Abstract

The Russian October Revolution of 1917 exerted a profound influence on early twenty-century China, which was then grappling with the question of its future direction. As the aggression of the Western powers shattered the Chinese people’s hopes of following the Western model of modernization, and the diplomatic failure at the Paris Peace Conference dispelled their illusions about Western democracy, the October Revolution, with its dual opposition to capitalism and imperialism, offered China’s progressive intellectuals—then searching for a way forward—an entirely new vision of national development. Soviet Russia’s first declaration on China pledged to renounce the privileges that Tsarist Russia had wrested from China and to treat China as an equal. In sharp contrast to the policies of the other imperialist powers, this greatly enhanced Soviet Russia’ appeal and won widespread recognition from political figures across the spectrum, including Sun Yatsen. This political choice to “take Russia as a model” directly shaped the development of modern Chinese poetry. Beginning with the conception linking literature and revolution advanced by Li Dazhao and Zheng Zhenduo, continuing with Jiang Guangci, Tian Jian, and Guo Moruo’s imitation of Russian and Soviet poetry in both its themes and artistic forms such as “staircase poetry (ladder verse), and culminating in the Chinese Poetry Society’s advocacy of “grasping reality”, poetry came to be conceived as a political weapon for disseminating revolutionary ideals and mobilizing the masses, while the poet was recast as the voice of the people. This orientation was subsequently institutionalized through Mao Zedong’s Talks at the Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art, which established the principles that literature and art should serve the workers, peasants, and soldiers, with political criteria taking precedence over artistic ones. During the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, the translation and dissemination of Soviet Great Patriotic War poetry stimulated a wave of the creation of national narrative poetry. From the October Revolution to the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the image of Russia and the Soviet Union underwent a profound transformation: shifting from an external point of reference to an object of identification, and from a source of cultural influence to the political choice of “following the Soviet road.” In doing so, it responded to China’s political anxieties and became a vital spiritual resource for the country’s modern political transformation and the construction of poetic modernity.

Keywords: Image of Russia and the Soviet Union, Politicization of poetry, Chinese imaginaries of modernity, Literature and revolution, Revolutionary poetry