Nicolai Volland. Socialist Cosmopolitanism: The Chinese Literary Universe,1945—1965.

InThe World Republic of Letters(1999,2004),Pascale Casanova analyzes the overlapping levels of power behind the global production and circulation of aesthetic style,literary prestige,and cultural capital. Influenced by scholars like Pierre Bourdieu,she offers us a sociological account of world literature by situating its world-makingpoiesisat the global intersection of aesthetics and politics. In other words,this metaphorical world republic of letters,however cosmopolitan it aspires to become,betrays a hegemonic political economy in which Paris occupies the center of prestige and power,whereas minor literatures on the periphery are often rendered inferior,if not invisible. Nicolai Volland’sSocialist Cosmopolitanism: The Chinese Literary Universe,1945–1965(2017) follows Casanova’s sociological approach in its effort to investigate the making of modern Chinese literature in the context of world literature. Whereas Casanova’s case studies of Kafka,Joyce,and Faulkner focus on transnational modernist literature in liberal-democratic vistas of Enlightenment humanism,however,Volland digs diligently,for his archive of texts,into the relatively under-studied literary and political histories of the Socialist Bloc. Volland’s world republic of letters,although he prefers to refer to it as the “l(fā)iterary universe,” thus replaces Casanova’s Paris with Moscow as the center of (socialist) world literature. In short,Volland reads Chinese socialist literature as world literature. As such,the book’s investment inpost-Enlightenmentideas and literatures invites the reader to imagine beyond Goethe’s inaugurating moment ofWeltliteraturin order to take stock of other global imaginaries such as socialist cosmopolitanism. Specifically,Volland examines Chinese literature from the 1950s as “a literature in the world,a literature of the world,a literature for the world” (3). Sociologically oriented as it is,the book nevertheless aims to prize “l(fā)iterary texts and their aesthetic dimension over sociology and context” (17). Indeed,among other strengths,it stands out with its meticulous and insightful reading of both canonical and non-canonical socialist-realist texts from China as they interacted with their counterparts in the Soviet Union as well as other socialist nations. It carefully teases out the complex manners of transculturation in which socialistrealist genres,themes,motifs,and stock narratives,though disseminated from Moscow,went on to take on lives of their own throughout the pan-socialist world,especially China.

Apart from the introduction and conclusion,the book consists of six chapters,each of which addresses a thematic concern that seeks to tie together close readings of chosen texts,historicization of national and transnational politics at the given time,analyses of the broad literary field in which particular practices of writing and reading were conducted,as well as reflections on the book’s contributions to general theories of world literature. Chapter 1 attempts at a working theory of transculturation that stems from the unique ideological and institutional conditions of socialist cosmopolitanism against the backdrop of the Cold War. Suggesting that the field of world literature,à latheorists such as David Damrosch,remains incapable of understanding the transnational system of literary circulation in the mid-twentieth century across the Socialist Bloc,the book purports to fill the gap by presenting the case of Chinese socialist literature. Specifically,it dwells on the case of Feng Zhi as a bi-culturally educated translator,writer,and above all cultural diplomat. In other words,the materialization of socialist world literature depended upon “state-sponsored travel and literary circulation in the 1950s” carried out by cultural ambassadors like Feng Zhi (26). The chapter emphasizes the bureaucratic working of literary circulation that underpins the cosmopolitan episteme of world literature at the time. Aside from cultural diplomats like Feng Zhi,the chapter examines the translation activities of the state-sanctioned Epoch Press (shidai chubanshe) in order to drive home the larger point that literature participates in the very institution-making and cultural imagination of a socialist collectivity spearheaded by the Soviet Union and eagerly joined by more and more new socialist states from Eastern Europe to the Pacific Rim. The “imagined community” of the socialist block was made viable by the circulation of socialist realist narratives,images,and motifs.

Chapters 2 and 3 focus on two important socialist genres,namely,land reform fiction and industrialist fiction,in order to illuminate the working of the Chinese socialist literary universe in the 1940s and 1950s. While emphasizing the presence and influence of the Soviet Union as the center of the global literary universe,it demonstrates the extent to which the sovereignty of the Chinese socialist state asserted its agency in localizing foreign literature so as to serve its own ideological agendas. To lay bare the dialectic of the national and the transnational,the local and the global,these two chapters read texts transnationally within a network of canon-making. Chapter 2’s reading of Zhou Libo’s novelHurricane(Baofeng zhouyu),for example,demonstrates the Chinese text’s intertextual and trans-cultural awareness of Sholokhov’sVirgin Soil Upturned. Land reform fiction was invented to advance a political agenda across the Socialist Bloc,that is,“revolution and socialist construction in the countryside” (41). The circulation of a Russian text,via translation,had already initiated a process of transculturation which educated the Chinese reader about the linear sense of socialist time as well as the class consciousness required to realize historical agency. Zhou’sHurricane,however,manages to Sinicize thetelosof socialist time and agency through the temporalization and spatialization of China within the Northeast in which the novel is set. The novel’s geopolitical imagination of the Northeast in its border-drawing with Korea,the Soviet Union,and the Eurasian continent at once affirms and transcends the framework of the nation-state in order to arrive at the socialist fantasy of world (land) revolution. Similarly,the canon-making of industrialist fiction follows the same transnational and intertextual logic whose ultimate ideological anchor is the installation of the Soviet as reference point for imagining futurist industrial modernity. Using Cao Ming as a case of industrialist fiction at the outset of the genre’s formation in China,this chapter studies the increasingly prominent depictions of the factory,machinery,and the working class in (Chinese) industrial fiction and their participation in charting China’s path to socialism. These two chapters seek to advance a practice of transnational reading that is theorized as “horizontal reading,” or “synchronicity.” Simply put,writers and readers at the time demonstrated “an awareness of the gravitational forces of the literary universe” that their counterparts from Moscow to Berlin,from Bucharest to Beijing,were simultaneously on a collective path to achieve socialism through the vehicle of literature (64). Such is the account of the socialist cosmopolitan cultural sphere.

