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Literary and Politic Fields Intersection:
Russia and Taiwan Cases
Igor Sitnikov
International Master’s Program in Taiwan Studies
National Chengchi University
ABSTRACT
In this article on the base of Bourdieu’s theory of fields the author makes the retrospective
and comparative analysis of the literary and political fields’ relations development in two
national societies – early USSR and early martial law’s Taiwan. The review shows that despite
of the different cultural background and the transformation of the societies into diametrically
opposite authoritarian systems, from the point of view of literary field autonomy both ‘literary’
movements - socialist realism of USSR and anti-Communist literature of Taiwan - have more
common than different features. In both cases political systems were accompanied by the loss of
autonomy of the literary fields, which turned into a political propagandist instruments.
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Bio Statement
Igor Sitnikov is Master program student of International Master’s Program in Taiwan Studies, at
National Chengchi University (Taipei). He is graduated from the Moscow State University of
Culture and Arts on specialty “Management in Social Sphere” (2002). He is a member of
Russian Writers League, the author of the book of fiction Phagocytosis (1997) and the book of
poetry translation from Polish What Has Happened in Our Home by Pyotr Mizner (2000).
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Introduction
On the base of Bourdieu’s theory of fields this work makes the retrospective and
comparative analysis of the literary and political fields’ relations development in two national
societies – early USSR and early martial law’s Taiwan – both of which had historical experience
of the social control method application and suffered transformations into authoritarian systems.
The famous French sociologist Bourdieu has found (1993, 6) that any social formation is
structured as a hierarchically organized series of fields – the cultural, economic, political, etc.
Each of them is relatively autonomous, but have changeable relations of interdependency with
the others. These social fields not only have appreciable influence on each other, sometimes they
fight for hegemony in society or stand upon theirs autonomy. For example, it seems that for the
19th century European and Russian societies the role of literary field was decisive. Literary field
agents were understood as effective generators of new social ideas. In the 20th century the
literary field agents loose theirs positions. In some societies they were transformed into one of
the instruments in the vast imperialized space of the political field, in others became a products
for the economic field.
The 20th century as whole is a period of fundamental social modernizations all over the
world. By the beginning of the century sociology discovered already the existence of the
underlying principles that governs all social affairs and, with this guide, agents of the political
field in some societies tried in practice to solve social problems. The idea that independent ego is
an illusion and that an individual is just a part of never-ending, ever-changing stream of tested
group experiences born to life the idea of social control. For some political field agents this idea
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seemed to be a panacea from any social problems, especially in the periods in and after of
political and economic disasters, that in most gigantic dimensions took place in China and Russia.
These societies became polygons of tragic social experiments of the social control method
application.
This work shows the correlation between autonomy of the literary field and the condition
of the political field in societies. Authoritarian societies demonstrate the least level of literary
autonomy irrespective of theirs cultural and ideology backgrounds.
Thus the West German critic and commentator Ruehle illuminates (Ruehle 1969) the
relationships between a writer and a totalitarian state. He shows the conflict between literary and
political ideals in the moments of different social events: in the Russian Revolution, in the Stalin
era USSR, in the Hiltler Germany. The author examines how the ‘political correct’ writers made
theirs peace with dictatorship regimes and how ‘political incorrect’ writers created masterpieces
out of theirs struggle with a totalitarian state.
Taiwanese scholar Der-wei Wang devotes (2004) for the similar subject. On the base of
wide historical and literal materials he illuminates the intersection and changeable relations of
the three social fields: political, literary and scientific (history); he shows how political agents
can use literature field to rewrite history according their purposes. Der-wei Wang delineates the
many forms of political violence in Chinese societies and their literary manifestations.
The cases of Taiwan and Russia for the comparative analysis seems to be especially
interesting because in these two countries the social control in the literary field was represented
by two opposite ideological constructions: socialist realism and anti-Communist literature. In the
work is shown and analyzed both common features of the cases and theirs differences.
