Socialist Cosmopolitanism, by Nicolai Volland (introduction)

SOCIALIST

COSMOPOLITANISM The Chinese Literary Universe, 1945-1965

NICOLAI VOLLAND

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INTRODUCTION

ight snow was drifting over Red Square in the heart of Moscow when Wang Meng ⥟㩭 (b. 1934) joined the queue outside the Lenin mausoleum. Not many people were intent on seeing the remains of the Soviet Union’s first leader on this cold and wet day in November 2004, but for Wang it was the completion of a lifelong quest. Wang Meng had started writing his first novel, Qingchun wansui 䴦᯹㨀ⅆ (Long live the youth), in 1953, at the age of eighteen, in the hope that his book might win him enough fame to be selected as a delegate to that year’s World Youth Festival, and thus given the opportunity to travel to Moscow. His dream faded when his book failed to fi nd a publisher. Over the next half century, politics, chance, and fate intervened, time and again, preventing Wang from paying his respects to Lenin. It was not until the dawn of the twenty-first century that he fi nally found himself at the doors of what had been, for many years, the most holy site in the secular socialist world.

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In his crystal sarcophagus, inside the brightly lit mausoleum, Lenin’s face and clothes appear fresh and neat. I reverentially bow to the body. Who would have thought that it would take me so long to come to Lenin’s final place of rest?

If it had been back then . . . But in Russia today Lenin is spoken of in disrespectful and profane ways. How can there be such dissipation,

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such carelessness? How can we ignore history? Has the pendulum of history now swung to the other extreme?

Silence. Silence says more than words can express.1

Wang Meng recalled his visit to the Lenin mausoleum in a 2006 collection of essays, Sulian ji 㯛㙃⽁ (Mourning the Soviet Union). After his failed debut as a novelist, Wang had been in turn celebrated and condemned by the party-state; spent more than a decade in banishment to the far western frontier of the People’s Republic of China (PRC); and in the 1980s become one of its most acclaimed writers (and, for a brief period, the PRC’s minister of culture). By the time he visited Moscow in 2004, navigating the streets of the Russian capital with the help of paperback translations of Soviet novels, their pages yellow with age, Wang was past his prime. His visit was personal and private. Its aim: to recover memories, if not the spirit, of the heyday of the Sino-Soviet alliance of the 1950s, a decade that had shaped his country and his generation. Wang Meng and many of his peers had experienced their most immediate encounter with the socialist world through cultural channels: novels, films, songs. On the flight to Moscow in 2004, Wang searched the inflight radio menu in vain for Soviet-era folk songs; he tossed away his headphones in annoyance—all he could find was Russian rock. He would be vindicated later, when his hosts took him to a Stalin-era-themed restaurant in central Moscow, where a singer young enough to have been his granddaughter, Wang comments, performed all the classics from the days of his youth.

Wang Meng’s account speaks of a bittersweet nostalgia. China’s engagement with the socialist world had lasted but a decade before it fell apart in acrimony. The power of images etched into the memory of millions of Chinese in the 1950s, however, outlasted the political and economic split of 1960, the polemical debates over ideology in 1963, and the military clashes along the two countries’ shared border in 1969.

Even as the Sino-Soviet alliance receded into history, it remained a powerful, lasting presence for Wang’s generation, which had grown up surrounded by images of the Soviet Union and China’s other brethren nations in the socialist bloc.

Culture was the conduit. Translated novels, poetry, children’s stories, and dubbed films; performances by visiting orchestras, ballet troupes,

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and acrobatic ensembles; exhibitions of photography and arts and crafts; and many more—the socialist world permeated Chinese culture throughout the 1950s. Chinese books, films, and performances, in turn, were exported, to the Soviet Union and other nations in the socialist bloc. Just as the young PRC joined a transnational alliance spanning half the globe, Chinese literature became part of a global circuit of cultural production and consumption. “The intellectual creations of individual nations,” Karl Marx had prophesied, “become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.”2 A century after the Communist Manifesto was written, the day had finally arrived, it seemed, for a brand new form of literature, and New China was not to miss the celebration of this new epoch. Chinese literature of the 1950s was a literature in the world, a literature of the world, a literature for the world. The moment of worldliness was brief, alas. After little more than a decade, friendship and celebrations gave way to shouting matches, vilifications, and xenophobia. And yet, the cosmopolitanism of the 1950s, the cultural exchanges back and forth across the socialist world, resonated deeply and shaped the worldview of an entire generation. Its enduring power is felt in Wang Meng’s pilgrimage to Moscow, in his quixotic quest to recover the spirit of his youth, to roll back amnesia.

