Proletarian Movement Research Articles

Performing The Politics of Translation in Modern Japan: Staging The Resistance by Aragorn Quinn

Reviewed by: Performing The Politics of Translation in Modern Japan: Staging The Resistance by Aragorn Quinn David Jortner PERFORMING THE POLITICS OF TRANSLATION IN MODERN JAPAN: STAGING THE RESISTANCE. By Aragorn Quinn. London and New York: Routledge, 2020. 169 pp. Hardcover, $128.00; paperback, $39.16. "Political theatre" is a term loaded with a variety of meanings. In the history of Japanese theatre, especially in the Meiji and Taishō eras, political theatre is often used in conversations about the Jiyū Gekijō (Free Theatre, 1909–1919) and the Tsukiji Shōgekijō (Tsukiji Little Theatre, 1924–1928) as well as the work of playwrights and artists such [End Page 421] as Hijikata Tatsumi and Kubo Sakae. Inherent in this discussion is the connection between political, modern, and "Western;" for many of these artists modernity was inimically linked to political activism and new forms of theatre. As Aragorn Quinn aptly demonstrates in his work Performing the Politics of Translation in Modern Japan, during the early Meiji Restoration era performance and memory was deeply connected with explorations of term such as liberty (jiyū) and revolution (kakumei). The text demonstrates how the engagement of these words and the world of performance extends from the Restoration through the Proletarian Theatre movement and into the postwar world. With this book Quinn has done a deep dive into the intersections between performance, politics, and language. In doing so, he has created an important resource for scholars of Japanese and political theatre. Quinn's book is divided into 5 chapters, but it is better seen as an exploration of three different periods in Japanese theatre: The Freedom and People's Rights Movement, the Proletarian Movement, and the Occupation/postwar period. What connects all of these periods in Quinn's argument is the connection between their performances and the differing ideas (and translations) of political/cultural terms such as "liberty" and "revolution." The first chapter looks at how "liberty" was translated in the early Meiji period and how that manifested itself through productions of William Shakespeare's plays and the performances of Kawakami Otojirō. One of the highlights in this chapter is the translation, publication, and production histories of works such as Tsubouchi Shōyō's The Amazing Story of Caesar: The Legacy of the Sharpness of Liberty's Sword (Jiyū no tachi nagori no kireaji: Shiizaru kidan), his translation of Julius Caesar, as well as Kawashima Keizō's The Rise and Fall of Rome (Rōma seisuikan), his translation of the same play. This chapter also includes how these translations were connected with the Association for Theatre Reform (Engeki kairyō kai). In addition, Quinn illustrates how this terminology was used by Kawakami Otojirō and by other political theatre (shōshi shibai) performances. The second chapter explores plays of the Meiji Restoration. One of the more interesting elements of this chapter is a reclamation of Sasaki Takamaru's place in theatre history. Sasaki was involved with the Forerunner Theater (Seunkuza) as well as the Avant-Garde Theater (Zen'eiza). Much of the chapter is devoted to an analysis of his play The Secret Account of Tsukuba (Tsukuba hiroku). One of the delights of Quinn's text is his inclusion of segments of the play in both Japanese and in his translation; one wishes for a complete translation of the play. Quinn's analysis of Sasaki gives an interesting reading as to why the Proletarian Theatre movement failed to foment revolution and can prove as an interesting model for other leftist writers of this period. [End Page 422] Chapter Three looks at plays which take the attempted assassination of Itagaki Taisuke in 1882 as their primary subject matter. For Quinn, "these plays sit at important transitions in performance conventions in modern Japanese theater and are uniquely situated to highlight the inter-relationship of … seemingly disparate performance modes" (p. 81), such as kyūgeki (old theatre), sōshi, and shingeki (new theatre). In this chapter Quinn raises many interesting possible readings of leftist theatre while looking at the texts of one night pickle plays (ichiyazuke) by Kawakami, Sudō Sadanori, and Sasaki. This chapter argues for several interesting ideas about expanding Japanese theatre scholarship—he argues for a "long nineteenth century" approach to...

