The Agents of Soviet Literature

Abstract

The new Soviet fiction was not to be found in the library of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) in Peking, or the Oriental Library of the Commercial Press in Shanghai, where readers such as Zheng Zhenduo borrowed the books of Russian classics and prerevolutionary modernists in English translation in the 1920s. Before 1929, little of it (with the exception of works by Maxim Gorky) would have been available in English at all. This literature could not be profitably sought in the foreign-language bookstores in Shanghai, or—as the same Zheng Zhenduo recommended to worldly Chinese fans of Artsybashev’s Sanin in 1924—ordered via those bookstores from publishers in London and New York. To gain access to the first major works of Soviet literature as they began to appear in the 1920s, one could turn (as Lu Xun did) to Japanese translations, which, however, were also limited in scope and could not catch up with the rapid developments in the Soviet literary scene. To be able to follow these, one needed to know at least some Russian and (replicating the feat of Tang-dynasty translators of Buddhist sutras, famed for the arduous pilgrimages they undertook to find and bring the sacred texts from India to China) to travel to the Soviet Union.