The Accidental Facilitator: Xiao San's Outsized Role in Sino-Soviet Literary Exchanges

The language barrier was a recurrent impediment to realizing any literary international. In addition to this, there was also the problem of the lack of a common language in the more extended sense, of a lack of mutual cultural referents and tropes. Further obstacles to amalgamation were the very different writing systems in Asian countries, and widespread illiteracy, especially in Asia, which made it less realistic that throughout Eurasia leftists would be generating and reading common literary texts, let alone the masses. Despite these problems, in Europe and Soviet Russia many intellectuals strove to overcome language differences in the name of establishing a common culture. In the Soviet Union, in the initial and more internationalist post-revolutionary years, Soviet bodies and many intellectuals promoted what they called an "international language." Among the Soviet avant-garde, leading enthusiasts for internationalism were mostly also distinctly Euro-centric, although some of its members sought to include Asian languages in their messianic scenarios for a world literature. Nevertheless, during the interwar years something like a litintern did emerge, if in faltering fashion. It was most in evidence in the 1930s, when the need to unite the cultural forces of the left gained a new urgency. After the Nazi takeover in Germany in 1933, followed by the Spanish Civil War in 1936-39 and the SinoJapanese War of 1937-1945, writers all over the world were moved to join literary organizations linked with the Comintern. The author points out that China was obviously a particularly problematic case for melding its literatures with the Euro-Russian in a single literature, given the very different literary traditions of the two. A further complication is that the Chinese hieroglyphic writing system proved an impediment to spreading literacy, which was essential if the Chinese masses were to participate in the literary commons. Yet within Asia-and actually, as compared with European literatures as well-Chinese leftist literature came closest to fusing with the Russian Soviet. The article looks at the career of the figure who played an outsized role in bringing together the Soviet and Chinese leftist literatures, the Chinese poet and translator Xiao San 萧三(Xiao Zizhang 萧子暲, 1896-1983). It argues that-as is indicated in the name he adopted for himself in the early 1920s and used in the Soviet Union, Emi Xiao-Xiao identified with Émile Zola and sought to project for himself an identity as a writer and political activist;but even more consequential than his role as a writer per se proved to be the part he played as a broker between the Soviet and Chinese literary worlds.