Party-mindedness and Socialist Realism (USSR)
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From the times of Russian classic literature with such significant figures as Pushkin,
Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Gorky the role of literary field actors was understood in
Russian culture as a dominant for the social development. During the 19th century Russian
culture was literary centric: it was not religion or science, but exactly literary field actors, who
formed national mentality. Literature in Russia usurped the power in all fields of the social
consciousness: philosophy, politics, economy, sociology, religion. As a modern Russian literary
critic Golubkov writes (2005): “Russian literature of 19th and 20th centuries took upon itself the
functions which were not at all peculiar for it.”
Literature was sacralized by society, turned into a particular form of religion, and a writer
was converted into a prophet of the new epoch. This kind of phenomena can be explained as a
result of the long period without freedom of speech in the society. And such hypertrophied
functions of the literary field were a reaction on the religion and politic fields’ domination in
previous periods of the social history.
Later on the base of Marxist sociological theory of economic determinism Lenin and
other Russian revolutionists used this specific situation turning literature into a propagandist
instrument of social control. Long before the realization of October Revolution by Lenin was
developed already the most important concept of Communist cultural policy - “partymindedness” (partiinost). Thus in 1905 Lenin wrote (James 1973, 104-5): “We want to establish,
and we shall establish, a free press, free not simply from the police, but also from capital, from
careerism, and what is more, free from bourgeois-anarchist individualism. … First of all, we are
discussing party literature and its subordination to party control.”
After the revolution Bolsheviks party leaders understood clearly that the literary field and
such industry like publishing required particularly careful control; they were determined to
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protect themselves from ideological and political damage. In 1921 the Politburo ordered agencies
of state control to follow carefully what was printed and distributed. The Bolsheviks prevented
the spread of religious literature, pornography, and ‘counterrevolutionary works’. In 1922, in the
end of the Civil War, the literary censorship body Glavlit was established. Lenin and other party
leaders proudly claimed new censorship as a legitimate weapon in theirs class struggle. For
example, Trotsky already in 1918 had supported (Trotskii 1991, 248) censorship as a temporary
imperative: “Our standard is clearly political, imperative and intolerant… we ought to have a
watchful revolutionary censorship and a broad and flexible policy in the field of art…”
However in first decade after October Revolution Bolshevism was in harmony with the
important trends of the time. Many Russian intellectuals welcomed such measures as the peace
pact, land distribution, industrialization, social reform and popular education. The Left writers many of them were avant-gardists (or modernists in other terminology) - saw the Revolution as
the fulfillment of their dreams. The ideas of the Revolution stimulated their creativity and the
socialization of cultural institutions offered them material support.
Many new literary groups were developed during this period. But by the Party all these
literary groups were classified just as “fellow travelers”. From the point of view both of the
writers and the Party, the literature of the early Soviet Union was a literature of Revolutionary
illusions. From the other hand during the 1920s appeared a number of novels that were
correspond to the Party concept.
Thus the novel of Serafimovich (1863-1949), The Iron Flood (Zheleznii Potok, 1924),
depicts mass action and mass mentality of the Civil War and describes the march of the Taman
Army and thousands of refugees across the Caucasus in 1918. The army escape annihilation only
by submitting to the iron will of their commander, who promises death as punishment for the
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slightest insubordination. In the novel there is no hero, only the mass, no psychology, only the
power of history. After the Civil War Serafimovich was the chief editor of the literary magazine
Oktyabr. He was awarded the Stalin Prize (1943), Order of the Red Banner and Order of Lenin.
Another novel, Chapayev (1924), by Furmanov (1891-1926) is the story of a legendary
Civil War hero. The book depicts a wild leader, who reflected the typical features of the fighting
leader of the period. The author, who appears in the person of Commissar Klychkov, is trying to
educate Chapayev, who shows his violent temper and political ignorance. Image of Chapayev is
the example of independent personality, the feature of the Party’s fear.
