In "The World of Man", the Soviet novel "The Yershov Brothers" is mentioned in three places, and the characters in "The Yershov Brothers" also appear in the imagination of the protagonist Bingkun: when Bingkun saw the poor blind little light, he held him in his arms, and at that time, Bingkun's mind immediately appeared similar to the picture and situation in "The Yersov Brothers".
Chinese writers were quite influenced by Russian and Soviet novels. When describing Chinese characters and reality, Chinese writers born in the 1950s often directly use literary depictions in Russian and Soviet novels to replace their own image revelations.
Being able to directly transplant the literary situation in Soviet novels like Liang Xiaosheng and use it in his own literary works, another writer can list Mo Yan.
Saying that Mo Yan imitated the Latin American writer Márquez, even Mo Yan himself scoffed and denied it, but Mo Yan wrote at the key point in his novel, directly using the character psychology in the Soviet writer's "Quiet Don River" to replace his own revelation of literary characters.
For example, in "Life and Death Fatigue", Mo Yan wrote:
"I don't know how to describe the mood of Blue Liberation at that moment, because many great novelists, in dealing with such plots, have set an insurmountable standard for us. For example, in the novel "The Quiet Don" by the Soviet writer Sholokhov, which has been praised by countless university literature professors and writers, Aksinya's post-stray bullet, the mood and feelings of his lover Gregory are described: "There was an inexplicable force pushing toward his chest, and he fell backwards, and his face fell down", "He seemed to wake up from a nightmare, raised his head, and saw a black sky and a dazzling black sun above his head." ”
Sholokhov made Gregory fall to the ground unconsciously, what should I do? Did I also let Blue Liberation fall to the ground? Sholokhov left Gregory's heart blank, what should I do? Did I also let Blue Liberation's heart go blank? Sholokhov asked Gregory to look up and see a dazzling black sun, what should I do? Did I also let Blue Liberation see a dazzling black sun? Even if I don't let Blue Liberation fall to the ground, but let him lie upside down on the ground; even if I don't let Blue Liberation have a blank heart, but let him think a thousand thoughts, a thousand feelings, and think about the world in a minute; even if I don't let Blue Liberation see a dazzling black sun, but let him see a round of dazzling or non-dazzling, white gray red blue sun, is that even if it is my originality? No, that's still a clumsy imitation of the classic. ”
We can roughly see that Mo Yan's Master of Soviet Literature was Sholokhov, and his representative work was "The Quiet Don River".
Liang Xiaosheng's teacher of Soviet literature can be counted as Kochetov's "The Yershov Brothers."
In Liang Xiaosheng's scripted novel Zhiqing, it is described that the Zhiqing who joined the team in Shaanxi secretly read literary books, one of which is also "The Yersov Brothers".
One of them particularly emphasized: "The Brothers of Yersov" is a good novel.
It can be seen that Liang Xiaosheng really has a special love for "The Brothers of Yersov".
In fact, if we look at the reminiscences of that era, we will find that the response of "The Brothers of Yelsov" among Chinese readers at that time was beyond our imagination.
Although this novel is contrary to the "thaw" literature and is unfair to Stalin, and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, such a pure novel that represents the creative tendencies of Soviet conservatives is even more abandoned, but from the literary level, from the perspective of character portrayal, from the level of human warmth, it is easier to get the reader's recognition and recognition.
In contrast, the Russian and Soviet literature that is now at the top of the best-seller list is a jerky, ambiguous, and musty work such as "The Master and Margaret", and behind these novels, "Later Soviet literature" has occurred, and now because the Soviet Union has disappeared, it has re-picked up the literary works before the Soviet Union and directly skipped an era, but the incomprehensible trampling, neglect and staleness of human nature in these novels make people feel with a kind of intellectuals in the bookstore who are out of touch with the imaginary hollowness of the reality and lack of fresh life breath. However, as a representative work of Russian literature in the last century, it is obviously difficult to say, and it can only be said that this was a wanton ravage and slaughter of Russian and Soviet literature after the collapse of the Soviet Empire.
"The Brothers of Yersov" inherits the panoramic structure of "War and Peace" in terms of structure, penetrates into the various spiritual levels of the characters, and shows the overall social landscape.
At least in this novel, we can see a realistic overview of the society at that time, and its cognitive value of society is more meaningful than those novels that indulge in personal spiritual space, which have the significance of restoring the old era.
The Yelshof Brothers are roughly divided into two threads, one is a political clue and the other is an emotional clue.