And it pervades the literature of that era. The encounter with the socialist world was constitutive to Chinese literature—and culture in general—of the 1950s. * * * This book proposes to read Chinese socialist literature as world literature. The worldliness of its very moment of inception, the high tide of cultural internationalism in the 1950s, forces us to reinsert this literature into its historical context, which is at the same time its epistemological context, its horizon of significance. Pointing out and zooming in on the multiple and multidirectional links and connections, the intersections and nodes that embed local literary production and consumption within transnational cultural circuits, ultimately opens up new avenues to the texts themselves. The vantage point of the world

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provides a historicist perspective that brings into purview authors and readers—the agents of cultural circulation—without privileging them over the works themselves; it lays open potentials of meaning within and beyond the literary text.

The world and worldliness, its attendant mode of being-in-the-world, figure on several levels that are at once distinct and overlapping.

These multiple understandings tie in with the debates about world literature over the past decade and a half, but, this book contends, no single definition of world literature is capable of fully capturing the worldliness of any given moment. To account for the meanings and functions of the world in the literary space of, say, socialist China in the 1950s, we need to acknowledge different configurations of world-ing that are at work jointly, and aim to understand them both in distinction from each other and in their actual interplay and collusion. The complexity of the transnational and transcultural literary imagination precludes any single conceptual denominator for the world and world literature.3 World-orientedness, first of all, results from the global flow of texts.

David Damrosch, for instance, defines world literature as “encompass[ing] all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language.” 4 World literature, in other words, is “a mode of circulation and of reading, a mode that is as applicable to individual works as to bodies of material, available for reading established classics and new discoveries alike.”5 The focus on flows and movement, on global trafficking in literature, gestures to the globalization of culture and provides a seemingly transparent standard for inclusion in or exclusion from the domain of the world. It does not, however, ask so much what precisely makes some texts travel and others not, what it is in these texts that makes them “enter” the world.

On a second level, then, worldliness needs to be understood as contained within a text, in the way it operates and relates to other texts, to the larger universe of literature. Wolfgang Iser, for example, points out that “texts must already contain certain conditions of actualization that will allow their meaning to be assembled in the responsive mind of the recipient.”6 In the model developed by reception aesthetics, fictional texts stand in a dynamic relationship with their readers: they acquire meaning only in the process of being read, while at

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the same time, they carry in themselves the very conditions that structure their reading. Yet neither producers nor consumers of literary texts exist in a vacuum, in empty space. In actual practice, they move to and fro in the wide spectrum of texts available to them, in chaotic and often frenzied motion, in the process obscuring any externally imposed boundaries—boundaries between texts just as those between national literatures. Literary works, consequently, never exist in isolation, but always in relation to other works, relations that are actualized by both their producers and consumers.7 Writers and readers alike respond to the textual universe by way of reference and allusion, fleeting association and (un)conscious grouping. Worldliness, hence, is wrought into texts by authors and by their audience, where it constitutes a node pointing outward toward the (literary) world at large. Literature, in other words, establishes its own being-in-the-world, through the myriad processes of transculturation.8 Even the dynamic interplay of the inner and the outer, however, does not exhaust the possibilities of worldliness of a text or body of texts. On a third level, we can finally ask how literary texts create their own image and understanding of the world, a literary world, as it were. Such an understanding of world can be diegetic, as proposed by Eric Hayot.9 Alternatively, it can be extradiegetic, referring then to the world (or image of the world) created by a multiplicity of texts, by a body of literary works, a canon. In either case, the literary world provides structuring principles, the rules that define the continents and regions of its world, and—by extension—the hierarchies of meaning that point beyond the world of literature to the world at large. A world literature perspective, in sum, can operate on at least three distinct but interrelated and mutually complementary levels.

Taken together, they provide a vantage point to reevaluate both larger literary systems and individual texts. It is this perspective, outlined here in the briefest of terms, that I will be developing in the chapters of this book.

The 1950s offer an especially fertile ground to inquire into the meanings of worldliness and to test the ability of a world literary perspective to throw new light onto both the literary macrocosm and its manifold microcosms. The emerging Cold War world in all its selfcontradictoriness challenges commonsensical definitions of the world: two blocs—political, economic, ideological, cultural, literary—each a

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world that understands itself as the world. A dual universalism, as it were, produced by the Cold War constellation, which, ultimately, itself becomes a universal framework. Paradoxically, this framework is both Manichean and monologic, singular and dualistic at the same time.

