. Rezhisser. Teatr, 2000), 197. The figure of ten to fifteen minutes comes from Mikhail Zagorskii, “ ‘Rychi, Kitai!’ v teatre imeni Meierkhol’da” [“Roar, China! in the Meyerhold Theater”], Zhizn’ iskusstva 6 (1926): 11. Compare the report of the Peking and Tientsin Times from July 2, which has Hawley taking a sampan back from the Wanliu to confront the boatmen when they start throwing his tung oil in the river. Cited in Qiu, Renmin nandao mei cuo ma?, 120–21. Tret’iakov, “Rychi, Kitai!,” 90. “ ‘Rychi, Kitai!’ v Teatre Meierkhol’da: Beseda s rezhisserom V. Fedorovym” [“Roar, China! in the Meyerhold Theater: A Conversation with Director V. Fedorov”], Vecherniaia Moskva, November 12, 1925. See, for example, Pravda, June 26, 1924; New York Times, July 6, 1924; North China Daily News, July 10, 1924; and New York Herald Tribune, November 9, 1930. Tret’iakov, “Rychi, Kitai!,” 118. Joanna Waley-Cohen, “Collective Responsibility in Qing Criminal Law,” in The Limits of the Rule of Law in China, ed. Karen G. Turner (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015), 112–31. Cited in Qiu, Renmin nandao mei cuo ma?, 572. Gamsa, in “Tret’iakov’s Roar, China!,” 100, 108n52, claims daoyin was an anachronism from the Imperial age. Tret’iakov, “Rychi, Kitai!,” 128. Tret’iakov, “Rychi, Kitai!,” 129–30. Tret’iakov, “Rychi, Kitai!,” 143. RGALI f. 963, op. 1, ed. khr. 461, l. 2. Myong Jung-Baek, “S. Tret’jakov und China” (PhD diss., University of Göttingen, 1987), 40. On Soviet nationalities policy, see Yuri Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review 53, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 414–52; Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005). Cited in Tian Han, “Nuhouba, Zhongguo” [“Roar, China”], in Tian Han quanji, vol. 13 (Shijiazhuang: Huashan wenyi chubanshe, 2000), 105. On the roots of Old Left culture in secularized Christian narratives, see Rossen Djagalov, “The Red Apostles: Imagining Revolutions in the Global Proletarian Novel,” Slavic and East European Journal 61, no. 3 (2017): 396–422. Interpretations of Bolshevism as

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66.

67. 68.

69.

70. 71.

72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78.

79. 80. 81.

82.

83.

secularized millenarianism include Nikolai Berdiaev, The Origin of Russian Communism (London: Centenary, 1937); and, more recently, Igal Halfin, From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000); and Yuri Slezkine, The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017). New York Times, June 23, 1924, 1; Shen Bao, July 2, 1924, 10; “H.M.S. Cockchafer at Wanhsien: The Full Account of Commdr. Whitehorn’s Timely Action After Hawley Murder,” North China Herald, March 7, 1925, 386. Tret’iakov, “Rychi, Kitai!,” 117. No reports mention this detail. On suicide as moral protest, see Sing Lee and Arthur Kleinman, “Suicide as Resistance in Chinese Society,” in Chinese Society: Change, Conflict and Resistance, ed. Elizabeth J. Perry and Mark Selden (London: Routledge Curzon, 2003), 294–317. K. Famarin, “Rychi, Kitai (Teatr imeni Meierkhol’da)” [“Roar, China (Meyerhold Theater)”], Vecherniaia Moskva, January 28, 1926. This was Babanova’s first role en travesti, according to Konstantin Rudnitsky, Russian and Soviet Theater: Tradition and the AvantGarde, trans. Roxane Permar (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988), 198. Tret’iakov, “Rychi, Kitai!,” 89. For an overview of the Madame Butterfly story in its various permutations, see Jonathan Wisenthal, ed., A Vision of the Orient: Texts, Intertexts, and Contexts of Madame Butterfly (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006). M. Turovskaia, Babanova: Legenda i biografiia [Babanova: Legend and Biography] (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1981), 76–77. “ ‘Rychi, Kitai!’ Instrumenty i kostiumy pribyli iz Kitaia” [“Roar, China! Instruments and Costumes Arrive from China”], Vecherniaia Moskva, December 10, 1925. Turovskaia, Babanova, 77–78. Nikolai Bukharin, “ ‘Rychi, Kitai!’ v teatre Meierkhol’da” [“Roar, China! in the Meyerhold Theater”], Pravda, February 2, 1926, 3. Quoted in Konstantin Rudnitskii, Rezhisser Meierkhol’d (Moscow: Nauka, 1969), 345. “ ‘Rychi, Kitai!’,” Vecherniaia Moskva, December 10, 1925. “ ‘Rychi, Kitai!’ Muzykal’nye instrumenty iz Kitaia. Na avtomobiliakh cherez pustyniu Gobi” [“Roar, China! Musical Instruments from China. By Car Through the Gobi Desert”], Vecherniaia Moskva, December 4, 1925. RGALI f. 963, op. 1, ed. khr. 467, l. 12–13. Rudnitskii, Russian and Soviet Theater, 197. “Hu-Han-Min—o ‘Rychi, Kitai!’ (Stat’ia chlena politbiuro Gomindana)” [“Hu Hanmin on Roar, China! (An Article by a Member of the Guomindang Politburo)”], Komsomol’skaia Pravda, February 5, 1926. V. E. Meierkhol’d, “ ‘Rychi, Kitai!’ Beseda s korrespondentom ‘Vechernei Moskvy’ (1926 god)” [“Roar, China! A Conversation with a Correspondent from Evening Moscow (1926)”], in V. E. Meierkhol’d, Stat’i, pis’ma, rechi, besedy [Articles, Letters, Speeches, Conversations] (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1968), 2:99. P. Markov, “Teatral’nyi sezon 1925/26 goda” [“Theatrical Season 1925/26”], Pechat’ i revoliutsiia 3 (1926); reprinted in Meierkhol’d v russkoi teatral’noi kritikе, 202–3.

2742. TRANS LATING CH INA ON STAGE

84. 85.

86.

87. 88. 89.

90. 91. 92.

93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98.

99.

Kolchevska, “From Agitation to Factography,” 395. For Meyerhold’s programmatic early statements on theatricality, see “The Stylized Theatre” and “The Fairground Booth,” in Vsevolod Meyerhold, Meyerhold on Theatre, ed. and trans. Edward Braun (Bury St. Edmunds, UK: Methuen, 1991), 58–63, 119–42. Fedorov was the first director other than Meyerhold to direct a production at the Meyerhold Theater. See D. I. Zolotnitskii, Budni i prazdniki teatral’nogo Oktiabria [Work Days and Holidays of Theatrical October] (Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1978), 43. For cast members’ claims that Meyerhold transformed the production in final rehearsals, see collective letter to Kharkovskii Proletarii, August 13, 1926, and collective letter to Pravda, August 24, 1926. For Fedorov’s rejection of these claims and resignation from the theater, see Vasilii Fedorov, “Otvet na ‘privet!’—pis’mo v redaktsiiu” [“A Reply to a ‘Hello!’ Letter to the Editors”], Zhizn’ iskusstva 34 (1926): 12–13. Kolchevska, “From Agitation to Factography,” 389–91. James M. Symons, Meyerhold’s Theatre of the Grotesque: The Post-Revolutionary Productions, 1920–1932 (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1971), 140. See, for example, Vera Iureneva, Moi zapiski o kitaiskom teatre [My Notes on Chinese Theater] (Moscow: Tea-kino-pechat’, 1928), 36–38. Iureneva’s analysis of Chinese theater as centred around play or performance (igra) and her rejection of naturalist theater as “literature in images” echo Meyerhold’s earlier statements on theatricality and anticipate Bertolt Brecht’s interpretations of Chinese theater in the mid-1930s. Meierkhol’d, “ ‘Rychi, Kitai!’,” 99. A. Tsenovskii, “Rychi, Kitai!” [“Roar, China!”], Trud, January 24, 1926. Sergei Gorodetskii, “Teatr im. Meierkhol’da. ‘Rychi, Kitai!’ ” [“The Meyerhold Theatre. Roar, China!”] Iskusstvo trudiashchimsia 5 (1926); reprinted in Meierkhol’d v russkoi teatral’noi kritikе, 199; Zagorskii, “Rychi Kitai.” Zagorskii, “Rychi Kitai.” Emphasis in original. Famarin, “Rychi, Kitai.” Gorodetskii, “Teatr im. Meierkhol’da. ‘Rychi, Kitai!’ ”; for Gorodetskii’s collaborations with Meyerhold see Symons, Meyerhold’s Theatre of the Grotesque, 95. Sergei Radlov, “Rychi, Kitai!” [Roar, China!], Krasnaia gazeta, August 28, 1927; reprinted in Meierkhol’d v russkoi teatral’noi kritikе, 203. Tret’iakov, “Rychi, Kitai!,” 81–82. Tret’iakov, “Rychi, Kitai!,” 101, 131. The Boxer refrain is “tian da tian men kai, di da di men lai” (໽ᠧ໽䭔ᓔˈഄᠧഄ䭔՚) or “heaven break open the gates of heaven, earth break open the gates of earth.” Tretyakov may have found it in the eyewitness reportage of Dmitrii Grigorevich Ianchevetskii, U sten nedvizhnogo Kitaia [At the Walls of Immovable China] (St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo P. A. Artem’eva, 1903); republished as 1900: Russkie shturmuiut Pekin [1900: Russians Storm Beijing] (Moscow: Eksmo, 2008). The song is quoted on page 145 in the 2008 edition. Robert Crane, “Between Factography and Ethnography: Sergei Tretyakov’s Roar, China! and Soviet Orientalist Discourse,” in Text & Presentation, 2010, ed. Kiki Gounaridou (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), 48–50; see also Steven S. Lee, The Ethnic Avant-Garde: Minority Cultures and World Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 104.

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100. 101. 102.

103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112.

113. 114. 115. 116. 117.

118. 119.

120. 121.

Gamsa, “Tret’iakov’s Roar, China!,” 95. Dieter Stern, “Myths and Facts About the Kiakhta Trade Pidgin,” Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 20, no. 1 (2005): 175–87. Olga Bakich, “Did You Speak Harbin Sino-Russian?,” Itinerario 35, no. 3 (2011): 23–36; Johanna Nichols, “Pidginization and Foreigner Talk,” in Papers from the Fourth International Conference on Historical Linguistics, ed. Elizabeth Closs Traugott, Rebecca Labrum, and Susan C. Shepherd (Amsterdam: John Benjamins B. V., 1980), 397–408. One scholar calls the pidgin Siberian Pidgin and argues that it descends from a pidgin first developed in interactions with English traders in the sixteenth century. E. Perekhval’skaia, Russkie pidzhiny [Russian Pidgins] (St. Petersburg: Aleteia, 2008), 8–9, 80–81, 116–28, 137. For details on Chinese migrants in the USSR, see Aleksander Larin, Kitaitsy v Rossii vchera i segodniia [The Chinese in Russia Yesterday and Today] (Moscow: Muravei, 2003). Bakich, “Did You Speak Harbin Sino-Russian?,” 23–24. Tret’iakov, “Rychi, Kitai!” 82; Gamsa, “Tret’iakov’s Roar, China!,” 106n17. Nichols, “Pidginization and Foreigner Talk,” 398–99; Bakich, “Did You Speak Harbin Sino-Russian?,” 30–31. Nichols, “Pidginization and Foreigner Talk,” 403. Note that ezdi in the example above violates this rule. Nichols, “Pidginization and Foreigner Talk,” 399. Tret’iakov, “Rychi, Kitai!,” 93. For confirmation of mashinka as equivalent to moshennik in Harbin pidgin, see Bakich, “Did You Speak Harbin Sino-Russian?,” 30. Bakich, “Did You Speak Harbin Sino-Russian?,” 32. Quoted in Kolchevska, “From Agitation to Factography,” 390. I borrow the term “double context” from Brian James Baer and Susanna Witt, “The Double Context of Translation,” in Translation in Russian Contexts: Culture, Politics, Identity (London: Routledge, 2018), 1–16. Baer and Witt, “The Double Context of Translation,” 2–3. Lawrence Venuti, The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference (London: Routledge, 1998), 12. Venuti, The Scandals of Translation, 11. Crane, “Between Factography and Ethnography,” 48–49. Bulgakov may have drawn on contemporary newspaper reports that described opium trading and other criminal activity among Moscow’s Chinese migrant population. Lesley Milne, Mikhail Bulgakov: A Critical Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 117. Bakich, “Did You Speak Harbin Sino-Russian?,” 31–32; Perekhval’skaia, Russkie pidzhiny, 344. See, for example, their first scene together, in Mikhail Bulgakov, Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh [Collected Works in Five Volumes], vol. 3 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1992), 84–85. Gorodetskii, ““Teatr im. Meierkhol’da. ‘Rychi, Kitai!’,” 199. Dieter Stern, “Social Functions of Speaking Pidgin: The Case of Russian Lexifier Pidgins,” in Marginal Linguistic Identities: Studies in Slavic Contact and Borderland Varieties, ed. Dieter Stern and Christian Voss (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2006), 166.

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122.

123. 124. 125. 126. 127.

128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135.

136. 137. 138.

Mikhail Bakhtin, “Slovo v romane: k voprosam stilistiki romana” [“The Word in the Novel: Towards Questions of the Stylistics of the Novel”], in Sobranie sochinenii [Collected Works], vol. 3 (Moscow: Iazyki slavianskikh kul’tur, 2010), 24. On the tendency of pidgins to develop in colonial situations, see Bakich, “Did You Speak Harbin Sino-Russian?,” 23. Tret’iakov, “Rychi, Kitai!” 96. Chifan (ৗ仃) means “eat” in Chinese. Tret’iakov, “Rychi, Kitai!,” 153. Stern, “Social Functions of Speaking Pidgin,” 174. “V teatre im. V. S. Meierkhol’da” [“In the Meyerhold Theater”], Pravda, March 26, 1926. The front page of this issue reports on protests in Beijing and around the world against the shootings of March 18. Meyerhold’s theater had used the telegram device before, at a 1920 performance of The Dawns (Zori) during the Civil War. See Boris Alpers, Teatr sotsial’noi maski [Theatre of the Social Mask] (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1931), 24. I borrow this term from Rebecca Walkowitz, Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). See Meserve and Meserve, “Stage History of Roar, China!,” 4–9; Qiu, Renmin nan dao mei cuo ma?, insert; Lee, Ethnic Avant-Garde, 101–8. Gamsa, “Tret’iakov’s Roar, China!,” 94. Meserve and Meserve, “Stage History of Roar, China!,” 10; Gamsa, “Tret’iakov’s Roar, China!,” 99; Qiu, Renmin nan dao mei cuo ma?, insert. Meserve and Meserve, “Stage History of Roar, China!,” 9. This version was also performed in Taiwan. See Qiu, Renmin nan dao mei cuo ma?, 460–83; Gamsa, “Tret’iakov’s Roar, China!,” 99. Meserve and Meserve, “Stage History of Roar, China!,” 6. On Li Hua’s woodblock, Nuhouba, Zhongguo! (ᗦਐ৻ˈЁ೟ʽ), and other echoes of Roar, China! in Chinese visual art of the 1930s, see Xiaobing Tang, “Echoes of Roar, China! On Vision and Voice in Modern Chinese Art,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 14, no. 2 (Fall 2006): 467–94. Souritz, Soviet Choreographers, 243. Programmy gosudarstvennykh akademicheskikh teatrov 25 (1927): 7. The following synopsis is based on the versions of Mikhail Kurilko’s libretto for the 1927 Bolshoi production preserved in the Bakhrushin State Theater Museum, Moscow: “Skhema baleta 1–3 akta” [“Ballet Outline Acts 1–3”], f. 467 n. 58; “Stsenarii baleta” [“Ballet Scenario”], f. 467 n. 59; and “Libretto baleta” [“Ballet Libretto”], f. 467 n. 59. A version of this libretto was made available to audiences, according to the review of the premiere in Pravda, June 21, 1927, 5. Running orders for this production are preserved in RGALI f. 2085 op. 1. For summaries of the 1929 Leningrad production, see A.  A. Gvozdev, Krasnyi mak: v pomoshch’ zriteliu [The Red Poppy: An Aid for the Viewer] (Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1931); and V. Bogdanov-Berezovskii, Krasnyi mak [The Red Poppy] (Leningrad: Biuro obsluzhivaniia rabochego zritelia pri Upravlenie leningradskikh teatrov, 1933).

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139.

140. 141. 142.

143.

144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154. 155.

156. 157. 158.

159.

“Zapiska predsedatelia Vneshnepoliticheskoi komissii TsK VKP(b) V.  G. Grigor’iana V.-M. Molotovu k zapisi besedy sotrudnika VOKS Erofeeva s Emi Siao o balete R. M. Gliera ‘Krasnyi mak.’ 16 marta 1951g” [“Note from the President of the External Political Committee of TsK VKP(b) V. G. Grigoryan to V. M. Molotov in Addendum to the Record of the Conversation between VOKS Official Erofeev and Emi Siao regarding the Ballet The Red Poppy by R. M. Glière. 16 March 1951”]. Document held in RGASPI, accessed April 9, 2014, http://www.rusarchives.ru/evants/exhibitions/prc60-f/89.shtml; “Balet Krasnyi mak v Bol’shom teatre” [“The Ballet The Red Poppy in the Bolshoi Theatre”], Programmy gosudarstvennykh akademicheskikh teatrov 24 (1926): 12. Sally Banes, Dancing Women: Female Bodies on Stage (London: Routledge, 1998), 7, 64. Kurilko, “Stsenarii baleta,” 2. In the Leningrad production of 1929, the Captain took the red poppy out of a bouquet given to him by Tao Hua and handed it in turn to a “young coolie.” Gvozdev, Krasnyi mak, 11; Bogdanov-Berezovskii, Krasnyi mak, 16–17. The role of this “young coolie,” danced by Boris Vasilevich Shavrov, anticipated the character of Ma Licheng in the 1949 revival (see below). Tsentral’nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstv (TsGALI) f. Р-337 op. 1–1 d. 60 l. 101. E. Surits, “Nachalo puti: balet Moskvy i Leningrada v 1917–1927 godakh” [“The Beginning of the Path: Moscow and Leningrad Ballet in 1917–1927”], in Sovetskii baletnyi teatr 1917–1967 [Soviet Ballet Theatre 1917–1967] (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1976), 70. Svetlana Katonova, Balety R. M. Gliera (Moscow: Sovetskii kompozitor, 1960), 7. Souritz, Soviet Choreographers, 250. Figures taken from repertoire books for 1929 and 1930, held in the archive of the Mariinsky Theater. See, for example, Z. K. Gulinskaia, “Rozhdenie sovetskogo baleta” [“The Birth of Soviet Ballet”], in Reingol’d Moritsevich Glier (Moscow: Muzyka, 1986), 123–38. N. Volkov, “Krasnyi mak” [“The Red Poppy”], Izvestiia, June 22, 1927. Ezrahi, Swans of the Kremlin, 46–57. Volkov, “Krasnyi mak.” Gvozdev, Krasnyi mak, 4. S. Levin, “Dva baleta Gliera” [“Two Ballets by Glière”], in Muzyka sovetskogo baleta (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe muzykal’noe izdatel’stvo, 1962), 128. Gvozdev, Krasnyi mak, 14. Em. Beskin, “Novye puti v balete (‘Krasnyi mak’ v Bol’shom teatre)” [“New Paths in Ballet (The Red Poppy at the Bolshoi Theatre)”], Vecherniaia Moskva, June 17, 1927. The 1929 production in Leningrad echoed this stylistic rift. Act 1 was choreographed by Fedor Lopukhov, while choreography of the second and third acts was shared between Leonid Leontiev and Vladimir Ponomarev. Gvozdev, Krasnyi mak, 10–16. Souritz, Soviet Choreographers, 235. Souritz, Soviet Choreographers, 234–35. M. Kurilko, “Vospominaniia o vozniknovenii baleta Krasnyi mak” [“Reminiscences About the Origins of the Ballet The Red Poppy”], June 6, 1952, Bakhrushin Theater Museum f. 467 n. 62 p. 3; Gulinskaia, Reingol’d Moritsevich Glier, 127–28. Souritz, Soviet Choreographers, 241–42.

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160.

161.

162. 163. 164. 165. 166. 167. 168. 169. 170.

171. 172. 173.

174.

175. 176. 177. 178. 179. 180. 181.

“ ‘Krasnyi mak’: K postanovke v Bol’shom teatre. Beseda s E. V. Gel’tser” [“The Red Poppy: Towards the Production in the Bolshoi Theatre. A Conversation with E.  V. Geltser”], Programmy gosudarstvennykh akademicheskikh teatrov 23 (1927): 8. According to Sadko, “ ‘Krasnyi mak’ v Bol’shom teatre” [“The Red Poppy in the Bolshoi Theatre”], Zhizn’ iskusstva 26 (1927): 4. Sadko (pseudonym of Vladimir Blium) was reacting to the premiere in June 1927, when the alliance between the Comintern and the Left Guomindang in Wuhan was still intact. Gel’tser, “ ‘Krasnyi mak.’ ” Vik., “Krasnyi mak” [“The Red Poppy”], Pravda, June 21, 1927. See also Sadko, “ ‘Krasnyi mak’ v Bol’shom teatre.” Deborah Jowitt, Time and the Dancing Image (New York: William Morrow, 1988), 54. Cyril W. Beaumont, Complete Book of Ballets: A Guide to the Principal Ballets of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London: Putnam, 1951), 485–96. L. Entelis, 100 baletnykh libretto [100 Ballet Librettos] (Leningrad: Muzyka, 1971), 143–46. Ekaterina Belova, ed., Russkii balet: entsiklopediia [Russian Ballet: An Encyclopedia] (Moscow: Soglasie, 1997), 234. Belova, ed., Russkii balet, 17. Writing in an issue of Sovetskii artist dedicated to the twenty-fifth anniversary of The Red Poppy, Sovetskii artist 23 (1952): 3. Pu Songling, Lis’i chary: Iz sbornika strannykh rasskazov Pu Sunlina (Liao chzhai Chzhi i) [Fox Charms: From Pu Songling’s Collection of Strange Tales (Liao zhai zhi yi)], trans. V. M. Alekseev (Petrograd: Gos. izd-vo, 1922). V. V. Nosova, Baleriny [Ballerinas] (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1983), 256, 261. “Beseda s E. V. Gel’tser,” 8. Lisa C. Arkin and Marian Smith, “National Dance in the Romantic Ballet,” in Rethinking the Sylph: New Perspectives on the Romantic Ballet, ed. Lynn Garafola (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997), 11–68. “Beseda s L.  A. Lashchilinym” [“A Conversation with L.  A. Lashchilin”], Programmy gosudarstvennykh akademicheskikh teatrov 58 (1926): 9. In Leningrad, the lineup was an awkward German, a well-trained Englishman, a black woman from one of the junks, a Chinese pirate, and an Indian (Bogdanov-Berezovskii, Krasnyi mak, 10). Souritz, Soviet Choreographers, 237; V. Shigin, “Poeziia matrosskoi revoliutsii” [“Poetry of the Sailors’ Revolution”], Morskoi sbornik 3–6 (2017): 93–94. N. V. Sheremet’evskaia, Progulka v ritmakh stepa [A Stroll in the Rhythms of Tap Dance] (Moscow: Pechatnoe delo, 1995), 8. Souritz, Soviet Choreographers, 237. A similar sequence with dancing sailors graced Meyerhold’s 1924 production D.  E. (Daesh’ Evropu) [Give Us Europe]. Surits, “Nachalo puti,” 69. Souritz links the success of “Yablochko” to patriotic sentiment over the recent assassination of Soviet consuls in Guangzhou and Poland. Surits, “Nachalo puti,” 71. “Beseda s E. V. Gel’tser,” 8. V. Iving, “V balete” [“In Ballet”], Izvestiia, 28 December 1927, 6. According to Bei Wenli, Geltser as Tao Hua had special sticking pads applied to her temples, to hoist up the skin

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182.

183.

184. 185. 186. 187.

188. 189. 190.

191. 192. 193. 194. 195. 196.

197.

and make her eyes look “long and thin like those of an oriental person.” Bei Wenli, “E-Su yishu zhong de Zhongguo qingdiao” [“The Taste for China in Russian-Soviet Art”], Eluosi wenyi 4 (October 1999): 58. Chapter titles includes “My Plaything,” “My Friend and My Doll,” “Dainty Dishes for a Doll,” “A Doll’s Correspondence,” and “My Naughty Doll.” Pierre Loti, Madame Chrysantheme (1887; Project Gutenberg, 2006), https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3995/3995 -h/3995-h.htm#link2HCH0018. Levin, “Dva baleta Gliera,” 137. The writer and Esperantist Hu Yuzhi, who saw The Red Poppy during a visit to Moscow in 1931, was convinced that Tao Hua’s theme was based on “Three Variations on the Plum Blossom Theme” (mei hua san nong ṙ㢅ϝᓘ), one of the ten great classical tunes of China (shi da gu qu क໻স᳆)—although Hu also admitted that he was not an expert on music. Hu Yuzhi, Mosike yinxiang ji [Impressions of Moscow] (Shanghai: Xin shengming shuju, 1931), 131. For the ballet context, see Jowitt, “Heroism in the Harem,” chap. 1 in Time and the Dancing Image. Nepomnyashchy, “Dance as Metaphor,” 195–201. Jowitt, Time and the Dancing Image, 55. Lynn Garafola, “Russian Ballet in the Age of Petipa,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ballet, ed. Marion Kent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 158; Jowitt, Time and the Dancing Image, 57–58. Kurilko, “Stsenarii baleta,” 2. Kurilko, “Stsenarii baleta,” 2. V. Tsaplin, “Novoe libretto baleta ‘Krasnyi mak’ ” [“The New Libretto of the Ballet The Red Poppy”], Sovetskii artist, November 25, 1949. Tsaplin lists the other authors of the rewritten libretto as A. Tomskii, L. Lavrovskii, M. Gabovich, A. Ermolaev, O. Lepeshinskii, A. Messerer, and A. Radunskii. Synopsis taken from the program for a performance in 1951, held in the Bolshoi Theater Museum. Ezrahi, Swans of the Kremlin, 46–57. Dieter Heinzig, The Soviet Union and Communist China, 1945–1950: The Arduous Road to the Alliance (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2004), 364. Zhu Zhongli, Nanyi wangque di zuotian—Wang Jiaxiang xiaozhuan [Unforgettable Yesterday: A Biography of Wang Jiaxiang] (Xiamen: Lujiang chubanshe, 1987), 38–39. N. T. Fedorenko, “Stalin i Mao Tsedun” [“Stalin and Mao Zedong”], Part 2, Novaia i noveishaia istoriia 6 (1992): 83–84. The literature on the Opium Wars is immense; for an overview, see Gregory Blue, “Opium for China: The British Connection,” in Opium Regimes: China, Britain, and Japan, 1839–1952, ed. Timothy Brook and Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 31–54. On the discourse of national humiliation, see William A. Callahan, “National Insecurities: Humiliation, Salvation, and Chinese Nationalism,” Alternatives 29 (2004): 199–218; He Yu, Bainian guochi jiyao [A Summary of the Century of Humiliation] (Beijing yanshan chubanshe, 1997).

