Literature Translation from the Soviet Union to Chinese in the 1930s and 1940s

Author: Li Jin / Country: Mainland China
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-06-01
Features: Although Chekhov's works were introduced to China relatively early, their influence cannot be said to have fully taken root. Lu Xun was an exception. By the 1940s, it was widely recognized that Chekhov had influenced Lu Xun. Guo Moruo once wrote a special article to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Chekhov's death, stating, "Lu Xun and Chekhov are extremely similar—almost like twins. If Chekhov's works are 'the music of silent sorrow of humanity,' then Lu Xun's works can at least be called 'the silent sorrow of China.' They are both realists of mediocre souls." He felt that the achievements Lu Xun left in early Chinese new literature were "the seeds Chekhov had sown in the East." However, for most writers of Lu Xun's generation, it seems that only after experiencing the idealistic period of the May Fourth Movement and the fervent years of revolution—as Zhang Ailing once said, after experiencing the "soaring" and "unrestrained" side of life—did they come down to earth, confront the "practical life" of birth, death, old age, illness, eating, and reproduction, and recognize the "simplicity of life," only then did they truly understand and accept Chekhov.
Ba Jin's self-account of his journey from estrangement to love for Chekhov is very representative. At the age of 20, Ba Jin first encountered Chekhov's works, but he "read and read, yet couldn't understand what the author was trying to convey." In the 1930s, when he took up his pen with an unquenchable passion to call on young people like himself to fight and "conquer life," he reread Chekhov. Although he believed he had "gained some understanding of Chekhov," he still strongly felt the "difference" between them. Sometimes, he would even "get tired of reading and feel afraid," stifled to the point of "needing to drop the book and shout," as he put it. At that time, he also somewhat regarded Chekhov as a pessimist.
It wasn't until the 1940s that Ba Jin said he had "passed through the layers of 'vulgarity,' 'hypocrisy,' and 'scorn' of the old society" before he "couldn't help but think of Chekhov, couldn't help but love Chekhov." It was "a long period of life" that made him a "lover of Chekhov," allowing him to understand the worries, concerns, and warnings that came from Chekhov's "genuine heart of compassion," and to grasp the significance of Gorky's evaluation of Chekhov: "Chekhov first condemns not individual protagonists, but the social system that produces them; he laments not the fate of a few individuals, but the fate of an entire nation—his homeland." This is precisely the view Ba Jin repeatedly expressed in explaining the themes of his works. His love for and study of Chekhov led to a transformation in his creative life starting in the 1940s, one that was vastly different from his earlier work. In Restless Garden, the author treats Yang Laosan, the wastrel of another large family, not with the same hatred and disgust as he does Kuan and Keding in Family, but with the "heart of compassion" like Chekhov, speaking gently and sincerely of his worries, concerns, and warnings.
The most obvious example is The Fourth Ward, a novella that can almost be said to directly borrow the theme and symbolic methods of Chekhov's The Sixth Ward. A Cold Night shows that Ba Jin has mastered the essence of Chekhov's realism, marking his transformation from the passionate, "youthful" expression of emotions to a profound and calm revelation of life, the world, and the tragic fate of ordinary people without heroic colors. He has reached a mature artistic realm. It can be said that Ba Jin's later understanding of Chekhov directly drove the breakthrough and deepening of his later novels. The maturity and depth of writers like Zhang Tianyi, Sha Ting, and Shi Tuo in the 1930s and 1940s were also inseparable from their conscious absorption of Chekhov's creative experience.
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