This article investigates Soviet factography's relationship to its historical context through a reading of Sergei s Den Shi‐khua: A Bio‐interview. Tret'iakov composed this biographical narrative on the basis of a series of interviews he conducted in 1926–27 with a student at Sun Yat‐sen University in Moscow. Critical readers tend to juxtapose Den Shi‐khua to the realist novel, the object of Tret'iakov's explicit polemics in the late 1920s. However, the framing of the text calls to mind another parallel in contemporary life writing: the autobiographical accounts of the self demanded for participation in Soviet institutions, from Party membership to university application. Under the influence of Michel Foucault, recent studies on the formation of Soviet subjectivity have interpreted these autobiographical practices as a “hermeneutics of the self” that sought to read the inner disposition of individuals towards the Revolution. Tret'iakov invokes these hermeneutic practices in his introduction, framing the interview process as a form of confession that compels Den to produce his life story in accordance with authoritative Soviet norms. This confessional hierarchy of power resounds with the political context that brought Tret'iakov and his interlocutor together: the attempts by Soviet Russia to shape and control the revolutionary trajectory of Nationalist China in the 1920s. Ultimately, however, this hierarchical relationship collapses when the book's conclusion suggests that Den may have concealed the truth about himself. The power of Soviet narrative norms is undermined, but the bio‐interview emerges as a mode of truth production that remains contingent and refrains from final judgement.
This article contributes to an emerging history of socialist world cinema by uncovering the forgotten story of a Sino‐Soviet cinematic collaboration from 1957–58: a film expedition that travelled the route of a proposed railway line linking Almaty in Kazakhstan, via Xinjiang, to Lanzhou in western China. At the height of the Sino‐Soviet “honeymoon” in the 1950s, this 2,800km “Road of Friendship” was celebrated as a revival of the ancient Silk Road for an age of industrialized, international socialism. Co‐produced by the Moscow and Shanghai scientific‐popular film studios, the film had two directors, the Soviet veteran Vladimir Shneiderov and the Chinese novice Qin Zhen. The film they created appeared under two names: while its Chinese title, Almaty‐Lanzhou (Alamutu‐Lanzhou), spoke in neutral tones of connection and modernization, the Russian title, Under Ancient Desert Skies (Pod nebom drevnikh pustyn'), evoked the exotic allure of a motor expedition along the traces of the Silk Road. My excavation of the Road of Friendship and the film that celebrated its construction offers a case study in the aspirations and limitations of Sino‐Soviet collaboration in the mid‐1950s. In particular, the history of both railway and film illuminate the role of Xinjiang as a frontier region where the ideals of internationalist collaboration confronted a longer history of imperial contestation between the Russian and Chinese states in Central Asia. Grounded in archival materials, this reconstruction of the project foregrounds both the politics and the poetics of collaboration: both the production history of the film, and the way that the film itself stages and performs its own ideals of collaborative “friendship.” Collaboration, it becomes clear from the film and its production materials, was both an important ideal and a fraught business. The Road of Friendship itself, meanwhile, fell victim to the Sino‐Soviet Split of the early 1960s. The two sides were supposed to connect at the town of Druzhba (Dostyk, “Friendship”) on the Sino‐Soviet border, but the Chinese branch only reached Druzhba in 1990—just in time for the collapse of the USSR. Today the Lanzhou—Almaty rail route constitutes a central link in China's Belt and Road infrastructure initiative, another reimagining of the Silk Road for twenty‐first‐century global capitalism.
currents.berkeley.edu/ejournal/issue-28/tyerman.The title of this special issue of Cross-Currents, "Writing Revolution Across Northeast Asia," announces a compelling confluence of text and map. The articles presented here share a common concern with tracing the textual circulation of leftist culture in the early twentieth century across a circuit that linked Russia and the Soviet Union to Japan, Korea, and China. At the root of these investigations lies the question of what happens when transnational and internationalist ideologies (such as Marxism and anarchism) move from the political into the cultural sphere. Can we speak of "cultural internationalism," and how should we speak about it? How do ideas claiming a certain universality travel across different cultural regions with different historical legacies? 1 How can we describe socialist culture of the early twentieth century in its transnational complexity and internationalist ambition while remaining true to the concrete dynamics of its embodiment in situated texts, discourses, and practices?This attempt to trace socialist culture as a transnational and transregional phenomenon perhaps inevitably encounters the question of how to think about space. The articles in this special issue share a common concern with exploring and interrogating a series of spatial models operative in the fields of social and cultural theory: bounded nation-state, region, center-periphery, and network. These models appear here not only as descriptions of political power and social formations but also as forms that shape the circulation, translation, and transculturation of texts. Centerperiphery dynamics describe hierarchies of global, imperial, and transregional relations, counterbalanced in various ways by the logics of networks, regions, and nations. On the evidence of these articles, tracing the histories of socialist culture across Northeast Asia would seem to require a "multi-scalar" approach that can hold these spatial models in dynamic interaction. 2 In this afterword, I will attempt to draw out the spatial concerns that unite these articles and assess their implications. This interrogation of spatial models no doubt suits a special issue that itself works to disrupt boundaries, both disciplinary and regional. Merging world literature and close reading with intellectual
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