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198. 199.

200. 201.

202. 203.

204. 205. 206. 207.

208.

209.

Timothy Brook and Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, “Introduction: Opium’s History in China,” in Opium Regimes, 2–3. Zhou Yongming, “Nationalism, Identity, and State-Building: The Antidrug Crusade in the People’s Republic, 1949–1952,” in Opium Regimes, 381; Chen Yung-fa, ‘‘The Blooming Poppy Under the Red Sun,” in New Perspectives on the Chinese Communist Revolution, ed. Tony Saich and Hans van de Ven (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1995), 263–98. Zhou, “Nationalism, Identity, and State-Building,” 382 and passim. These concessions were made by the Qing Empire at the Treaties of Aigun (1858) and Peking (1860). S. C. M. Paine, Imperial Rivals: China, Russia, and their Disputed Frontier (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1996), 49–106. Austin Jersild, The Sino-Soviet Alliance: An International History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 1–23. Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s’’ezd sovetskikh pisatelei, 1934: Stenograficheskii otchet [First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers, 1934: Stenographic Record] (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1934), 365. The queue (bianzi 䖂ᄤ) was a traditional Manchu hairstyle imposed on the Chinese male population by the Qing dynasty. After the Republican Revolution of 1911–1912, the new government mandated the removal of queues. See Edward J. M. Rhoads, Manchus and Han: Ethnic Relations and Political Power in Late Qing and Early Republican China, 1861–1928 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), 60, 252–54. “Zapiska predsedatelia Vneshnepoliticheskoi komissii.” RGALI f. 2085 op. 1 ed. khr. 1170 l. 36–37. RGALI f. 2085 op. 1 ed. khr. 1170 l. 41. Gosudarstvennyi akademicheskii Bol’shoi teatr, “Krasnyi tsvetok” [The Red Flower] (Moscow, 1957), preserved in Bolshoi Theater Museum. After the Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s, offending Chinese sensibilities became less of a priority, and the name was changed back. Compare the summary of Krasnyi tsvetok in L. Entelis and M. Frangopulo, 75 baletnykh libretto [75 Ballet Librettos] (Leningrad: Sovetskii kompozitor, 1960), 79–84, with the summary of Krasnyi mak (with no male Chinese hero) in Entelis, 100 baletnykh libretto, 82–86. Two recent revivals of the ballet in 2010 used the original name: Krasnyi mak at the Krasnoyarsk State Theater of Opera and Ballet, Krasnoyarsk, accessed October 17, 2018, http://krasopera.ru/play/view/41, and Il Papavero Rosso, Opera Roma, Rome, accessed October 17, 2018, https://www.operaroma.it/spettacoli/balletto-papavero-rosso-10/. Sergei Tret’iakov, “U Zheltogo moria—zhelt’ i sin’.” Rabochaia Moskva, May 21, 1927. For a Soviet account of the opium trade in China as a deliberate imperialist policy to pacify the population, see S. M. Glan, “Deti velikogo Suna” [“Children of the Great Sun”], Vecherniaia Moskva, July 16, 1925. For “Tai-Khua,” see “Soderzhanie baleta Krasnyi mak” [“Content of the Ballet The Red Poppy”], in Programmy gosudarstvennykh akademicheskikh teatrov 58 (1926): 8–9. For “Taia-Khua,” see Kurilko, “Libretto”; Gosudarstvennyi akademicheskii Bol’shoi teatr, “100-oe predstavlenie baleta Krasnyi Mak” [“100th Performance of the Ballet The Red Poppy”] (Moscow, 1928), preserved in the Bolshoi Theater Museum. For “Taia-Khoa,” see Kurilko, “Stsenarii baleta”; Gosudarstvennyi akademicheskii Bol’shoi teatr, “Krasnyi mak” [“The Red Poppy”] (Moscow, 1927), preserved in the Bolshoi Theater Museum;

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211. 212. 213. 214. 215. 216. 217. 218. 219. 220. 221.

222. 223.

224. 225. 226. 227. 228. 229. 230. 231. 232.

M. Kubatyi, “Pobeda Bol’shogo baleta” [“The Triumph of the Bolshoi Ballet”], in Programmy gosudarstvennykh akademicheskikh teatrov 25 (1927): 1. Cast lists preserved in repertory book for 1929, archive of the Mariinsky Theater; cast list for the 1949 Kirov Theater production, archive of the Mariinsky Theater f. R-337 op. 1–1 d. 447 l. 133; Gosudarstvennyi akademicheskii Bol’shoi teatr, “Programma: Krasnyi Mak” [“Programme: The Red Poppy”] (Moscow, 1949); Gosudarstvennyi akademicheskii Bol’shoi teatr, “Krasnyi tsvetok” [“The Red Flower”] (Moscow, 1957), both preserved in the Bolshoi Theater Museum. RGALI f. 2085 op. 1 ed. khr. 1170 l. 41. V. N. Tikhomirov, “Baletmeisterskii stsenarii” [“Ballet Master’s Scenario”], RGALI f. 648 op. 2 ed. khr. 321 l. 6–10. Wendy Swartz, Reading Tao Yuanming (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2008), 171. I am grateful to Roy Chan for first drawing my attention to this possible intertext. “Beseda s E. V. Gel’tser,” 8. Kurilko, “Stsenarii baleta,” 2. See, for example, Zhu, Nanyi wangque di zuotian, 38; Bei Wenli, “E-Su yishu zhong de Zhongguo qingdiao,” 57–58. RGALI f. 648 op. 2 ed. khr. 321 l. 92. M. I. Kurilko, “Krasnyi mak” [“The Red Poppy”], Sovetskii artist (June 11, 1952): 2. M. I. Kurilko, “Eshche raz o Krasnom make” [“Once Again About The Red Poppy”], Sovetskii balet 5 (1984): 36. Stephen W. Bushell, Chinese Art (London: Wyman and Sons, 1904), 111; Tikhomirov, “Baletmeisterskii stsenarii,” 8. Lydia Liu, “The Question of Meaning-Value in the Political Economy of the Sign,” Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 20. Kurilko, “Libretto,” 3. Karl Marx, “Introduction,” in A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, February 7 and 10, 1844 [translation], Marxists Internet Archive, accessed October 29, 2018, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx /works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm. Kurilko, “Stsenarii baleta,” 6. “Beseda s E. V. Gel’tser,” 8. Kurilko, “Stsenarii baleta,” 6. Kurilko, “Stsenarii baleta,” 8 Kurilko, “Libretto baleta,” 6. Kurilko “Skhema baleta,” 6. Kurilko, “Libretto baleta,” 7. Roy Chan, “Broken Tongues: Race, Sacrifice and Geopolitics in the Far East in Vsevolod Ivanov’s Bronepoezd No. 14–69,” Sibirica 10, no. 3 (Winter 2011): 47. Gina Marchetti, Romance and the “Yellow Peril”: Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 84–89; Chan, “Broken Tongues,” 47.

2822. TRANS LATING CH INA ON STAGE

233.

234.

235.

236. 237. 238.

239.

240.

241. 242.

243.

See repertory books for 1929, archive of the Mariinsky Theater. The two productions overlapped on February 17, April 7, and September 11. This was a 1925 revival of a 1922 production: see the review in Zhizn’ iskusstva 7 (1925): 30. The production of Lehar’s Yellow Jacket mentioned at the start of this chapter was still playing at the Maly during The Red Poppy’s run. Eliot Borenstein has noted the tendency in 1920s Soviet culture to affirm new forms of affiliation that bypass biological reproduction. See Eliot Borenstein, Men Without Women: Masculinity and Revolution in Russian Fiction, 1917–1929 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 1–41. I draw here on feminist accounts of patriarchal culture’s figuration of masculine subjectivity as transcending the body; see, for example, Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M Parshley (New York: Knopf, 1989), 23–25; Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 2007), 16. Kurilko, “Libretto baleta,” 7. V. Iving, “ ‘Krasnyi mak’ v Bol’shom teatre” [“The Red Poppy at the Bolshoi Theatre”], Sovremennyi teatr 2 (1927): 3. My use of the terms language and code relies in particular on Yurii Lotman, Struktura khudozhestvennogo teksta [The Structure of the Artistic Text] (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1970); and Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972). Aleksandr Pushkin, Evgenii Onegin, chap. 3, stanza XXXIII, in A. S. Pushkin, Sobranie sochinenii v 6 tomakh [Collected Works in 6 Volumes], vol. 4 (Moscow: Pravda, 1969), 63. I am grateful to Boris Gasparov for this reference. S. T. Aksakov, “Alen’kii tsvetochek (skazka kliuchnitsy Pelagei)” [“The Little Red Flower (A Fairy Tale from My Housekeeper Pelageia)”], in Detskie gody Bagrova-vnuka [Childhood Years of Grandson Bagrov] (1858), Sobranie sochinenii [Collected Works] (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1986), 1:494–513. Vladimir Nabokov, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (New York: Vintage, 1997), 7. O. S. Sapanzha and N.  A. Balandina, “Balet ‘Krasnyi mak’ v prostranstve sovetskoi povsednevnoi kul’tury” [“The Ballet The Red Poppy in the Space of Soviet Everyday Culture”], Vestnik Akademii Russkogo baleta imeni A. Ia. Vaganovoi 1 (2017): 33–39. For examples of May 1 postcards featuring poppies, see “Sovetskie otkrytki k 1 maia,” Felbert’s Freak Collection (blog), accessed July 16, 2019, https://felbert.livejournal.com /255942.html. Barthes, Mythologies, 122.

3. THROUGH AN INTERNATIONALIST LENS: CHINA IN EARLY SOVIET CINEMA 1.

2.

Sergei Mikhailovich Tret’iakov, Kinematograficheskoe nasledie: Stat’i, ocherki, stenogrammy vystuplenii, doklady [Cinematic Legacy: Articles, Sketches, Stenogrammes of Speeches, Lectures], ed. I. I. Ratiani (St. Petersburg: Nestor-Istoriia, 2010), 8–10. “Khronika” [“Chronicle”], Kino 20 (1925): 2.

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3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

15.

16. 17. 18.

Lars Kleberg, “Ėjzenštejn’s Potemkin and Tret’jakov’s Ryči, Kitaj!,” Scando-Slavica 23, no. 1 (1977): 29–37. Sergei Tret’iakov, “Kino i Kitai” [“Cinema and China”], Kino 28 (1925): 3. Emma Widdis, Visions of a New Land: Soviet Film from the Revolution to the Second World War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 1–18. Widdis, Visions of a New Land, 64–65. Dziga Vertov, “Kinoki. Perevorot,” Lef 3 (1923): 141, cited in Widdis, Visions of a New Land, 64. The Lumière brothers’ first commercial screening took place in Paris in December 1895, and the first film screening in St. Petersburg was held on May 4, 1896. Denise J. Youngblood, The Magic Mirror: Moviemaking in Russia, 1908–1918 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 8. Shanghai’s first screening occurred on August 11, 1896. Andrew Jones, Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 11. Peter Wollen, “On Gaze Theory,” New Left Review 44 (2007): 106. China on Fire was produced by the Experimental Workshop of the State Cinema Technicum (Gosudarstvennyi tekhnikum kinematografii, GTK), an artistic collective consisting of Z. Komissarenko, N. Maksimov, Iu. Merkulov, and N. Khodataev. Scenario by Vinogradov and the collective, photography by Shulman. I have used the copy available on YouTube, accessed on June 23, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4IGWnY0yyE. Widdis, Visions of a New Land, 2–4; Oksana Sarkisova, Screening Soviet Nationalities: Kulturfilms from the Far North to Central Asia (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017), 1–2, 8–11; Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005). Brian J. Harley, “Maps, Knowledge, and Power,” in The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design, and Use of Past Environments, ed. Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 303. Benjamin Pinkus, The Jews of the Soviet Union: The History of a National Minority (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 84–88. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Formy vremeni i khronotopa v romane: ocherki po istoricheskoi poetike” [“Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel: Notes Towards a Historical Poetics”], in Literaturno-kriticheskie stat’i [Literary-Critical Essays], ed. S. G. Bocharov and V. V. Kozhinov (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1986), 120–22. Michael Flanagan, Bakhtin and the Movies: New Ways of Understanding Hollywood Film (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 56. For other applications of the chronotope to cinema, see, for example, Pepita Hesselberth, Cinematic Chronotopes: Here, Now, Me (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014); Paula J. Massood, “City Space and City Times: Bakhtin’s Chronotope and Recent African-American Film,” in Screening the City, ed. Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice (London: Verso, 2003), 200–215. Bakhtin, “Formy vremeni i khronotopa v romane,” 121. Vladimir Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (London: Pluto, 1996), 81. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes Towards a Historical Poetics,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 247.

2 8 4 3 . TH RO U GH AN INTERNATION A LI ST LEN S

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

31. 32.

33. 34.

Obshchestvo druzei aviatsionnoi i khimicheskoi oborony i promyshlennosti SSSR (AVIAKHIM), founded in May 1925. “Perelet Moskva–Mongoliia–Kitai” [“The Moscow–Mongolia–China Flight”], Pravda, June 10, 1925. Scott W. Palmer, Dictatorship of the Air: Aviation Culture and the Fate of Modern Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 6. Anindita Banerjee, We Modern People: Science Fiction and the Making of Russian Modernity (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2012), 42–51. Palmer, Dictatorship, 81. Palmer, Dictatorship, 85–98. “American Aviators in Shanghai,” North China Daily News, June 5, 1924, 11. Shanghai also hosted two unsuccessful round-the-world attempts that summer: a French expedition led by Georges Pelletier D’Oisy, and a British squadron led by Archibald StuartMacLaren. See “D’Oisy Wrecks Plane in Shanghai Landing; Weeps and Abandons His Flight to Japan,” New York Times, May 21, 1924; Patrick M. Stinson, Around-the-World Flights: A History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), 43. Palmer, Dictatorship, 161–62. “Japanese Airmen Found: Forced to Land in Thick Rain and Fog: Quite Safe,” North China Daily News, May 30, 1925; Palmer, Dictatorship, 163, 167–68. Grigory Rozenblat for Pravda, Zinaida Rikhter for Izvestiia, Aleksandr Lebedenko for Leningradskaia Pravda, and Vladimir Mikhels for the Russian Telegraph Agency (Rossiiskoe telegrafnoe agenstvo, ROSTA). “S kino-apparatom v Kitai,” Kino 12 (1925): 1. In addition, three of the four correspondents published book-length accounts of their experiences. See Rikhter, 7,000 kilometrov po vozdukhu; Aleksandr Lebedenko, Perelet Moskva–Mongoliia–Pekin [The Moscow–Mongolia–China Flight] (Leningrad: Priboi, 1925); V. Mikhel’s, Ot kremlevskoi do kitaiskoi steny–perelet Moskva–Pekin [From the Kremlin Walls to the Great Wall of China: The Moscow–Mongolia–China Flight] (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1927). It is possible that Rozenblat would have followed suit, had he not been killed in a plane crash at Kharkov in 1926. See “Gibel’ samoleta ‘Dorn’e-kometa’: ubit sotrudnik ‘Pravdy’ tov. G. Ia. Rozenblat” [“Crash of ‘Dorn’e-Comet’ Aeroplane: Comrade Rozenblat, Pravda Correspondent, Killed”], Pravda, May 20, 1926. Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York: Norton, 1999.), 309, 316. See the coverage of Sun’s death on the first three pages of Pravda, March 14, 1925, particularly Grigorii Zinov’ev, “Na smert’ Sun-Iat-Sena” [“On the Death of Sun Yat-sen”] and Karl Radek, “Vozhd’ kitaiskogo naroda” [“Leader of the Chinese People”]. Spence, The Search for Modern China, 322–23; S. A. Smith, A Road Is Made: Communism in Shanghai, 1920–27 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2000), 89. Sergei Tret’iakov, “Na perelome (Pis’mo iz Pekina)” [“At Breaking Point (Letter from Beijing)”], Pravda, June 3, 1925; “Den’ unizheniia (Pis’mo iz Pekina)” [“Day of Humiliation (Letter from Beijing)”], Pravda, June 4, 1925; Lev Trotskii, “Moskovskii dukh” [“The Spirit of Moscow”], Pravda, June 6, 1925; Grigorii Zinov’ev, “Vsemirno-istoricheskoe znachenie shankhaiskikh sobytii” [“The World-Historical Significance of the Events in

3 . TH RO U GH AN INTE RNATIO NALI ST LEN S285

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45.

46.

47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

Shanghai”], Pravda, June 7, 1925; Karl Radek, “Shankhaiskie sobytiia” [“The Events in Shanghai”], Pravda, June 5, 1925. Sarkisova, Screening Soviet Nationalities, 2–8. Widdis, Visions of a New Land, 112; Sarkisova, Screening Soviet Nationalities, 73, 238n44. Steven G. Marks, Road to Power: The Trans-Siberian Railroad and the Colonization of Asian Russia, 1850–1917 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). Vladimir Shneiderov, Vosem’ kinoputeshestvii [Eight Cine-Expeditions] (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1937), 13. See the advertisement on the back page of Vecherniaia Moskva, November 19, 1925, which includes a map of the Flight’s route. Virilio, War and Cinema, 88. Virilio, War and Cinema, 26–27. Quoted in Riabchikova, “ ‘Glaz kino sledoval glazu letchika’: ‘Velikii perelet’ Vladimira Shneiderova i Georgiia Bliuma” [“ ‘The Cinema Eye Has Followed the Eye of the Pilot’: Vladimir Shneiderov and Georgy Blium’s Great Flight”], Kinovedcheskie zapiski 98 (2011): 260. V. Pertsov, “Podniat’ v vozdukh!” [“Take to the Skies!”], Sovetskii ekran 1 (1926): 14. Pertsov, “Podniat’ v vozdukh!” This account of the film is based on the copy preserved in the Russian State Archive of Film and Photographic Documents (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv kinofotodokumentov, RGAKFD): Velikii perelet, RGAKFD N. Uchetnyi 2721 (6 reels, reel 2 missing). Gromov, “Perelet Moskva–Mongoliia–Kitai: Letchiki o perelete” [“The Moscow– Mongolia–China Flight: The Pilots on the Flight”], Pravda, June 21, 1925; E. Vilenskii, “Na Vostok,” Sovetskii ekran 14 (1925): 3. We can sense in these reports the origins of the heroic aviator’s symbolic role in Stalinist culture, although in 1925 the pilots and mechanics are presented as a collective, with no exceptional individuals singled out. See Scott W. Palmer, “Aviation Cinema in Stalin’s Russia: Conformity, Collectivity, and the Conflict with Fascism,” in Russian and Soviet History: From the Time of Troubles to the Collapse of the Soviet Union, ed. Steven A. Usitalo and William Benton Whisenhunt (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), 200–214. Shneiderov, Vosem’ kinoputeshestvii, 12. E. Mikhel’s, “Kinooperatory v vozdukhe” [“Cinematographers in the Air”], Kino 32 (1925): 3, quoted in Riabchikova, “ ‘Glaz kino,’ ” 270; Georgii Blium, “Kak snimalsia ‘Velikii perelet.’ Zametki operatora” [“How The Great Flight Was Filmed. Cameraman’s Notes”], Kinozhurnal ARK 1 (1926): 29. Shneiderov mentions the use of the Askania camera in Vosem’ kinoputeshestvii, 11. Shneiderov, Vosem’ kinoputeshestvii, 14. “Soviet Flight a Great Achievement, Airman Says,” The China Press, August 22, 1925, 3. Baabar, Twentieth Century Mongolia, trans. D. Sühjargalmaa, S. Burenbayar, H. Hulan, and N. Tuya, ed. C. Kaplonski (Cambridge: White Horse, 1999), 248–71. Lebedenko, Perelet Moskva–Mongoliia–Pekin, cited in Riabchikova, “ ‘Glaz kino,’ ” 288n24. S. Gekht, “Velikii perelet” [“The Great Flight”], Kino 36 (1925): 1.

2 8 63 . TH RO U GH AN INTERNATION A LI ST LEN S

54.

55. 56.

57.

58. 59. 60. 61.

62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

Matthew J. Payne, “Viktor Turin’s Turksib (1929) and Soviet Orientalism,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 21, no. 1 (2001): 40–41; Sarkisova, Screening Soviet Nationalities, 13–16; Michael G. Smith, “Cinema for the ‘Soviet East’: National Fact and Revolutionary Fiction in Early Azerbaijani Film,” Slavic Review 56, no. 4 (1997): 677. Blium, “Kak snimalsia ‘Velikii perelet,’ ” 29. The figure of thirty thousand comes from the report in Shi Bao, July 16, 1925. Izvestiia reported that representatives of 250 organizations met the planes at Nanyuan (“Podgotovka vstrechi v Pekine” [“Preparation for the Reception in Beijing”], Izvestiia, July 14, 1925, 3). For a detailed description of the reception ceremony at the airfield see Chen Bao, July 16, 1925; Vera Vladimirovna Vishniakova–Akimova, Dva goda v vosstavshem Kitae 1925–1927: vospominaniia (Moscow: Nauka, 1980), 48–49. Vladimir Shneiderov, Letter to the Executive Board of Proletkino, quoted in Riabchikova, “ ‘Glaz kino,’ ” 266. Wen-hsin Yeh, Shanghai Splendor: Economic Sentiments and the Making of Modern China, 1843–1949 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). Mikhel’s, Ot kremlevskoi do kitaiskoi steny, 226. Vladimir Shneiderov, “Kak snimalsia ‘Velikii perelet’: zametki rukovoditel’ia s”emki” [“How The Great Flight Was Filmed: Director’s Notes”], Kinozhurnal ARK 1 (1926): 28; Blium, “Kak snimalsia ‘Velikii perelet,’ ” 28–9; Riabchikova, “ ‘Glaz kino,’ ” 287n15; Zhongguo dianying fazhan shi, 143–44. Shneiderov, Vosem’ kinoputeshestvii, 30. Riabchikova, “ ‘Glaz kino,’ ” 268. Widdis, Visions of a New Land, 115. Ariella Azoulay, Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography (London: Verso, 2012), 11–18. Azoulay, Civil Imagination, 24–25. Gekht, “Velikii perelet.” Viktor Shklovskii, “ ‘Velikii perelet’ i kinematografiia” [“The Great Flight and Cinematography”], Kino 38 (1925): 3. Tret’iakov, “Nedolet-perelet-popadanie,” 4. Shneiderov, Vosem’ kinoputeshestvii, 22, 26, 29. The Proletkino crew may have been banned from aerial filming in China by the Chinese authorities: the Department of Aviation stipulated that “photographic equipment” could not be transported on board the planes. “E feiji laihua linshi banfa zhi hanzhi” [“Statement on Provisional Measures for the Russian Aircraft Arriving in China”], Shen Bao, 22 July 1925, 15. Khrisanf Khersonskii, “Put’ na vostok: ‘Velikii perelet’ ” [“Path to the East: The Great Flight”] Kinozhurnal ARK 1 (1926): 22, cited in Riabchikova, “ ‘Glaz kino,’ ” 280. Riabchikova, “ ‘Glaz kino,’ ” 289n29. Tret’iakov, “Nedolet-perelet-popadanie.” RGALI f. 1923, op. 1, ed. khr. 133. Tretyakov’s report is not dated, but his suggestion that the expedition could depart in January 1926 implies it was composed in late 1925. RGALI f. 1923, op., ed. khr. 133, l. 2.

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76. 77.

78. 79. 80. 81. 82.

83. 84.

85.

86. 87. 88.

RGALI f. 1923, op., ed. khr. 133, l. 3. RGALI f. 1923, op., ed. khr. 133, l. 5. Funding was to be provided jointly by Goskino and Sovkino. This report is undated, although a reference to the premiere of Tretyakov’s play Rychi, Kitai! tells us it was composed after January 23, 1926, and the report’s acknowledgment of the Guominjun’s defeat may date the report to as late as April (see later in this chapter). Sergei Tret’iakov, “Kitai na ekran” [“China Onscreen”], Sovetskoe kino 5–6 (1927): 16. “Kinoekspeditsiia v Kitai,” Kino 11 (1926): 1. For this argument in a Soviet context, see G. Levkoev, “Kino-ekspeditsiia na Vostok” [“Cine-Expedition to the East”], Kinozhurnal ARK 6–7 (1925): 28. Richard Taylor, Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1979), 73. “Chto dat’ Vostoku?” [“What to Give the East?”], Kino 24 (1925): 1. This was one of four articles on Kino’s front page devoted to this theme: see also “Filmu na Vostok” [“Film to the East”], “O Vostoke i dlia Vostoka” [“About the East and for the East”], “Chto na Vostoke?” [“What Is in the East?”], Kino 24 (1925): 1. For other instances of the press campaign, see An. Skachko, “Organizatsiia vostochnogo kino” [“Organization of Eastern Cinema”], Sovetskoe kino 2–3 (1925): 16–18; An. Skachko, “Vostochnaia kino-fil’ma” [Eastern Cine-film], Sovetskoe kino 6 (1925): 24–27; Armen Gasparian, “Put’ na Vostok” [Path to the East], Kino 11 (1925): 7; “Prodvizhenie kino na Vostok (Beseda s t. Pavlovich-Vel’tman)” [“Cinema’s Eastward Advance (A Conversation with Comrade Pavlovich-Veltman)”], Kino 13 (1925): 1; S. Vel’tman, Zadachi kino na Vostoke: Pravda i nepravda o Vostoke [The Tasks of Cinema in the East: Truth and Untruth about the East] (Moscow: Nauchnaia assotsiatsiia vostokovedeniia pri Prezidiume TSIK SSSR, 1927). An. Skachko, “Kino dlia Vostoka” [“Cinema for the East”], Kinozhurnal ARK 10 (1925): 3; Sarkisova, Screening Soviet Nationalities, 37–39. “Vostkino,” Sovetskoe kino 1 (1926): 24. The Soviet conception of Vostok was extremely broad: in the first issue of Novyi Vostok, Mikhail Pavlovich makes the case for understanding Vostok as encompassing “the whole colonial world,” including Africa and Latin America. Mikhail Pavlovich, “Zadachi vserossiiskoi nauchnoi assotsiatsii Vostokovedeniia” [“The Tasks of the All-Russian Scientific Association of Orientology”], Novyi Vostok 1 (1922): 9. L. P., “Kino v Kitae” [“Cinema in China”], Kino 10 (1925): 2; Sovetskii, “Kino v Kitae” [“Cinema in China”], Sovetskoe kino 6 (1925): 52–55; A. Grinfel’d, “Kinematografiia Kitaia (Issledovatel’skii ocherk)” [“Cinema of China (A Research Sketch)”], Kino-Front 9–10 (1926): 37–38. Weihong Bao, Fiery Cinema: The Emergence of an Affective Medium in China, 1915–1945 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 42. Zhang Zhen, An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema, 1896–1937 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 118–50. Treti’akov, “Kino i Kitai.” The Thief of Baghdad was eventually banned by the Chinese government. Negative reviews focused on the performance of Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong as a “Mongol slave girl.” See Graham Russell Gao Hodges, Anna May Wong: From Laundryman’s Daughter to Hollywood Legend (Hong Kong: Hong Kong

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89. 90.

