In the past few years, it has been an era when everything is in ruins and the future is bright, the interference of political movements is relatively small, the way of learning is still relatively correct, their feelings are very simple, and their enthusiasm for learning is also sufficient, so many talented students have emerged. I still vividly remember the first time Comrade Shi Changdong, who later became a very accomplished esthetician, came to my house. Probably in writing class, he handed in an essay, I corrected it for him, and after the assignment was sent, he thought his essay was well written, but I changed it badly, so he ran to my house to comment on it. I like this kind of young man who has independent opinions and is not afraid of tigers, so I gave him an analysis of why he was so modified, and he was convinced. Later, he often came to my house to sit, wrote articles and showed them to me, and it became a friend of the year. At that time, I was close to some progressive young people, many of whom were party members and league members, and I always expressed various opinions without reservation. However, who would have thought that in 1955 I was arrested and imprisoned, and this became a "crime" against me for engaging in "conspiracy activities" at Fudan University, and my classmates, who were close to me, were also labelled as "Hu Feng influencers" and suffered crimes. A young teaching assistant who used to come to my house often criticized me in Shanghai's "Literature and Art Monthly" and said eloquently: "Jia Zhifang, like Hu Feng, has always dressed himself up as a person who loves young people, co-opted and deceived young people, and used young people who are not yet politically mature. Inviting students to drink and giving money to students are among his usual methods. In addition, whenever a student's manuscript was rejected by the editorial department of the newspaper, he always expressed regret, told the students how bad a certain editorial department was, and persuaded the students to write some manuscripts for publication by him. It was in this way that he not only severed the relationship between the contributors and the editorial board of the national journal, but also skillfully built a mass base for himself, and also pulled the manuscript for his clay society. "I'm going to copy this passage because he writes it quite realistically, and aside from the words that go to the syllabus and go online, my relationship with the students outside of class is probably about drinking, giving money, and introducing the manuscript. This critical essay helped me recall many vivid details of the time. However, how good it would be for the friendship between teachers and students to go down at this step, compared with the situation in the future when students were specially encouraged to report teachers, teachers and students were guarded everywhere, and teachers and students were like passers-by, I still miss that period of affection between teachers and students.
I offered four courses at Fudan University, first on "Selected Readings of Modern Literature" and "Soviet Literature", which were offered during the Aurora period, and then on "Selected Readings of World Literature" and "Writing". At that time, "Soviet literature" was a general term, in fact, it was about Soviet Russian literature, from Rajishev's "Journey from Petersburg to Moscow" to Soviet Patriotic War novels, but the theory that ran through the analysis was to use a set of things in the Zhdanov style that was popular in the Soviet Union at that time, and I also referred to Japanese and English research materials on Soviet and Russian literature. In line with the preparation of these two courses, I successively translated and published Baluhati's "Chekhov's Dramatic Art" (1951), "Chekhov's Notes" (1953), and "On Reportage" (1953) by Czechkirch, as well as the manuscripts of his future works, sketches of his life, as well as his reading experience and sentences copied from the works of other writers. The book was written from 1892 to 1944, the year he wrote his masterpieces "The Neighbor" and "Ward No. 6", and until the year when "The Cherry Orchard" was staged, which was his most mature creative period. Part of "Subject Matter" is also a note-taking thing, which is the accumulation of material for Chekhov's novels. The diary is written between 1896 and 193 and is similar to the previous two parts. The publication of this "Notes" not only contributed a fortune to the study of Chekhov, but also provided an important material for the study of the process and laws of literary creation. At that time, I was translating from the Japanese translation by the famous Russian literature expert Kamisai Kiyoshi of Japan, and also from the English translation published in 1922. I liked this book very much, and after it was published, I wrote an introduction article in the newspaper, and some of the words in it can be regarded as my evaluation of "Notes":
His notes, each short, even a single sentence, were "something shorter than a sparrow's nose," but as Gorky described them, they were beautiful and delicate laces, the product of deep refinement. ...... What Chekhov wrote down in his notes was not only what he saw and heard, but also what he felt and thought. It is what he has seen and heard, and what he has felt and thought about. They are all extracted from the so-called dense forests of life.
The language used in the notebook, like the language in his writings, is the language of the everyday, concise and unpretentious, poetic, such as "it is raining", which is used very naturally, as one says in life, and he never writes anything pompously according to the laws of rhetoric.
Chekhov's notes, like his works, are bright and concise.
He can penetrate the essence of things with simple brushstrokes, whether it is dialogue, memorization, characters, plots, aphorisms, or topics, they are all things that are full of characteristics and have a high degree of generalization. They stand on their own and can be read as social essays.
Chekhov's Notes, as an essay, are characterized by the spirit of all of Chekhov's creations: self-sustaining in anger and optimistic humor out of purity. Its important value, as Gorky said, is that they are an inspiration and love for life. He used the strong moral power of the people to denounce the age of vulgarity and sin that still occupies the triumphant era, and at the same time heralded the era of the triumph of beauty and goodness.
