Echoes of Maxim Gorky in the Works of Ding Ling and Shen Congwen

Echoes of Maxim Gorky in the Works of Ding Ling and Shen Congwen by Jeffrey C. Kinkley The importance of Maxim Gorky to modern Chinese literature is evident, Mao Dun said, in the fact that no other foreign author was translated and retranslated as often as he. That might seem inevitable in view of Gorky •s inter·nat ional 1iterary stature in the two decades preceding the May Fourth Movement in China, his reputation as "Firebii'd of the [Russian] Revolution" at a time when Chinese writers were turning lett, his expressed concern for China's own revolution, and his continued presence and prestige in Soviet letters. His impact on Ba J in, Guo Moruo, Lu Xun, Mao Dun, and Qu Qiubai is well known and often celebrated, yet Gorky in reality achieved fame in China rather late. A full book of his writing appeared in Chinese only in 1928, nine years after the May Fourth incident and 11 years after the October Revolution. Three volumes of his short storles then appeared suddenly in 1928, followed the next year by Xi a Yan •s translation of Mother, the novel destined to be viewed iri the USSR as the foundation of socialist realism.[l] China's belated fascination with Gorky coincided with its late-1920 •s surge of interest in proletarian fiction. The lack of attention to Gorky earlier may have reflected a consensus about him that was gathering by the 1920's in the West (outside the USSR), that Gorky was a great soul and a major author of his time, but not destined to join Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy as one of the greats of History. Sti 11, like many a modern Chinese writer, Gorky had such a positive political reputation that his authorial contrib ~tion to the revolutibn could be judged ind~pendently of the quality of his prose. Hence, even as disillusionment with the Russian Revolution hastened Gorky's depreciation in the West, continued optimism about the lessons of that revolution seems in China to have elevated Mother--far and away Gorky •s most sentimentally heroic work--to a standJng as great or greater than that of his more finely modulated narratives. (Gorky himself came to regret the didactic heavy-hand~dness of Mother; neither before nor after did he write such schematically partisan fiction). [2) The popularity of Mother in China was not an unprecedented or perhaps even a surprising phenomenon; consider the influence in the United States and then again in China of .!lncle .Iom•s Cabin. A more tmpressive sign of Gorky's impact on China is the _fact that his Mother had literary influences there, incl udlng some not even related to the novel's political ethos. Interliterary phenomena can be unpredictable.[3] This essay is a short inquiry lnto the interliterary presence of Gorky in the works of Ding Ling (1904-1986) 56 and Shen Congwen (1902-1988). Shen and Ding were among China's most important authors of the May Fourth era and their names have often been linked. They began their careers after the May Fourth Movement as close friends and colleagues--so close that some thought them lovers, while others at first mistook them (and Ding Ling's husband Hu Yepin) to be a single person. That was in the mid-1920's. There are in fact similarities between Shen Congwen' s and Ding Ling's early subjective works, as between both their works and others', such as Yu Dafu' s . [4] At the height of ~he new fervor over Gorky in 1928-29, Shen, Ding, and Hu were in Shanghai, ~he center of the proletarian literature movement, publishing their own feui lleton and then their own magazines. They pointedly refused to commit themselves to the leftist literary camp, but this did not necessarily prejudice them against Gorky (one of whose first Chinese translators was Hu Shi). In the 1930 1 s, however, Shen Congwen parted ways with Ding and Hu both geographically and politically. Although the friendship blossomed again following the arrests of Hu Yepin in 1931 and Ding Ling in 1933, Shen and Ding were to end up estranged--personally, politically , and artistically. In the 1930 •s...