91. 92.

93.

94. 95. 96. 97. 98.

99. 100. 101. 102. 103.

University Press, 2012), 43. By contrast, The Thief of Baghdad was the most popular film of the 1920s in the Soviet Union; see Vance Kepley Jr. and Betty Kepley, “Foreign Films on Soviet Screens, 1922–1931,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 4, no. 4 (1979): 437. Bao, Fiery Cinema, 82. Vladimir Shneiderov, “Kitaiskii kinematograf ” [“Chinese Cinema”], Sovetskii ekran 5 (1926): 14–15; Riabchikova, “ ‘Glaz kino,’ ” 264, 267–68; for Proletkino’s expression of interest, see 269. Riabchikova, “ ‘Glaz kino,’ ” 268. “Kino na vystavke v Kharbine” [“Cinema on Exhibition in Harbin”], Kino 12 (1925): 1; G.  B., “Kino na Vostoke” [“Cinema in the East”], Kino 11 (1925): 7; “Kino-diplomatiia-vlast’,” Kino 15 (1926): 5. Cheng Jihua lists Battleship Potemkin as the second Soviet film to be screened in China (excluding Harbin), after a small-scale screening by the Chinese Communist Party of the short newsreel film The Funeral of Lenin (Pokhorony Lenina) in 1924. Cheng finds no evidence that The Great Flight reached Chinese audiences in 1926. Cheng Jihua, ed., Zhongguo dianying fazhan shi, vol. 1 (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 1998), 139, 144. Tret’iakov, “Kitai na ekran,” 16. Tret’iakov, “Kitai na ekran,” 16–17. Tret’iakov, “Kitai na ekran,” 17. “General’naia liniia (Beseda s S. M. Eizenshteinom)” [“The General Line (A Conversation with S. M. Eisenstein)”], Kino 32 (1926): 1. For these collaborations see Salazkina, In Excess; Carlos Espinosa Domínguez, “The Mammoth That Wouldn’t Die,” in Caviar with Rum: Cuba-USSR and the Post-Soviet Experience, ed. Jacqueline Loss and José Manuel Prieto (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). For an account of Soviet-Turkish cinematic collaboration in the 1930s, 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. “General’naia liniia (Beseda s S. M. Eizenshteinom).” Henry Wei, China and Soviet Russia (Princeton, NJ: D. Van Nostrand, 1956), 60. RGALI f. 1923, op. 1, ed. khr. 133, l. 3. RGALI f. 1923, op. 1, ed. khr. 133, l. 5. Plot summaries for all three parts of Dzhungo are preserved in Tretyakov’s archive (RGALI f. 2886, op. 2, ed. khr. 8) as well as Eisenstein’s (RGALI f. 1923 op. 1. ed. khr. 131). The Eisenstein copies, which include scenarios for Zheltaia opasnost’, Goluboi ekspress and Kitai rychit, plus an alternative, longer scenario for Zheltaia opasnost’, are published in Tret’iakov, Kinematograficheskoe nasledie, 212–20. The copies in Tretyakov’s archive include an additional, unpublished version of the third film, renamed Zhemchuzhnaia reka. Because Zheltaia opasnost’ and Zhemchuzhnaia reka are the two films that are budgeted into the later Goskino report on the expedition, it seems likely that these additional versions are second drafts. Eisenstein also refers to the third film as Zhemchuzhnaia reka in his discussion of the expedition. See “General’naia liniia (Beseda s S. M. Eizenshteinom).”

3. THROUGH AN INTERNATIONALIST LENS289

104.

105. 106. 107.

108. 109. 110.

111.

112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118.

119. 120. 121.

122.

123. 124.

See, for example, Tretyakov’s comments at the LEF roundtable on cinema, “LEF i kino: Stenogramma soveshchaniia” [“LEF and Cinema: Stenogramme of Roundtable”], Novyi Lef 11–12 (1927): 52. Sergei Tret’iakov, “Our Cinema,” October 118 (Fall 2006): 30. A section from the expedition plan insists: “The emphasis must be on local resources, in terms of both acting and directing.” Muzei kino, f. 57, op. 2, ed. khr. 13, l. 3. “Proletariat Moskvy s toboi!” [“The Proletariat of Moscow Is with You!”] Prozhektor 10 (1925): 25; Leon Trotsky, “May Day in the West and the East” (April 1923; Marxists Internet Archive), accessed July 11, 2019, http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/04/mayday.htm. See, for example, North China Herald, April 19, 1924; April 26, 1924; and June 14, 1924. For details on Feng’s 1924 coup see Arthur Waldron, From War to Nationalism: China’s Turning Point, 1924–1925 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 181–207. I follow chiefly the second, longer summary of Zheltaia opasnost’. The detail of the Captain hiding in the palace comes from the first summary. Both scenarios are reprinted in Tret’iakov, Kinematograficheskoe nasledie, 212–13, 218–20. Phil Billingsley, Bandits in Republican China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 13; John Fitzgerald, Awakening China: Politics, Culture, and Class in the Nationalist Revolution (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 141. Sergei Tret’iakov, Chzhungo, 2nd expanded ed. (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1930), 342–47. Fitzgerald, Awakening China, 141. Fitzgerald, Awakening China, 247–9. Spence, The Search for Modern China, 321; Fitzgerald, Awakening China, 287. Tret’iakov, Kinematograficheskoe nasledie, 217. This is the final image in Kitai rychit, the more detailed of the two surviving librettos. Tret’iakov, Kinematograficheskoe nasledie, 218. Tani Barlow, “Semifeudalism, Semicolonialism,” in Afterlives of Chinese Communism: Political Concepts from Mao to Xi, ed. Christian Sorace, Ivan Franceschini, and Nicholas Loubere (Canberra: ANU Press, 2019), 237–41. Sergei Tret’iakov, “Proizvodstvennyi stsenarii” [“The Production Scenario”], Novyi Lef 2 (1928): 32. Rey Chow, Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 7–9. Laikwan Pang, Building a New China in Cinema: The Chinese Left-Wing Cinema Movement, 1932–1937 (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 144–47; Bao, Fiery Cinema, 242–50. On the curious absence of Shanghai Document from Chinese film history, see Xinyu Dong, “From Shanghai Document to Shanghai 24 Hours: the City, the ‘Sovkino Expedition,’ and Montage Complex,” in The Collegium Papers VI, ed. Luca Giuliani and David Robinson (Sacile, Italy: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, 2005), 84–85. Tret’iakov, “Kitai na ekran,” 18. Written and directed by V. R. Gardin, cinematography by D. Shliugleit and K. NaumovStrazh. See Sovetskie khudozhestvennye fil’my: Annotirovannyi katalog [Soviet Fiction

2 9 0 3 . TH RO U GH AN INTERNATION A LI ST LEN S

125. 126. 127. 128.

129.

130.

131. 132. 133. 134.

135.

136. 137. 138. 139.

Films: Annotated Catalogue], vol. 1, Nemye fil’my, 1918–1935 [Silent Films, 1917–1935] (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1961), 303. Chinese members of the Institute of Oriental Languages played the Chinese roles, and leftover footage from The Great Flight and Shanghai Document was reportedly incorporated into the film (Kino 26 [1928]: 1). Тhe film, which does not survive, told the story of Communist leader Dzhou De-shen and his Russian wife, Elena Nikolaevna, against the backdrop of the failed Canton uprising. A contemporary review lambasts the film for molding its historical material into “a shining example of the most low-grade trash” (Rabochii, Minsk, June 8, 1929). For more on The Blue Express, see Jay Leyda, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film, 3rd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 272. Tret’iakov, “Kitai na ekran,” 18. L. Vaks, “ ‘Shankhaiskii dokument’ (prosmotr v ODSK)” [“Shanghai Document (Screening at ODSK)”], Kino 17 (1928): 5. G. Prozhiko and D. Firsova, eds., Letopistsy nashego vremeni: rezhissery dokumental’nogo kino [“Chroniclers of Our Time: Directors of Documentary Film”] (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1987), 103–5. Nicholas Cull and Arthur Waldron, “Shanghai Document—Shankhaiskii Dokument (1928): Soviet Film Propaganda and the Shanghai Rising of 1927,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 16, no. 3 (1996): 314, 327n23. Cull and Waldron, “Shanghai Document,” 309–31; Dong, “From Shanghai Document,” 80–90; Xinyu Dong, “China at Play: Republican Film Comedies and Chinese Cinematic Modernity” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2009), 168–79. Cull and Waldron, “Shanghai Document,” 313. John MacKay, “Film Energy: Process and Metanarrative in Dziga Vertov’s ‘The Eleventh Year’ (1928),” October 121 (Summer 2007): 41–78. Cull and Waldron, “Shanghai Document,” 316–20. For Eisenstein’s understanding of “intellectual montage,” see Sergei Eisenstein, “The Dramaturgy of Film Form (The Dialectical Approach to Film Form),” in The Eisenstein Reader, ed. Richard Taylor (London: British Film Institute, 1998), 108–10. For Vertov’s conception of montage as the “linkage of meaning,” see Dziga Vertov, “From the History of the Kinoks,” in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 100. A recent overview of their approaches and disagreements can be found in Mikhail Iampol’skii, “Skvoz’ tuskloe steklo”: 20 glav o neopredelennosti [“Through a Glass Darkly”: 20 Chapters on Indeterminacy] (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2010), chap. 8 and 9. Karl Marx, Capital: Volume One, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1977), 667. For the exposition of this theory, see “The Labor Process and the Valorization Process,” chap. 7 in Capital, 283–306. Quoted in Vaks, “ ‘Shankhaiskii document.’ ” Sergei Drobashenko, Istoriia sovetskogo documental’nogo kino [History of Soviet Documentary Film] (Moscow: Izdanie Moskovskogo universiteta, 1980), 24. On this point see Widdis, Visions of a New Land, 115. Vaks, “ ‘Shankhaiskii dokument.’ ”

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140.

141.

142.

143. 144.

145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152.

153. 154.

155. 156.

157. 158. 159. 160.

For overviews of the city symphony genre, see Alexander Graf, “Paris–Berlin–Moscow: On the Montage Aesthetic in the City Symphony Films of the 1920s,” in Avant-Garde Film, ed. Alexander Graf and Dietrich Scheunemann (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 77–92; Laura Marcus, “ ‘A Hymn to Movement’: The ‘City Symphony’ of the 1920s and 1930s,” Modernist Cultures 5, no. 1 (2010): 30–46; Scott McQuire, “The City in Fragments,” chap. 3 in The Media City: Media, Architecture and Urban Space (Los Angeles: Sage, 2008), 62–90. Wolfgang Natter, “The City as Cinematic Space: Modernism and Place in Berlin, Symphony of a City,” in Place, Power, Situation, and Spectacle: A Geography of Film, ed. Stuart C. Aitken and Leo E. Zonn (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1994), 218. Vlada Petric, “Cinematic Abstraction as a Means of Conveying Ideological Messages in The Man with the Movie Camera,” in The Red Screen: Politics, Society, Art in Soviet Cinema, ed. Anna Lawton (London: Routledge, 1992), 91–92. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, “On Alternative Modernities,” Public Culture 11, no. 1 (1999): 3–8. Marcus, “A Hymn to Movement”; McQuire, “The City in Fragments.” Both draw on the classic account of modern urban life as shaped by fragmentation and shock in Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 2007), 155–200. Vertov, “Kinoki. Perevorot,” 141–42. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 92. Bao, Fiery Cinema, 241. Dong, “From Shanghai Document,” 81–82. Cull and Waldron, “Shanghai Document,” 324; Zhang Zhen, An Amorous History of the Silver Screen, 64–69. Dong, “China at Play,” 178–79. Dong, “From Shanghai Document,” 88. Kh., “Revoliutsionnyi dokument na zapade” [“A Revolutionary Document in the West”], Kino 2 (1929): 4; Cull and Waldron, “Shanghai Document,” 324–25; Dong, “From Shanghai Document,” 80. Cull and Waldron, “Shanghai Document,” 310–11. A review in Kino accused the film of producing a “parody” of the Soviet village that rural residents would find it difficult to follow. “Na prosmotrakh: Kitaiskaia mel’nitsa” [“At Screenings: The Chinese Mill”], Kino 23 (1928): 5. Khrisanf Khersonskii, “Kitaiskaia mel’nitsa” [“The Chinese Mill”], Kino 30 (1928): 3. Isaak Babel’, The Chinese Mill: A Mobilization Drill, trans. Nathalie Babel Brown, Ulbandus Review 1, no. 2 (Spring 1978): 130–31. This publication sets Babel’s original Russian text alongside a parallel English translation. Babel’, The Chinese Mill, 144–47. Babel’, The Chinese Mill, 148–49 (my emphasis). Babel’, The Chinese Mill, 110–11. China featured heavily in the pages of Prozhektor in 1927. Zhivtsov may be looking at Prozhektor’s special issue on China (5 [Маrch 15, 1927]), which was published in the wake

2 923. TH RO U GH AN INTERNATION A LI ST LEN S

161. 162. 163. 164. 165. 166. 167.

of what seemed like a Communist victory in Shanghai. Aleksei Ivin’s text on “Revolutionary Beijing” (“Revoluitsionnyi Pekin,” Prozhektor 5 [Маrch 15, 1927]: 18–19) was published in the same issue (see chapter 1). Babel’, The Chinese Mill, 126–29. Babel’, The Chinese Mill, 128–29. Babel’, The Chinese Mill, 130–31. Babel’, The Chinese Mill, 131. Khersonskii, “Kitaiskaia mel’nitsa.” Babel’, The Chinese Mill, 130–31. Khersonskii, “Kitaiskaia mel’nitsa.”

4. CONFESSIONS AND COLLABORATIONS: AUTHORITY, AGENCY, AND FACTOGRAPHIC INTERNATIONALISM IN DEN SHI-KHUA 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

Biographical information on Gao Shihua is taken from Gao Li, “Gao Yaheng xiansheng shengping shilüe” [“A Biographical Sketch of the Life of Mr. Gao Yaheng” (sic)], in Fuling wenshi ziliao 14 (2006): 223–25; Ran Qilei and Shen Xiaofei, “Gao Xinya xiansheng de gushi” [“The Story of Mr. Gao Xinya” (sic)], in Fuling gushi, ed. Li Shiquan (Zhonggong Chongqing shi Fuling qu weixuan chuanbu, 2009), 133–35. The name “Gao Shi-khua” appears in a typed list of Tretyakov’s Beijing students preserved in his archive (RGALI f. 2886, op. 1, ed. khr. 14). Soviet Sinologist Roman Belousov claims he learned Gao’s real name in a 1959 letter from Cao Jinghua, another of Tretyakov’s students from Beijing, who went on to become a prominent scholar and translator of Russian literature. Roman Belousov, “Sergei Tret’iakov o Kitae,” Solntse v zenite: Vostochnyi almanakh 10 (1982): 567. On Gao’s translation work with Feng’s Soviet advisers see Gao Li, “Gao Yaheng,” 223; Gao Xingya, “Wusi qianhou de Beijing daxue eyu xi,” Wenshi ziliao xuanji 135 (1999): 184. For record of Gao’s enrolment see RGASPI f. 530 op. 1 d. 42 l. 13. His student card number was 301. As attested by Gao Li, “Gao Yaheng,” 223. The university’s files confirm this: see RGASPI f. 530 op. 2 d. 23 l. 52ob, where Gao’s Chinese name is recorded with a different shi character: 催຿㧃, Миронов. I am grateful to Yu Min-ling for first making me aware of Gao’s Russian pseudonym. In the unpublished note, “Kak ia pisal Dena” [“How I Wrote Deng”], dated June 24, 1934, Tretyakov states that “Deng Shihua and I worked together for half a year, meeting almost every day.” RGALI f. 2886, op. 1, ed. khr. 22, l. 2. Gao officially disenrolled from Sun Yat-sen University on August 5, 1927. See RGASPI f. 530 op. 1 d. 42 l. 13. However, this date is listed as the disenrollment date for a large number of students, which suggests it may have been a general graduation date, not the date when Gao actually left Moscow. Belousov, “Sergei Tret’iakov o Kitae,” 567. In the extract “Deng Shihua’s wedding,” published separately in 1928, Tret’iakov appears not to have completed his edit, leaving the

4 . CO NFE SS IO NS AND CO LLABO R ATI ON S293

7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20.

surname Gao in the text. See Sergei Tret’iakov, Svad’ba Den Shi-khua (Moscow: Rabochaia Moskva, 1928), 56. In later editions, the name in this passage is changed to Deng. Besides the first extract, which appeared in Novyi Lef, extracts from Den Shi-khua were serialized in periodicals, including Pioner, Rabochaia Moskva, Pionerskaia pravda, Chitatel’ i pisatel’, Molodaia gvardiia, and Krasnoe studenchestvo. Full editions appeared in 1930 (repr. 1931), 1933, and 1935. In addition, extracts from the book were published as separate volumes: Svad’ba Den Shi-khua (1928) and Detstvo Den Shi-khua [The Childhood of Den Shi-khua] (1931; repr. Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1933). For full publication history, see B.  M. Tolochinskaia, Russkie sovetskie pisateli—prozaiki: Bibliograficheskii ukazatel’, vol. 7, part 2 (Moscow: Kniga, 1972), 349, 389. Tret’iakov, “Neskol’ko slov,” 14. Tret’iakov, “Neskol’ko slov,” 14. See Elizabeth Astrid Papazian, Manufacturing Truth: The Documentary Moment in Early Soviet Culture (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009), 46–50. Li Yingnan (a.k.a. Inna Li) also makes this point about Den Shi-khua’s poor timing, although she perhaps overstates the case in claiming that the book was “of no interest to anybody.” Li Yingnan, “Kitai v tvorchestve Sergeia Tret’iakova: Roman ‘Den Shi-khua’ ” [“China in the Work of Sergei Tret’iakov: The Novel Den Shi-khua”], Russkii Kharbin, zapechatlennyi v slove 6 (Blagoveshchensk: Amurskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 2012): 241. Sometimes written Gao Xinya (催ᮄѲ); see, for example, Ran and Shen, “Gao Xinya xiansheng de gushi.” Gao Xingya, “Chaha’er minzhong kang Ri tongmengjun er san shi” [“A Couple of Points about the Anti-Japanese Allied Forces of the Masses in Chaha’er”], in Cong jiuyiba dao qiqi shibian: Yuan Guomindang jiangling kang Ri zhanzheng qinli ji [From the September 18 Incident to the July 7 Incident: Personal Reminiscences of the Former Guomindang Generals in the War of Resistance to Japan], ed. Liu Qiet al. (Beijing: Zhongguo wenshi chubanshe, 1987), 566–67. Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 255–60. Jochen Hellbeck, “Working, Struggling, Becoming: Stalin-Era Autobiographical Texts,” The Russian Review 60, no. 3 (July 2001): 341–42. Igal Halfin, Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 7. Clark, The Soviet Novel, 16–17. Igal Halfin, From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000). Cristina Vatulescu, Police Aesthetics: Literature, Film, and the Secret Police in Soviet Times (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 33. This linking of character psychology to historical development derived from the literary theories of Georgy Plekhanov. See Edward J. Brown, The Proletarian Episode in Russian Literature, 1928–1932 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1953), 78. See, for example, Osip Brik, “Razgrom Fadeeva” [“Fadeev’s Razgrom”], in Literatura fakta: Pervyi sbornik materialov rabotnikov LEFa, ed. Nikolai Chuzhak (Moscow:

2 9 44. CO NFE SS IO NS AND CO LLA B OR ATI ON S

21. 22. 23.

24.

25.

26. 27.

28.

29. 30.

Izdatel’stvo Federatsiia, 1929; repr. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1972), 91–96; T. Grits, “Mertvyi shtamp i zhivoi chelovek” [“The Dead Cliché and the Living Person”], in Literatura fakta, 132–33. Sergei Tret’iakov, “Biografiia veshchi,” in Literatura fakta, 68. Tret’iakov, “Neskol’ko slov,” 14. Tretyakov coins the term “living ‘living’ person” in his review of Vladimir Arseniev’s V debriakh Ussuriiskogo kraia [In the Wild of Ussuri Krai]. See Sergei Tret’iakov, “Zhivoi ‘zhivoi’ chelovek,” Novyi Lef 7 (1928): 44–45. Evgeny Dobrenko identifies the adventure novel as one of the most popular genres among children ages twelve to fifteen (especially boys) in the mid-1920s. Evgeny Dobrenko, The Making of the State Reader: Social and Aesthetic Contexts of the Reception of Soviet Literature, trans. Jesse M. Savage (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 72. A. Golyshevskii, Mest’ kuli (Moscow: “Doloi negramotnost’,” 1927); Sergei Auslender, Nekotorye zamechatel’nye sluchai iz zhizni Li-Siao (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1927); Vladimir Vladimirskii, Golova v kletke: Rasskazy iz zhizni Zapadnogo Kitaia (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1929); Leonid Ierokhonov, Mal’chik iz Nan-fu (Moscow: Krasnaia gazeta, 1930); A. Kartsev, Smert’ Li-Chana (Moscow: Krasnii proletarii, 1930); A. Lebedenko, Chetvertaia pulia Li Sina (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1931); and Galina Serebriakova, Riksha (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1931). For chronological comparison, Den Shi-khua was serialized in various periodicals between 1927 and 1929, and then published in separate editions in 1930 (repr. 1931), 1933, and 1935. See Tolochinskaia, Russkie sovetskie pisateli, 349, 389. Clark, The Soviet Novel, 255–60. Nikolai Zhurakovsky’s novel Wings of Fire (1928) includes a scene in which Dr. Sun Yat-sen deploys his medical training to cure a young laborer of fever, while offering the political wisdom that guides his patient toward a career as a revolutionary. See Nikolai Zhurakovskii, Kryl’ia ognia: Roman iz zhizni kitaiskoi molodezhi [Wings of Fire: A Novel from the Life of Chinese Youth] (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1928). In Aleksandr Isbakh’s poem Ballada o Lenine i Li-Chane [The Ballad of Lenin and Li-Chan] (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1928), the laborer Li-Chan learns about Lenin and the Soviet Union from a newspaper dropped by a passer-by. See, for example, the child’s rebellion against corporal punishment in Auslender, Nekotorye zamechatel’nye sluchai iz zhizni Li-Siao, 22; or the teacher Wu-Chan in Tretyakov’s poem for young readers, “Li-Yang Is Stubborn,” who advises his pupil Li-Yang to accept the constant misfortunes that befall him (Sergei Tret’iakov, Li-ian upriam: poema [Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1927]). Sergei Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua: Bio-interv’iu (Moscow: Molodaiia gvardiia, 1930), 39. All references are to this edition unless otherwise specified. Zhang Peijue appears briefly as a coconspirator in the buildup to the revolution, under his courtesy name Zhang Liewu (ᔉ߫Ѩ). (Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 51.) Deng Yapo serves as deputy commander to Xiong Kewu during the siege of Wanxian, but they part company after a disagreement over the treatment of civilians. (Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 86–88.)

4. CONFESSIONS AND COLLABORATIONS295

31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41.

42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48.

Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 153. For more on the adventure narrative qualities of this section of the book see Papazian, Manufacturing Truth, 51. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 170. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 289–94. Phillipe Lejeune, “The Autobiographical Pact,” in Lejeune, On Autobiography, ed. Paul John Eakin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 22. Elizabeth Papazian suggests we should read these changes as responses to two historical circumstances: the split between the Comintern and the Guomindang after 1927, and the rise of the Socialist–Realist novel as the canonical form of Soviet literature after 1934. See Papazian, Manufacturing Truth, 49–50. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 4. Sergei Tret’iakov, “Den Sy-khua (Bio-interv’iu),” Novyi Lef 7 (1927): 14. For the Formalist distinction between form and material as a rejection of the form–content binary, see, for example, Viktor Shklovsky, Literature and Cinematography, trans. Irina Masinovsky (London: Dalkey, 2008), 1–23. Tret’iakov, “Den Sy-khua,” 14; Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 3; Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua (1933), 3; Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua (1935), 3. Tret’iakov, “Den Sy-khua,” 14; Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 3; Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua (1933), 4; Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua (1935), 5. Tret’iakov, “Den Sy-khua,” 14; Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 3; Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua (1933), 4; Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua (1935), 5. Tret’iakov, “Den Sy-khua,” 15. The intertext is the line “Ia khochu, chtob k shtyku priravniali pero” (“I want the pen to be equal to the bayonet”) in the poem “Domoi” (“Homeward”), written while Mayakovsky was returning from his trip to the United States in 1925. Vladimir Maiakovskii, “Domoi,” Sobranie sochinenii v vos’mi tomakh (Moscow: Pravda, 1968), 4:396. Gao Shihua, “Chen ziji de chuan,” Qian cao 1, no. 3 (1923): 37–42; Anton Chekhov, “Lao yuanding de gushi” [“The Head-Gardener’s Story”], trans. Gao Shihua, Wenyi xun kan 3 (1923): 1–2; Chekhov, “Qiu hun (du mu ju)” [“The Proposal: A Joke in One Act”], trans. Gao Shihua, Wenyi xun kan 15 (1923): 2–3, Wenyi xun kan 17 (1923): 2–3, Wenyi xun kan 18 (1924): 2–3, Wenyi xun kan 19 (1924): 2–3; Gao Shihua, “Eguo minge xuan yi” [“A Selection of Russian Folk Songs in Translation”], Wenyi xun kan 22 (1924): 1–2; Mikhail Lermontov, “Xiao shami” [“Mtsyri”] trans. Gao Shihua, Chongqing shangwu ribao shi zhounian jinian kan (1924), 143–50. Tret’iakov, “Den Sy-khua,” 14; Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 3; cf. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua (1933), 4; Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua (1935), 4. Tret’iakov, “Den Sy-khua,” 14; Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 3; cf. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua (1933), 4. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua (1933), 4. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 335. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua (1933), 4. This third version of the introduction is dated August 10, 1932. The same point about Den’s limited linguistic abilities in Russian appears in the introduction to the 1935 edition, dated November 1934. Tret’iakov, “Kak ia pisal Dena,” 2.

