Wang Meng · Soviet Memorial

Author: Wang Meng
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-05-01
Features: For the author—youth is revolution, love, literature, and also the Soviet Union. A journey to the Soviet Union was a soulful adventure. Because no other foreign country had evoked so much love, obsession, and longing in the author during his youth, nor had it later caused him such confusion, pain, and even terror when mentioned. The Soviet Union has collapsed. The rise, fall, prosperity, and decline of the world's first socialist major power, the heroic, absurd, terrifying, and charming yet ultimately unsuccessful experiments conducted by a significant portion of humanity on this vast land; the lessons learned, the loves and enmities experienced, would long remain in people's memories and in the annals of history, warning and enriching human civilization, making humanity wiser and more mature. This book collects firsthand accounts and the author's insights into Soviet literature, music, painting, and more. The most interesting part of the book is the concluding piece, "The Song Sounds Like Bright Spring," which reads like both a novel and an essay, narrating the story of a protagonist's love, separation, and reunion with a Soviet expert from the 1950s to the 1990s. A Russian friend once told me: "The Soviet Union appeared in history for failure, not for success, and it is no longer something to be missed." I have no intention of participating in historical, political, sociological, or sociological discussions about the Soviet Union's "party and state collapse." I am not an expert in the history of the international communist movement. I am simply willing to face the great neighboring country, Russia, with the same courage as I faced the once-flourishing, friendly, and later deeply antagonistic Soviet Union of Socialist Republics. I face its global influence and eventual dissolution just as I face youth, my own soul, my own experiences, my own beauty and ugliness, my own goodness and sins, my own praise and punishment, my own youth and aging. To face, to record, and to speak—this is the origin of this book, "A Eulogy for the Soviet Union." It is first and foremost my heart's history, a testament of a young man from back then: reflecting the changing tides, loving the great motherland and neighbor. Dedicated to this book to welcome and commemorate the 90th anniversary of the October Socialist Revolution of the Soviet Union in 2007.