In this schizophrenic world, defined by “a war of ideology and a fight unto the death,”10 the worldliness of cultural production and consumption appears in sharpened relief, seen as through a prism. The political and diplomatic structures facilitated, even encouraged, circulation on a massive scale, creating not one, but two, competing world literatures.

Writers and readers alike—and not least the texts themselves—found themselves hurled into this transnational space, where new literary constellations emerged that inscribed themselves into practices of reading and writing. And cultural production itself, without fail, came to shape the contours of the emerging worldview(s), literary and other wise.

Chinese socialist literature, and in par ticular the rich body of texts written in the 1940s and 1950s, has followed a less than straightforward trajectory of reception, which has been replicated in close turn by criticism: celebrated in the 1950s, critiqued and selectively rewritten in the early 1960s, vilified during the Cultural Revolution, revived briefly in the post-Mao era, forgotten during the 1980s, dug up during a nostalgic 1990s, exploited by crass commercialism in the twenty-fi rst century. Renewed interest, both popular and critical, in major works of the period dates to the 1990s, with the rise of the “red classics,” a shorthand for a dozen or so full-length novels that were reprinted and marketed by state-owned publishers. The origins of the term “red classics” (hongse jingdian ㋙㡆㍧‫ )݌‬remain somewhat uncertain, but are most likely traceable to the energetic marketing efforts of publishers like Renmin wenxue chubanshe Ҏ⇥᭛ᅌߎ⠜⼒ or Huashan wenyi chubanshe 㢅ቅ᭛㮱ߎ⠜⼒, which started selling bundles of these “canonical works” in the mid-1990s.11 At around the same time, scholars in mainland China and in overseas journals such as Jintian Ҟ໽ (Today) and Ershiyi shiji ѠकϔϪ㋔ (Twenty-First Century) turned critical attention to a similar body of works.12 In the new millennium, cashrich Chinese multimedia corporations in search for politically as well as commercially feasible entertainment drew on the alleged canonicity of these works for a constant stream of films, multiepisode TV dramas,

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and even video games. In the expanding Chinese university system, meanwhile, the socialist texts from the 1950s became a popular subject for MA and PhD theses, fueling a new wave of research.

The selective revival of Chinese socialist literature since 1989 carries the imprint of national and transnational trends. For one, the gung-ho commercialism of the 1990s—decreed by the Party as a means of compensation for the feverish and freewheeling climate of the 1980s that had come to an abrupt halt in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989—fostered a conservative turn that allowed the reemergence of literary works from China’s early socialist period. At the same time, a rising tide of nationalism, part grassroots and part officially sponsored, structured the reading of these texts. Tales of class struggle and land reform thus were refocused, through the lens of patriotism, into images of national pride. The end of the Cold War, finally, had removed the larger intellectual framework, the Manichean world in which the young PRC had to choose sides. The erstwhile transnational context, with its allegories of solidarity and intertextual references, collapsed into monistic nationalism; texts that had functioned as variations on transnational themes were now read as national histories of distinction and achievement. The Soviet Union disintegrated not just as a global political entity but also as an intellectual frame of reference for Chinese socialist literature. And the same mix of domestic and geopolitical transformations can be felt in critical discourses on this literature.

Worldliness has collapsed in scholarly engagement with Chinese literature from the 1940s and 1950s, in a striking inward turn. Titles such as The Russian Hero in Modern Chinese Fiction, common from the 1960s to the 1980s, have given way to Milestones on a Golden Road: Writing for Chinese Socialism, 1945–80.13 Richard King’s insightful longue durée study of the evolution of the main themes in Chinese socialist fiction is by no means blind to Soviet influences, and indeed discusses the impact of socialist realism on impor tant writers. Yet it is striking how it is “Chinese socialism” that is the goal of writing, or so the title suggests—in fact, how Deng Xiaoping’s notion of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” has not just gained acceptance beyond its place of origin but is applied retroactively, here to literature from as early as 1945.