2 9 6 4. CO NFE SS IO NS AND CO LLA B OR ATI ON S

49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54.

55. 56.

57. 58.

59. 60.

61. 62. 63.

64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

“Bibliografiia: Den Shi-khua” [“Bibliography: Den Shi-khua”], Oktiabr’ 5–6 (1930): 279. “Bibliografiia: Den Shi-khua,” 279. Georg Lukács, “Reportage or Portrayal?,” in Lukács, Essays on Realism, ed. Rodney Livingstone, trans. David Fernbach (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 49. Lukács, “Reportage or Portrayal?,” 61. See, for example, Myong Jung-Baek, “S. Tret’jakov und China” (Ph.D. diss., University of Göttingen, 1987), 98–99; Papazian, Manufacturing Truth, 50; Natasha Kolchevska, “Toward a ‘Hybrid’ Literature: Theory and Praxis of the Faktoviki,” The Slavic and East European Journal 27, no. 4 (Winter 1983): 458. It is possible that the photograph resides in Tretyakov’s archive because it was intended for publication as part of Den Shi-khua. It may have been left out for the same reason the protagonist’s name was changed: to protect his identity. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 276. Three pages later, Deng explains that his glasses were subsequently stolen and he did not buy a new pair; he wore them only to affect the look of a student. Tret’iakov, Den Shikhua, 275–78. Sergei Tret’iakov, Chzhungo (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1927), 64. Agnes Smedley, “The Coming-of-Age of a Chinese Intellectual: An Epoch of Oriental History Reflected in an Autobiography,” New York Herald Tribune, June 24, 1934, Section VII (Books). For a recent account of Smedley’s engagement with China, see Richard So, Transpacific Community: America, China, and the Rise and Fall of a Cultural Network (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 1–40. Devin Fore, “ ‘All the Graphs’: Soviet and Weimar Documentary Between the Wars” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2005), 33. Tomi Huttunen, “Montage Culture: The Semiotics of Post-Revolutionary Culture,” in Modernisation in Russian since 1900, ed. Markku Kangaspuro and Jeremy Smith (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2006), 190. Tret’iakov, “Den Sy-khua,” 15; Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 3–4; Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua (1933), 4; Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua (1935), 5. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1990), 59. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 61–2; Michel Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley et al. (New York: New Press, 1997), 225. Halfin, Terror in My Soul, 7, 11. Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary Under Stalin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 26. Halfin, Terror in My Soul, 29. L. Min-ling Yu, “Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow, 1925–1930” (PhD diss., New York University, 1995), 17–48. On two versions of the register for kruzhok no. 3, 1927, these three students’ names are marked with a small blue cross, highlighting their lack of Communist affiliation. RGASPI f. 530 op. 1 d. 23 l. 3, l. 10, l. 20, l. 33; RGASPI f. 530 op. 1 d. 24 l. 3, l. 13.

4 . CO NFE SS IO NS AND CO LLABO R ATI ON S297

69.

70. 71. 72. 73.

74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81.

82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

88. 89. 90.

91. 92.

93.

See RGASPI f. 530 op. 2 d. 43 l. 45, where Mironov is listed as a Guomindang member, and the rest of the form’s questions—concerning “discipline,” “self-control suitable for a Party member,” and “any noted theoretical deviations”—are crossed through with a line. RGASPI f. 530 op. 2 d. 23 l. 52ob. RGASPI f. 530 op. 2 d. 42 l. 103. RGASPI f. 530 op. 2 d. 42 l. 110. RGASPI f. 530, op. 2, ed. khr. 6; RGASPI f. 530, op. 2, ed. khr. 23, l. 5. RGASPI f. 530, op. 1, ed. khr. 6, l. 41. This outline is similar to the list of topics guiding the autobiographies of students at Sverdlov University as recorded by Halfin, Terror in My Soul, 44. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 54–61. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 98. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 238, 241. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 242. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 127. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 290, 316. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 337. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 305–6. The Chinese Socialist Youth League (Zhongguo shehui zhuyi qingnian tuan, Ё೟⼒᳗Џ㕽䴦ᑈ೬) was founded under the leadership of Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao in 1920 and held its first congress in 1922. See Klaus H. Pringsheim, “The Functions of the Chinese Communist Youth Leagues (1920–1949),” The China Quarterly 12 (1962): 75–76. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 380. RGASPI f. 530, op. 1, ed. khr. 6, l. 42, 60, 61. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 4. Tret’iakov, “Biografiia veshchi,” in Literatura fakta, 67–68. Tret’iakov, “Biografiia veshchi,” in Literatura fakta, 66. Li Yingnan offers an alternative explanation for the limited inner psychology in Den Shi-khua, suggesting that the text expresses character psychology through action in a manner reminiscent of the Chinese novelistic tradition. Li considers Den Shi-khua to be essentially a novel, despite Tret’iakov’s factographic claims. Li, “Kitai v tvorchestve Sergeia Tret’iakova,” 244. “Bibliografiia: Den Shi-khua.” Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 329. Gao Shihua, “Chen ziji de chuan.” For more on the Low Grass Society and their journal see Michel Hockx, Questions of Style: Literary Societies and Literary Journals in Modern China, 1911–1937 (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 95–100. Gao Shihua, “Chen ziji de chuan,” 42. Jia Yumin, “Lu Xun youguan renwu xin kao er ze” [“Two New Pieces of Research on People Connected to Lu Xun”], in Shanghai Lu Xun yanjiu 4 (1991): 119. Chekhov uses the child’s perspective, for example, in the 1888 story “Grisha” (Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 30 tomakh, vol. 5 [Moscow: Nauka, 1976], 83–85). See Mark Gamsa, The Chinese Translation of Russian Literature: Three Studies. Boston: Brill, 2008.

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94.

95.

96. 97. 98. 99.

100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107.

108.

109.

For an extended discussion of this influence see Mark Gamsa, The Reading of Russian Literature in China: A Moral Example and Manual of Practice (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). On the Compendium, see Lydia Liu, “The Making of the ‘Compendium of Modern Chinese Literature,’ ” in Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900–1937 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 214–38. Lu Xun, “Dao yan” [“Introduction”], in Xiao shuo er ji [Second Fiction Collection], ed. Lu Xun (Shanghai: Liangyou tushu yinshua gongsi, 1935), 6. Gao’s story appears on 122–27. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 330–31. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 357. Haun Saussy comments on the non-alignment of these two conceptions of modernism, China’s May Fourth realism and the Soviet avant-garde turn against realism, in his account of Mei Lanfang’s visit to Moscow in 1934 (discussed in the Epilogue). See Haun Saussy, “Mei Lanfang in Moscow, 1935: Familiar, Unfamiliar, Defamiliar,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 18, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 23. Tret’iakov, “Den Sy-khua,” 14. Cf. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 3; Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua (1933), 4. Viktor Shklovskii, “Iskusstvo, kak priem,” 13. Sergei Tret’iakov, “Otkuda i kuda? Perspektivy futurizma,” Novyi Lef 1 (1923): 200. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 3. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 3. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 3. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua (1933), 4; Den Shi-khua (1935), 5. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 5. There is a village named Gaojiazhen 催ᆊ䬛 (Gao Family Town) in Fengdu county, east of Chongqing along the Yangtze. Gao’s biographers claim he was born in Linshijian (㬎Ꮦ䬛) in Fuling district, which is closer to Chongqing along the river. See, for example, Ran and Shen, “Gao Xinya xiansheng de gushi,” 132. For example, Mayakovsky’s 1926 poem “Muscovite China,” which focuses on the experiences of Chinese laundry workers in Moscow, opens with the following lines: “Chzhan Tszo-lin da U pei-fu da Sui da Fui— / razbiraisia, ot usilii v myle! / Natoshchak poprobui rasshifrui / putanitsu raskitaennykh familii!” (Zhang Zuolin and Wu Peifu and Sui and Fui— / good luck working that out, in a lather from the effort! / Try on an empty stomach to decipher / the tangle of Sinified surnames!); Vladimir Maiakovskii, “Moskovskii Kitai,” Prozhektor 9 (1927): 28. Tretyakov seems to bend his translator’s rights to suit his narrative purposes. Although Den Shi-khua never supplies the Chinese characters for its protagonist’s name, Gao Shihua’s given name used the characters Ϫ㧃, Shìhuá. One of the meanings of the character Ϫ/shì is “world”; one of the meanings of 㧃/huá is “China.” The double translation then rests on the fact that the sounds shi and hua could also connote other characters: 㢅, huā, means “flower,” and there is a rare character pronounced sh (radical 72, ᮹, plus ৣ) that means “bright.” In any case, Tretyakov (or Gao?) performs a translator’s sleight of hand by translating Ϫ/shì as Russian “mir,” which can have the meaning “world,” but then

4 . CO NFE SS IO NS AND CO LLABO R ATI ON S299

110. 111. 112. 113.

114. 115. 116.

117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129.

130.

using the other meaning of “mir,” “peace” (which Ϫ/shì does not have), to make the joke about the unsuitability of such a name in a time of war. Tret’iakov, “Kak ia pisal Dena,” 2. Tret’iakov, “Kak ia pisal Dena,” 2–3. Lejeune employs Benveniste’s concepts of utterance and enunciation in his discussion of autobiography. Lejeune, “The Autobiographical Pact,” 8–9. For an overview, see Maurice Friedberg, “Theoretical Controversies,” in Literary Translation in Russia: A Cultural History (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 69–108. Soviet orthodoxy would coalesce by the end of the 1930s around a restrained form of free translation; see the epilogue for more discussion. Brian James Baer, Translation and the Making of Modern Russian Literature (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 127–28. Sergei Tret’iakov, “O perevode” [“On Translation”], Novyi Lef 7 (1928): 41. All following quotations are taken from this page. For the reformulation of form-content as form-material-function, see Sergei Tret’iakov, “Chem zhivo kino,” Novyi Lef 5 (1928): 26–27; Fore, “ ‘All the Graphs,’ ” 44–50. For Nida’s concept of functional equivalence see Nigel Statham, “Nida and ‘Functional Equivalence’: The Evolution of a Concept, Some Problems, and Some Possible Ways Forward,” The Bible Translator 56, no. 1 (January 2005): 29–43. Tret’iakov, “O perevode.” Tret’iakov, “O perevode.” Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 9. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 32. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 16–17. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 18. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 184–85. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 163–67. Gao Li, “Gao Yaheng,” 223; Gao Xingya, “Wusi qianhou de Beijing daxue eyu xi,” 185. Tret’iakov, “O perevode,” 41. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 207. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 191. A “functional” English translation might be “good riddance to bad rubbish.” Nor are Tretyakov and Gao the only translators involved in the book’s production. When we encounter Den’s poetic eulogy for a fellow Sichuan native who committed suicide while studying in France, a footnote informs us of a double translation process: “Translation from Chinese to English and notes by Jeffrey Chen. Basic translation from English to Russian by V. N. Kiulevein.” Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 330. Jeffrey Chen was a professor in the history department at Beijing University and a contact for the Soviet cultural diplomatic agency VOKS; see GARF f. 5283 op. 4 d. 13 (1) l. 105. Kiulevein is listed in the credits to the 1930 edition as “stenographer and translator of poems.” On Brecht’s indebtedness to Tretyakov, see Robert Leach, “Brecht’s Teacher,” Modern Drama 32 (1989): 502–11.

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131. 132. 133. 134. 135.

136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145.

146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154.

155. 156. 157.

Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 10. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 38. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 106. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 322. Not included in the 1930 edition, this footnote appears in the 1935 text, reprinted in Sergei Tret’iakov, Strana-perekrestok: Dokumental’naia proza, ed. T. S. Gomolitskaia-Tret’iakova (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1991), 241. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 228. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 240. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 131. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 335. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 336. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 337. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 344. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 344. The standard full rendering of Tretyakov’s surname in Chinese consists of six characters: ⡍߫ᄷѲ⾥໿, Teliejiyakefu. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 344. In addition to Gao’s account cited at the beginning of the chapter, see also Li Yingnan, “Xie’ergai Teliejiyakefu de Zhongguo qingjie” [“Sergei Tretyakov’s China Complex”], in Eluosi wen xue: Chuantong yu dangdai [Russian Literature: Traditional and Contemporary], ed. Yun Lü (Beijing: Beijing da xue chu ban she, 2012), 394; Gao Mang, “ ‘Tie Jieke’—Beida de Sulian jiaoshou” [“Tie Jieke: Beijing University’s Soviet Professor], in Xinling de jiaochan: Gao Mang sanwen suibi xuanji [Mutual Vibrations of Heart and Soul: An Anthology of Gao Mang’s Essays] (Beijing: Zhongyang bianyi chubanshe, 2005), 61–66. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 346–47. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 347. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 386–88. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 389. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 390. Tret’iakov, “Den Sy-khua,” 15. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 390. RGALI f. 2886 op. 1. ed. khr. 14. For the description of his students, see Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 344–46. Gao Xingya, “Beijing daxue eyu xi,” 185. Very probably this is the same Ding Wen’an who published a series of translations from Russian into Chinese in the 1950s, including several volumes on Soviet law and two Soviet studies of Vissarion Belinsky. See, for example, M.  T. Iovchuk, Bielinsiji [Belinsky], trans. Ding Wen’an (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1954). Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 349–52, 355–56. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 390. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 2.

4. CONFESSIONS AND COLLABORATIONS301

158. 159. 160. 161. 162. 163. 164.

165. 166. 167. 168. 169. 170. 171. 172. 173. 174.

175.

176. 177. 178. 179. 180. 181. 182.

Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 391. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 386. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 391. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 341. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 391. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 301. Myong, for example, identifies Den’s rejection of anarchism as a statement so close to the worldview of Tretyakov that we are tempted to read this as the latter’s editorial insertion. Myong, “S. Tret’jakov und China,” 106. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 391. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 202. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 259. Tret’iakov, “Kak ia pisal Dena,” 4. Tret’iakov, “Kak ia pisal Dena,” 4. Halfin, Terror in My Soul, 59–66. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 391. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 392. Tret’iakov, Den Shi-khua, 4. Smedley, in her review of the 1934 English translation of Den Shi-khua, confirms this: “No, Tan, did not become a Communist. When I left China last year, Tan—that is not his real name—was editing a Peking newspaper in defence of the Chinese militarist, Feng Yu-hsiang.” Smedley, “Coming-of-Age.” M. M. Minasian, Bai Eluosi renmin de shengli: Di wu ci daji [Victory in Belorussia: The Fifth Stalinist Blow], trans. Gao Xingya (Beijing: Shidai chubanshe, 1954); A. I. Keluoliefu [Korolev], Jiti nongzhuang suo youquan de ji ge wenti [Some Issues of Kolkhoz Property Law], trans. Gao Xingya (Beijing: Falü chubanshe, 1956); Ajie’erbaijiang suwei’ai shehui zhuyi gongheguo [The Azerbaijan Soviet Republic], trans. Gao Xingya (Beijing: Minzu chubanshe, 1957). “Gao Xingya fan dang fan renmin de zuixing leilei” [“Gao Xingya’s Extensive Crimes Against the Party and the People”], Sichuan ribao, August 30, 1957, 2. Gao Xingya, “Wode zuixing de jiantao” [“My Self-Criticism of My Crimes”], Sichuan ribao, September 1, 1957, 5. Gao Li, “Gao Yaheng,” 225. Gao Xingya, Feng Yuxiang jiangjun [General Feng Yuxiang] (Beijing: Beijing chubanshe, 1982). Leona Toker, “Toward a Poetics of Documentary Prose—From the Perspective of Gulag Testimonies,” Poetics Today 18, No. 2 (1997), 194–96. Tret’iakov, “Otkuda i kuda?,” 202. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 11. I am grateful to Elizabeth Papazian for first bringing the Bakhtinian echoes in Tretyakov’s bio-interview to my attention.

302EP ILO GU E

EPILOGUE 1.

2.

3. 4.

5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

V. N. Nikiforov, Sovetskie istoriki o problemakh Kitaia (Moscow: Nauka, 1970), 139; C. Martin Wilbur and Julie Lien-ying How, Missionaries of Revolution: Soviet Advisers and Nationalist China, 1920–1927 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 421–23; Vera Vladimirovna Vishniakova–Akimova, Dva goda v vosstavshem Kitae 1925–1927: vospominaniia (Moscow: Nauka, 1980), 267–68. Karl Radek, “Sovremennaia mirovaia literatura i zadachi proletarskogo iskusstva” [“Contemporary Literature and the Tasks of Proletarian Art”], in Pervyi Vsesoiuznyi s”ezd sovetskikh pisatalei, 1934: Stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1934), 311. Oskar Erdberg, Kitaiskie novelly [Chinese Novellas] (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1959), 12. Lenin’s essay is quoted immediately after the scene with the Orientalists (Erdberg, Kitaiskie novelly, 11–12). For an example of unmasking the exotic, see the story “On Lushan Mountain” (Erdberg, Kitaiskie novelly, 117–30). Erdberg, Kitaiskie novelly, 170. Erdberg, Kitaiskie novelly, 171. For a contrasting description of the students as “bewildered young folk  .  .  . returning to a land which was killing Revolutionists,” see Anna Louise Strong, China’s Millions (New York: Coward-McCain, 1928), 343. Strong’s account was also published in the USSR as “Cherez Gobi s Borodinym” [“Across the Gobi with Borodin”], Prozhektor 22 (1927), 12–16. The account of the journey by Percy Chen, the son of the Nationalist foreign minister Eugene Chen, describes Adolphe’s body being transported to Ulaanbaatar for burial—a detail that undercuts Erdberg’s symbolism. Percy Chen, China Called Me: My Life Inside the Chinese Revolution (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), 171. Stalin’s original formulation was “proletarian in content, national in form.” See I.  V. Stalin, “O politicheskikh zadachakh universiteta narodov Vostoka: Rech’ na sobranii studentov KUTV 18 maia 1925 g.” [“On the Political Tasks of the University of the Peoples of the East: Speech at a Meeting of KUTV Students, 18 May 1925”] (1925; Marxists Internet Archive), accessed on September 2, 2019, https://www.marxists.org/russkij/stalin/t7 /university_eastern_peoples.htm. The switch to “socialist in content and national in form” was made at the Sixteenth Party Congress in 1930. See XVI s”ezd VKP(b). Stenograficheskii otchet [16th Congress of the VKP(b). Stenographic Record] (Moscow: Ogiz, 1930), 55–56. For an illuminating discussion of national form in the context of 1930s Soviet culture, see Nariman Skakov, “Culture One and a Half,” in Comintern Aesthetics, ed. Glaser and Lee (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020), 227–54. Elizabeth McGuire, Red at Heart: How Chinese Communists Fell in Love with the Russian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 75–76; Nick Knight, Marxist Philosophy in China: From Qu Qiubai to Mao Zedong, 1923–1945 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), 31–32. Mark Gamsa, The Reading of Russian Literature in China: A Moral Example and Manual of Practice (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 70–71. Gamsa, The Reading of Russian Literature, 76–78.

EP ILO GU E303

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

Wang-chi Wong, Politics and Literature in Shanghai: The Chinese League of Left-Wing Writers, 1930–1936 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991); Leo Ou-Fan Lee, “Literature on the Eve of Revolution: Reflections on Lu Xun’s Leftist Years, 1927–1936,” Modern China 2, no. 3 (1976): 295, 300–308. Laikwan Pang, Building a New China in Cinema: The Chinese Left-Wing Cinema Movement, 1932–1937 (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 41, 144–48; Weihong Bao, Fiery Cinema: The Emergence of an Affective Medium in China, 1915–1945 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 242–50. Nailya Safiullina and Rachel Platonov, “Literary Translation and Soviet Cultural Politics in the 1930s: The Role of the Journal Internacional’naja literatura,” Russian Literature 72, no. 2 (2012): 248–55. Maria Khomitsky, “World Literature, Soviet Style: A Forgotten Episode in the History of the Idea,” Ab Imperio 3 (2013): 119–54; Rossen Djagalov, “The People’s Republic of Letters: Towards a Media History of Twentieth-Century Socialist Internationalism” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2011), 6. Chzhan I-Pin [Zhang Yiping], “A-Lian’ ” [“A-Liang”], trans. S. Polevoi, Vestnik inostrannoi literatury 11 (1928): 66–74; Ye Shao-tsziun’ [Ye Shaojun, a.k.a Ye Shengtao], “Zolotaia ser’ga” [“The Golden Earring”], trans. Zoia Kazakevich, ed. B. Vasil’ev, Vestnik inostrannoi literatury 4 (1930): 99–107; Tai Tszin-nun [Tai Jingnong], “My stroim” [“We Are Building”] and “Vchera noch’iu” [“Last Night”], trans. A. Ivin, Literatura mirovoi revoliutsii 7 (1931): 70–76; Mao Dun, “Vesennii shelk” [“Spring Silk”], trans. N. Nekrasov, Internatsional’naia literatura 3–4 (1934): 310–20; Khu Lan-chi [Hu Lanqi], “Konets Van Bo-pi” [“The End of Wang Bopi”], trans. Ia. Neiman, Internatsional’naia literatura 10 (1935): 74–84; Chzhou Shi [Rou Shi], “Mat’ ” [“Mother”], trans. E. Kalashnikova, Internatsional’naia literatura 5 (1937): 96–106; Lu Sin’ [Lu Xun], “Blagoslovenie” [“The Sacrifice”], trans. Е. K., Internatsional’naia literatura 10 (1937): 127–36; Tin Lin [Ding Ling], “Podarok” [“The Gift”], trans. A. Ivin, Internatsional’naia literatura 11 (1937): 112–17; Tian’ Tsziun’ [Tian Jun, a.k.a Xiao Jun], “Derevnia v avguste” [“Village in August”], trans. M. Ukhanskii, Internatsional’naia literatura 6 (1938): 3–40; Lu Sin’ [Lu Xun], “Lekarstvo” [“Medicine”], “Neznachitel’nyi sluchai” [“An Incident”], trans. N. Fedorenko, Internatsional’naia literatura 11 (1939): 80–85. Few of these stories focused on proletarian experience; an exception is Yan Tsin-zhen [Yang Qingren], “Slepoi Li” [“Blind Li”], trans. Emi Siao, Internatsional’naia literatura 11–12 (1931): 84–88. Some translations actively play down more modernist elements: see, for example, Fedorenko’s translation of “Yao” 㥃 [“Medicine”], which elides several of Lu Xun’s more arresting figurative images and dilutes the story’s use of color symbolism. Mao Tsze–dun [Mao Zedong], “Moia zhizn’“ [“My Life”], trans. from English by N. Sh., Internatsional’naia literatura 11 (1937): 101–11; Mao Tsze–dun, “Moia zhizn’ (prodolzhenie)” [“My Life: Continued”], Internatsional’naia literatura 12 (1937): 95–101; Emi Siao, “Chzhu De” [Zhu De], Anna Louise Strong, “V gostiakh u Chzhu De” [“A Visit with Zhu De”], Internatsional’naia literatura 11 (1938): 140–51. “Tri goda geroicheskoi bor’by kitaiskogo naroda,” Internatsional’naia literatura 7–8 (1940): 115–63.

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20.

21.

22.

23.

24. 25.

26.

27.

The question remains whether anyone actually read the Chinese material in the journal. A recent survey of letters to International Literature finds readers responding in the main to texts by Western authors. One letter writer from 1938 reports reading “with interest” Xiao Jun’s Village in August, but also calls for more translations of U.S. author Pearl Buck. Buck’s novels about China The Good Earth, Sons, The Mother, and Dragon Seed were all excerpted in International Literature, far exceeding in sheer page numbers any Chinese writer besides Xiao. Nailya Safiullina, “Window to the West: From the Collection of Readers’ Letters to the Journal Internatsional’naia literatura,” Slavonica 15, no. 2 (2009): 159; Pearl Buck, “Zemlia (otryvki iz romana),” Internatsional’naia literatura 2 (1934]: 34–57; Pearl Buck, “Synov’ia (otryvki iz romana)” trans. N. L. Daruzes, Internatsional’naia literatura 5 (1935): 9–52; Pearl Buck, “Mat’ (otryvki iz romana),” trans. N. L. Daruzes, Internatsional’naia literatura 9 (1935): 3–34; Pearl Buck, “Dragonovo plemia,” trans. N. Daruzes and T. Ozerskaia, Internatsional’naia literatura 1 (1943): 27–60. For biographical information on Xiao, see McGuire, Red at Heart, 19–30, 82–88, 184–87; 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. Baer and Witt (London: Routledge, 2018), 146–48. See, for example, E. Siao, “Dvizhenie proletliteratury v Kitae” [“The Proletarian Literature Movement in China”], Vestnik inostrannoi literatury 6 (1930): 162–68; E. Siao, “Kitai: Godovshchina rasstrela kitaiskikh revoliutsionnykh rabochikh” [“China: Anniversary of the Shooting of Chinese Revolutionary Workers”], Literatura mirovoi revoliutsii 5 (1932): 93–94; E. Siao, “Latinizatsiia kitaiskoi pis’mennosti” [“Latinization of Chinese Writing”], Literatura mirovoi revoliutsii 11–12 (1931): 149; E. Siao, “Literatura kitaiskoi revoliutsii” [“Literature of the Chinese Revolution”], Internatsional’naia literatura 3–4 (1934), 323–33: E. Siao, “Pamiati velikogo kitaiskogo pisatelia Lu Siunia” [“In Memory of the Great Chinese Writer Lu Xun”], Internatsional’naia literatura 12 (1936): 184–90. Clark, “Translation and Transnationalism,” 147. For translations, see Yan, “Slepoi Li”; Se-Bin-Iue, “Vstuplenie v otriad (iz avtobiografii soldata)” [“Joining the Platoon (from the Autobiography of a Soldier)”], trans. Emi Siao and M. Borisova, Internatsional’naia literatura 10 (1937), 137–39; Khe Din, “Vozvrashchenie (rasskaz)” [“The Return (A Story)”], trans. Emi Siao, Internatsional’naia literatura 11 (1937): 117–24. Clark, “Translation and Transnationalism,” 147; Gao Tao, Xiao San yi shi yi pin [Lost Pieces and Forgotten Things by Xiao San] (Beijing: Wenhua yishu chubanshe, 2010), 3. Shelia Fitzpatrick, “Cultural Revolution as Class War,” in Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928–1931, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 8–40; Edward J. Brown, The Proletarian Episode in Russian Literature, 1928–1932 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1953); In Search of Revolution: International Communist Parties in the Third Period, ed. Matthew Worley (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004). McGuire, Red at Heart, 187. Xiao had written some juvenilia before 1930: his collected works list three pieces from 1919, 1920, and 1923. Xiao San, Shi wen ji [Collected Poems and Essays], vol. 1 (Beijing: Beijing tushuguan chubanshe, 1996), 1–3. E. Siao, “Krovavoe pis’mo,” Literatura mirovoi revoliutsii 1 (1932): 29–30; E. Siao, “Vyshe znamia Kominterna,” Internatsional’naia literatura 3–4 (1934): 309; E. Siao, “Pesnia

E P ILO GU E30 5

28.