Maoist Miniatures: The Proletarian Everyday, Visual Remediation, and the Politics of Revolutionary Form

Across an extended historical arc, Chinese writers and theorists were invested in new, short literary forms that would be able to intervene in the reorganization of social relations. These forms occurred under a range of names during the twentieth century—the wall story 墙头小说, the short short story 小小说, and the microstory 微型小说—but consistently marked a series of avant-garde experiments concerned with locating an alternative to the long-form novel. This article examines this history from its emergence amid the international proletarian movement of the 1930s, through the Great Leap Forward, and on to the early reform period, and does so through the theoretical lens of the everyday 日常生活 and the relation between literary texts and visual media. It demonstrates how the deployment of these forms shifted from an attempt to remake everyday life to their assimilation to a discourse of modernization in the reform period.

Hayama Yoshiki’s “The Prostitute” in Taiwanese and Manchukuo Proletarian Literature

In the 1920s and 1930s, the Japanese proletarian literary movement had an enormous impact on East Asian writers, who often translated and adapted Japanese tales. Amongst them, Hayama Yoshiki’s 1925 short story “Inbaifu” (The Prostitute) enjoyed great popularity. This paper focuses on the Taiwanese writer Lang-shi-sheng’s adaptation of “Inbaifu”, the 1935 “Yami” (Darkness), and Manchukuo writer Yuan Xi’s adaptation of the same Japanese source text, the 1938 short story “Shi tian” (Ten Days). By comparing the Taiwanese and Manchukuo stories, this paper suggests that both versions of “Inbaifu” reflect the Japanese debate on proletarian literature that was fashionable in East Asia in the 1930s. However, by resetting the stories in Taiwan and Manchukuo, respectively, the authors created cultural products that defy borders and simple nationalist interpretations.

Ladies Aid as Labor History

AbstractIn the Arabic-speaking mahjar (diaspora), the plight of the working poor was the focus of women’s philanthropy. Scholarship on welfare relief in the interwar Syrian, Lebanese, and Palestinian diaspora currently situates it within a gendered politics of benevolence. This article reconsiders that frame and argues for a class-centered reassessment of “ladies aid” politics exploring the intersections of women’s relief with proletarian mutual aid strategies. Founded in 1917, the Syrian Ladies Aid Society (SLAS) of Boston provided food, shelter, education, and employment to Syrian workers. SLAS volunteers understood their efforts as mitigating the precarities imposed on Syrian workers by the global capitalist labor system. Theirs was both a women’s organization and a proletarian movement led by Syrian women. Drawing from SLAS records and the Syrian American press, the article centers Syrian American women within processes of working-class formation and concludes that labor history of the interwar mahjar requires focus on spaces of social reproduction beyond the factory floor.

The Japan Proletarian Writers’ League’s ‘Greatest Enemy’: Miyamoto Yuriko Denounces Hayashi Fusao’s Youth

ABSTRACT Writing in the early 1960s, literary critic Hirano Ken argued that writer Hayashi Fusao became the Japan Proletarian Writers’ League’s (Nihon Puroretaria Sakka Dōmei) ‘greatest enemy’, following his romantic interpretation of the Meiji Restoration in his historical novel Seinen (Youth). Hirano asserted that Hayashi questioned the Marxist interpretation of the Meiji Restoration, in hopes of challenging the leadership of the Writers’ League. Hirano maintains that this confrontation eventually led to the dissolution of the proletarian literature movement. Thus, here we first examine the initial criticism of Seinen by Kamei Katsuichirō and Tokunaga Sunao, followed by an analysis of the increasingly scathing condemnations of Hayashi’s historical novel by Kobayashi Takiji, Miyamoto Kenji, and finally a vitriolic and particularly mocking piece by Miyamoto Yuriko. Next, we review Hayashi’s response to this criticism, and end by considering appraisals of the confrontation: first, from a contemporary source in Marxist literary critic Aono Suekichi, and secondly, from Hirano Ken. Ultimately, this study hopes to underscore the contributing role of scorn and derision in intensifying the battle over the politics versus literature debate in the proletarian literature movement’s final days.

