Maxim Gorky in China : 1920s commentary and Shen Congwen's "Three Men and One Woman"

Abstract

This essay examines the Chinese reception of Maxim Gorky before he was enshrined as the founding father of socialist realism. During the 1920s, aesthetic and political assessments of his fiction were checkered. These varied assessments gave rise to varied thematic and formal appropriations in Chinese literature, such as in Shen Congwen’s 沈從文 1930 Sange nanren he yige nuren 三個男人和一個女人 (“Three Men and One Woman”), which presents a bleak interpretation of the tension between individual and collective in Gorky’s 1899 “Dvadtsat’ shest’ i odna” (“Twenty-six and one”).