For Chinese readers at that time, what impressed "The Brothers of Yelsov" was the emotional clues inside.
The emotional clues in "The Brothers Of Yelsov" are indeed shocking. In the novel, the fifth elder of the Ye family was injured in the face by the Germans in World War II, leaving a scar and getting acquainted with liaolia, a girl who was also disfigured, and the two people had pity for each other and lived together. However, because the fourth elder surrendered to the enemy in World War II, after his release from prison, he returned to his hometown, he could not recognize Liao Liya as his former girlfriend, but Liao Liya saw at a glance that he was the boyfriend of that year, so that a girl, becoming a common lover of the two brothers of the Ye family, whether from the ethical and moral or psychological feelings, broke out a huge shock wave, and such a tragic collision is the tragedy caused by the war.
This is also the biggest indictment of war in the emotional threads of the Yelshof Brothers.
And in the superficial political clues in "The Brothers of Yelsov", there are also rifts of the era in the shadow of the sword and light. The novel depicts a group of opportunists who, by means of anti-personal superstition, attack the builders of the system, portraying them as conservatives, bureaucrats, and anti-reformers. From a moral point of view, the novel nails the so-called radicals who have the ideas of the "thawed" people to the pillar of shame.
This is also the characteristic of any novel, that is, the characters of the villains are used as moral filters to distinguish the advantages and disadvantages of their characters, and accordingly, their political line will be placed negatively. This is to replace historical evaluation with moral evaluation.
Arrentsev, the speculator in "The Brothers in Yershov", is a morally corrupt person himself, he plays with women in the ministry, abandons his wife, is accused by his wife, is in a morally inferior position, and in desperation, he comes to the steel factory at the grassroots level. In this new unit, he continues to come out on top, hoping to eradicate any force that stands in his way to the knighthood, and the dissenting epoch of his political choices, which the author proves through his moral defects, is an underlying law in the novel, a morally noble man, whose political choices must be correct, and vice versa.
The Yelsov Brothers were introduced to China in 1961, when Soviet literature was no longer as popular as they were in the 1950s, and the Yershof Brothers were chosen to enter China precisely because of the anti-revision tendencies in the novels. Obviously, the political clues in "The Brothers in Yersov" are very much in line with the Chinese views in the Sino-Soviet controversy.
For Chinese readers, the tense clash of ideas described in the novel's political clues will not trigger the empathy effect, because the themes in the novel are easily acceptable to Chinese readers. The contradictions and conflicts between human natures depicted in the emotional clues in the novel have brought a strong stimulus to Chinese readers. Just like the physical and mental damage that Liao Liya suffered from the scars of war, it is a rare area of Chinese fiction.
What realizes the intersection of political clues and emotional clues in the novel is the emergence of the element of love that breaks the barriers and barriers between these two clues.
In the political clues, the highest-ranking person is naturally Gorbachev, the secretary of the municipal party committee, who stands at the top of the political clues and bears the fury of the front of the ideological shock waves in the political clues.
In the emotional clues, it is the triangular relationship between two brothers in the Ye family and a disfigured girl.
What breaks this vertical linear relationship between the two threads horizontally is the love relationship between Kaba, the daughter of the municipal party secretary, and Andrei, a descendant of the Ye family.
Love can always break the integration and communication between the plates that cannot interact, as Liang Xiaosheng has always emphasized in "The World of Man", there is a possibility of breaking the class difference, that is, the marriage between different classes. Love is the only force that can achieve class disintegration. This is the source of motivation for the love chapter between Bingyi and Dongmei in "The World of Man".
The love between the daughter of the secretary of the municipal party committee and the worker Andrei in "The Brothers of Yelshof" finally has a happy ending, they enter the palace of marriage, and in the novel, there is also a symbolic description, that is, on the day when the secretary of the municipal party committee died, his daughter gave birth to a child at the same time, which indicates that the love crystallization of the daughter of the high cadre and the working class fills the tragic absence after the death of the cadre, in the mind of the author of the novel. The descendants of the working class are sufficient to match the status of senior cadres. This is also the degree of recognition of the working class in the era when the Brothers of Yelshof was published, at least in theory, unquestionable.
But in "The World of Man", Liang Xiaosheng's position is obviously not the 1956 year when the Soviet novel was published, but in the novel, he sets the love between the daughter of the governor and the descendants of the workers as a love without descendants, which obviously has Liang Xiaosheng's more thoughtful intentions.