The subsequent two chapters shift their focus to the terrains of science fiction and children’s literature. Chapter 4 argues that science fiction served as a replacement of popular entertainment literature when Chinese and Western pulp fiction was banned after 1949. Above all,the futuristic images of,for example,spaceships in science fiction kindled the imagination of a socialist utopia that China aimed to emulate from the Soviet brother. Science fiction in socialist China,furthermore,blended science and fiction,using fiction to popularize science on the one hand and deploying scientific fantasy as a means of fictional enchantment on the other. Imagining the Soviet as a harbinger of techno-scientific modernity,Chinese science fiction metamorphosed into socialist entertainment fiction. If science fiction helped the public imagine the socialist-utopian future,then the figure of the “ideal child” served as a literary trope which the Socialist Bloc promoted. The introduction of Soviet children’s literature,as explained in Chapter 5,depended on translating theoretical texts on the genre’s participation in modeling the new socialist personhood. The chapter further compares and contrasts the representations of the child in the Chinese filmThe Adventures of San Mao(San Mao liulang ji) and the dubbed Soviet filmPrivate Aleksandr Matrosov,as well as analyzing the reception ofThe Story of Zoyain China. In so doing,this chapter shows that the socialist state’s takeover of the orphaned child renders socialism imaginable as a kinship family and as such illustrates the construction of the ideal revolutionary subject. This,and the previous,chapters,together reveal “l(fā)evels of kinship and affinity” among different genres as they traveled between the Soviet Union and China and among other socialist nations,helping the book to conclude that Chinese socialist literature was part and parcel of a socialist world literature (152).

The final chapter continues to map out the spatial imagination of the socialist world by examining Chinese socialist literature’s engagement with wider notions of socialist cosmopolitanism and world literature. Concretely,it focuses on the changing fate of the journalYiwen(Translation),which served as a prestigious state-sponsored forum for translated literature. Methodologically,this chapter thus departs from close readings of specific texts to sociological inquiries into the institutional life of a literary journal. The journal was China’s window on the world. This singular journal is significant to the book’s proposed goal of examining socialist cosmopolitanism,because only in tracing a genealogy of this state-sponsored journal’s shifting notions of world literature can a comprehensive account of China’s literary worldliness in the 1950s become crystalized in such ways that reveal not only the aesthetic-stylistic cartography but also the entire political economy that underpins literary production. The journal’s life witnessed China’s entrance into the world of socialist brotherhood as well as the breakdown of the Sino-Soviet alliance,whose broad geopolitical landscape determined what was included or excluded by this publication venue. This chapter offers a literary geography ofYiwen,in which the Soviet Union enjoys the center (zone one) to be followed by the socialist nations of Eastern Europe and East Asia (zone two) and then by third-world countries of Latin America and Africa (zone three); zone four ambiguously and selectively includes the capitalist countries,especially Europe and the United States. Again,such a cartography of socialist world literature resembles Casanova’s world republic of letters,although modernist authors in her formulation were considered “progressive” by the power structure of socialist cosmopolitanismonlyprovided that they aligned with the ideological program of the socialist revolution. Otherwise stated,socialist world literature,which was integral to the Cold War revolution,envisioned a new world order that harbors a counterhegemonic and anti-imperialist agenda.

Volland’s book is a remarkable contribution to both modern Chinese studies and theories of world literature. For the former,it transnationalizes the field by stretching the definition of modern Chinese literature to include the transnational,transcultural,and intertextual spaces of literary production,circulation,and consumption. Contributing to the discussion on theories of world literature,the book also challenges theorists to seriously consider socialist-realist literature and the Cold War geopolitical formation of literature. Indeed,socialist literature is often dismissed as overly propagandistic and thus lacking in aesthetic autonomy,because the socialist state and all its institutions played an incontestable role in programming literature. The statist and institutionalist dimensions of socialist literary texts perhaps make liberal humanists hesitate to admit them as worthy candidates into the canon of world literature. From Johann Gottfried von Herder to Germaine de Sta?l,from Erich Auerbach to René Wellek,undergirding the history of world literature as an intellectual thought and as a literary aspiration is the liberal-humanist thesis that the soul of each nation owns a distinct literature that registers its political autonomy as well as literary achievements. The notions of literariness and aesthetic autonomy,in such a formulation,often neglect the (liberalist and capitalist) ideology of the aesthetic,as Terry Eagleton reminds us. In this light,Volland’s study of socialist cosmopolitanism successfully dissects the complex and nuanced aesthetic and political aspects of socialist literature that merit the careful attention of world literature theorists. Volland’s use of the term “cosmopolitanism,” however,might be counterproductive,because it carries the discursive baggage of a liberal-humanist bent. Yet in the pan-socialist world of political solidarity and national liberation,which the book examines,the world-mapping-and-making poetics often spoke the language of “internationalism.” Terminology and the conceptual fine-tuning aside,Volland’sSocialist Cosmopolitanism: The Chinese Literary Universe,1945–1965should be commended for the new grounds that it has broken for scholars working in such fields as modern Chinese literature and world literature.