Русские писатели в чешской среде первой половины 1920-х гг.: периодика левого политического крыла (газета «Руде право»)

The paper examines perceptions of Russian literature in the first half of the 1920s by a Czech literary criticism of the left-wing political orientation, namely by Rudé Právo, newspaper of the communist party of Czechoslovakia. On the one hand, at this time, the Russian classics are being rethought in terms of their usefulness for the purposes of proletarian movement, up to discrediting individual authors (for example, F. M. Dostoevsky) and adjusting ideas of other writers to the communist ideology (L. N. Tolstoy). On the other hand, much attention of the editors is paid to the modern literature of post-revolutionary Russia, whose representatives are evaluated and selected for translation and review, provided they accept and praise the revolution (first of all, this is the poem The Twelve by A. A. Blok, poetry by V. V. Mayakovsky, prose by M. Gorky and V. G. Korolenko), whereas their work is assessed one-sidedly, exclusively in the ideological aspect. The first attempts of writing generalizing materials on the contemporary literary process (for example, Peasant revolutionary poetry by I. Weil) are being made. In general, Russian literature is viewed from an ideological standpoint, only with varying degrees of categoricality by individual critics. As the author reveals it was of great importance for the shaping of the ideological position and cultural program of the Czech communists, and compared with other literatures, its role is identified as leading.

The Muslim Woman Discourse in the Ukrainian Soviet Press of the 1920 -1930s

The article analyzes the Muslim woman discourse in the Ukrainian Soviet press of the 1920-1930s. It is the publications in the newspapers about the women of the Soviet Union East that are of significant interest in the study of the feminist movement history. The purpose of the research is to analyze newspaper texts of the Soviet period to deconstruct their propagandistic content and to characterize the real state of the Muslim woman. The merit of the Ukrainian journalists is that they called attention to the issues of women’s life in Central Asia, Caucasus, Transcaucasus, and Crimea of that time. The key aspects highlighted by the press are family abuse, judicial absence of rights, and illiteracy. The Ukrainian press of the 1920s stated a hard dependent state of the Muslim woman in the family and in the society in the pre-Revolution past, it announced the life enhancement for women in the Soviet present. In the 1930s, the press focused on the “emancipated” Muslim women. The issues of women’s everyday life, daily routine, and health lacked the attention of journalists. An ideological component in the publications about women of the Soviet Union was important. Communist propaganda stressed that women’s emancipation is a part of the international proletarian movement for social liberation. The woman was of no value as an independent personality, she was considered as a resource, which can be used to consolidate the Soviet regime in regions and to spread communist propaganda. The press of that time formed a stereotype about the woman of the East as a victim of gender-based discrimination, who was not able to overcome that independently, without the help of the Soviet authorities.

O movimento operário no interior paulista: uma análise das greves gerais de 1917 e 1919 em Piracicaba

A segunda década do século XX foi marcada por duas grandes greves gerais de operários, respectivamente nos anos 1917 e 1919. Os trabalhadores da cidade de São Paulo exerceram papel importante na história do movimento proletário desse período e foram os primeiros a cruzarem os braços na busca por profundas reformas sociais que melhorassem ou mesmo transformassem radicalmente as condições de vida da classe trabalhadora do país, influenciando militantes e operários em diferentes municípios do interior do estado e até mesmo em outras unidades federativas do Brasil. As paralisações, no entanto, ganharam contornos próprios em cada uma das cidades tomadas pela classe trabalhadora. As greves operárias de 1917 e 1919 em Piracicaba mantiveram semelhanças com os movimentos paredistas da capital paulista, mas também foram marcadas por peculiaridades que podem nos ajudar a compreender a complexa atuação dos trabalhadores nas pequenas e médias cidades brasileiras durante a Primeira República. Este artigo pretende, portanto, analisar esses dois importantes eventos no município, comparando-os com as mobilizações verificadas na capital, apontando as conexões e as singularidades regionais.