Where the Soviet Union once overdetermined Chinese literary studies—

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which often applied models developed in the study of Russian literature to the Chinese, as in Ng’s book—the former has all but disappeared today, as a critical paradigm (for good?) and as a major historical condition in the making of Chinese socialist literature.14 More recently, interest in the 1950s as a crucial period in modern Chinese literary history has resurged from another direction, aiming to recover, in an archaeological manner, modern voices and lyrical traditions that had been long submerged, drowned out by the epic chorus of socialist writing. In Modernity with a Cold War Face: Reimagining the Nation in Chinese Literature Across the 1949 Divide, Xiaojue Wang traces the fate of some of modern China’s greatest stylists, authors such as Shen Congwen, Eileen Chang, and Ding Ling.15 Wang’s nuanced study demonstrates how writers—in socialist China as well as in postcolonial Taiwan and colonial Hong Kong—transformed the modern heritage of the Republican era, searching for a new language to express concerns rooted in the wide-open, worldly literary culture before 1949. Following a different intellectual pathway, David Wang aims to restore “the lyrical in epic time” to its rightful place in literary history, pointing out that the midcentury cataclysms and revolutions “bring into view the extraordinary work of Chinese lyricism at its most intense.”16 Far from being displaced and expelled from the brave new world of socialist China, the lyrical—itself a notion containing both traditional and cosmopolitan layers of meaning, as Wang points out—assumed new forms and shapes, providing inspiration to writers in the PRC (just as in Hong Kong and Taiwan).

Taken together, these and other revisionist studies provide a muchneeded corrective that enriches our understanding of the 1950s, first by focusing attention on some of the fi nest and most sophisticated writing of the period, which had been swept aside by the maelstrom of revolution, and second by highlighting continuities and connections that tie the socialist period more closely than ever before to an earlier, openly acknowledged period of cosmopolitanism.17 Timely and important as these interventions are, they fail to address the elephant in the room. Shen Congwen and Eileen Chang, and other writers of their generation, were marginal figures in the PRC literary world. They were marginalized, not because of their cosmopolitanism, but because they professed to the wrong cosmopolitanism.18 If cosmopolitanism, as these

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studies show, was carried over into the socialist period, can it be limited to those nonsocialist writers? Can the “divide” that wasn’t, 1949, block out and seal off the world for most, when it is shown allowing for continuity in some? Can we limit our critical purview to the margins, without addressing the very same questions to those works that occupied front and center of the stage, that stood in the limelight of literary life in the PRC? These are some of the central concerns that the study of Chinese socialist literature must address. Can we assume, a priori, the insularity and lack of worldliness of the many, the mainstream socialist authors and their works, the literature of the 1950s? Or, to put it differently: can there be such a thing as a socialist cosmopolitanism?

COSMOPOLITANISM: SOCIALIST THINKING AND FEELING BEYOND THE NATION China in the 1950s was outward looking, engaged with the world beyond its borders through multiple channels and on manifold levels. In the chapters that follow, I will scrutinize the various modes of worldliness that defined Chinese socialist literary life. The cultural formations that emerged in tandem with the new state were not just internationalist in nature—built on cooperation and solidarity, that is, all the while accepting “differences of polity as well as culture.”19 Their aims in fact went much further. That is because, first of all, both the producers and the consumers of the new pansocialist literatures were steeped in the cosmopolitanism of the prewar era, in centers of cultural production such as Berlin, or Budapest, or Shanghai. They might have come to oppose that cosmopolitanism, of the decadent bourgeoisie in the European salons and the foreign concessions of Asia, but they did not reject cosmopolitanism per se. They subscribed to the same concerns and aims, to the notion of a shared destiny, to expectations of a common future. Second, and more important, the claims of this new culture were universal: Once space turned into time, the Other (the West, capitalism) became the past, both their own past, now left behind, and that of global history. Socialism, in turn, became present as much as future. Not just the future, but the only future. And socialist literature

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became the literature of the future, shared by all forward-looking people.20 Finally, this new, common culture understood itself and was to be understood in transnational terms, locating its framework of reference explicitly outside and beyond the nation-state of old. It could not but gesture toward the par ticular and the universal at the same time. Any socialist literature, hence, positioned itself within the cosmopolitan space of cultural production and consumption.