29. 30.

31.

32. 33.

34.

35.

36. 37.

38. 39.

manchzhurskikh partizan,” Internatsional’naia literatura 11 (1937): 125–26; E. Siao, “Krasnaia ploshchad’,” Internatsional’naia literatura 3–4 (1940): 17. Emi Siao, Stikhi [Poems], trans. Aleksandr Romm (Moscow: Zhurnal-gazeta ob’’edinenie, 1932); Emi Siao, Za Sovetskii Kitai [For Soviet China], trans. Aleksandr Romm (Vladivostok: Dal’giz, 1934); Emi Siao, Krovavoe pis’mo [A Letter in Blood], trans. Aleksandr Romm (Moscow: Goslitizdat, 1935); Emi Siao, Khunan’skaia fleita [The Hunan Flute], trans. Aleksandr Romm (Moscow: Goslitizdat, 1940); Emi Siao, Mao Tsze–Dun. Chzhu De. Vozhdi kitaiskogo naroda [Mao Zedong. Zhu De. Leaders of the Chinese People] (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1939); Emi Siao, Geroicheskii Kitai [Heroic China] (Moscow: OGIZ, 1939); Agnes Smedley and Emi Siao, Rasskazy o Kitae [Tales of China] (Kharkiv: Ukrains’kyi robitnyk, 1934). See his speech in Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s”ezd sovetskikh pisatelei, 365–66. McGuire, Red at Heart, 188; A. L. Beglov and N. L. Vasil’ev, “Nenapisannaia retsenziia A. I. Romma na knigu M. M. Bakhtina i V. N. Voloshinova ‘Marksizm i filosofiia iazyka’ ” [“A. I. Romm’s Unwritten Review of M. M. Bakhtin’s and V. N. Voloshinov’s Marxism and the Philosophy of Language”], Philologica 2 (1995): 199. McGuire, Red at Heart, 188–89; Xiao San, “Wo wei zuolian zai guowai zuole xie shenme?” [“What Did I Do for the Left League Abroad?”], in Xiao San, Shi wen ji, vol. 2, 196–97. For retranslations into Chinese by Xiao’s former secretary, see Gao Tao, Xiao San yi shi yi pin. Clark, “Translation and Transnationalism,” 147, 156n16. Susanna Witt, “Between the Lines: Totalitarianism and Translation in the USSR,” Contexts, Subtexts and Pretexts: Literary Translation in Eastern Europe and Russia, ed. Brian James Baer (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011), 149–70. Xiao was in this respect unusual but not unique: for example, the Georgian poet T’itsian T’abidze supplied his own cribs for Boris Pasternak’s translations. See Harsha Ram, “Towards a Cross-Cultural Poetics of the Contact Zone: Romantic, Modernist, and Soviet Intertextualities in Boris Pasternak’s Translations of T’itsian T’abidze,” Comparative Literature 59, no. 1 (2007): 75–77. See, for example, Emi Siao, “Pesnia manchzhurskikh partizan” [“Song of the Manchurian Partisans”], trans. O. Shchepillo, Internatsional’naia literatura 11 (1937): 125–26. Xiao mentions using a folksong form for his first collaboration with Romm. Xiao, “Wo wei zuolian zai guowai zuole xie shenme?,” 196. Hu Zhao 㚵ᰁ highlights Xiao’s use of folk forms in his preface to Gao Tao, Xiao San yi shi syi pin, 1–2. Wong, Politics and Literature in Shanghai, 135–40. Maurice Friedberg, “Theoretical Controversies,” in Literary Translation in Russia: A Cultural History (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 69–108; Susanna Witt, “Arts of Accommodation: The First All-Union Conference of Translators, Moscow, 1936,” in The Art of Accommodation: Literary Translation in Russia, ed. Leon Burnett and Emily Lygo (London: Peter Lang, 2013), 141–84. For the Chinese text, in this case one of Xiao’s originals, see Xiao San, Shi wen ji, vol. 1, 18–21. For Romm’s translation, see Literatura mirovoi revoliutsii 4 (1931): 67–69. On the formal innovations of modern Chinese poetry, see Bonnie S. McDougall, “Modern Chinese Poetry (1900–1937),” Modern Chinese Literature 8, no. 1/2 (Spring/Fall 1994),

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40.

41.

42. 43.

44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

127–70; Michelle Yeh, “Modern Poetry in Chinese: Challenges and Contingencies,” in A Companion to Modern Chinese Literature, ed. Yingjin Zhang (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2016), 151–66. Sinologist Vladimir Rogov, writing in International Literature in 1940, described Xiao’s poetry as taking shape “under a double influence: ancient Chinese poetry, canonically strict and imagistic, and the new dynamic forms of our Soviet poetry.” Vl. Rogov, “Khunanskaia fleita” [“The Hunan Flute”], Internatsional’naia literatura 11–12 (1940): 295. Katharine Holt, “Performing as Soviet Central Asia’s Source Texts: Lahuti and Džambul in Moscow, 1935–1936,” Cahiers d’Asie centrale 24 (2015): 213–38; Evgenii Dobrenko, “Naideno v perevode: rozhdenie sovetskoi mnogonatsional’noi literatury iz smerti avtora” [“Found in Translation: The Birth of Soviet Multinational Literature from the Death of the Author”], Neprikosnovennyi zapas 78, no. 4 (2011; Zhurnal’nyi zal), accessed on January 20, 2021, https://magazines.gorky.media/nz/2011/4/najdeno-v-perevode -rozhdenie-sovetskoj-mnogonaczionalnoj-literatury-iz-smerti-avtora.html. Min Tian, Mei Lanfang and the Twentieth-Century International Stage: Chinese Theatre Placed and Displaced (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 152. Sergei Tret’iakov, “Mei Lan’-fan: Nash gost’ ” [“Mei Lanfang: Our Guest”], Pravda, March 2, 1935; Sergei Tret’iakov, “Vstrecha (Mei Lan’-fan)” [“A Meeting (Mei Lanfang)”], Pravda, March 1, 1935; Sergei Tret’iakov, “Polmilliarda zritelei. K gastroliam Mei Lan’-fana v SSSR” [“Half a Billion Spectators. Towards Mei Lanfang’s Tour of the USSR”], Literaturnaia gazeta, March 15, 1935; Sergei Tret’iakov, “Teatr, kotoromu 1000 let” [“A ThousandYear-Old Theatre”], Trud, March 15, 1935; Sergei Tret’iakov, “Velikoe masterstvo (o Mei Lan’-fane)” [“Great Artistry (On Mei Lanfang)”], Pravda, March 23, 1935; Sergei Tret’iakov, “Novyi teatr starykh form” [“A New Theatre of Old Forms”], Pravda, March 26, 1935; Sergei Tret’iakov, “Teatr-gost’ ” [“Theatre-Guest”], Krasnaia gazeta, April 1, 1935. Lars Kleberg, “Zhivye impul’sy iskusstva” [“Vital Impulses of Art”], Iskusstvo kino 1 (1992): 132–39. Bertolt Brecht, “Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting,” in Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 91–99. Verfremdung translates more accurately not as “alienation” but as “estrangement,” indicating a debt to Viktor Shklovsky’s Formalist concept of ostranenie, mediated most likely through Brecht’s friendship with Tretyakov. See Douglas Robinson, Estrangement and the Somatics of Literature: Tolstoy, Shklovsky, Brecht (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 169–72. Tian, Mei Lanfang and the Twentieth-Century International Stage, 155. Katerina Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 192–209. Haun Saussy, “Mei Lanfang in Moscow, 1935: Familiar, Unfamiliar, Defamiliar,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 18, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 8–29. Kleberg, “Zhivye impul’sy iskusstva,” 133–34. Kleberg, “Zhivye impul’sy iskusstva,” 135. Sergei Tret’iakov, “Aziatskii teatr. (Ot nashego spetsial’nogo pekinsgoko korrespondenta)” [“Asian Theatre. (From Our Special Correspondent in Beijing)”], Prozhektor 21

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52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60.

61. 62. 63. 64.

65.

66. 67.

68.

69. 70.

(1924), 30. This article was expanded to form the chapter “Teatr” [“Theatre”] in Sergei Tret’iakov, Chzhungo (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1927), 77–102. Tret’iakov, Chzhungo, 96. Tret’iakov, “Polmilliarda zritelei.” Tret’iakov, Chzhungo, 98. Tret’iakov, “Polmilliarda zritelei.” Sergei Tret’iakov, Mei Lan’-fan i kitaiskii teatr [Mei Lanfang and the Chinese Theatre] (Moscow: VOKS, 1935). Copy held in RGALI f. 2886, op. 1. ed. khr. 70, l. 2. Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome, 193. Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome, 8, 169. On the impact of the Purges on the international community in the USSR and those with links abroad, see Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome, 210–11; Liudmila Shtern, Western Intellectuals and the Soviet Union, 1920–1946: From Red Square to the Left Bank (New York: Routledge, 2007), 1, 176, 193. Sergei Tret’iakov, “Sovetskii Kitai (Otvet na anketu ‘nad chem rabotaiut pisateli?’)” [“Soviet China (Reply to Questionnaire “What Are Writers Working On?”)], Kniga i proletarskaia revoliutsiia 7 (1936): 164. RGALI f. 613, op. 3, ed. khr. 7, l. 155–56. The provisional deadline was June 1, 1936. RGALI f. 2886, op. 1, ed. khr. 70, l .2. The loss of much of Tretyakov’s personal archive at the time of his arrest is described in the written introduction to his file in RGALI, f. 2886, op. 1. V. F. Koliazin, ed., ‘Vernite mne svobodu!’ Deiateli literatury i iskusstva Rossii i Germanii— zhertvy stalinskogo terrora [Give Me Back My Freedom! Literary and Artistic Figures of Russia and Germany Who Fell Victim to the Stalinist Terror] (Moscow: Medium, 1997), 46–68. Vera T. Reck, Boris Pil’niak: A Soviet Writer in Conflict with the State (Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1975), 3–4; Yuri Slezkine, The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 864. Wilbur and How, Missionaries of Revolution, 426–27. M. Alekseev, Sovetskaia voennaia razvedka v Kitae i khronika “kitaiskoi smuty” 1922–1929 [Soviet Military Intelligence in China and a Chronicle of the “Chinese Time of Troubles”] (Moscow: Kuchkovo pole, 2010), 409. No mention is made of this arrest in another source, which claims Ivin received a doctoral degree in 1936 and died in evacuation in Tashkent in 1942. A. Saran, “Livny–Parizh–Pekin. Zhizn’ Alekseia Ivanova,” Na beregakh bystroi Sosny no. 9 (2001): 75–85. Ia.  V. Vasil’kov and M. Iu. Sorokina, eds, Liudi i sud’by: Biobibliograficheskii slovar’ vostokovedov—zhertv politicheskogo terrora v sovetskii period (1917—1991) [People and Fates: A Bio-Bibliographical Dictionary of Orientalists Who Fell Victim to Political Terror in the Soviet Period (1917–1991)] (St. Petersburg: Peterburgskoe vostokovedenie, 2003), 370. Vasil’kov and Sorokina, Liudi i sud’by, 92. Nicolai Volland, Socialist Cosmopolitanism: The Chinese Literary Universe, 1945–1965 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017).

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71.

72.

73.

74. 75.

76.

Mao Zedong, “On New Democracy” (January 1940; Marxists Internet Archive), accessed August 13, 2019, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume -2/mswv2_26.htm. David Holm, “Folk Art as Propaganda: The Yangge Movement in Yan’an,” in Popular Chinese Literature and Performing Arts in the People’s Republic of China, 1949–1979, ed. Bonnie S. McDougall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 3–35; 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), 148. Paul Clark, The Chinese Cultural Revolution: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 10–54; Yan Li, China’s Soviet Dream: Propaganda, Culture, and Popular Imagination (New York: Routledge, 2018), 106–10. Lorenz Luthi, The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). For a more extensive discussion of this film, see Edward Tyerman, “Stalled at Friendship Station: Under Ancient Desert Skies and Cinematic Internationalism on the Eve of the Sino-Soviet Split,” forthcoming in a special issue of The Russian Review on Soviet internationalism, October 2021. See, for example, Alexander Cooley, “Tending the Eurasian Garden: Russia, China and the Dynamics of Regional Integration and Order,” in Sino-Russian Relations in the 21st Century, ed. Jo Inge Bekkevold and Bobo Lo (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 113–39.

BIBLIOGRAPHY AND SOURCES

A R C H I VA L S O U R C E S

In references to materials from Muzei kino, RGALI, and RGASPI, “f.” stands for “fond” (an archival collection pertaining to a specific person or an institution), “o.” for “opis’ ” (catalogued subsection of the collection), “ed. khr.” for “edinenie khraneniia” (individual file in the collection), and “l.” for “list” (page number). “Ob.” stands for “oborot” (the reverse side of the page). In references to materials from the A. A. Bakhrushin Central State Theater Museum, “f.” stands for “fond,” and “n.” for “nomer” (number). In references to materials from TsGALI, “f.” stands for “fond,” “o.” for “opis,’ ” d. for “delo” (individual file in the collection), and “l.” for “list.” In references to materials for RGAKFD, “N. Uchetnyi” refers to “catalog number.” Arkhiv Mariinskogo teatra (Archive of the Mariinsky Theater), St. Petersburg. Gosudarstvennyi tsentral’nyi muzei imeni A. A. Bakhrushina (A. A. Bakhrushin Central State Theater Museum), Moscow. Muzei Bol’shogo teatra (Bolshoi Theater Museum), Moscow. Muzei kino (Museum of Cinema), Moscow. RGAKFD: Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv kinofotodokumentov (Russian State Archive of Documentary Film and Photography), Moscow. RGALI: Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva (Russian State Archive of Literature and the Arts), Moscow.

310 BIBLIO GRAP H Y AND SOUR CES

RGASPI: Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial’no-politicheskoi istorii (Russian State Archive of Social and Political History), Moscow. TsGALI: Tsentral’nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva (Central State Archive of Literature and the Arts), St. Petersburg.

M AG A Z I N E S A N D N E WS PA P E R S China Weekly Review. Shanghai: Millard Publishing House, 1923–1950. Internatsional’naia literatura. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1933–1943. Izvestiia. Moscow: 1917–. Kino-gazeta, renamed Kino in 1925. Moscow: Kino-izdatel’stvo RSFSR, 1923–1941. Kinozhurnal ARK, renamed Kino-Front in 1926. Moscow: Assotsiatsiia revoliutsionnykh kinematografistov/Kinopechat’, 1925–1928. Komsomol’skaia Pravda. Moscow: TSK VLKSM, 1925–. Literatura mirovoi revoliutsii. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1931–1932. Minguo ribao ⇥೟᮹ฅ. Shanghai: Minguo ribao she, 1916–1932. New York Herald Tribune. New York: New York Tribune, Inc., 1926–1966. New York Times. New York: H. J. Raymond, 1857–. North China Daily News. Shanghai: North-China Herald, 1864–1951. North-China Herald. Shanghai: H. Shearman, 1850–1941. Peking and Tientsin Times. Tianjin: Tientsin Press, 1894–1941. Pravda. St. Petersburg, Moscow: Kommunisticheskaia partiia Rossiiskoi Federatsii, 1912– Programmy gosudarstvennykh akademicheskikh teatrov. Moscow: Kinopechat’ RSFSR, 1925–1928. Prozhektor. Moscow: Izd-vo Pravda, 1923–1935. Rabochii. Minsk: Tsentral’nyi komitet Kommunisticheskoi partii Belorussii, 1927–1937. Severnyi rabochii. Yaroslavl: Iaroslavskii Gubkom VKP(b), 1922–1991. Shen bao ⬇ฅ. Shanghai: Shen bao she, 1872–1949. Sichuan ribao ಯᎱ᮹ฅ. Chengdu: Sichuan ribao she, 1900s–. Sovetskii ekran. Moscow. Kino-izd-vo RSFSR, 1925–1929. Sovetskoe kino. Moscow: Izd-vo Avangarda, 1925–1928. The Times. London: Times Newspapers Ltd., 1788–. Trud. Moscow: Soviet Vseobshchei konfederatsii professional’nykh soiuzov, 1921–. Vecherniaia Moskva. Moscow: Moskovskii gorodskoi komitet KPSS, 1923–. Vestnik inostrannoi literatury. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’sto, 1928–1930. Washington Post. Washington, DC: Washington Post, 1877–. Wenyi xunkan ᭛㮱ᯀߞ [later Wenyi zhoukan ᭛㮱਼ߞ]. Shanghai: Minguo ribao she, 1923–1924. Zhizn’ iskusstva. Leningrad: Tea-Kino-Pechati, 1918–1929.

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FILMOGRAPHY Animated Soviet Propaganda: From the October Revolution to Perestroika. DVD. Studio City, CA: Jove Film Distribution, 2006. Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt. Directed by Walter Ruttmann. Fox Europa, 1927. Chelovek s kinoapparatom. Directed by Dziga Vertov. VUFKU, 1929. Chetyresta millionov (Dzhou De-shen). Directed by V. Gardin. Screenplay by V. Gardin, Ia. Babushkin. Belgoskino and Vostokkino, 1928. Goluboi ekspress. Directed by Il’ia Trauberg. Screenplay by Leonid Ierokhonov. Sovkino Leningrad, 1929. Kitaiskaia mel’nitsa. Directed by A. Levshin. Screenplay by Isaak Babel’. Sovkino, 1928. Kitai v ogne. Gosudarstvennyi tekhnikum kinematografii—GTK: Z. Komissarenko, N. Maksimov, Iu. Merkulov and N. Khodataev, 1925. Moskva. Directed by Mikhail Kaufman. Sovkino, 1927. Piat’ minut. Written and directed by A. Balagin and G. Zelondzhev-Shipov. Goskinprom Gruzii, 1929. Pod nebom drevnikh pustyn’. Directed by Vladimir Shneiderov and Qin Zhen 㽗⦡. Screenplay by Shneiderov and Vladimir Kreps. Moskovskaia kinostudiia naucho-populiarnykh fil’mov and Shanghai kexue jiaoyu dianying zhipianchang, 1958. Shankhaiskii dokument. Directed by Iakov Bliokh. Cameraman V. L. Stepanov. Sovkino, 1928. Velikii perelet. Directed by Vladimir Shneiderov. Cameraman Georgii Blium. Proletkino, 1925.

BOOKS AND ARTICLES Aksakov, Sergei Timofeevich. Sobranie sochinenii. Vol. 1. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1986. Alekseev, M. Sovetskaia voennaia razvedka v Kitae i khronika “kitaiskoi smuty” 1922–1929. Moscow: Kuchkovo pole, 2010. Alekseev, Vasilii Mikhailovich. Nauka o Vostoke. Moscow: Nauka, 1982. Alpers, Boris Vladimirovich. Teatr sotsial’noi maski. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1931. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Anderson, Kevin B. Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Arkin, Lisa C., and Marian Smith. “National Dance in the Romantic Ballet.” In Rethinking the Sylph: New Perspectives on the Romantic Ballet, ed. Lynn Garafola, 11–68. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997. Arsen’ev, Pavel, and Aleksei Kosykh. “Kitaiskoe puteshestvie S. Tret’iakova: poeticheskii zakhvat deistvitel’nosti na puti k literature fakta.” Translit 10–11 (2012): 14–20.

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Arvatov, Boris. Iskusstvo i proizvodstvo. Moscow: Proletkul’t, 1926. Arvatov, B., N. Aseev, O. Brik, B. Kushner, V. Maiakovskii, S. Tret’iakov, and N. Chuzhak. “Za chto boretsia LEF?” Lef 1 (1923): 3–7. Auslender, Sergei Abramovich. Nekotorye zamechatel’nye sluchai iz zhizni Li-Siao. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1927. Azoulay, Ariella. Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography. London: Verso, 2012. Baabar. Twentieth Century Mongolia. Trans. D. Sühjargalmaa, S. Burenbayar, H. Hulan, and N. Tuya. Ed. C. Kaplonski. Cambridge: White Horse, 1999. Babel’, Isaak. The Chinese Mill: A Mobilization Drill. Trans. Nathalie Babel Brown. Ulbandus Review 1, no. 2 (Spring 1978): 99–156. Baer, Brian James. Translation and the Making of Modern Russian Literature. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. Baer, Brian James, and Susanna Witt, eds. Translation in Russian Contexts: Culture, Politics, Identity. London: Routledge, 2018. Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. ——. Literaturno-kriticheskie stat’i. Ed. S. G. Bocharov and V. V. Kozhinov. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1986. ——. Sobranie sochineii. Vol. 3. Moscow: Iazyki slavianskikh kul’tur, 2010. Bakich, Olga. “Did You Speak Harbin Sino-Russian?” Itinerario 35, no. 3 (2011): 23–36. Baldwin, Kate A. Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters Between Black and Red, 1922–1963. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. Banerjee, Anindita. We Modern People: Science Fiction and the Making of Russian Modernity. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2012. Banes, Sally. Dancing Women: Female Bodies on Stage. London: Routledge, 1998. Bao, Weihong. Fiery Cinema: The Emergence of an Affective Medium in China, 1915–1945. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Barlow, Tani. “Semifeudalism, Semicolonialism.” In Afterlives of Chinese Communism: Political Concepts from Mao to Xi, ed. Christian Sorace, Ivan Franceschini, and Nicholas Loubere, 237–41. Canberra: ANU Press, 2019. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972. Bartlett, Rosamund. “Japonisme and Japanophobia: The Russo-Japanese War in Russian Cultural Consciousness.” Russian Review 67, no. 1 (2008): 8–33. Bassin, Mark. “Russia Between Europe and Asia: The Ideological Construction of Geographical Space.” Slavic Review 50, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 1–17. Beaumont, Cyril W. Complete Book of Ballets: A Guide to the Principal Ballets of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. London: Putnam, 1951. Beglov, A. L., and N. L. Vasil’ev. “Nenapisannaia retsenziia A. I. Romma na knigu M. M. Bakhtina i V. N. Voloshinova ‘Marksizm i filosofiia iazyka.’ ” Philologica 2 (1995): 199–216. Bei Wenli 䋱᭛࡯. “E-Su yishu zhong de Zhongguo qingdiao.” Eluosi wenyi 4 (October 1999): 55–58. Beijing Sound Museum. Beijing shengyin—xiangqi yu ba bu yu. Beijing Sound Museum, 2015. Belousov, Roman. “Sergei Tret’iakov o Kitae.” Solntse v zenite: Vostochnyi almanakh 10 (1982): 559–80.

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Belova, Ekaterina, ed. Russkii balet: entsiklopediia. Moscow: Soglasie, 1997. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 2007. ——. Selected Writings. Vol. 2. Ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1999. ——. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Berdiaev, Nikolai. The Origin of Russian Communism. London: Centenary, 1937. Bianco, Lucien. Stalin and Mao. Trans. Krystyna Horko. Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2018. “Bibliografiia: Den Shi-khua.” Oktiabr’ 5–6 (1930): 279. Billingsley, Phil. Bandits in Republican China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988. Bloch, Ernst. “Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics.” Trans. Mark Ritter. New German Critique 11 (Spring 1977): 22–38. Bogdanov, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich. “Puti proletarskogo tvorchestva.” Proletarskaia kul’tura 15–16 (1920). Reprinted in Literaturnye manifesty: Ot simvolizma do “Oktiabria” [Literary Manifestos: From Symbolism to “October”], ed. N. L. Brodskii and N. P. Sidorov, 333–38. Moscow: Agraf, 2001. Bogdanov-Berezovskii, V. M. Krasnyi mak. Leningrad: Biuro obsluzhivaniia rabochego zritelia pri Upravlenii leningradskikh teatrov, 1933. ——, ed. Reingol’d Moritsevich Glier: stat’i, vospominaniia, materialy. Vol. 1. Moscow: Muzyka, 1965. Bohnenkamp, Max Lowell. “Turning Ghosts into People: The White-Haired Girl, Revolutionary Folklorism and the Politics of Aesthetics in Modern China.” PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2014. Borenstein, Eliot. Men Without Women: Masculinity and Revolution in Russian Fiction, 1917–1929. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Ed. Randal Johnson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Braginskaia, Nataliia. “ ‘Akh, eto sovershenno po-kitaiski!’ Ob orientalizme v opere Stravinskogo ‘Solovei.’ ” Nauchnye trudy Belorusskoi gosudarstvennoi akademii muzyki 23 (2010): 233–41. Brecht, Bertolt. “Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting.” In Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett, 91–99. New York: Hill and Wang, 1964. Brik, Osip. “Ot kartiny k foto.” Novyi Lef 3 (1928): 29–33. Brook, Timothy, and Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, eds. Opium Regimes: China, Britain, and Japan, 1839–1952. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Brooks, Jeffrey. Thank You, Comrade Stalin!: Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Brown, E. J. The Proletarian Episode in Russian Literature, 1928–1932. New York: Columbia University Press, 1953. Browning, Gary. Boris Pilniak: Scythian at a Typewriter. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1985. Buck-Morss, Susan. “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered.” October 62 (Fall 1992): 3–41.