The popularity of "The Brothers Yelshof" in China at that time was almost invariably a love conflict that brought people a strong sense of excitement in the novel, that is, the love tragedy of LiaoLia in the novel.
In his reminiscence essay "The Harvest Hut" (in the book "Stars Full of Youth", 2012 edition), Gu Qianke, a Shanghai intellectual who went to the countryside to the Heilongjiang Construction Corps in 1969, mentioned that when he joined the team, the most talked about novels included "The Yersov Brothers".
The most controversial thing in "The Brothers of Yelsov" is the love tragedy of the old four Stepan and Liaolia.
Here are the highlights discussed in this article:
One Zhiqing said: "Liao Liya is the most heart-wrenching character in the whole novel, but she is not perfect. At first, it is weak and delicate, pure and lovely, but in the end it is ugly and obedient, which is completely contrary to the aesthetic principles of the current era; the psychological description of the novel is too dark and obscure, and the protagonist's final ending is too tragic, contrary to the high-spirited era at that time. ”
Another zhiqing disagreed with the above view: "I think that her tragic fate with Stepan is the biggest attraction of the whole novel." What is a tragedy? Tragedy is about destroying the most beautiful things in the world alive before you. Liaolia, a woman who had survived the ravages of the German army, was finally destroyed by the forces of habit that had been spurned for losing her femininity. She climbed up the blast furnace and jumped vertically into the billowing molten steel, turning into a wisp of green smoke that lingered in the depths of the soul, and also achieved an eternal classic. ”
Of course, in the yelshof brothers novel, LiaoLia once thought of jumping into the blast furnace overflowing with molten steel, but was stopped by the workers, and her whereabouts were later unknown, leaving a suspense at the end of the novel.
There is also Zhiqing who pays more attention to Stepan in "The Brothers of Yelsov" and sympathizes with him. In "The World of Man", Bingkun also expresses an inappropriate sympathy for stepan, who was once a rebel, which shows that the novel's focus on the tangled minds of Chinese audiences at that time was the same.
The article "The Cottage of the Harvest" introduces this young man and interprets the image of Stepan as follows:
"As for Stepan, I think it was very successful." What were you doing when the Germans were killing me? Why do you have to come back alive? This cry of blood sent his soul under the condition of true purgatory. This confession of life is worse than death, writing something deep in human nature, it seems that each of our readers has been baptized by the soul, real, three-dimensional, profound, and touching! ”
"You are involved in a forbidden area: he is a traitor, a sinner, and in our artistic creation, we definitely belong to the category of Fu Zhigao!"
"But he is first and foremost a man, a living man. He didn't ask for anything, he just wanted to go back alive to see his Liaolia. Stepan's sins stem from his weakness, from some of the inherent weaknesses of human nature—the lust for life (the cherishing of life, in fact, the most basic quality of human nature, is beyond reproach, but in those days, we did not dare to touch this topic). He did not betray his comrades-in-arms, but he sold his soul, his motherland, and the most precious thing in our values. I think he's just a middleman. ”
This discussion also stopped in this place.
Kochetov statue
In the original book of "The World of Man", Bingkun also participated in the debate between his brothers and sisters around the "Yersov Brothers", and Bingkun's position was also like that of Pu Mingqing of that era, focusing on the image of Stepan in the novel, which at that time seemed to belong to the middle character.
It can be said that Liang Xiaosheng's repetition of "The Yershov Brothers" in "The World of Man" is not only his reading experience and ideological experience, but also the common psychological process of that generation of intellectuals, in this sense, the "Yershov Brothers" that no one knows today is far more than the premier Russian and Soviet literature such as "Dr. Zhivago" and "The Master and Margaret", which arouse the empathetic reaction of Chinese readers.
After all, compared with the male protagonists in "Doctor Zhivago" and "The Master and Margaret" who are still addicted to the emotional experience beyond morality and give people a strange feeling of a paradise detached from reality, the "Brothers Yelsov" attaches the emotions of the characters to the blazing reality, and is constrained and prescribed by reality, which is more in line with the real living conditions of individual life in modern situations, thus gaining the recognition of the audience.
In the identification of Russian and Soviet literature, the utilitarian screening method caused the sinking and obliteration of this section of Soviet literature. Liang Xiaosheng reminds Chinese audiences and readers of a very moving and passionate era of Soviet literature. "The Brothers Of Yersov" is imprinted with the attention and focus of an era. Even if it is dusted today, when we open the pages of this novel, we can still feel the heat of emotion and soul inside, and feel the vividness of words and thoughts.