Xiao San, Intermediary between Soviet Literature and Leftist Chinese Literature

Abstract

AbstractThis article engages the issue of whether communist internationalist culture in Asia evolved vertically, from directives, models, and so on, emanating from Soviet officialdom or the Comintern in particular, or whether it was generated horizontally, through laterally articulated networks and individual contacts. It addresses this question by looking at the case of Emi Siao (Xiao San), a Chinese communist poet and political activist whose career took him to France, Germany, Soviet Russia, and ultimately back to China during the Sino‐Japanese War, and who changed both wives and national party memberships as he moved from country to country. Throughout his life and travels Xiao developed and adhered to a firm conception of what a socialist internationalist literature should be and what it should accomplish, a conception shaped by his close association with revolutionary Russian culture and his efforts to translate that culture to his compatriots. To what degree Xiao succeeded can be measured in part by how well they were reflected in Mao’s Theses on Literature, which were promulgated in 1942 and which became canonical for communist China. Did these theses follow the tenets of Soviet Socialist Realism (in other words, were they derived vertically)? Or did they present a distinctive and more nationally inflected, and thus horizontally generated, version of socialist literature?