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Bukh, Alexander. “National Identity and Race in Post-Revolutionary Russia: Pil’niak’s Travelogues from Japan and China.” In Race and Racism in Modern East Asia: Western and Eastern Constructions, ed. Rotem Kowner and Walter Demel, 177–98. Leiden: Brill, 2012. Bulgakov, Mikhail Afanas’evich. Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh. Vol. 3. P’esy. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1992. Bushell, Stephen W. Chinese Art. London: Wyman and Sons, 1904. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge, 2007. Callahan, William A. “National Insecurities: Humiliation, Salvation, and Chinese Nationalism.” Alternatives 29 (2004): 199–218. Chan, Roy. “Broken Tongues: Race, Sacrifice and Geopolitics in the Far East in Vsevolod Ivanov’s Bronepoezd No. 14–69.” Sibirica 10, no. 3 (Winter 2011): 29–54. Chekhov, Anton. “Grisha.” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 30 tomakh, vol. 5 (Moscow: Nauka, 1976), 83–85. Chen, Percy. China Called Me: My Life Inside the Chinese Revolution. Boston: Little, Brown, 1979. Cheng Jihua ⿟ᄷढ, ed. Zhongguo dianying fazhan shi. Vol. 1. Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 1998. Chow, Kai-wing, Tze-ki Hon, Hung-yok Ip, and Don C. Price, eds. Beyond the May Fourth Paradigm: In Search of Chinese Modernity. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008. Chow, Rey. Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. Chu, Jinyi. “Patterns of the World: Chinese Fashion and Cosmopolitan Ideas in Late Imperial Russia.” PhD diss., Stanford University, 2019. Chuzhak, Nikolai, ed. Literatura fakta: pervyi sbornik materialov rabotnikov LEFa. Moscow: Federatsiia, 1929. Reprint, Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1972. Clark, Katerina. “Boris Pilniak and Sergei Tretiakov as Soviet Envoys to China and Japan and Forgers of New, Post-imperial Narratives (1924–1926).” Cross Currents: East Asia History and Culture Review 7, no. 2 (November 2018): 27–47. ——. Eurasia Without Borders: The Dream of a Leftist Literary Commons. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021. ——. Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. ——. The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. Clark, Paul. The Chinese Cultural Revolution: A History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Claudin, Fernando. The Communist Movement: From Comintern to Cominform. Vol. 1. New York: Monthly Review, 1975. Clifford, James. “On Ethnographic Authority.” Representations 2 (Spring 1983): 118–46. Collins, Daniel. “The Tower of Babel Undone in a Soviet Pentecost.” The Slavic and East European Journal 42, no. 3 (Autumn 1998): 423–43. Constant, Samuel Victor. Calls, Sounds and Merchandise of the Peking Street Peddlers. Beijing: The Camel Bell, 1935. Cooley, Alexander. “Tending the Eurasian Garden: Russia, China and the Dynamics of Regional Integration and Order.” In Sino-Russian Relations in the 21st Century, ed. Jo Inge Bekkevold and Bobo Lo, 113–39. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

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Crane, Robert. “Between Factography and Ethnography: Sergei Tretyakov’s Roar, China! and Soviet Orientalist Discourse.” In Text & Presentation, 2010, ed. Kiki Gounaridou, 41–53. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011. Cull, Nicholas, and Arthur Waldron. “Shanghai Document—Shankhaiskii dokument (1928): Soviet Film Propaganda and the Shanghai Uprising of 1927.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 3 (1996): 309–31. Dalin, Sergei Alekseevich. Ocherki revoliutsii v Kitae. Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1927. ——. V riadakh kitaiskoi revoliutsii. Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1926. David-Fox, Michael. Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921–1941. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. de Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Trans. H. M. Parshley. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989. de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. d’Encausse, Hélène Carrère, and Stuart R. Schram. Marxism and Asia: An Introduction with Readings. London: Allen Lane, 1969. Denton, Kirk, ed. Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893–1945. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996. Diatlov, V. I. “Sindrom ‘zheltoi opasnosti’ v dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii: ekzotizatsiia kak mekhanizm degumanizatsii i iskliucheniia.” In Pereselencheskoe obshchestvo Aziatskoi Rossii: migratsii, prostranstva, soobshchestva, ed. Diatlov and K. V. Grigorichev, 526–54. Irkutskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 2013. Dickerman, Leah. “The Fact and the Photograph.” October 118 (Fall 2006): 132–52. Dickinson, Gary, and Linda Wrigglesworth. Imperial Wardrobe. Berkeley: Ten Speed, 2000. Dirlik, Arif. The Origins of Chinese Communism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Djagalov, Rossen. From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature and Cinema Between the Second and the Third Worlds. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020. ——. “The People’s Republic of Letters: Towards a Media History of Twentieth-Century Socialist Internationalism.” PhD diss., Yale University, 2011. ——. “The Red Apostles: Imagining Revolutions in the Global Proletarian Novel.” Slavic and East European Journal 61, no. 3 (2017): 396–422. Dobrenko, Evgeny. Aesthetics of Alienation: Reassessment of Early Soviet Cultural Theories. Trans. Jesse M. Savage. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005. ——. The Making of the State Reader: Social and Aesthetic Contexts of the Reception of Soviet Literature. Trans. Jesse M. Savage. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997. ——. “Naideno v perevode: rozhdenie sovetskoi mnogonatsional’noi literatury iz smerti avtora.” Neprikosnovennyi zapas 78, no. 4 (2011). https://magazines.gorky.media/nz/2011/4/najdeno -v-perevode-rozhdenie-sovetskoj-mnogonaczionalnoj-literatury-iz-smerti-avtora.html. Dobrenko, Evgeny, and Eric Naiman, eds. The Landscape of Stalinism: The Art and Ideology of Soviet Space. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003. Domínguez, Carlos Espinosa. “The Mammoth That Wouldn’t Die.” In Caviar with Rum: CubaUSSR and the Post-Soviet Experience, ed. Jacqueline Loss and José Manuel Prieto, 109–18. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

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Dong, Xinyu. “China at Play: Republican Film Comedies and Chinese Cinematic Modernity.” PhD diss., Harvard University, 2009. ——. “From Shanghai Document to Shanghai 24 Hours: The City, the ‘Sovkino Expedition,’ and Montage Complex.” In The Collegium Papers VI, ed. Luca Giuliani and David Robinson, 80–90. Sacile: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, 2005. Drobashenko, Sergei Vladimirovich. Istoriia sovetskogo dokumental’nogo kino. Moscow: Izdanie Moskovskogo universiteta, 1980. Du, Wenwei. “The Chalk Circle Comes Full Circle: From Yuan Drama Through the Western Stage to Peking Opera.” Asian Theatre Journal 12, no. 2 (1995): 307–25. Dzhurova, T. S. “Teatralizatsiia deistvitel’nosti. ‘Vziatie Zimnego dvortsa’ Nikolaia Evreinova.” Izvestiia rossiiskogo gosudarstvennogo pedagogicheskogo universiteta im. A. I. Gertsena 14, no. 43–1 (2007): 104–8. Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990. Edmond, Jacob. “Scripted Spaces: The Geopoetics of the Newspaper from Tret’iakov to Prigov.” Slavic Review 75, no. 2 (Summer 2016): 299–330. Entelis, L. 100 baletnykh libretto. Leningrad: Muzyka, 1971. Entelis, L., and M. Frangopulo. 75 baletnykh libretto. Leningrad: Sovetskii kompozitor, 1960. Erdberg, Oskar [Sergei Petrovich Razumov]. Kitaiskie novelly. Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1959. Esherick, Joseph. “How the Qing Became China.” In Empire to Nation: Historical Perspectives on the Making of the Modern World, ed. Joseph W. Esherick, Hasan Kayalı, and Eric Van Young, 229–59. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006. Esmeir, Samera. “On Becoming Less of the World.” History of the Present 8, no. 1 (Spring 2018): 88–116. Ezrahi, Christina. Swans of the Kremlin: Ballet and Power in Soviet Russia. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012. Fedorenko, Nikolai Trofimovich. “Stalin i Mao Tsedun.” Part 2. Novaia i noveishaia istoriia 6 (1992): 83–95. Feng Yi. “The Sound of Images: Peddlers’ Calls and Tunes in Republican Peking.” Journal of Modern Chinese History 4, no. 1 (Jun 2010): 29–55. Filimonova, Tatiana. “From Scythia to a Eurasian Empire: The Eastern Trajectory in Russian Literature, 1890–2008.” PhD diss., Northwestern University, 2013. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual: Exploring Forms of Political Theatre. London: Routledge, 2005. Fitzgerald, John. Awakening China: Politics, Culture, and Class in the Nationalist Revolution. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996. Fitzpatrick, Sheila, ed. Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928–1931. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Flanagan, Michael. Bakhtin and the Movies: New Ways of Understanding Hollywood Film. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Fore, Devin. “ ‘All the Graphs’: Soviet and Weimar Documentary Between the Wars.” PhD diss., Columbia University, 2005. ——. “Introduction.” October 118 (Fall 2006): 3–10. ——. “The Operative Word in Soviet Factography.” October 118 (Fall 2006): 95–131.

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INDEX

aesthetics: aesthetic debates of the 1920s, 5; and “distribution of the sensible,” 20; and exoticism, 27 (see also exoticism); and political consciousness, 24; Rancière  and, 20; realism (see realism; Socialist Realism); and smoothness/transparency vs. process/madeness, 31–32; and Soviet avant-garde, 21; theatrical chinoiserie, 87, 114, 116–18; and trade sounds, 56–57 (see also “Roar China”); and Tretyakov’s “Beijing,” 48–50. See also internationalist aesthetics Aksakov, Sergei, 116, 131 Alekseev, Vasily Mikhailovich, 26, 117 “Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting” (Brecht), 240 alienation or estrangement effects, 218–22, 240–41, 306n45 All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (VOKS), 66, 122–23, 240 Almaty–Lanzhou railway, 245–46 anti-imperialism: and China on Fire (1925 film), 137, 140; and Christianity, 108; and May Thirtieth movement, 166; and

The Red Poppy (ballet), 115; and role of opium in Chinese history, 121–23; and Soviet films exported to Chinese audiences, 160–61; and Tretyakov’s Roar, China!, 83, 95, 108, 110 anti-Semitism, 139 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 106 Apter, Emily, 106 Armoured Train 14–69 (Ivanov), 129 Around Uzbekistan (1925 film), 147 art, 248n9; Creative Society advocation of “art for art’s sake,” 77; Pilnyak’s affirmation of art’s autonomy from politics, 65; and political consciousness, 23–24. See also aesthetics; ballet; cinema; internationalist aesthetics; literature, Chinese; literature, Russian; music; poetry; Socialist Realism; theater “Art as Device” (Shklovsky), 210 Aseev, Nikolai, 22 autobiography: confessional autobiographies, 189–90, 202–8, 226–27; and Marxism, 203; and overcoming automatization through factographic writing, 210–14; and the “referential pact” with readers

334IND E X

autobiography (Continued ) (Lejeune’s concept), 195; and “roadto-consciousness” narratives, 190, 195; and Soviet assessment and surveillance of university students, 204–6; as tool for producing subjectivity, 34, 190, 203; and unmasking, 226–27. See also bio-interview automatization, and autobiography, 210–14 aviation, 144–57, 284n25, 285n46, 286n70 Avshalamov, Aaron, 57 “Awakening of Asia” (Lenin), 12–13, 233 Azoulay, Ariella, 154–55 Babanova, Maria, 98, 99, 100, 273n69 Babel, Isaac, 34, 143, 182–85, 244 Badmaev, Petr, 15 Baer, Brian James, 275n112 Ba Jin, 8 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 32, 142–44, 230 ballet: and documentary impulse toward China, 7; drambalet as dominant mode of Soviet ballet, 113–14, 121; early Soviet distaste for, 89; prerevolutionary traditions expressing revolutionary themes, 115–20; The Red Poppy (see The Red Poppy); and symbolic dream device, 114. See also specific ballets Banerjee, Anindita, 144 Bao, Weihong, 160, 174 Battleship Potemkin (1925 film), 83–84, 134, 160, 162, 166, 268n204, 288n93 La Bayadère (ballet), 114, 116 Beijing: Franck on, 261n65; and the Great Flight (1925), 147; and The Great Flight (1926 film), 151; Ivin on, 54–55; Li Dazhao on, 54; Pilnyak and, 68; soundscape of, 56–57; as space of temporal contradictions, 52, 54–55; Tretyakov’s sketch of, 47–54, 50, 53 “Beijing Enraged” (Tretyakov article), 44 Beijing Opera, 240, 241, 245 “Beijing” (Tretyakov article), 47–54, 50, 53

Beijing University, 16; Gao Shihua and, 187, 188, 194–95, 205, 220–21, 226; Ivin and, 55, 195; Tretyakov and, 5, 22, 41–43, 195, 258n17 Belgoskino, 168 Belinsky, Vissarion, 15, 300n154 Belousov, Roman, 292n1 Bely, Andrei, 15, 67 Benjamin, Walter, 21, 72 Benois, Alexandre, 87 Benveniste, Émile, 213, 299n112 Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (1927 film), 172 Berstl, Julius, 86 Beskin, Emmanuil. See Famarin, K. “Best Verse, The” (Mayakovsky), 1–3, 7, 14 Bianco, Lucien, 9 bio-interview: Tretyakov’s bio-interview with Gao Shihua (see Den Shi-khua); Tretyakov’s second bio-interview (unfinished), 243 Bliokh, Yakov, 168, 169, 171, 172, 176 Bliukher, Lev, 244 Blium, Georgy, 145, 150, 151, 153, 155, 156 Bloch, Ernst, 52 Blok, Aleksandr, 66 Blue Express, The (1929 film), 168–69 Blue Express, The (part of trilogy). See under Dzhungo Blyukher, Vasily, 13 Bogdanov, Aleksandr, 23 Bolshoi Theater, 32–33, 89–90, 121. See also Red Poppy, The Borenstein, Eliot, 282n234 Borodin, Mikhail, 13, 14, 153, 162, 231, 244 Bourdieu, Pierre, 248n9 Boym, Svetlana, 83 Brecht, Bertolt, 9, 86, 218, 240–41, 249n27, 306n45 Brik, Osip, 21, 37 Bronze Idol, The (Pavlov play), 86 Buck, Pearl, 304n20 Bukharin, Nikolai, 98 Bulgakov, Mikhail, 107, 275n117 Burlaki na Volge (Repin painting), 74

INDEX335

Burliuk, David, 22 Bushell, Stephen W., 125, 127 Canton. See Guangzhou Canton Uprising (1927), 14, 41, 168, 290n124 Cao Jinghua, 8, 234, 292n1 Caucasian Chalk Circle (Brecht play), 86 Cavalcanti, Alberto, 171 CCP. See Chinese Communist Party Chaadaev, Petr, 15 Chalk Circle, The (play), 86, 87, 89, 116 Chan, Roy, 129 Chapaev (1934 film), 167, 234 Chekhov, Anton, 197, 209, 297n92 Chen, Jeffrey, 299n129 Chen Bao (newspaper), 40 Chen Boda, 121, 122 Chen Duxiu, 12, 297n81 Cheng Jihua, 268n204, 288n93 Chiang Kai-shek, 13, 14, 176, 204, 223 China: alterity of, and Western thought, 9 (see also exoticism); Canton Uprising (1927), 14, 41, 168, 290n124; CCP victory in Chinese Civil War (1949), 35, 244; Chinese Communist Revolution, 35, 121; Chinese revolutionaries educated in the Soviet Union, 8, 13 (see also Communist University for the Workers of the East; Sun Yat-sen University for the Workers of China); Civil War, 35, 148–49, 244; cosmopolitan quality of intellectual life in the 1920s, 80; diplomatic relations with Soviet Union established, 13, 146; distinctive revolutionary path, 35, 182, 233, 245–46; Great Leap Forward, 245; history of China as global signifier, 8–9; Japanese invasion, 189, 233, 235; Lenin and, 12–13 (see also Lenin, Vladimir); Lincheng incident (1923), 165; May Fourth movement, 8, 78, 79, 166, 209, 298n99; May Thirtieth movement, 8, 146, 153, 165–66; and modernity (see modernity); national form of the Chinese Revolution,

35 (see also national form, concept of); Nationalist split from CCP, 4, 8, 168, 169, 187, 232–33; national self-consciousness, 167; New Culture movement, 8, 12, 18, 241; Opium Wars, 33, 92, 121–22 (see also opium); Qing Empire, 11–12; Russian expansion into Manchuria, 13, 104, 122; semicolonial condition, 6, 11, 136, 142–43, 151–53, 166–67, 232; Shanghai uprising of March 1927, 1, 4, 14, 175–77, 223; sounds of (see sounds of China); Soviet intervention in internal politics, 4, 8, 13, 41; Soviet socialism as model for, 8, 10–11, 80; Stalin and, 14 (see also Stalin, Joseph); and traditional culture/”backwardness,” 12, 17–18, 33, 66, 71, 150–51, 153, 156, 166, 235, 242, 245; treaty ports, 12; and uneven development, 9, 39, 52, 54–55, 82, 151–53, 260n61; Xinhai Revolution (1911–1912), 11, 193, 194. See also Chinese Communist Party; Chinese language; Guomindang; literature, Chinese; People’s Republic of China; Russian views of China; SinoSoviet relations; specific cities China on Fire (1925 film), 136–42, 138–41, 161, 161–62, 283n10 China Roars. See under Dzhungo Chinese Art (Bushell), 125, 127 Chinese Communist Party (CCP), 182; alliance with Guomindang, 4, 13, 233; and Comintern agents, 251n51; founding of, 13; Gao Shihua and, 196, 203–4, 225, 228, 301n174; and opium use, 122; and The Red Poppy (ballet), 121–23; split from Guomindang, 4, 8, 168, 169, 187, 232–33; victory in Chinese Civil War (1949), 35, 244 Chinese language: Ivin’s recommendations for language study, 18, 20; language limitations bypassed in Tretyakov’s “Roar China,” 32, 65; linguistic choices in Tretyakov’s Roar, China!, 103–10; not spoken by Tretyakov, 44. See also Chinese Pidgin Russian; translation

3 36 IND EX

Chinese Mill, The (1928 film), 34, 143, 181–86 Chinese Novellas (Tarkhanov), 231–33 Chinese Pidgin Russian, 104–9, 275n102 Chinese Socialist Youth League, 205, 297n81 “Chinese Story” (Pilnyak), 16, 32, 39, 67–76, 80–83 Chinnery, Colin Siyuan, 261n84, 262n99 Choibalsan, Khorloogiin, 150 Chow, Rey, 167 Christianity, 96–97, 108 chronotope: and cinema, 142–43; and city symphony genre, 172; definition of, 142–43; and The Great Flight, 151, 158; and Pilnyak’s “Chinese Story,” 68–69; and Shanghai Document, 171, 174; and Tretyakov’s “Beijing,” 48, 54, 68 Chu-Iun-Vai (translation of Berstl play), 86 Chukovsky, Kornei, 215 Chuzhak, Nikolai, 40–41, 43, 257n9 Chzhungo (Tretyakov), 16, 22, 42–47, 45, 46, 70–71, 259n42; introduction (“Loving China” essay), 25–27. See also specific sketches cinema, 29, 33–34, 134–86; agitational cinema, 136–37, 162, 163; and center-periphery relations, 151; Chinese audiences for Soviet films, 83, 84, 136, 143, 160–62, 167–68, 234; Chinese film industry, 160, 234; and chronotopes (see chronotope); cinematic affect, 143, 163–64, 176, 183–85; cinematic gaze theory, 136; city symphony genre, 171–74; combination of documentary and fictional film, 158 (see also Dzhungo); comedy, 34, 134, 182, 185; culture films, 147, 158; and documentary impulse toward China, 7, 143, 158 (see also Dzhungo); expedition films, 146–47, 153, 169, 170–71, 245–46 (see also The Great Flight; Shanghai Document); “face to face” encounters with China through cinema, 135, 136, 139, 143, 154–55, 184; and imagined geography of new Soviet identity, 135, 137, 147; imbalance of seer

and seen, 136–37; and internationalist aesthetics, 134–35, 143, 159–60, 186; intertitles, 155, 160, 169; Lenin on, 29; as medium for internationalist connection, 33–34, 84, 134, 135, 136, 154–55, 162, 171, 184; and montage (see montage); Pilnyak’s failed cinematic collaboration with Tian Han and Jiang Guangci (see Go to the People); revolutionary melodrama (see Dzhungo); Sino-Soviet collaborations of the 1950s, 245–46; and Soviet centerperiphery relations, 135; Soviet films exported to international audiences, 83, 160, 181–82; and superiority of the “cine-eye” over the human eye, 173–74; transnational system of film production, 160; Tretyakov’s hopes for, 134–35, 242; unrealized Dzhungo project (see Dzhungo); U.S. films, 160–61. See also specific films “Cinema and China” (Tretyakov article), 134–35 city symphony film genre, 171–74 Clark, Katerina, 190, 254n103, 258n17 class consciousness. See proletarians/ laborers; revolution and revolutionary consciousness collaborative authorship, 35, 38, 44–45; collaborative autobiography (“biointerview”) (see Den Shi-khua); and Romm’s translations of Xiao San’s poetry, 35, 237–39; and training Gao Shihua as factographer, 209–14; and translation issues, 35, 44–45, 214–18 colonialism, 3, 247n6; China as a semicolonial space, 6, 11, 136, 142–43, 151–53, 166–67, 232 (see also Shanghai Document); Comintern and, 3; Lenin and, 3, 11, 142, 146 comedy, 34, 143, 182, 185. See also Chinese Mill, The Comintern (Third Communist International), 13–14, 249n18; and China as a “semicolonial” country, 12; and

IND EX 3 37

colonized and semi-colonized countries, 3, 11; Comintern agents in China, 16, 41, 231, 251n47, 251n51 (see also Borodin, Mikhail; Voitinsky, Grigory); defeat of Comintern policy in China, 14, 35, 41; dissolution by Stalin (1943), 35; and Dzhungo (unmade film trilogy), 166; and the Great Flight (1925), 146; intervention in China’s internal politics, 4, 8, 13–14; model of world revolution, 10–11; political project of internationalism, 5, 21, 31 (see also internationalism; internationalist aesthetics); relationship with Guomindang, 213, 231–33 (see also under Guomindang); split from Nationalists (see under Sino-Soviet relations); and tension between centripetal and centrifugal forces, 7–10; turn to Asia, 3–4, 11 Communist Manifesto, The (Marx and Engels), 3 Communist University for the Workers of the East (KUTV), 8, 44, 233–34 Compendium of Modern Chinese Literature, A (Zhao Jiabi), 209 confessional autobiographies, 189–90, 202–8, 226–27 Le Corsaire (ballet), 116 Craig, Gordon, 240 Crane, Robert, 106 Creation Society, 77 Dalin, Sergei, 38, 256n4 de Certeau, Michel, 173–74 de Mille, Cecil B., 161 Deng Xiaoping, 8 Den Shi-khua (Tretyakov collaborative biography), 22–23, 34–35, 69, 83, 187–230, 265n140, 297n81; and alienation effects, 218–22; beginning of, 211–12; as “biointerview,” 188, 189, 192, 195–98, 201–2, 206–8, 211–14, 221–22, 229; bio-interview as mode of education and factographic training, 208–14; “bio-photograph,” 199– 201, 200, 296n54; choice of present tense,

218–19; collaboration process, 191, 196–98, 207–8, 210–14, 220–21, 292n4; compared to other Soviet fictional narratives and confessional autobiographies, 190–94, 202–3; and confessional autobiography, 202–8, 226–27; critics’ responses, 198, 207, 225; and education at the level of utterance and the level of enunciation, 213; ending of, 191, 195, 223, 227, 229; and ethnography, 188, 194, 195, 212–13; and exoticism, 214; explanation of protagonist’s name, 211–12; and forms of agency, 208, 214, 226, 229; and internationalism, 208, 212, 230; and internationalist aesthetics, 191, 230; lack of attention to internal psychology, 207–8, 226, 229, 297n87; and the “literature of fact” or “factography,” 188, 191, 199, 201–2, 207; and montage, 199–201, 200, 230; narrative described, 193–95, 204–5; as narrative of political education, 188, 194–95, 204–5, 213, 228–29; narrative structure, 195, 201; postscript, 223–30; power dynamic in collaboration process, 191, 196–97, 202, 206–7, 226; and reader’s awareness of mediation, 219–20; and the “referential pact” with readers (Lejeune’s concept), 195–96; reliability of Gao Shihua’s narrative, 219–20, 224–29; and reshaping interviewer, interviewee, and reader, 208–23; role in mediating between Russia and China, 188–89; timing of publication, 188–89, 293n10; and Tin Iuin-pin’s testimony, 224–29; and training Gao Shihua as factographer, 209–14; and training the active reader, 214–23; transfer of narratorial power to Tretyakov, 221–23; translation issues, 214–18, 299n129; Tretyakov’s appearance in the narrative, 205, 220–22; Tretyakov’s authorial mediation, 198–99, 201, 219–20; Tretyakov’s introductions, 191, 192, 195–97, 201–2, 206–7, 210–11, 295n47. See also Gao Shihua

3 38 IND E X

development, uneven, 9, 39, 52, 54–55, 82, 151–53, 173, 260n61 Dikii, Aleksei, 114 Ding Ling, 235 Ding Wen’an, 224, 300n154 Dobrenko, Evgeny, 294n24 documentary principles as “literature of fact”: and biographical narrative, 198 (see also Den Shi–khua); Chinese reportage on the Soviet Union, 40; and deniability, 228; “documentary moment” in early Soviet culture, 2, 40–41; documentary principles as “literature of fact,” 6–7, 30–31, 40–41, 163 (see also “factography”/”literature of fact”); and Dzhungo (unmade film trilogy), 158, 163–65; and early Soviet films, 33–34; and The Great Flight (1926), 158 (see also The Great Flight); and Pilnyak’s “Chinese Story,” 67–68, 70; Tretyakov and documentary reportage, 26–27, 30–31, 37–38, 40–45, 47–55, 158 (see also specific works); and Tretyakov’s “Roar China,” 58, 61. See also Chinese Mill, The; Chzhungo; Dzhungo; Great Flight, The; Shanghai Document Dong, Xinyu, 177, 179 drambalet, 113–14, 121 dubinushka, 73–74 Dzhabaev, Dzhambul, 240 Dzhungo (unmade film trilogy), 22, 33–34, 134, 143, 158–67, 288n93; The Blue Express, 159, 165; and conflict between story and material, 167; and documentary reportage, 143, 163–65; and ethnographic authenticity, 166–67; intended audiences, 143, 160, 162, 167; and internationalist aesthetics, 159–60; intertitles, 160; participants in proposed expedition, 159; The Pearl River/China Roars, 159, 165–66; pedagogical aspirations of project, 162, 163; plot summaries and topics planned, 159, 163–67, 288n103; reasons for not completing project, 163; and revolution, 164; The Yellow Peril, 159, 164–65