Rosa Luxemburg’s Concept of Spontaneity and Creativity in Proletarian Mass Movements—Theory and Practice

ABSTRACTIn her 1906 booklet, “The Mass Strike, the Political Party, and the Trade Unions,” Rosa Luxemburg described her basic concept of democracy and emphasized the importance of spontaneity in proletarian mass movements. According to Luxemburg, socialist party leaders should accept and support the spontaneity of the workers, as it would result in an increase in readiness for action and creativity on the part of the masses; it would also strengthen labor organizations. The strong connection between spontaneity and creativity in the proletarian mass movements is also found in other of Luxemburg’s works, such as “The Crisis of Social Democracy” (1915), her unfinished manuscript on “The Russian Revolution” (September/October 1918) and the “Spartacus Program” (December 1918). Analyzing the anti-war mass movements in Germany from 1916 until 1918, we can see that Luxemburg’s concept of the close connection between spontaneity and creativity became reality, especially during Germany’s successful November Revolution in 1918.

空白の「文学史」を読む : プロレタリア運動にみる性と階級のポリティクス

空白の「文学史」を読む : プロレタリア運動にみる性と階級のポリティクス

The Image of Chinese Culture in Travel Notes Published in the USSR in the 1920s and 1930s

This article considers the formation of the image of China and Chinese culture in travel notes published in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s. While analysing typical texts on China by Z. V. Richter, G. I. Serebryakova, A. Ivin, M. G. Andreev, N. K. Kostarev and Paul Vaillant-Couturier, the author considers different approaches of the writers to the Chinese culture which faced an encounter of the traditional lifestyle and modern trends in the context of a radical change in the zeitgeist in China in the first third of the 20 th century. It is discovered that the travellers had preferences in describing old customs, social issues under modernisation processes, the origin and the rapid development of progressive ideas and proletarian revolutionary movements in old China. The author reveals the dynamics of the construction of the image of China and Chinese culture in Soviet non-fiction of that period, which served the interests of Soviet official ideology. Based on the analysis, the author concludes that the image of Chinese culture in Soviet and foreign travel notes published in the USSR in the 1920s and 1930s was largely formulated for the purpose of propaganda of Soviet values and hence was politicised. Under the influence of this image, Soviet readers were supposed to form a good impression of the Chinese people, express sympathy to the Chinese labourers and moral support for the proletarian revolution in China. This kind of politicisation was also supposed to stimulate the rooting of the idea that it was the Soviet Union that was the cradle of great revolutions, the stronghold of the world proletarian movements and the springboard of the struggle against imperialism and capitalism.

Assembly Lines: Researching Radical Print Networks

ON 11 AUGUST 1931, THE RCMP led a coordinated raid on the Toronto headquarters of the Communist Party of Canada and the private homes of several of the party's key members, seizing large numbers of files, books, and other publications. Party leader Tim Buck was arrested under 98 of the Criminal for intention to carry out the act of sedition, and over the next few days related raids in both Ontario and British Columbia resulted in a series of further arrests, with eight men (including Buck) eventually brought to trial. (1) The mass of print seized was never used at trial. It remained in the hands of the Attorney-General of Ontario, (2) eventually entering the Public Archives of Canada (now Library and Archives Canada) through the ago's institutional fonds (Preliminary Inventory 1, 25). Within this seized material was a collection of pamphlets and periodicals, including Canadian publications and those obtained from radical organizations and other groups. The Canadian Labor Defense League (CLDL), a fledgling offshoot of the International Red Aid formed to support the legal defense of workers in Canadian courts, was certainly represented among these texts. Given the proximity of the group's headquarters to those of the Communist Party, as well as references to correspondence with its leading members, it is likely that the CLDL's publication, the Canadian Labor Defender, was found among the seized documents. In typical fashion, the Defender's first response to the raids and arrests was rough but thorough. Although the cover for the September 1931 issue of the magazine is a thrice-repeated linocut image of a man gripping a set of prison bars against a background of a massed crowd brandishing CLDL banners, nearly every page inside is given over to the story of the Communist leaders, including Buck's own account and responses from International Red groups in other countries (CLD 2.5: 5-6, 10). [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] By the time of the October issue's release, which bears a cover photomontage depicting the so-called Kingston Eight the magazine is dominated by an intense scrutiny of the case. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The images of the accused and the slogans accompanying them mark the swift solidification of the ways in which the radical left represented itself in the period following the Communist trial. Most significantly, a short article by R. Curtis entitled Section 98 of the Criminal Code (CLD 2.6: 10) formally introduces and explains the law that would become the primary focus of the Canadian Labor Defense League's publications and class organization as a whole in Canada for the next four years. The Canadian Labor Defender, as part of a network of pamphlets and periodicals circulating in Canada during the Depression years, is a fascinating and under-examined example of radical print. The dialogic connection between pamphlets as texts with their own formal and rhetorical patterns and the assemblage found in the pages of the Defender and other proletarian periodicals throws into relief the dense network of writers, artists, organizations, and labourers who worked to produce these forms of print and who hefted them as tools in an intensely focused agitational campaign. The Defender stands out as a location of intertextual and meta-textual critique on the role of pamphlet publishing in the campaign strategies of Canadian radical organizations in the 1930s. This essay will consider the Defender as a site for both bibliographic recuperation and network analysis of these groups, which together work to support a new critical assessment of the Canadian radical print produced alongside the periodical's run. I will be looking specifically at a set of reviews of co-circulating periodicals and pamphlets published in the Defender through 1932 and 1933, which lays bare the agitational concerns of the cldl and the proletarian movement suggested in its pages. Ultimately, the singular focus of the cldl on protesting and repealing 98 became the undoing of the print-based network it projects: repeal of the law prefigured the collapse of the organization and the expiration of the Defender. …