Socialist writers, ever since Marx, have been among the most vociferous critics of cosmopolitanism. The Kantian Weltbürger was too closely associated with the bourgeoisie and Enlightenment ideas of humanism,21 and, by implication, with the global spread of capitalism and the rise of transnational modes of production.22 Socialist critics have routinely (and most notoriously so under Stalin) castigated a sinful “rootless cosmopolitanism,” all the while boasting their own “internationalism.”23 Yet as a matter of fact, Katerina Clark notes, internationalism and cosmopolitanism were mutually imbricated in the Soviet Union of the 1930s (as was nationalism).24 Both party leadership and rank-and-file “cultural workers” (as the intelligentsia had been rechristened) effortlessly combined an internationalist ideology with cosmopolitan practices in their interactions with cultural production from across the world. Clark’s observation—which is easily supported by similar cases—highlights the need for nuance.25 Notably, cosmopolitanism is not an ideology. It is a set of attitudes and practices, and cultural practices in par ticular.26 Cosmopolitanism, as a critical paradigm, has undergone a renaissance, triggered not least by the ongoing project of making sense of the post– Cold War world, with its globalized economy and rapid integration of information flows, but also resurgent forms of nationalism.27 This newer conceptual approach builds on a critique of the Kantian humanist universalism and its Eurocentrism and sees transnational experiences and attitudes as particularistic rather than universal, and exclusive rather than inclusive, as situated and located in concrete contexts.28 This critical engagement with the cosmopolitical tradition has freed up the notion of cosmopolitanism for new interpretations and innovative approaches, leading to discoveries of cosmopolitanism in unlikely times and places.29 Sheldon Pollock and his collaborators thus

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reject the universalistic claims of a monadic cosmopolitanism, and instead call for conceptual openness: “Cosmopolitanism must give way to the plurality of modes and histories—not necessarily shared in degree or in concept regionally, nationally, or internationally—that comprise cosmopolitan practice and history. We propose therefore that cosmopolitanism be considered in the plural, as cosmopolitanisms.”30 Cosmopolitan visions can thus be identified in geograph ical and historical contexts far beyond post-Enlightenment Eu rope or European-inspired settings such as Republican China.

Based on these assumptions, for instance, Pollock proposes an alternative definition, highlighting “unbounded spatiotemporal circulation and normativity in literary and intellectual practice that sought to ensure that circulation” as central features of cosmopolitanism. 31 Pollock explores what he calls the “Sanskrit cosmopolis,” a supraregional formation underwritten by a cultural and political order defined in Sanskrit. The “language of the gods,” he argues, had entered the “world of men” early in the first millennium a.d., and become a cosmopolitan medium of political and intellectual discourse in a region stretching from present-day Afghanistan and Pakistan through the Indian subcontinent to mainland and maritime Southeast Asia. Before giving way to a range of local, vernacular languages by ca. a.d. 1500, Sanskrit allowed for the spread of a unique understanding of culture and power even without a united, imperial polity as the driving force.32 Building on Pollock and other recent reflections on cosmopolitan formations outside of Eu rope and the Enlightenment context, Ronit Ricci examines the emergence of what she calls an “Arabic cosmopolis” in much of South and Southeast Asia since ca. a.d. 1500. Ricci traces the rise of Arabic in “a translocal Islamic sphere constituted and defined by language, literature, and religion.”33 In her study, she shows that rather than remaining a stable and immutable code, Arabic was incorporated into the local cultural idiom, and consequently served both local and translocal needs, providing identity while retaining its ability to function as a bridge in multidirectional cultural interactions.

Exploring the possibility of cosmopolitan practices in a socialist nation, finally, Katerina Clark shows how the Stalinist Soviet Union underwent a “cultural turn” in 1931–1932 and greatly expanded both the

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availability of foreign culture in Russia and the Soviet Union’s contacts with the outside world. In pursuit of national greatness, Stalin aspired to prove the superiority of Soviet civilization by turning Moscow into a cosmopolitan hub where leftist intellectuals from all over Europe met and converged. Paradoxically, the Soviet Union became more open just as it became a closed society.34 Similar observations can be made for the young PRC. The focus on cosmopolitan practices, and especially practices of cultural production and cultural consumption, provides a conceptual starting point for the reevaluation of Chinese socialist literature.