The Rout (1927), by Fadeyev (1901-1956), is a story of a group of Red partisans in the
Far East. A Communist and the commander Levinson is different from Chapayev. His authority
derives from his self-control and irons will. Fadeyev shows many other characters of partisans
with their own psychology, which are surrounded by a poetic aura. Varya is the only woman, she
is maternal and lascivious. Later Fadeyev was forced to eliminate the “physiological” love
scenes to suit the prudishness of the Stalin era.
As the Communist utopia more and more became transformed into the Stalinist reality,
the world of power came into ever greater conflict with the world of the intellect. Stalin resolved
the conflict in a very direct manner: he literally killed art. Writers, whom he called “engineers of
the human soul,” were faced with the choice of either physical or intellectual extinction.
In April 1932 the Party Central Committee announced the dissolution of all existing
literary and artistic organizations, to be succeeded by unitary, All-Union bodies. From this
moment Soviet writers are ordered to become “artists in uniform” and the literature development
moved in direction to socialist realism. Later the advanced socialist realism, which was defined
by its three mandatory qualities of narodnost’ (reflection and promotion of the viewpoint and
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interests of the people), ideinost’ (ideological soundness), and partiinost’ (Party-mindedness),
became a mainstream of the Soviet literature.
One of the most important works of socialist realism doctrine became How the Steel Was
Tempered (1932-1934), a novel of Nikolai Ostrovsky (1904-1936). The novel is about the heroic
life of Komsomol member. The central character, Pavel Korchagin, sacrificed his energy and
health for the building of Communism, and in result for years, like the author, suffered from
illness, paralysis and blindness.
In 1945, Fadeyev wrote another very important for socialist realism novel, The Young
Guard, which was based on real World War II events. The novel described an underground antifascist youth organization named Young Guard, which fought against the Nazis in the occupied
city in the Ukraine.
From 1946 till 1954 Fadeyev was a chairman of the Union of Soviet Writers, he
supported Stalin, proclaiming him "the greatest humanist the world has ever known" and during
the 1940s actively promoted a campaign of criticism and persecution against many of the writers.
After the 20th Party Congress in 1956, where was criticized Stalinism, Fadeyev committed
suicide. From the 20th Party Congress the new era of socialist realism starts.
Fukan, Chinese “Realist” Tradition, and “Anti-Communist” Novels (Taiwan)
Very important for the study of Taiwan literature development from the point of view of
its intersection with the political field are two works of Sung-sheng Chang: Modernism and the
Nativist Resistance: Contemporary Chinese Fiction from Taiwan (Chang 1993) and Literary
Culture in Taiwan: Martial Law to Market Law (Chang 2004).
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Since the rise of “new fiction” (xin xiaoshuo) in the late Qing era politics and literature
had been closely tied together in Chinese society, and writing finally transformed itself into
political action. After the Communist won a victory in mainland China and the Nationalists
retreat to Taiwan in 1949, Chinese literature divided into two traditions, each with a distinct
political and aesthetic program.
Essay writing is one of the most important trends in Taiwan literature, which was widely
represented in the product of a special institution, the fukan (副刊), or literary supplement to
newspapers. This institution developed in mainland China in the 1920s and 1930s. It published
the “new literature”, served as a forum for discussion of cultural issues and also disseminated
new ideas to the public. In Taiwan the fukan served as an important “ideological state apparatus”
for the authoritarian Nationalist regime and became the most significant sponsor of literary
activities. One of the first missions of the fukan in Taiwan after 1949 was public Mandarin
education. The fukan used to teach Mandarin to native Taiwanese educated under the Japanese
colonial rule and also to provide literary education to young mainlander soldiers who followed
the Nationalist government.
Thus the person of the chief editor of fukan in the United Daily News, Lin Haiyin [(19182001) 林海音 (f)], is a very important figure in the intersection of literary and political fields in
Taiwan. She criticized the oppressive social system; however, the framework of her stories
disqualifies them from consideration as works of “critical realism”. Instead of criticizing social
ills or the feudal remnants in contemporary society, Lin’s criticism of China’s feudal past serves
to ratify the present sociopolitical order, and in this case is similar to those of communist
literature in the People’s Republic of China.
