Soviet Socialist Realism as a Manual of Practice

Abstract

Since the days of Thucydides, the Western mind was trained in the distinction between two “ways of talking”: the mythical/fictional, in which (to give an example closer to our time) Sherlock Holmes lived in Baker Street, and the historical/truthful, in which he did not exist.¹ In traditional China, the cultural prestige of history (shi) was always above that of fiction (wen), but the borders between these two “ways of talking” were far from clear. Comparing Thucydides (460-400 BC) with the Qing-dynasty historian Zhang Xuecheng (1738–1801), Anthony Yu concluded that Zhang lacked the Greek’s understanding of the inevitable subjectivity in the writing of history, hence of the gap between the word and the event. Two millennia later, Zhang saw as “events” what were manifestly “words”: ancient Chinese accounts of the Yellow Emperor were no more reliable than the Greek myths from which Thucydides wished to distinguish his own writing.