Chinese writers and readers in the 1950s had a cosmopolitan tradition to build on. In his study of the encounter of Western and Chinese theater from the May Fourth period to the Cultural Revolution, Joseph Levenson traces the multiple connections between the cultural radicalism of the 1920s and the first decade of Chinese Communist Party rule. “Communist cosmopolitanism,” as he calls it, inherited the sensitivities of the earlier generation, trying to redefine the relationship between nation and world, to reclaim a cosmopolitan outlook that had collapsed together with the imperial ideology of Confucianism. Chinese writers thus helped to launch a revolution, “against the world to join the world, against their past to keep it theirs, but past.”35 After the breakdown of the Confucian world order, originally a cosmopolitan worldview that had been reduced, by the early twentieth century, to a national ideology, Chinese intellectuals turned to cosmopolitan sources of inspiration to regain a world outlook of universal scope and dimensions, a project that remained very much in progress in the 1950s.36 It is this cosmopolitanism, so Levenson contends, that provided the paradigmatic framework for modern Chinese culture from the 1920s to the Cultural Revolution, when it finally broke down, and the erstwhile “Communist cosmopolitans” were denounced as “bourgeois cosmopolitans.” Socialist Chinese culture of the 1950s thus did not so much displace the cosmopolitanism of the Republican period, as reorienting and redefining it. Transnational cultural production in the PRC appropriated this heritage and consequently created a new brand of cosmopolitanism—what I call “socialist cosmopolitanism.”

Socialist cosmopolitanism as a concept characterizes the patterns of cultural production and consumption examined in this book. It

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refers to a set of attitudes and practices that appreciates a shared yet diverse socialist culture and promotes transnational circulation across the socialist world. It is practiced by both literary producers and consumers, by writers and readers alike, and it permeates Chinese literary texts of the 1950s.

Socialist cosmopolitanism perpetuates an earlier cosmopolitan tradition, but distinguishes itself from other cosmopolitan formations by three central features: the valorization of the collective, which replaces the individual as the agent of cosmopolitan cultural practice, and which is ultimately represented by the socialist state; the acknowledgment of the role of the national within the transnational; and fi nally an emancipatory ideal that establishes cosmopolitanism as a subversive force that aims to change the existing world order, empowering groups of subalterns that were hitherto shut out of the cosmopolitan celebration of the world, but also whole regions on the periphery of this world order. These features that defi ne what is “socialist” about socialist cosmopolitanism are not rooted in an unchanging Marxist canon, but rather in the political and cultural practices of the socialist states, and are thus dynamic themselves. While socialist cosmopolitanism was normative in that it served the aims of the party-states, it remained open-ended and provided the producers—and to some degree, the consumers—of socialist culture with significant amounts of leeway in shaping and defining the outlook of the evolving cosmopolitan project.

The individual occupies a central position in formulations of cosmopolitanism ever since Kant’s Weltbürger. Socialist thinkers never embraced this celebration of individual agency. The “new man” that socialist regimes everywhere, from the Soviet Union to China to Cuba, set out to shape was by definition part of a larger collective, his class, and by extension the socialist society as a whole.37 In actual cultural practice, admittedly, the collective never replaced individual writers, artists, and performers as the principal agents of creative labor. The elevation of the collective, however, justified the increasing role in the field of cultural production of the collective’s self-appointed representative—the socialist state.38 This power shift toward the partystate was felt acutely in the domain of literary production and circulation. After the founding of the PRC, the government became an

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impor tant actor in its own right, setting the parameters of transnational cultural practice through a centralized institutional framework and through interventions into the politics of textual production.39 The nation-state presents an impor tant problem for theories of cosmopolitanism, and classical formulations in par ticular show contempt for nationalism and the political order of the nation. Cosmopolitanism is in fact celebrated as a liberating force that frees the individual “citizen of the world” from the shackles of a narrow and narrow-minded nation-state. The reconciliation of the transnational and the national, hence, is one of the main characteristics of socialist cosmopolitanism, or at least a professed goal. In actual practice, a tension between the nation and the transnational remains detectable on both the institutional and the textual levels of socialist cosmopolitanism—which is not least a result of the empowerment of the party-state as the privileged agent of the collective will. The problem of the state had been addressed by Stalin, in his Problems of Leninism (1926), and by Lenin, in The State and Revolution (1918). Lenin had paved the way by arguing for the continued existence of the state after the revolution, as an instrument of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Stalin, borrowing liberally from Bukharin, promoted the theory of socialism in one country, which established the Soviet Union as a vanguard nation within the international Communist movement. Taken together, the formulations of Lenin and Stalin confirmed the socialist nation as a powerful actor and thus set a precedent that was embraced by nationalist leaders of other socialist parties—most notably Mao— who could thus claim autonomy for their own party-states within the larger revolutionary process.40 This accommodation of the national and the transnational (and the tensions produced thereby) became a central aspect of socialist cosmopolitanism.