Earth Upturned (Meyerhold production), 102 Eisenstein, Sergei, 9; and Battleship Potemkin (1925 film), 83–84, 134; and Chinese theater, 241; collaboration with Tretyakov, 22, 33–34, 84, 85, 89, 134; and Dzhungo (unmade film trilogy), 22, 33–34, 159, 162, 163, 288n103; and emotion in cinema, 163, 176; Mei Lanfang and, 240; as member of the Soviet avant-garde/LEF, 21; and montage theory, 170; Que Viva Mexico, 162; “The Magician of the Pear Orchard,” 240; and Tretyakov’s Gas Masks, 89 Ekk, Nikolai, 167 Eleventh Year (Vertov film), 169 Emi Siao. See Xiao San emotion: and The Chinese Mill (1928 film), 183–85; cinematic affect, 143, 163–64, 176, 183–85; and Dzhungo (unmade film trilogy), 163–64; Eisenstein and, 163, 176; role of emotion/sensation in organizing consciousness, 7, 10, 23–24; and Shanghai Document (1928 film), 176; Tretyakov and, 23–24, 163–64, 176 Engels, Friedrich, 3 Erdberg, Oskar, 231–32. See also Tarkhanov, Oskar Erdman, Nikolai, 102 Esmeir, Samera, 31 estrangement effect. See alienation or estrangement effects ethnography, 43–44; and Den Shi-khua (collaborative autobiography), 188, 194, 195, 212–13; and Dzhungo (unmade film trilogy), 166–67; ethnographic naturalism and Roar, China!, 89, 100–110; and The Great Flight (1926 film), 150–51; Malinowski and, 44; and Shanghai Document (1928 film), 174; Tretyakov’s Marxist ethnography, 43–44 Eurasianism, 66–67, 73 Eurocentrism, 4, 15, 17–18 Evreinov, Nikolai, 89

INDEX339

exoticism, 24–27; and China-themed plays of the 1920s, 86–88; and Chinese Novellas, 232; and Den Shi-khua (collaborative autobiography), 214; “French exotic,” 25–26; and The Great Flight (1926 film), 150–51; and Ivin’s “Revolutionary Beijing,” 54–55; and Pilnyak’s “Chinese Story,” 70; and The Red Poppy (ballet), 112, 114, 121, 130–31; and Shanghai Document (1928 film), 174; and soundscape of Chinese cities, 57; and translation issues, 215; Tretyakov and overcoming exoticism, 24–25, 39, 41, 47–54, 86, 214; and unfinished film Go to the People, 82 “factography”/”literature of fact,” 7, 30–31, 37–38, 40–42, 163, 192, 207; bio-interview as mode of education and factographic training, 208–14; Chuzhak and, 40–43; and Den Shi-khua (collaborative autobiography), 188, 191, 199, 201–2, 207; and mode of reading, 202; and overcoming automatization, 210–14; Pilnyak and, 67–68; purpose of, 41; and translation strategies, 215; Tretyakov and, 30–31, 40–43, 88–89, 207, 209–14, 218 Fairbanks, Douglass, 161 Famarin, K. (Emmanuil Beskin), 102–3, 114 Farrère, Claude, 25 Fedorenko, Nikolai, 121 Fedorov, Vasily, 101, 274n86 Feng Yuxiang, 13, 44, 148, 163, 164; Gao Shihua and, 188–89, 217, 227–28, 301n174 fetishism, 25–26, 87 Filimonova, Tatiana, 67 film. See cinema First Congress of the Peoples of the East, 3 Flanagan, Michael, 142 Forty Canes or Love in China (political operetta), 89 Foucault, Michel, 202–3, 206, 207 400 Million (1929 film), 168 Franck, Harry, 261n65

Frigate Pallada (Goncharov), 49 Frunze, Mihkail Vasilevich, 65 Futurists, 60–62 Galperin, Mikhail, 85, 270n29 Gamsa, Mark, 104 Gaonkar, Dilip, 172 Gao Shihua, 34, 187–230, 200, 234; agency of, 214, 226, 229; as author and translator, 197, 208–9, 217–18, 228; background, 187, 211–12, 298n107; at Beijing University, 187, 188, 194–95, 205, 220–21, 226; career, 187–89, 217, 227–28; and CCP, 196, 203–4, 225, 228, 301n174; and collaborative autobiography (see Den Shi-khua); eventual fate of, 227–28; Feng Yuxiang and, 188–89, 217, 227–28, 301n174; and internationalist knowledge production, 191, 208, 212; and Marxism, 195, 205, 211; in Moscow at Sun Yat-sen University, 187, 188, 195, 203–4, 224–25, 292n4; name changes, 187, 189; and name translation issues, 298n109; as real name of Den Shikhua, 187, 292n1; return to China in 1927, 187–89, 191, 223–30, 232, 292n4; Russian language skills, 197–98, 217; Russian pseudonym, 187, 204, 292n3, 297n69; “Sinking Their Own Ship,” 209; and Soviet assessments and surveillance, 204–6; Tin Iuin-pin’s assessment of, 224–29; and training as factographer, 209–14; Tretyakov and Ivin as teachers of, 187, 195 Gao Xingya. See Gao Shihua Gao Yaheng, 187, 194 Gas Masks ( Tretyakov play), 89, 105 Gastev, Aleksei, 23 Geisha, The (Jones operetta), 87 Geltser, Ekaterina, 90, 114–18, 125, 278n181 geography: cartography and China on Fire (1925 film), 137–42; and cinema, 135–42; imagined geography of new Soviet identity, 135, 137, 147; and montage, 135. See also Great Flight, the

3 40 IND EX

Georgievsky, Sergei, 15 German Ideology, The (Marx), 49 Glière, Reinhold, 90, 114 “going to the people” movement in Russia and China, 77–78 Goncharov, Ivan, 49 Gorodetsky, Sergei, 102–3, 107 Gorsky, Aleksandr, 116 Goskino, 134, 158, 162, 163 Go to the People (unfinished film), 32, 39–40, 77–83 Gozzi, Carlo, 86 Great Flight, the (Soviet transcontinental flight of 1925), 144–57, 148 Great Flight, The (1926 film), 33, 135, 143, 147–58, 154, 156–57, 170–71 Great Leap Forward, 245 Gromov, Mikhail Mikhailovich, 145 Guangzhou, 11, 146, 147, 148, 153, 158, 165. See also Canton Uprising Gumilev, Lev, 15 Guomindang (Nationalist Party), 11; alliance with CCP, 4, 13, 233; and The Chinese Mill (1928 film), 185; and Chinese Novellas, 232; and Dzhungo (unmade film trilogy), 163, 166; and The Great Flight (1926 film), 148–49, 153; and Shanghai uprising of 1927, 14, 34; Soviet rapprochement with Guomindang (1932), 167; Soviet support for, 4, 13, 168, 191, 213; split from CCP, 4, 8, 168, 169, 187, 232–33; split from Soviet Union, 166, 187, 196, 229, 231–32 Guo Moruo, 77 Halfin, Igal, 190, 203, 206, 207, 226 Hankou, 68, 72–73 Harley, Brian, 137 Hawley, Edwin C., 88–89, 93–94, 270n23, 272n50. See also Roar, China! Hayot, Eric, 9 Hegel, G. W. F., 9, 14–15, 136 Hellbeck, Jochen, 190 Herald of World Literature (journal), 234, 236

Herder, J. G., 14–15 Heroic China (Xiao San), 236 Herzen, Alexander, 55 History of the Heart in the Red Capital, A (Qu Qiubai), 40 “Homeward” (Tretyakov article), 44 “How I Wrote Deng” (Tretyakov unpublished note), 198, 212–13, 226, 292n4 Hughes, Langston, 64 Hu Hanmin, 100 Hu Lanqi, 235 huosheng (trade sounds), 56–57, 59 Hu Shi, 12, 18 Huttunen, Tomi, 201 Imperial Ballet, 114 Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (Lenin), 10–11, 260n61 internationalism, 3–5; and aesthetic tensions between emancipation and control, 21; and The Chinese Mill (1928 film), 182, 185–86; and cinema, 33–34, 82 (see also specific films); and comedy in film, 34, 182, 185; competing visions of, 31, 83; contradictions between global solidarity and Soviet leadership, 5, 29–30; contradictions between transnational community and cultural differences, 5, 39; and Den Shi-khua (collaborative autobiography), 191–92, 208, 212, 230; and global imaginary geography, 136; and the Great Flight (1925), 145, 148; Ivin and, 18; Lee on, 74; Lenin and, 11, 18; and need for new sense of China based on sensation/ bodily experience, 19–20; Pilnyak and, 39, 67–69, 71, 75–76; and The Red Poppy (ballet), 114, 118; and Roar, China!, 83, 85; and social recognition across distance as fundamental challenge, 136 (see also transnational connection between Soviet and Chinese people); and Soviet traveling writers in China, 38 (see also Pilnyak, Boris; Tretyakov, Sergei Mikhailovich);

IND E X 3 41

and Stalin’s “nationalist in form, socialist in content” formulation, 35, 233, 302n8; and tension between centripetal and centrifugal forces, 7–8, 29–30, 42, 64 (see also under internationalist aesthetics); and theatrical productions, 91 (see also specific productions); Tretyakov and, 39, 83, 85, 191–92, 208, 212, 230; and unfinished film Go to the People, 82; Xiao San and, 236–37. See also internationalist aesthetics; specific works and authors internationalist aesthetics, 5; and The Chinese Mill (1928 film), 143, 186; and “Chinese Story” (Pilnyak story), 71; and cinema, 134–35; defined/described, 5, 20–21; and Den Shi-khua (collaborative autobiography), 191, 230; and different media, 31; and Dzhungo (unmade film trilogy), 159–60; failures of internationalist project, 35–36; goals of, 7, 17, 19–21, 35–36; and Orientalism, 29; and “redistribution of the sensible,” 20, 24; and The Red Poppy (ballet), 117; and Roar, China! (Tretyakov play), 105–6; and “Roar China” (Tretyakov poem), 61, 64; and tension between centripetal and centrifugal forces, 91, 92, 109 (see also under internationalism); tensions between Soviet perspective and need for collaboration, translation, and mediation, 83 internationalist subjectivity, 7, 19–23, 29, 58, 253n93 International Literature (journal), 35, 234–36, 304n20 International Workingmen’s Association, 3 Ivanov, Aleksei Alekseevich. See Ivin, A. Ivanov, Vsevolod, 66, 129 Iven, Joris, 172 Ivin, A. (Aleksei Alekseevich Ivanov), 187, 252n74, 253n78; and ameliorating Russian ignorance about China through language study and direct sensory experience, 16–20; arrest of, 244, 307n67;

at Beijing University, 16, 187, 195; and cultural convergence of the Soviet and Chinese people, 18; observations of uneven development in China, 54–55; “Revolutionary Beijing,” 54–55, 74; Tretyakov and, 54 Jakobson, Roman, 60–61 Jameson, Fredric, 5 Japan, 10, 12; and British musical theater, 86–87; and charges of espionage, 244; invasion of China, 189, 233, 235; and production of Roar, China! (1942), 110; Russian anxieties about the Yellow Peril, 10, 15; Tian Han in, 78 Jiang Guangci, 8, 81, 234; career, 76; failed cinematic collaboration with Pilnyak, 32, 39–40, 76–83; on Pilnyak as a “fellow traveler,” 76–77 Joffe, Adolf, 13 Jones, Sidney, 87 journalism. See “factography”/”literature of fact”; documentary; Tretyakov, Sergei Mikhailovich Journey to the Land of Hunger (Qu Qiubai), 40 Jowitt, Deborah, 115–16 Kalatozov, Mikhail, 162 Kamei, Fumio, 181 Kameneva, Olga, 264n121 Karakhan, Lev, 13, 16, 244 Kates, George N., 57 Kaufman, Mikhail, 172–73 Khersonsky, Khrisanf, 158, 185 Kino (newspaper), 134, 149, 157, 160 Kisch, Egon Erwin, 40 Klabund, A. H., 86 Kleberg, Lars, 134 Kojève, Alexandre, 136 Kollontai, Alexandra, 27–28 Koonen, Alisa, 87 Kostarev, Nikolai, 38 Krasnaia gazeta (newspaper), 42

342IND EX

Krasnaia nov’ (journal), 17 krasnyi mak, 131, 133, 280n107. See also Red Poppy, The Kropotkin, Peter, 195 Kuleshov, Lev, 135 Kurilko, Mikhail Ivanovich, 90, 114, 119, 125, 126, 127, 128, 276n138 KUTV. See Communist University for the Workers of the East laborers. See proletarians/laborers Lacan, Jacques, 130 Lahuti, Abulqasim, 240 language: Chinese Pidgin Russian, 104–9, 275n102; and collaboration process for Den Shi-khua, 197–98; language limitations bypassed in Tretyakov’s “Roar China,” 32, 39, 65; linguistic choices in Tretyakov’s Roar, China!, 103–10. See also Chinese language; translation Laozi, 15 Lashchilin, Lev, 114 Lavrovsky, Leonid, 123 League of Left-Wing Writers, 234 Lebedenko, Aleksandr, 150–51 Lee, Steven, 74 Left Front of the Arts (LEF), 21, 23 Lehar, Franz, 86, 87 Leibniz, G. W., 9 Lejeune, Philippe, 195, 299n112 Lenin, Vladimir: “Awakening of Asia,” 12–13, 232; and cinema, 29; and colonialism, 3, 11, 142, 146; and internationalism, 11, 18; and uneven development, 260n61 Leontiev, Leonid, 277n155 Lermontov, Mikhail, 197 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 5 Levshin, A., 182 Levý, Jiří, 91 Leyda, Jay, 78, 268n204 Liaozhai zhiyi, 117 Li Dazhao, 12, 14, 16, 54, 224; and Chinese Socialist Youth League, 297n81; and

“going to the people,” 77; Marxism reading group, 205 Li Hua, 64, 110 Lincheng incident (1923), 165 Linde, F. V., 83 Li Quanfu, 86 literature, Chinese, 35; Gao Shihua and, 208– 9; and International Literature (journal), 235, 236–40; League of Left-Wing Writers, 234; May Fourth literature, 209; and New Culture movement, 12; Russian influence on, 8, 209, 233–34; Xiao San and, 235–40 literature, Russian: and alienation effects, 218–22; children’s books/adventure stories, 29, 190, 192, 294n24; Chinese interest in Soviet literature, 76, 79, 234; Chinese intermediaries of the 1930s (see Mei Lanfang; Xiao San); confessional autobiographies, 189–90, 202–8, 226–27 (see also autobiography); debate over novelistic fiction, 192; lack of major works on China in the 1930s, 233; “literature of cognizing life” vs. “literature of constructing life” (Chuzhak’s ideas), 30–31; and the “literature of fact” or “factography,” 7, 30–31, 40–42, 188, 192, 218 (see also “factography”/”literature of fact”); revolutionary Bildungsroman, 189–90, 192–94; “road-to-consciousness” narratives, 190, 192–93, 195, 228–29; Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), 192, 198; and Socialist Realism, 188, 190, 206, 295n35 (see also realism); and Soviet cultural influence in China, 8, 209, 233–34. See also poetry Literature and Revolution (Trotsky), 76 “literature of fact.” See “factography”/”literature of fact” Literature of the World Revolution (journal), 234, 236 Little Red Flower, The (ballet), 116 Liu, Lydia, 127 Liu Hua, 69–70

IND E X 3 43

Liukom, E. M., 270n28 Liu Shaoqi, 8 Li Yingnan, 297n87 Li Yiyuan, 89, 164 Lopukhov, Fedor, 277n155 Loti, Pierre, 25, 118, 131 Lotman, Yurii, 282n238 “Loving China” (Tretyakov essay), 24–27 Low Grass Society, 208–9 Lukács, Georg, 198, 201 Lumière brothers, 136, 283n8 Lunarcharsky, Anatoly, 234 Lu Xun, 12, 16, 167, 209, 234, 235, 244; influence of Russian literature on, 8; Pilnyak and, 79–80; Xiao San and, 236 Madame Butterfly narrative, 98, 118, 129–30 Madame Butterfly (Puccini opera), 87, 130 “The Magician of the Pear Orchard” (Eisenstein), 240 Magnanimous Cuckold, The (Meyerhold production), 101 Maksimov, N., 283n10 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 44 Malraux, André, 249n27 mamandi, 71–72, 75, 80 Manhatta (1921 film), 171 Man with a Movie Camera (1929 film), 172, 175–76 Mao Dun, 8, 235 Mao Zedong, 12, 16, 166; and concept of national form, 35, 244–45; and divergent Soviet and Chinese models of state socialism, 35; in Moscow, 121; Xiao San’s biography of, 236 maps: and China on Fire (1925 film), 137–42; and The Chinese Mill (1928 film), 185; and the Great Flight (1925), 147; and The Great Flight (1926 film), 156 Marchetti, Gina, 129–30 “March of the Volunteers” (song), 77 Mariinsky Theater, 113 Marinetti, Filippo, 60–61

Markov, Pavel, 101 Marx, Karl, 3, 49, 247n6 Marxism: commodity fetishism, 25–26; and confessional autobiographies, 203; and education of Chinese revolutionaries in the Soviet Union, 8; embraced by Chinese intellectuals, 77; Gao Shihua and, 195, 205, 211; Mao Zedong and, 244; Qu Qiubai and, 234; and Shanghai Document (1928 film), 170–71, 181; and Soviet assessment and surveillance of university students, 206; and Soviet cultural influence in China, 233–34; and Tian Han’s “selfcriticism,” 78–79, 83–84 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 21, 197, 238, 247n4, 298n108; “The Best Verse,” 1–3, 7, 14 May Fourth movement, 8, 78, 79, 166, 209, 298n99 May Thirtieth movement, 8, 146, 153, 165–66 Mei Lanfang, 35, 233, 240–43, 298n99 Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 22, 85, 101–3, 240, 244 Meyerhold Theater, 22, 33, 97, 274n86, 276n127; and combination of naturalistic authenticity and theatrical artifice, 102; and linguistic choices in Roar, China!, 105–6; and staging of Roar, China!, 89, 94–95, 100–103 Mikado, The (Gilbert and Sullivan), 87 Mikhels, V., 152 Mirbeau, Gustave, 25 modernity: and aviation, 149 (see also aviation); Beijing and, 54; and China’s loss of sovereignty, 35; and Den Shi-khua (collaborative autobiography), 192, 194, 204, 213; and Dzhungo (unmade film trilogy), 166; and Mei Lanfang’s visit to Moscow (1935), 241; and New Culture and May Fourth movements, 8; and nostalgia, 83; Pilnyak’s ambivalence about Russian and Chinese modernity, 65, 83, 266n168; and The Red Poppy (ballet), 130; revolutionary modernity in China and Russia, 9, 10, 27, 28, 30, 55, 65, 130, 171, 192;

3 44IND E X

modernity (Continued ) rival forms of, 19, 33; semicolonial modernity, 33, 153, 166, 195; Shanghai and, 152, 152, 171; Soviet Union as model for China, 8; technologized modernity, 76, 82, 149, 151; urban modernity, 172; and Western culture’s “dream of the universalization of culture,” 9 Mongolia, 144, 147, 148, 150 Mongols, 67, 73, 74 montage, 34, 42–43, 135–36; and Chinese leftwing cinema, 234; and The Chinese Mill (1928 film), 183–84; and city symphony genre, 171–74; and Den Shi-khua (collaborative autobiography), 199–201, 200, 230; and The Great Flight (1926 film), 155; and Shanghai Document (1928 film), 143, 168, 170–74, 180–81; Soviet montage theory, 34, 168, 170, 234 Moscow: Gao Shihua in, 187, 188, 195, 203–4; and Kitai-gorod (China-town), 66; and uneven development, 173. See also Communist University for the Workers of the East; Sun Yat-sen University for the Workers of China Moscow, Do You Hear? (Tretyakov play), 105 Moscow (1927 film), 172–73, 175 Moscow Art Theater, 88, 101 “Moscow–Beijing” (Tretyakov travel sketch), 37, 38 Mother (1926 film), 167 “Muscovite China” (Mayakovsky poem), 298n108 music, 56–59; and common use of pentatonic scale across Eurasia, 73–74; folk music and transnational communities, 74; huqin (musical instrument), 96, 100; “March of the Volunteers” (song), 77; musical theater, 86–87; Pilnyak and, 73–74; and Pilnyak’s on-set experiences with Go to the People, 81; and The Red Poppy (ballet), 117–18; and Roar, China!, 96, 98, 100;

Robeson and, 74; traders’ use of sound instruments, 57–59, 262n99, 262n103 Nabokov, Vladimir, 131 Naked Year, The (Pilnyak), 65–66 “Nanjing Road” (Xiao San), 238–39 national form, concept of, 35, 233, 240–45 Nemirovich-Danchenko, Vladimir, 240 New Culture movement, 8, 12, 18, 241 Nida, Eugene, 215 “Night. Beijing” (Tretyakov poem), 42, 57 Nightingale, The (Stravinsky opera), 87 “nonsynchronism” (Bloch’s concept), 52 nostalgia, 69, 72–75, 83 Nothing but the Hours (1926 film), 171 Novitsky, Pavel, 98 Novyi Lef (journal), 22, 37, 40, 187, 192, 293n7 Novyi mir (journal), 67, 265n140 Novyi Vostok (journal), 15–16, 17, 70, 287n84 observation: and “the eyes of a consumer” (Tretyakov’s concept), 49; and Ivin’s “Revolutionary Beijing,” 54–55; observations of uneven development in China (see development, uneven); and overcoming automatization, 210–14; and Pilnyak’s “Chinese Story,” 71; and “production eyes” (Tretyakov’s concept), 49; Tretyakov and the method of prolonged observation, 38–39, 43–45, 48–54; and Tretyakov’s “Beijing,” 47–55; and Western ethnography, 43–44. See also ethnography; sensation/bodily experience; sounds of China; visual perception of China “October Revolution and Russian Literature, The” (Jiang Guangci), 76 Olivier, Laurence, 87 “One and a Half Billion Spectators” (Tretyakov), 242 “On New Democracy” (Mao Zedong), 244 onomatopoeia, 32, 57–64 “operativity,” 30, 41, 43

IND E X 3 45

opium: CCP eradication of use, 122; and Chinese discomfort with title The Red Poppy, 121–23; opium dream sequence in The Red Poppy, 112, 114–16, 120, 123, 128–29; Opium Wars, 33, 92, 121–22; and resignification of the poppy in The Red Poppy, 119–33; Tretyakov on, 124 Orientalism, 9–10, 16, 29, 115–16, 151 Orientalism (Said), 9 Palmer, Scott, 144 Papazian, Elizabeth, 2, 295n35 Papernyi, Vladimir, 7 Pavlov, Georgy, 86 Pavlovich, Mikhail, 15–16, 158, 160, 287n84 Pearl River, The. See under Dzhungo Peirce, C. S., 61 People’s Republic of China, 110, 120, 233 People’s Republic of Mongolia, 150 Pertsov, Viktor Osipovich, 149, 169 Peter the Great, 67 Petipa, Marius, 114, 116, 118 Pharaoh’s Daughter, The (ballet), 114, 116 photography, 43, 50, 51, 199–201, 200, 296n54. See also Prozhektor Pilnyak, Boris, 16, 81, 83–84, 265n143, 266n168; arrest and execution, 65, 244; and art’s autonomy from politics, 65; and Chinese intermediaries, 38, 76–77; and Chinese sense of time, 71–72, 75; “Chinese Story,” 16, 32, 39, 67–76, 80–83; compared to Tretyakov, 65, 68, 70–71; and Eurasianism, 66–67, 73; failed cinematic collaboration with Tian Han and Jiang Guangci, 32, 39–40, 76–83; focus on sensory experience, 38, 39, 71, 80–82; and internationalism, 39, 67–69, 71, 75–76; and internationalist aesthetics, 71; Lu Xun and, 79–80; mediating between difference and commensurability, 65, 82–83; and mediation of Chinese culture, 71; and music, 73–74; The Naked Year, 65–66; and nostalgia, 69, 72–75, 83;

and revolution, 69, 75–76, 79; “SanktPiter-Burkh,” 67; scandal about “Tale of the Unextinguished Moon,” 65; and translation issues, 38, 39, 71–73, 82; as traveling writer, 38; visit to China (1926), 65–67, 79–80, 83, 264n121 Piscator, Erwin, 240 Plekhanov, Georgy, 234 poetry, 1–3, 7, 42, 57, 236–40, 298n108. See also “Roar China” Polevoi, Sergei, 16 Ponomarev, Vladimir, 277n155 Popova, Lyubov, 102 Pound, Ezra, 9 Pravda (newspaper), 17, 42, 90, 93, 146, 271n32 Princess Turandot (Gozzi play), 86, 88, 91 Proletarian Culture movement, 23 proletarians/laborers: and colonized and semi-colonized countries, 3, 11; and The Communist Manifesto, 3; and Dzhungo (unmade film trilogy), 165; and The Great Flight (1926 film), 152; juxtaposition of labor and leisure, 62, 111, 117, 169–71, 174–76; and the literature of fact program, 41; and The Red Poppy (ballet), 113, 114, 117; and Shanghai Document (1928 film), 169–71, 174–76; and Tretyakov’s “Roar China” (play), 94–96; and Tretyakov’s “Roar China” (poem), 61–64; and violence of 1927, 176; words for, 247n4 Prozhektor (photo-journal), 42, 43, 50 Puccini, Giacomo, 87 Pudovkin, Vsevolod, 167, 234 Pu Songling, 117 Pu Yi, 164 Qing Empire, 11–12 Qin Zhen, 245 Qiu Kunliang, 270n23 Que Viva Mexico (Eisenstein film), 162 Qu Qiubai, 8, 40, 233–34

346 IND EX

Rabochaia Moskva (newspaper), 42, 43 Radek, Karl, 109, 146, 231, 244 Radlov, Sergei, 103–5 Rain (1929 film), 172 Rancière, Jacques, 20, 24 RAPP. See Russian Association of Proletarian Writers Razumov, S. P., 231–32 realism, 209, 235; aesthetic conflict between naturalism/realism and conventionality/ theatricality, 31, 85, 88–89, 91, 101–3; and Den Shi-khua (collaborative autobiography), 192, 198; and influence of Russian literature on Chinese writers, 8, 209; vs. “literature of fact,” 192, 209; and May Fourth movement, 209, 235, 298n99; nineteenth-century realism in Russian literature, 209; and The Red Poppy (ballet), 113–14; Socialist Realism, 113–14, 188, 190, 206, 241, 295n35; and Soviet avant-garde, 298n99; tension between realism and modernism, 5, 31, 241 red, cultural meanings of color, 131–32 “redistribution of the sensible,” 20, 24 Red Poppy, The (ballet), 32–33, 85–86, 110–33, 276n138, 277n142, 277n155, 279n183; analysis of narrative, 111–13, 118–21, 127–30; and anti-imperialism, 115; Chinese discomfort with title, 121–23; Chinese spectators’ responses, 33, 92, 121–24, 133; chinoiserie aesthetics, 116–18; choreography, 112, 114, 116–18, 277n155; compared to Roar, China!, 91–92, 94, 110–11, 117, 133; contrast between first and second acts, 114; creators, 114–15, 123–28; critics’ responses, 113–16; dancers, 114, 118, 270n28, 277n142, 278n181 (see also Geltser, Ekaterina; Lashchilin, Lev); and internationalism, 114, 118; and internationalist aesthetics, 117; musical choices, 117–18; name of character Tao Hua, 124–27, 133; narrative reworked in production of 1949, 120–21; opium dream sequence, 112, 114–16, 120, 123, 128–29; and