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When Lin was appointed editor of the most important fukan in Taiwan, some of her
personal assets were taken into consideration. She was a Taiwan native: it was to the advantage
of the Nationalists to include sympathetic native Taiwanese in the cultural bureaucracy. As
Chang suggests (Chang 2004, 86), “being female was also a plus” because “a feminine façade of
gentleness” helped to soften in some way the harshness of cultural policies reality, and this point
of view can explain the high percentage of women editors at that time. Selecting and editing
manuscripts, Lin was actively engaged in shaping an aesthetic position within the confines of
official ideology.
In early post-1949 period Taiwan, mainlanders dominated “the field of cultural
production”. It happened because the political force of the Nationalist rule played a significant
role, giving mainlanders a decisive advantage over native Taiwanese. After Taiwan was returned
to rule by a Chinese government in 1945, Mandarin Chinese replaced both the Taiwanese dialect
and Japanese as the official spoken language. The creative activities of middle-aged native
Taiwanese writers were greatly hampered by this language barrier. Political fear is another factor
that silenced native Taiwanese writers, as many Taiwanese intellectuals were persecuted during
and after the February 28 Incident in 1947. The literary scene in Taiwan during the 1950s was
therefore virtually dominated by mainland writers who followed the Nationalists to Taiwan
around 1949. These émigré writers were frequently mobilized in the state-sponsored cultural
programs and produced a literature that has often been characterized as anti-Communist.
So the literary period from the 1950s to the 1960s was characterized by so-called
“sinocentric Mainstream” or “nostalgic anti-Communist literature” (Chang 2004). Certain
periods of the Republican era on the Chinese mainland became favorite subject. It was lyrical
reminiscences of gentry-class family life, folk legends and historical romances. The prose style
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of that period tended to retain many archaic expressions and allusions to classical literature. This
phenomenon is apparently a direct result of the cultural policy of the Nationalist government,
which promoted traditional culture partly as a means to assert its own legitimacy as a Chinese
government. Der-wei Wang suggests (Der-wei Wang 2000, 39) that anti-Communist writers in
Taiwan were “engaged in a novelistic discourse to narrate and thereby rationalize the loss of the
national land.” This kind of literary writing with the nostalgia theme, which prevailed in the
fiction of this time, was best exemplified by the works of Ch’i-chuen [(1917) 琦君 Chi-Chun (f)].
Many readers saw in Ch’i-chuen’s works theirs own childhoods in the countryside. The
attraction of her work for readers in post-1949 Taiwan is thus closely tied to the nostalgic
sentiments of Taiwan’s mainland expatriates. For example, her autobiographical story The
Chignon depicts relations between her mother and her father’s younger and prettier concubine.
Both author and her mother adhered to the Buddhist and Taoist principles of nonaction and
passivity. After the husband’s death the animosity between the two women was dissolved.
Over the course of the 1950s not only the literature of criticism of China’s feudal past and
literature of nostalgia determined the literary mainstream in Taiwan; the KMT party used
literature in all its forms to disseminate an anti-Communist and anti-Russian ideology. Thus the
"combat" literature and other kinds of anti-Communist literature developed in the country.
Duanmu Fang [端木方 (m)], a mainland émigré writer, in 1954 wrote a novel A Badge of
Scars. The protagonist of the novel is a young Nationalist soldier. In a battle against Japanese he
received a permanent scar on his face. Soon he joins a group of guerrillas against the Japanese,
which at the same time had to fight another enemy – the Communists. This novel seems to be
one of the most propagandist works among anti-Communist combat literature in Taiwan. The
major idea of the novel is that ideological and emotional scars are worse than the physical
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wounds. The narrator shows a range of wounds, both individual and social, caused by the
Japanese and the Communists: a disfigured body, a broken heart, a separated family and
disjointed country.