Tenko and Writing: The Case of Nakano Shigeharu

In 1934 Nakano Shigeharu (1902–79), a Marxist writer and key figure in the Japanese proletarian literature movement since the mid-1920s, renounced his ties with the Japan Communist Party by way of vowing not to participate in social movements, an act known in Japanese as tenko . It was a time when a large number of Marxists committed tenko under increasingly heavy state suppression of leftists. The most common English rendering of the term tenko is “ideological conversion.” While apt for many cases, this does not adequately describe Nakano’s case because he did not convert to an alternate ideological position. Through a close reading of two of his works, “Suzuki, Miyakoyama, Yasojima” (1935) and “The Novelist Who Cannot Write a Novel” (“Shosetsu no kakenu shosetsuka,” 1936), this article investigates the “position” Nakano turned “to” and the critical potency of his thinking and writing from there .

Agroecology and Radical Grassroots Movements' Evolving Moral Economies

I focus on the role of agroecology in rural proletarian social movements in this article. First, I highlight these movements' conception of agroecology as an important element of their political ideology. Second, I explore the value of agroecology in helping maintain the permanence of the peasantry. Third, I show that rural proletarian movements emphasize agroecology because it is key to attaining sovereignty. I draw upon the geographic lenses of territory, the production of space, and autonomous geographies in positing these arguments. Throughout the article, I draw upon a case study of the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement, one of the most vocal agroecological social movements, to illustrate these arguments.

Rosa Luxemburg's Critique of Lenin's Ultra Centralistic Party Concept and of the Bolshevik Revolution

After Rosa Luxemburg's manuscript from 1918 on the Russian Revolution was published in the very early days of 1922 there were—and have continued to be—many discussions on the differences between Luxemburg and Lenin. Luxemburg had a very different position on the character of a socialist proletarian movement and on the role of its leaders in comparison to Lenin and also in contrast to the bureaucrats of the old Social Democratic Party of Germany. A socialist organization should always place its emphasis on the proletarian masses. The kind of socialism and the route to achieve it should be decided by the proletariat rather than the leadership, whose only purpose is to provide a wide framework of socialist issues and drive forward short-, middle- and long-term goals. From these basic democratic ideas Luxemburg criticizes Lenin's Ultra Centralistic Party Concept (see Luxemburg's ‘Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy’ (1904) and her ‘Credo: On the State of Russian Social Democracy’ (1911)) and the practice of the Bolshevik revolution (see Luxemburg's manuscript ‘The Russian Revolution’ (September/October 1918)). This article will present new research findings based on recently discovered archival materials. It will address the following issues: the attitude of the other Spartacus leaders to the Bolsheviks’ revolutionary tactics; Luxemburg's possible change of view after the German November Revolution of 1918; and whether she showed hostility to the Bolsheviks or critical solidarity with the Russian comrades.