A final characteristic of socialist cosmopolitanism is a pronounced egalitarianism that counters the perceived elitism of cosmopolitanism in its classical formulations and aims to turn the cosmopolitan into an empowering force. The globe-trotting elites with their humanist ideals were not only ideologically suspect but also unacceptable for the exclusivity of their actual cosmopolitan practice. To broaden access to foreign literature and culture and participation in the myriad modes of cultural exchange beyond the moneyed classes was an explicit aim of

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socialist cosmopolitanism, or at least an ideal. The structural organization of cultural production and consumption in the PRC and other socialist states was designed to broaden the audience and, as far as possible, the agents of cultural practice across socialist China’s borders.

Ultimately, socialist cosmopolitanism gives expression to an emancipatory project of an even higher order: an ambition to topple the hegemonic structures of global culture. To achieve its goal of empowering the disadvantaged, the cosmopolitan project cannot stop at the borders of the nation-state, but must redraw the literary world map. It must elevate the status of whole regions on the periphery of the transnational cultural landscape—zones kept in a state of dependence from the centers of “world literature”—and reset the “Greenwich meridian of literature.” 41 Foreign cultural formations, according to this logic, can be appreciated only insofar as they are free from oppressive motives.42 The socialist world welcomes literature and art from friendly socialist nations (as well as oppressed third world peoples), on an equal basis, but rejects cultural production from hostile imperialist nations.43 The endeavor to reorder the geography of transnational culture, to redefine the centers and the margins of world literature, lies at the core of socialist cosmopolitanism, and lends it an activist bent, a counterhegemonic agenda that reverberates in the modes of literary circulation in the socialist world. Socialist literature, thus, is always already world literature.

THE LITERARY UNIVERSE: CONSTELLATIONS AND PERSPECTIVES To observe socialist cosmopolitanism in action and understand how it has shaped Chinese literature, this book explores the dynamics of the Chinese literary universe. The universe, on the one hand, indicates the world, the multiple modes of worldliness in Chinese literary practice in the 1940s and 1950s. On the other, it highlights the claims to universality that inhabit both cosmo-politanism in general and its socialist variety. The notion of the literary universe, as I am proposing it here, refers to the totality of literary texts, their multiple interactions, and the ways they relate to each other. I defi ne the literary universe in

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distinction especially from Bourdieu’s model of the literary field. This model is helpful, as it widens the analytical focus, bringing into purview writers, readers, editors, and critics, among others—the whole lineup of agents that partake in the making of literary meaning. What gets lost in the course of an overwhelmingly sociological analysis, however, is the centrality of the literary text: the text’s narrative economy, its epic or lyrical appeal, its poetic sensibility. With the focus on the literary universe, I aim to decenter the writer without removing him or her from the analysis and to acknowledge the multiple agents involved in literary production and consumption, all the while shifting the focus of analysis back to literary works themselves, to the texts and their aesthetic dimension, as well as their dynamic interaction and relationship with each other.

The literary universe, thus, contains a theoretically infinite number of texts. As a matter of fact, though, not all texts are equally visible and observable at the same time. Rather, the literary universe is always a limited one, always a “known” or “visible” universe. What is visible, and what is not, depends on the observer. The observers of the literary universe—writers and readers alike, as well as editors, publishers, critics, and others—are thus essential in the generation of literary meaning.

In par ticu lar, they define the relations between different texts.

The latter—the texts populating the literary universe—do not appear evenly distributed in space, but rather as clusters and constellations of varying size and shape. It is the observer who images these constellations from his or her par ticular point of view, who associates some texts with others, placing them in perspective and, in the process, helping to define the texts themselves. This is because in actual practice, literary texts are never read independently, in isolation, but rather through, or on the basis of, or in association with other literary works. Writers create literary texts on the background of their own history of reading (i.e., roaming the literary universe), in dialogue with other writers—or readers, or critics, or Communist Party superiors. In other words, they situate their own work, explicitly or implicitly, within the existing literary universe, within clusters of texts that generate meaning.44 Readers, on the other hand, approach any single literary work on the basis of their own reading experience, and thus insert it into an existing—subjective, imagined—textual cluster or constellation.

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Both perspectives are equally valid, and both cultural production and consumption will therefore serve as points of entry to the Chinese literary universe in the chapters to follow.

The understanding of the literary universe outlined here has two practical consequences. First, the literary universe, in the abstract, can neither be imagined nor be defined; what can be defined is always a par ticular universe, imagined as clusters of texts by certain groups of observers—for instance, the Chinese socialist literary universe, as it appears to readers and writers in socialist China. Second, such a “known universe” contains any kind of literary texts accessible to its observers (limited only by language competence or, to introduce another constraint, political censorship). And this may include, of course, translations of foreign texts. The latter have originated in faraway places, in remote regions of the universe, but have been transposed into the visible universe of another language.45 The literary universe, for all practical purposes, is oblivious to the “original” language of a literary work.