Another typical anti-Communist novel, Chen Jiying’s [ 陳 紀 瀅 ] Fool in the Reeds
describes how the Communists manipulate the ordinary people in order to destroy established
social and ethical orders. The novel’s protagonist is an illiterate man named Changshun the Fool.
When the Communists come to his native village he helps them kill the landlords and becomes
the head of the village. Together with the local rascals he brings horror and chaos to the life of
the people. But when his value is exhausted he himself is buried alive by his comrades. The
narrator depicts a terrible truth – the revolution is nothing but a band of fools, and the most
active its participants at the end also becomes its victims. For Chen only the Nationalist regime
can serve as the agency through which homesickness and nostalgia can be cured. Thus his
politicized nostalgia novels in the best way represent the ideology of mainstream literature
movement in Taiwan.
Conclusion
Political field agents in the early USSR and in after 1949’s Taiwan had different political
circumstances. The political circumstances resulted different tasks which the political fields
agents set to theirs literary instruments.
The socialist realism builders should explain for the population a moral logic of the
revolution which had overthrown the corrupt feudal tsar regime. Communist party needed moral
justification of its course to social control which could be fulfilled through the destruction of
‘bourgeois-anarchist individualism’ in the social mentality.
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Compared with the soviet ‘political correct’ writers, anti-Communist writers in Taiwan
had a more difficult task, they had to prove that the defeat in the civil war with Communists was
only a temporary event. According to this ideology task the writers in Taiwan must propagandize
the nation-building ideology that had dominated in the preceding Republican era in mainland.
This is a reason of the wide spreading of the nostalgia theme.
Thus the comparative analyses of the literary and political fields’ intersection in the early
Soviet Union and early martial law’s Taiwan shows that despite of the different cultural
background and the transformation of the societies into diametrically opposite authoritarian
systems, the process was accompanied by the loss of autonomy of the literary fields. In spite of
the social control in the literary fields in these two societies was represented by two opposite
ideological constructions - socialist realism and anti-Communist literature - from the point of
view of literary field autonomy both ‘literary’ movements have more common than different
features. And most important is that literary field lost its own function and turned into a primitive
propagandist instrument.
List of References
1. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1993. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature.
Edited and introduced by Randal Johnson. New York: Columbia University Press.
2. Chang, Sung-sheng Yvonne. 1993. Modernism and the Nativist Resistance: Contemporary
Chinese Fiction from Taiwan. Durham & London: Duke University Press.
3. Chang, Sung-sheng. 2004. Literary Culture in Taiwan: Martial Law to Market Law. New
York: Columbia University Press.
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4. Der-wei Wang, David. 2000. Reinventing National History: Communist and Anti-Communist
Fiction of the Mid-Twentieth Century. In Chinese Literature in the Second Half of a Modern
Century, edited by Chi, Pang-yuan and Der-wei Wang, David. Bloomington & Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press.
5. Der-wei Wang, David. 2004. The Monster that is History: History, Violence, and Fictional
Writing in Twentieth-Century China. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California
Press.
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1980-90-х годов: в предвестии постмодерна. Литературная учёба 1. [Golubkov, Mikhail.
Literary retrospections: the second half of the century. Boundary of 1980-90s: in the omen of
postmodern. Literaturnaya uchyoba 1].
7. James, C.Vaughan. 1973. Soviet Socialist Realism: Origins and Theory. London.
8. Kenez, Peter, and Shepherd, David. 1998. ‘Revolutionary’ Models for High Literature:
Resisting Poetics. In Russian Cultural Studies. An introduction, edited by Kelly, Catriona and
Shepherd, David. Oxford University Press.
9. Ruehle, Juergen. 1969. Literature and Revolution: a Critical Study of the Writer and
Communism in the Twentieth Century. New York, Washington, London: Frederick A. Praeger.
10. Trotskii, L. 1991. Literature and Revolution. London.
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