Tito as a Tourist

Yugoslavia's foreign policy orientation and the country's role in the nonaligned movement made it possible for Josip Broz Tito to behave like a tourist. This paper aims to show what kind of tourist Tito was and what elements of tourism are to be found in his travels. Tito’s travels were to be contextualized into an aristocratic tourism and the creation of his personality cult within the Yugoslav political system. The paper will also highlight the contradictions between the official communist ideology and the undisputed leader’s actions which have the characteristics of a capitalist tourist. Within this contradiction, the vindicating mediating factors, „the policy of peace“ and the nonaligned movement as the rationale for most of Tito’s travels as a tourist, were also backed up by the absolute impossibility of publicly drawing attention to the travels of aristocratic luxury unbecoming to the leader of a proletarian movement and of the working class struggle for power.

The Obscene, Violent Supplement of State Power: Korean Welfare and Class Warfare in Interwar Japan

This article reconsiders the concept of the state apparatus by looking at the micropolitics and history surrounding the largest “Korean welfare organization” in interwar Japan, the Sôaikai (), or Mutual Love Association. As a welfare organization of Korean workers in Japan, the Sôaikai not only operated as the largest institutional supplier of Korean day workers to the construction industry; it was also considered as a “preventive police organization” by the Japanese police. This connection to the police revealed a bloody history that has yet to be accounted for fully in historical studies of Korean workers in Japan. My thesis is that the history of the Sôaikai teaches us that the concept of the state apparatus must be considered in terms of its internal splitting, between a publicly avowed appearance and its publicly disavowed, spectral, or supplemental forms of organization. The stakes of understanding this splitting of state power, however, is that it compels us to reconsider the concept of the social “margin,” for the Sôaikai did not simply police Koreans in the “margin” of Japanese society. Rather, its work marked the division of Korean surplus populations in Japan as the ground for commodification and political repression. I call this the “divided margin.” The divided margin represented a larger colonial and policing strategy of dividing and conquering Korean proletarian movements and working-class identification by promoting and supporting ethnic identity instead—but only to the point where the ethnic consciousness did not become radicalized to the point of promoting national liberation. The problem of political repression has to be considered in light of the failings of this effort to neutralize proletarian identification through the promotion of ethnic identity. I then analyze anti-Sôaikai political movements by Korean workers, movements that coincided with the rise to parliamentary fame of the Sôaikai's cofounder, Pak Ch'um-gum, who became the first colonial subject elected into the Japanese National Diet in 1932. The inimitable and not quite indomitable Pak Ch'um-gum was arguably Japan's most famous colonial opportunist, and he failed consistently and miserably as a parliamentarian. As I discuss in the last pages of the article, Pak's failings as a parliamentarian reveal important aspects of how the Japanese empire tried to govern and represent its colonial populations in Korea and in Japan.

Engineering nonsense: ideology as absurdist farce in Kuno Toyohiko's experimental stories

Nonsense was an essential part of modernist author and economist Kuno Toyohiko's (1896–1971) creative process. Long before nansensu became a journalistic buzzword, Kuno published stories that defied the conventional logic of literature, both in terms of their style and subject matter. Kuno's background as a student of economics further contributed to the unusual quality of his stories. He tried to translate economic theories into literary expression, thereby combining two of his principal interests. Kuno became a vocal critic of Marxist literature in the 1920s, during the height of the proletarian culture movement. In his critical writing he employed C. H. Douglas's theory of social credit to question what he perceived to be the futile and sentimental strategy of organizing labor, and in his fictional work he used nonsense to expose popular Marxism as an absurdist farce. In both of these seemingly disparate approaches, Kuno championed the notion of ‘impassive and calculated engineering’, either of society through financial regulations or of literature through such techniques as free association and disjointed plots. Discontented with what he saw as the absence of stoic materialism in Marxist fiction, Kuno attempted to redefine literature in purely mechanical and technical terms.