The reader of a science fiction novel, for instance, will not care if he or she is reading an “original” or a translation, as long as the work successfully deploys the conventions of the genre and allows itself to be linked with other, similar texts. All texts within the literary universe are thus subject to the same laws of gravity, to the same dynamics. This observation has methodological implications for the present book, and for the study of literature in general: the effort to reconstruct the literary universe from a given perspective effectively requires us to move back and forth between literary texts from different linguistic or cultural backgrounds and acknowledge translated texts as fully valid members and component parts of a given literary universe.46 The literary universe thus provides us with a model that allows us to reconstruct the literary imagination of distinct, historical places and times. It prioritizes literary texts and their aesthetic dimension over sociology and context. It privileges neither authors nor readers, but rather allows us to approach the literary universe from the perspectives of both cultural production and cultural consumption. And it transcends the limitations of a nation- or national language–centered approach by acknowledging both “original” and translated texts as full-fledged inhabitants of the literary world, thus allowing for a wide-ranging inquiry that, at the same time, maintains a clearly

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Introduction

defined historical perspective. It is with this model in mind that I will approach the Chinese literary universe in the years immediately before and after the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Viewed through the lens of socialist cosmopolitanism—which will serve me alternately as a telescope and as a microscope—I aim to provide a thoroughly transnational reading that recovers the worldliness of Chinese socialist literature by situating literary production and consumption in socialist China within its transnational context. * * * Wang Meng’s nostalgic journey to Moscow, recounted at the onset of this chapter, was designed to recover traces of the worldliness that had shaped the Chinese literary universe of the 1950s and his own, personal universe. The world, for Wang Meng and his peers, had figured on three levels, in three different yet interrelated dimensions: in terms of circulation and cultural exchange, through which Chinese readers and writers were exposed to transnational socialist culture, and were themselves in turn participating in a pansocialist cultural domain; as worldliness contained in literary texts themselves, and through which these texts interacted with other works in the literary universe; and, finally, as the imaginary map of the world at large that emerged from the engagement with transnational literature and culture—China’s literary world. Put differently, cosmopolitan practice in socialist China needs to be understood simultaneously in terms of China in the world, China and the world, and finally China’s world.

It is this threefold understanding of worldliness that informs the organization of this book. Chapter 1 aims to unearth the structures of cultural cooperation and exchange that enabled literary circulation across transnational borders in the socialist bloc, and that made possible the flow of literary texts from the Soviet Union and the socialist nations of Eastern Eu rope and East Asia into China, and vice versa.

Chapters 2 through 5 examine the dynamics of the Chinese socialist literary universe, showing how a world literary perspective reshapes our understanding of Chinese cultural production and cultural consumption in the 1940s and 1950s. I will first turn to the problem of canonicity and the mechanics of socialist realism. Chapter 2 discusses

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a “classic” land reform novel in the context of agricultural fiction from across the socialist world. Chapter 3 turns to a little-known example of Chinese industrial fiction and demonstrates the role of transnational factors in the making and unmaking of a Chinese genre. Chapters 4 and 5 shift focus to modes of literary writing usually—but unjustly— beyond the purview of canon-driven scholarly inquiry. As my discussion shows, however, the same dynamics apply to those regions of the literary universe often considered popular or middle-brow and that have been overlooked in most studies of Chinese socialist literature.

Chapter 4 provides a transnational reading of Chinese socialist science fiction of the 1950s. In Chapter 5, I scrutinize children’s literature in the PRC, demonstrating, on the one hand, how fiction for children and young readers from the socialist world provides new meaning to Chinese children’s literature and, on the other, how the transnational was domesticated in the PRC. Throughout these four chapters, I will move between reader-centric and writer-centric perspectives, illuminating the creative interplay of different positions in the making of fictional constellations on the literary night sky. Chapter 6, finally, steps back to address the fi nal of the three dimensions of literary worldliness. Through a close reading of the journal Yiwen 䅃᭛ (Translations), I reconstruct the worldview, the understanding of the world at large, its geographic components and complex power dynamics, that emerges from the pages of the PRC’s premier journal of translated literature—in other words, the literary world of socialist China.