China and the West

Qu Qiubai and Russian literature : general
Ellen Widmer : In Qu Qiubai's opinion, the differences between Pushkin's und Turgenev's work was as much a reflection of changed social reality as it was a matter of improvements in literary techniques. Techniques, though, had also improved, making it easier for literature to Russian literature that was to be the nineteenth century. For Qu, the greatness of this new literature lay in its ability to 'apply the ideals of the culture to real life, to reflect real life in a literary form'.
The first great modern writer to emerge, in Qu's opinion, was Pushkin. Pushkin's genius lay, for Qu, in two places – his writing style and his commitment to write about real events. For Qu, Pushkin's use of language was both a remarkable reflection oft he common idiom and an istrument of such astonishing beauty that it set the standard for years to come. Pushkin erred, Qu notes, by immersing himself too enthusiastically in European romanticism and by takin himself too seriously, but he had a redeeming sense of duty toward the common people. This meant that his characters were often ordinary men, drawn in a lifelike manner ; or, if they were 'superfluous' gentry like Eugene Onegin, living parasitically off the labor of peasants and idly acquiring useless knowledge, they at least showed some signs of being ashamed of themselves. In any case, Qu feels, Pushkin's style and his characters were suffused with a Russianness new to Russian literature. For the first time in history, Russian literature had something to set it apart from European traditions and something to be proud of.
As social conditions went from bad to worse at the end of the nineteenth century, Qu maintains, it was only Maksim Gorky who was able to rise above the bleakness of reality and inspire firm hope in the future. Gorky, it seems, was writing of a new sort of Russina, the city man and the laborer, who felt anger, not despair, at bourgeois outrages and who drew strength from the conviction that the proletariat would rule the world. In language, too, Gorky's writing was refreshingly innovative, for it made use of a 'new vernacular', closer to the language of the working class than anything that had appeard in writing before 1923.