Orientalism, 115–16; origin of production, 90; popularity of, 113; prerevolutionary traditions expressing revolutionary themes, 115–20; production of 1927, 110–20, 127–28; production of 1949, 120–21; production of 1957, 123; and realism, 113–14; and reviving ballet in the Soviet Union, 89–90; revolutionary theme, 85, 90, 92, 113, 115–16, 128, 130; romance in, 112, 118–19, 130; and self-sacrifice, 92, 113, 120, 129; signification/resignification of the red poppy, 119–33; stage design, 116–18, 126, 127; strategy of performative mediation, 91; and translation issues, 91, 92, 124–27, 131, 133 “Red Scarf, The” (Erdberg), 232, 246 Reed, John, 40 Remizov, Aleksei, 15 Repin, Ilya, 74 revolution and revolutionary consciousness, 233; and autobiographies, 190; and Battleship Potemkin (1925 film), 134; and CCP, 182; and China on Fire (1925 film), 142; and China’s semicolonial condition, 142–43; Chinese Communist Revolution, 35, 121; and Chinese Novellas, 232; and Dzhungo (unmade film trilogy), 164; and Guomindang, 153; Ivin and, 54–55; Lee and, 74; Lu Xun and, 79–80; and May Thirtieth massacre (1925), 146; Pilnyak and, 65, 79–80, 83; and Pilnyak’s “Chinese Story,” 69, 75–76; and The Red Poppy (ballet), 85, 90, 92, 113, 115–16, 128, 130; revolutionary poetry, 238–40 (see also “Roar China”); “road-toconsciousness” narrative as master plot of the Soviet novel, 190, 192–93; and romance, 78–79; Russian Revolution, 77, 79, 89; and self-sacrifice (see selfsacrifice); and Shanghai Document (1928 film), 175; Tian Han and, 82; Tretyakov and, 52, 61–64, 82; and Tretyakov’s Roar, China!, 92, 96, 108; and unfinished film Go to the People, 78–79

IND EX 3 47

“Revolutionary Beijing” (Ivin article), 54–55, 74–75 Rikhter, Zinaida, 56 Road to Life (Ekk), 167 Roar, China! (Tretyakov play), 22, 32–33, 83, 93–110, 97; actors and acting style, 98, 99, 100, 101; analysis of narrative, 93–100; and anti-imperialism, 83, 95, 108, 110; based on Wanxian incident of 1924, 85, 88, 93–94, 96–97; Chinese production of 1949, 110; Chinese spectators’ responses, 100; and Christianity, 96–97, 108; and collective responsibility, 95; and combination of naturalistic authenticity and theatrical artifice, 101–3; compared to Battleship Potemkin, 134; compared to The Red Poppy, 91–92, 94, 110–11, 117, 133; and creation of sympathy between Chinese onstage and Soviet audience, 95–96, 100, 101; critics’ responses, 98, 101–5; and double context of domestic and foreign, 109; and Dzhungo (unmade film trilogy), 164; and ethnographic naturalism, 100–110; and “factography,” 88–89; international appeal of, 109–10; and internationalism, 83, 85; and internationalist aesthetics, 109; and Li Hua’s woodblock, 110; linguistic choices, 103–10; musical choices, 96, 98, 100; and national consciousness, 96; and overcoming exoticism, 86; and the performance of translation, 33, 92, 106– 10; as a “play-article,” 89; and revolution, 92, 96, 108; and self-sacrifice, 92, 96–100; significance of title, 96, 108; staging, 94–95, 100–103; strategy of performative mediation, 91; and translation issues, 91, 105–10; and transnational class consciousness, 95–96 “Roar China” (Tretyakov poem), 32, 39, 57–64, 262n99, 262n103, 263n104; and internationalist aesthetics, 61, 64; and internationalist subjectivity, 58; language

limitations bypassed in, 32, 65; and onomatopoeia, 57–64; and poetry as a form of reportage, 61; significance of title, 64 Robbins, Bruce, 19 Robeson, Paul, 74 Rodchenko, Aleksandr, 21, 45, 45 Rogov, Vladimir, 306n40 Romm, Aleksandr Ilich, 35, 237–39, 305n35 Rou Shi, 235 Roy, M. N., 250n32 Rozen School of Orientology at the University of St. Petersburg, 15 Russia, Imperial, 10, 13, 122, 148 Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), 192, 198 Russian language. See Chinese Pidgin Russian; translation Russian Populists, 77–78, 80 Russian Revolution, 77, 79, 89 “Russian Spoken Here” (Nabokov), 131 Russian views of China, 14–28; Chinese society viewed as an “anthill,” 55, 68; commodified exoticism, 25–26; distorted nature of popular knowledge about China, 15–18, 25–26; and early Soviet films, 33–34; and Eurocentrism, 17–18; geohistorical theme of “Russia between East and West,” 66; Ivin’s views and recommendations, 16–20; and lack of direct experience of China, 18–19; need for new sense of China, 19–28; perceptions of Chinese music, 56, 81; pre-Soviet contexts and attitudes toward China, 14–15; racialized geopolitical fears about the East, 10, 15; and stage theory of revolutionary development, 30; stereotypes, 25–26, 49, 68, 71, 86–88, 114; and theater productions of the 1920s, 86–87; Tretyakov on overcoming exoticism, 24–25. See also exoticism; literature, Russian; specific writers and works

348 IND E X

Ruttmann, Walter, 171–72 Rykov, A. I., 144 Said, Edward, 9, 16 “Sankt-Piter-Burkh” (Pilnyak), 67 satire. See Chinese Mill, The Saussy, Haun, 298n99 sdvig (Futurist technique), 62 Second International, 3, 248n6 seichas, 72, 75 self-sacrifice, 96; and The Red Poppy (ballet), 92, 113, 120, 129; and “road-toconsciousness” narratives, 190, 193; and Tretyakov’s Roar, China!, 92, 96–100 semiotics, 61, 130–31 sensation/bodily experience: focus on sounds of China, 55–64 (see also sounds of China); focus on visual perceptions of China, 47–55 (see also visual perception of China); and the Great Flight (1925), 149; Ivin and, 19–20; need for new sense of China based on sensation/bodily experience, 19–20; Pilnyak and, 38; and Pilnyak’s “Chinese Story,” 32, 39, 71, 72–73; and Pilnyak’s on-set experiences with Go to the People, 80–82; and the purpose of art, 23–24; Tretyakov and, 23–24, 28, 38; and Tretyakov’s “Beijing,” 47–55; and Tretyakov’s “Roar China,” 32, 39, 57–64. See also observation Serebryakova, Galina, 38, 56, 256n4 Serebryakova, Leonid, 56, 256n4 Shanghai: and Dzhungo (unmade film trilogy), 165–66; and the Great Flight (1925), 147; and The Great Flight (1926), 151–52, 152, 155–56; May Thirtieth massacre (1925), 146, 165–66; and modernity, 151–52; Pilnyak and, 68, 71, 75; Shanghai Document (see Shanghai Document); as space of uneven development, 152–53; as treaty port, 12; and uprising of 1927, 1, 4, 14, 175–77, 223 Shanghai Document (1928 film), 34, 135, 143, 168–81, 178–81; and associative thinking,

170–71; chronotope, 171, 174; and cinematic affect, 176; and city symphony genre, 171–74; compared to The Chinese Mill, 182; compared to The Great Flight, 170–71; compared to Man with a Movie Camera, 175–76; compared to Moscow, 174, 175; and eyeline match technique, 179; filming of, 169, 171, 179–80; international appeal of, 181–82; juxtaposition of labor and leisure, 169–71, 174–76; and Marxism, 170–71, 181; and montage, 34, 143, 168, 170–74, 180–81; and revolution, 175; and scenes of spectatorship, 177–81; and semicolonialism, 174, 177; sequences described, 169–70, 174–81; and shift in expedition film genre, 170–71; and transnational class consciousness, 171; and violent historical events of 1927, 175–77; and visual parallelism, 169–70, 180 Shavrov, B. V., 277n142 Shcherbatskaya, Olga, 265n143 Sheeler, Charles, 171 Shklovsky, Viktor, 16, 24, 158, 210, 306n45 Shmidt, Isai Pavlovich, 145 Shneiderov, Vladimir, 146, 147, 150, 151, 153, 155, 161–62, 245–46 “Sinking Their Own Ship” (Gao Shihua), 209 Sino-Soviet relations: breakdown of relations (1927), 182, 185, 187, 196, 229; breakdown of relations (late 1950s), 245; China as center of Soviet press attention in 1925, 146; Chinese migrants, 15, 67; and cinema, 135– 36, 143 (see also cinema; specific films); and competing visions of internationalism, 83; context of Sino-Soviet relations in the 1920s, 10–14, 82; and Den Shi-khua (collaborative autobiography), 188–89, 213; divergent models of state socialism, 35, 182, 233, 245–46; establishment of Sino-Soviet diplomatic relations (1924), 13; and Japanese encroachment, 189, 233; and power relations, 191; pre-Soviet contexts and popular attitudes toward China, 14–15; and sense of commonality

IND EX 3 49

in Pilnyak’s “Chinese Story,” 73; Soviet cultural influence in China, 8, 209, 233–34; Soviet rapprochement following CCP victory, 244; Soviet rapprochement with Guomindang (1932), 167, 243; Soviet split from Guomindang, 166, 187, 196, 229, 231–32; Soviet support for Guomindang, 4, 13, 168, 191; and Tretyakov’s “Cinema and China,” 134–35; and unfinished film Go to the People, 40, 76–83. See also Russian views of China; transnational connection between Soviet and Chinese people Smedley, Agnes, 40, 236, 249n27, 301n174 Smith, Lowell Herbert, 145 Sneevleit, Hendrikus, 251n51 Snow, Edgar, 40, 235, 249n27 So, Richard, 30 Socialist Realism, 113–14, 188, 190, 206, 241, 295n35 solidarity. See transnational connection between Soviet and Chinese people Solovyov, Vladimir, 10, 66 Soulié de Morant, George, 125 sounds of China, 55–64; auditory alienation, 56, 81; and “Chinese Story” (Pilnyak story), 71–73, 72–73; and “Night, Beijing” (Tretyakov poem), 57; and “Roar China” (Tretyakov poem), 57–64, 65; Russian perceptions of Chinese music, 56, 81; trade sounds, 56–57, 65, 72–73 Soviet avant-garde, 298n99; Left Front of the Arts, 21, 23; and “literature of fact,” 40–41; Mei Lanfang and, 35, 241; members of, 21; and postrevolutionary theater, 89; and the purpose of art, 23–24. See also Tretyakov, Sergei Mikhailovich Soviet Union: and anti-imperialism, 4, 8, 26, 35 (see also anti-imperialism); assessment and surveillance of university students, 204–6; aviation and its significance in the Soviet Union, 144–57, 285n46; centerperiphery relations, 151; and Chinese Civil War, 148–49; Chinese revolutionaries educated in, 8, 13 (see also Communist

University for the Workers of the East; Sun Yat-sen University for the Workers of China); contradictions between global solidarity and Soviet leadership, 5, 7–8; cultural meanings of the color red/red flowers, 131–32; differing cultural groups and modes of the 1920s, 29; diplomatic relations with China established, 146; divergent Soviet and Chinese models of state socialism, 35, 182, 233, 245–46; and the “documentary moment,” 2, 40–41; early Soviet understanding of connection between emotional/affective experience and political consciousness, 10; First Five-Year Plan, 41, 186; and geohistorical theme of “Russia between East and West,” 66–67; imagined geography of new Soviet identity, 135, 137, 147; and internationalism (see internationalism; internationalist aesthetics); intervention in China’s internal politics, 4, 8, 13–14, 41; and mass media, 29; and modernity, 9–10, 27, 30, 149, 151; Proletarian Culture movement, 23; Purges of the 1930s, 243–44; Qu Qiubai’s reportage on, 40; relinquishment of holdings in China, 13; Russian Populists and “going to the people,” 77–78; Socialist Realism, 113–14, 188, 190, 206, 241, 295n35; Soviet cultural influence in China, 8, 209, 233–34; Soviet socialism as model for China, 8; Soviet traveling writers in China, 32, 37–84 (see also Ivin, A.; Pilnyak, Boris; Tretyakov, Sergei Mikhailovich); tension between backwardness and technology at the periphery, 151; and theme of selfsacrifice, 96 (see also self-sacrifice). See also ballet; cinema; Comintern; literature, Russian; Moscow; Russian views of China; Sino-Soviet relations; theater; transnational connection between Soviet and Chinese people Sovkino, 172 Soy Cuba (Kalatozov film), 162 Spence, Jonathan, 25

350INDEX

Stalin, Joseph: and Canton Uprising (1927), 14; and dispute over China policy, 14; dissolution of the Comintern (1943), 35; “nationalist in form, socialist in content” formulation, 35, 233, 302n8; and production of The Red Poppy (1949), 120; Stalinist universalism, 35, 233; and “Tale of the Unextinguished Moon” (Pilnyak story), 65 Stanislavsky, Konstantin, 87, 88, 101, 240 State Academic Theater of Opera and Ballet, 113 Steiner, Evgeny, 29 Stepanov, V. L., 168, 169 stereotypes. See Russian views of China Stern, Jonathan, 58 Stories about China (Smedley and Xiao San), 236 Storming the Winter Palace (Evreinov play), 89 Storm over Asia (1928 film), 167, 234 Strand, Paul, 171 Stravinsky, Igor, 87 Strong, Anna Louise, 40, 249n27 Sun Meiyao, 165 Sun Yat-sen, 11, 13, 146, 224 “Sun Yat-sen in Beijing” (Tretyakov article), 42, 44 Sun Yat-sen University for the Workers of China, 8, 13; assessment and surveillance of university students, 206; Gao Shihua at, 187, 188, 195, 203–4, 224–25, 292n4 Tai Jingnong, 235 Tairov, Alexander, 87, 240, 241 Takuboku Ishikawa, 78 “Tale of the Unextinguished Moon” (Pilnyak), 65 Tarkhanov, Oskar, 38, 231–32, 244 theater: aesthetic conflict between naturalism/realism and conventionality/ theatricality, 85, 88–89, 91, 101–3; Asia-themed productions of the 1920s, 86–88 (see also The Red Poppy; Roar,

China!); Chinese theater, 56, 240–43; Chinese views of Russian China-themed productions, 33, 92, 100, 121–24, 133; and ethnographic authenticity/naturalism, 89, 100–110; and internationalism, 91; Madame Butterfly narrative, 98, 118, 129–30; Mei Lanfang’s visit to Moscow, 240–43; and modernist experimentalism, 88; and national form, 241–43; and Russian perceptions of Chinese music, 56, 81; and tension between centripetal and centrifugal forces, 91, 92; theatrical chinoiserie, 87, 114, 116–18; and transethnic romance, 87, 92, 98; and translation issues (see translation); Tretyakov and, 22, 32–33, 85 (see also Roar, China!). See also ballet; Roar, China!; Red Poppy, The Thief of Bagdad, The (1924 film), 161, 287n88 “Through Unwiped Glasses” (Tretyakov article), 49 Tian Han, 162; career, 77; failed cinematic collaboration with Pilnyak, 32, 39–40, 76–83; in Japan, 78; Linde and, 83; and Marxism, 78, 83–84; and revolution, 82; and Russian Populism, 77–78; “selfcriticism” of 1930, 78, 79, 83–84 Tianjin, 12, 48 Tikhomirov, Vasily, 90, 114–16, 118, 124, 127 Tin Iuin-pin, 224–29 Tisse, Eduard, 134, 159 Toker, Leona, 228 Tolstoy, Lev, 15, 195, 205, 208 Tolz, Vera, 15 translation: ambivalent role of translation as a form of mediation, 31; and Chinese intermediaries, 31, 39, 127; and collaborative authorship, 35, 44–45, 214–18 (see also collaborative authorship); and Den Shi-khua (collaborative autobiography), 34, 211–12, 214–18, 299n129; and exoticism, 215; and “factography,” 215; Gao Shihua as translator, 197, 208–9, 228; “illusionist”

INDEX351

vs. “anti-illusionist” translations (Levý’s concept), 91; and May Fourth cosmopolitanism, 80; and name of character Tao Hua in The Red Poppy, 124–27, 133; performance of, in theatrical productions, 33, 92, 106–10; Pilnyak and, 38, 39; and Pilnyak’s “Chinese Story,” 71; and Pilnyak’s on-set experiences with Go to the People, 80, 82; and The Red Poppy (ballet), 91, 92, 124–27, 131, 133; role of Chinese translators and intermediaries concealed in “Beijing,” 51–52; Romm’s translations of Xiao San’s poetry, 237–39; Russian and Soviet debates over, 214–15, 237; and Stalinist universalism, 233; and title of Tretyakov’s Chzhungo, 45, 47; translations of Chinese literature, 235–40; translations of Soviet literature, 234; translation strategies, 31, 92, 214–17, 237–38; Tretyakov and, 38, 39, 44, 51–52, 215–18, 298n109; and Tretyakov’s Roar, China!, 91, 92, 105–10; words related to time, 72 transnational connection between Soviet and Chinese people: and affective power of cinema, 143, 163–64, 176, 183–85; and The Chinese Mill (1928 film), 184, 185, 186; and cinematic montage, 135–36; and Comintern’s turn to Asia, 4; and Den Shi-khua (collaborative autobiography), 208, 212, 230; and Dzhungo (unmade film trilogy), 162; “face to face” encounters with China through cinema, 135, 136, 139, 143, 154–55, 184; and the Great Flight (1925), 148; and The Great Flight (1926 film), 154–55; and International Literature (journal), 235; love and social solidarity (Kollontai’s ideas), 27–28; Mayakovsky’s “The Best Verse” and, 2–3; and Pilnyak’s “Chinese Story,” 32, 39; and The Red Poppy (ballet), 114; and Shanghai Document (1928 film), 171; and Soviet aviation, 144–45 (see also The Great Flight); and

Stalin’s “nationalist in form, socialist in content” formulation, 233; and tension between vertical hierarchy and horizontal networks, 7–8; and translation issues, 217 (see also translation); and Tretyakov’s Roar, China!, 95–96 Trans-Siberian Railway, 148 Trauberg, Ilya, 168 Treaty of Versailles, 12 Tretyakov, Sergei Mikhailovich, 5–7, 6, 50, 83, 158, 253n78; and alienation effects in literature, 218–22; arrest and execution, 65, 228, 243–44; aspirations for engineering love for China, 30; background and career, 21–22; and Battleship Potemkin, 134; “Beijing,” 47–54; “Beijing Enraged,” 44; at Beijing University (1924–1925), 5, 22, 41–43, 187, 195, 258n17; bio-interview (see Den Shi-khua); Bogdanov’s influence on, 23; and Chinese intermediaries, 31, 32, 38, 39, 44, 51–52, 83, 191 (see also Gao Shihua); and Chinese theater, 241–43; Chuzhak and, 40–41, 257n9; and Chzhungo (see Chzhungo); “Cinema and China,” 134–35; collaboration with Eisenstein, 22, 33–34, 84, 85, 89, 134; collaboration with Meyerhold, 22, 85, 102; and collaborative authorship, 44–45, 83 (see also Den Shikhua); compared to Pilnyak, 65, 68, 70–71; criticisms of The Great Flight, 157–58, 170; as cultural mediator of China for a Soviet audience, 5, 22–28, 30, 37–38, 44; as deputy president of Artistic Council at Goskino First Film Factory, 134; and documentary reportage, 26–27, 32, 37–38, 40–45, 47–55, 88–89, 158; and Dzhungo (unmade film trilogy), 22, 33–34, 84, 134, 158–67 (see also Dzhungo); as editor of International Literature, 234–35; and emotion in cinema, 163–64, 176; and ethnography, 43–44; and “the eyes of a consumer,” 49; and “face to face”

352INDEX

Tretyakov (Continued ) encounters with China through cinema, 135, 136; and “factography” or “literature of fact,” 6–7, 30–31, 40–43, 88–89, 163, 207, 209–14, 218; familiarity with Chinese Pidgin Russian, 104–5; and fantasy vs. reality, 26–27, 86; first visit to Beijing (1921), 41–42; focus on sensory experience, 23–24, 28, 38, 47–55, 57–64; and form-material-function triad, 21; Gao Shihua and (see Den Shi-khua; Gao Shihua); Gas Masks (play), 89, 105; “Homeward,” 44; “How I Wrote Deng,” 198, 212–13, 226, 292n4; and internationalism, 39, 83, 85, 191–92, 208, 212, 230; and international subjectivity, 22–23; interview practices (see Den Shi-khua); Ivin and, 54; lack of attention to Chinese voices, 28; “Loving China,” 24–27; and May Thirtieth massacre (1925), 146; mediating between difference and commensurability, 65; Mei Lanfang and, 240–42; as member of the Soviet avant-garde/LEF, 21–22; missions as writer-ambassador, 258n15; and montage, 42–43, 199–201, 200, 230; Moscow, Do You Hear? (play), 105; “Moscow–Beijing” (travel sketch), 37, 38; and newspaper medium, 38–45; “Night. Beijing” (poem), 42, 57; objections to fetishized image of China, 6; “One and a Half Billion Spectators,” 242; and “operativity,” 30, 41, 43; on opium use, 124; and overcoming exoticism, 24–25, 39, 41, 47–54, 86, 214; and photography, 43, 50, 51; and poetry as a form of reportage, 61; and possibility of revolution in China, 52, 61–64, 82; and prolonged observation, 38–39, 43–45, 48–54; and the purpose of art, 23–24; return to Moscow (1925), 22, 32, 85; Roar, China! (see Roar, China!); “Roar China” (poem), 32, 39, 57–64, 262n99, 262n103, 263n104; and role of emotion/

sensation in organizing consciousness, 23–24; second “bio-interview” (unfinished), 243; and sounds of street trade, 57–64; and Soviet diplomatic community in China, 41; and Soviet films exported to Chinese audiences, 160–61; “Sun Yat-sen in Beijing,” 42, 44; on superiority of biography of a “living ‘living’ person” over fiction, 192, 294n23; theatrical productions, 22, 32–33, 83, 85 (see also Roar, China!); “Through Unwiped Glasses,” 49; and training Gao Shihua as factographer, 208–14; and translation issues, 38, 39, 44, 51, 105–10, 215–18, 298n109; and travel as a process of disenchantment, 49; as traveling writer, 37–38; understanding of the economy of pleasure, 26–27; and uneven development in China, 39, 52, 260n61; “Whence and Wither?,” 23–24, 210 Tretyakova, Olga, 243 Trotsky, Lev, 14, 52, 76, 79, 80, 146, 164, 234, 260n61, 266n177 Trubetskoy, Nikolai, 67, 73–74 Tsenovsky, A. A., 102 Tvorchestvo (Creation; journal), 21 Ukhtomsky, Esper, 15 Under Ancient Desert Skies (1958 film), 245 University of St. Petersburg, 15 unmasking, 226–27 Vakhtangov, Evgeny, 88, 91 Vasiliev, Aleksei, 150 Vasiliev, Boris, 244 Vasiliev brothers (Georgy and Sergei), 167, 234 Vatulescu, Cristina, 190 Vecherniaia Moskva (newspaper), 147 Veltman, Solomon, 16, 70, 158 Venuti, Lawrence, 106, 214 Vertov, Dziga, 21, 24, 135, 169, 170, 172 –74 Vilensky-Sibiryakov, Vladimir, 41

INDEX353

visual perception of China: and Ivin’s “Revolutionary Beijing,” 54–55; and Pilnyak’s “Chinese Story,” 71; and superiority of the “cine-eye” over the human eye, 173–74; and Tretyakov’s “Beijing,” 47–54; visual parallelism in Shanghai Document, 169–70. See also montage; observation Voitinsky, Grigory, 16, 41, 251n51 VOKS. See All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries Volga Boatman, The (1926 film), 161 Volkov, Nikolai, 113–14 Voltaire, 9, 14 Vostokkino, 160, 168 Wang Jiaxiang, 121 Wang Jingwei, 153, 223–34 Wanxian incident (1924), 85, 93–97 Warrant, The (Erdman play), 102 “What Is to Be Done with Ballet?” (article), 89 “Whence and Wither?” (Tretyakov essay), 23–24, 210 Widdis, Emma, 135 Wings of Fire (Zhurakovsky), 294n27 Witt, Susanna, 275n112 Wollen, Peter, 136 Wong, Anna May, 87, 287n88 woodblocks, 110 workers. See proletarians/laborers World War I, 10–11, 40 Wu Peifu, 163 Xiang Bikui, 95 Xiao Jun, 235

Xiao San (Emi Siao), 8, 35, 112, 119, 122–23, 233, 235–40, 304n20, 305n35; background, education, and career, 235–37; biographies of Mao Zedong and Zhu De, 236; and Internationals Literature (journal), 236–40; poetry, 236–40, 306n40; publications, 236–40 Xinhai Revolution (1911–1912), 11, 193, 194 Xiong Kewu, 194 Yaroslavsky, Emilian, 170 Yellow Jacket, The (Lehar play), 86, 87, 89 Yellow Peril, 10, 15 Yellow Peril, The. See under Dzhungo Yerokhonov, Leonid, 168 Ye Shengtao, 168, 235 Young, Robert, 7 Yu Dafu, 77 Yu Min-ling, 292n3 Zagorsky, Mikhail, 102 Zaria vostoka (newspaper), 42 Zeng Xiufu, 123, 124–25 Zhang Peijue (Zhang Liewu), 194, 294n30 Zhang Xueliang, 153 Zhang Yiping, 235 Zhang Zuolin, 14, 163 Zhao Jiabi, 209 Zhizn’ iskusstva (journal), 89 zhongguo (Chinese name for Chinese state), 45, 47 Zhu De, 235, 236 Zhurakovsky, Nikolai, 294n27 Zhu Zhongli, 121 Zinoviev, Grigory, 14, 146 Zoya’s Apartment (Bulgakov play), 107