China and the West

Kurt Wulff ist Lektor für Türkisch und Malaysich an der Universität Kopenhagen.

Karl Ludvig Reichelt hält sich in Norwegen auf und reist nach Schweden, Dänemark, Finnland, Deutschland und Amerika zur Unterstützung seines Projektes der Gründung eines christlichen buddhistischen Zentrums.

Sigfred Hopstock arbeitet für die Chinese Maritime Customs in China.

Mao, Dun. Andeliefu [ID D37670].
Mao Dun argued that the defeatist tone in Leonid Nikolaevich Andreyev's works was the natural flavor of literature after great changes and calamities. He was for him the spokesman of his age, when the boredom, disappointment and despondency of young people in Russia reached its peak, especially after their defeat in the Russo-Japanese war in 1904.
Mao Dun schreibt über To the stars : drama in four acts von Leonid Andreyev : "To the stars asks stoically for the meaning of life, but the whole play is steeped in pessimism, offering no solution. Look at the astronomer in the play. He detests the life of the common people, he says that they are like wax men, lifeless and soulless. He researches in astronomy, and feels the world beyond this world in full of wonderment, and that affairs in this world cannot be compared to it. He says : 'In our world someone dies every second, and in the universe probably a world is destroyed every second. How can I cry and fall into despair on account of the death of one man ?' So he is practically unmoved by the death of his own son. But he is unable to alleviate his wife's sorrow for her son, or his daughter-in-law's sorrow for her husband. Andreyev announces through this play the conflicts between emotion and ideals in life. The astronomer's solution is beyond normal thinking. What he seeks is an abstract world, one that not everybody can understand."

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.

Shen, Zemin. Enteliefu wen xue si xiang gai lu [37768].
"In no other country does literature occupy the same position in life as it does in Russia ; nor is there a national literature able to reflect as truthfully the views and the spiritual and material state of the people. Nor is there a second country where literature is considered as important. This is why no other literature is able to exert as great an influence on the life of its people, , nay on the people of the whole world."

Mao, Dun. Eguo jin dai wen xue za tan [ID D38171].
"All of modern Russian literature contains social thought, and a revolutionary outlook. The Russian people regard literature as something of the highest importance. They believe that literature should not only reflect life, but should also be useful in life."

Mikhail Petrovich Artsybashev and China general.
Ng, Mau-sang : Chinese writers did not seize upon the theme of sadness and despair in Artsybashev's work, nor did they stress the bloodshed, sexual license and sense of the insanity of human life that dominated it. Instead they found in his work a new type of hero in the protagonist Sanin. Sanin certainly does not possess the traditional heroic qualities ; but his forthright courage enables him to defy all human conventions, and stand firm against opposition. He is thus a source of strength, and appeared to them as an image of the totally emancipated man.
Artsybashev's popularity in a foreign country like China in the 1920s is not difficult to understand. His work presents the lives and thought of young revolutionaries. Punitive expeditions, mass executions, death-throes and bloodshed fill the pages of his revolutionary tales with gruesome power.

[Artsybashev, Mikhail Petrovich]. Xing fu. Lu Xun yi. [ID D12527].
Lu Xun. Xing fu yi zhe fu ji. [Nachwort].
Lu Xun calls Artsybashev a pessimist and a complete subjectivist, from whose every work arises the flavor of flesh, yet also a writer who only depicted the reality he saw.

Lin Fengmian studiert an der Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

Exhibition on modern Chinese art in Beijing.
Celso Constantini met the Chinese painter Chen Yuandu and was so impressed by his talent that he invited him home and suggested to him to include Christian motives into his work. After having done several paitings oredered by Constantini, Chen began to take up Christian motives and to interpret them in a Chinese way.

Beilby Alston ist Gesandter der britischen Gesandtschaft in Beijing.

John Fitzgerald Brenan wird britischer Vize-Konsul in China.

Scott Langshaw Burdett wird Student Interpreter der britischen Botschaft in Beijing..

Charles Fortesque Garstin ist handelnder Generalkonsul des britischen Konsulats in Shanghai.

Herbert Goffe ist Generalkonsul des britischen Konsulats in Hankou (Hubei).

John N. Jordan Direktor der Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China in London.

Claud Cecil Augustus Kirke ist handelnder Generalkonsul des britischen Konsulats in Hankou (Hubei).

Arthur John Martin ist Vize-Konsul der britischen Gesandtschaft in Beijing.

William Stark Toller ist Konsul des britischen Konsulats in Shanghai.