Russian Anarchism and the Bolshevization of Bakunin in the Early Soviet Period

The rise of anarchism, in its many different currents and doctrinal manifestations, became one of the distinctive characteristics of the Russian Revolution. Although recent research has shed new light on the fate of the anarchists under Soviet rule, the nature and extent of anarchist activity after 1921, as well as the Bolsheviks' struggle against it, remains beyond the scope of most studies. (1) Despite systematic repression by the state and its security organs, anarchist thought and continued to survive during the first decade of Soviet power in the pamphlets of the Voice of Labor (Golos truda) Publishing House as well as within legal institutions, principally the Kropotkin Museum. It saw its boldest expression in the anarchists' defense of their most legendary representative, Mikhail Bakunin (1814-76). Notwithstanding its fierce opposition to Marxian state socialism, the ideological legacy of Bakunin survived in the early Soviet period thanks not only to the anarchists but also to the need within early Soviet culture to elevate the Revolution's romantic, promethean impulse. Thus, at the same time that Bakunin inspired the anarchists with passionate rhetoric against authoritarianism, his words and deeds also provided official Soviet culture with an exemplary model of unrelenting libertarian struggle. In their efforts to appropriate Bakunin's legacy throughout the early 1920s, however, Bolshevik publicists had to seek strategies to commemorate Bakunin without implicitly challenging the notion of proletarian dictatorship. As I seek to demonstrate here, the publications and events surrounding Bakunin's 50-year jubilee in 1926, in particular, laid bare the contradiction inherent in the Bolsheviks' celebration of an anarchist legacy within an ever-strengthening state. Early Soviet interest in Bakunin reflected the resumption rather than the beginning of controversy over his image. Before 1917, the formation of the Bakuninist legacy evolved consistently along two diverging trajectories. The first, positive dimension of Bakunin's profile emerged during his own lifetime, when he won the respect of younger Russian populists through his many acts of revolutionary valor. (2) Alongside the heroic moments, Bakunin's reputation preserved highly inauspicious moments as well, thanks mainly to his brief but direct collaboration with Sergei Nechaev, his suspected co-authorship of pamphlets advocating methods of and his formation within the International workingmen's Association of a secret, conspiratorial alliance explicitly opposed to the leadership of Marx, all of which severely damaged the credibility of Bakunin's theory and practice of revolution. (3) By the turn of the century, violent manifestations of Bakuninist revolt made their reappearance in the motiveless terror, armed expropriations, and other acts of propaganda by the deed carried out by the more militant factions of newly formed anarcho-communist groups in Russia. Responding to the growth of anarchist moods throughout the 1905 period, Georgii Plekhanov frequently reminded fellow Marxists of the harm and demoralization Bakunin caused to the proletarian movement through his preference for spontaneous social upheavals and his contempt for organized political struggle. (4) The opposition between the heroic and the villainous aspects of the Bakuninist heritage naturally grew with the Bolsheviks' seizure and consolidation of power between 1917 and 1922. From the standpoint of many social democrats and other advocates of political gradualism, the dissolution of the Provisional Government and the Constituent Assembly in the name of an immediate proletarian dictatorship suggested the triumph of a purely regressive doctrine. In 1917, they undoubtedly found further confirmation of a growing Bakuninist threat in the resurgence of anarchist groups that in effect provided at least indirect support to the Bolshevik cause through their agitation for the instant transfer of all political and economic authority to the laborers themselves. …

Songs that cannot be sung: Hayashi Fusao's ‘Album’ and the political uses of literature during the early Showa years

In the fall of 1936 after publicly announcing his decision to withdraw from the proletarian literature movement, Hayashi Fusao (1903–75), one of Japan's best-known literati of the day, produced a decidedly ‘proletarian’ short story using literature to chronicle the lost voices of political dissent in early Showa Japan (1926–45). A study of Hayashi's ‘Album’ underscores the continued struggle of many literary men to convey their intellectual concerns in a time of rising militarism. It also challenges the usage of tenkō as a conceptual means of comprehending the intellectual community's support of the government during the 1930s.