In 1982, when I was able to walk freely in the sunlight again, I stumbled upon this translation from the "in-house stack" of the school library, and it was like meeting a long-lost relative on the street, and my eyes welled up with the tears of the elderly. I looked at the portrait of Chekhov printed on the title page of the translation, and thought of a passage from the writer I read a long time ago: "A man who has no requirements, who has no love and no hatred, cannot become a writer." This sentence has been my spiritual pillar on my long and bumpy road in life. This translation was later published in a revised edition by the Zhejiang People's Publishing House, and it was soon reprinted again, with a print run of more than 28,000 copies.
"Studies in Russian Literature" is a collection of essays on Russian literature that I translated, and except for one article written by a Communist Party of America, the rest were written by Soviet literary researchers, reflecting the theoretical level of the Soviet academic circles at that time and my own level of understanding. The book contains 26 essays, the first of which is the theory of Rajishev and the last is the theory of Gorky, which reveals through the arrangement "the great history of the development of Russian realist literature, which forever shook the hearts of mankind". And because it is a compilation of writers' theories, in each article can independently show the unique creative style of outstanding Russian writers. These 26 essays study 17 Russian writers and poets, including two studies by Chernyshevsky and Tolstoy, and eight studies by Gogol, giving a relatively comprehensive introduction to Gogol's contributions in various fields. Gogol is also my favorite writer, of course, because of the large amount of Gogol material at hand, I also wrote articles in newspapers commemorating him and Chekhov.
Interestingly, by 1955, when I was put in a position where every word or deed could be convicted, even the lovers of Chekhov and Gogol were accused of "propagating Hu Feng's reactionary theories by explaining their works" and "undermining the teaching of Soviet literature."
Overall, the three years I have spent at Fudan have been very pleasant in terms of getting along with my teachers and friends, interacting with students, teaching, writing, and personal life. My life has been turbulent, and I have rarely had a stable life for more than a few years in a row, and the teaching life of these years is rare for me. However, as a friend of Hu Feng, as an intellectual with a unique feeling about life and literature and art, the depression brought by the general climate at that time and the pleasant atmosphere in the school were just a contrast. I am referring to the dark tide of criticism of Hu Feng that is stronger than the year is concerned, although at first it was limited to literary and artistic thought, but the pressure on people is by no means limited to this. I have never been engaged in literary theory, nor do I have any great interest, so I have never been very clear about Hu Feng's theory, but what I respect is his upright personality strength, is the friendship with Hu Feng for decades of life and death, and what is more unforgettable is that Hu Feng once helped me in my most difficult time, we are friends, not betraying friendship is the basic creed of traditional Chinese life, and "betraying friends for glory" has always been despised by Shilin. So while I was worried about Hu Feng's situation, I also had a sense of foreboding that I had to sacrifice for my friends.
Feng Xuefeng
First of all, in the early days of liberation, Feng Xuefeng once returned to Shanghai from Beijing, chatting with friends, Mao Zedong had called him, the time may be on the eve of the liberation of the country, Mao Zedong asked Feng Xuefeng about Hu Feng's situation in Shanghai, he asked Xuefeng: "I heard that Hu Feng has a group of people around him?" The mode of thinking that the actions of intellectuals are not seen as individual actions, but as a collective force, is itself a signal that has been latent in future actions. Later, Pan Han came to work in Shanghai, and he also said in a report: "There is a group of people in Shanghai who are doing something else under the banner of Marxism. I sat down and heard this, and I quickly thought of Hu Feng's situation.
In the past few years, the ups and downs of criticizing Hu Feng have been large and sometimes small, until September and December 1952, when Beijing held a "discussion meeting on Hu Feng's literary and artistic thoughts," which was held intermittently four times, bringing Hu Feng's literary and artistic theory to the level of "anti-party," and finally ending with He Qifang's article "The Road of Realism or the Road of Anti-Realism." For the first time, Hu Feng, a stubborn and fierce Hubei native, had to bow his head to them, which was a huge blow to his spirit. I remember that when he returned to Shanghai from Beijing, it was almost winter, and we all wore thick cotton robes, but we still felt cold in our hearts. At that time, I had not moved to Fudan to live, and I still lived on Yongjia Road. One afternoon, Hu Feng's youngest son came to me and said that his father had returned. I went to see him with a bottle of wine and a bag of food to accompany the wine, and when I arrived at his house, I saw that he was depressed and looked very bad. If Hu Feng said it angrily, I felt the weight of what I heard, and my years of political experience once again reminded me that this was a bad omen, especially since Hu Feng, although he admitted that his theory was "petty-bourgeois", he by no means met the requirements that He Qifang expected. Hu Feng said indignantly: "How can I learn from He Qifang? During the left-wing movement in the thirties, we were all fighting, but he hid in the university and daydreamed, sang serenades, fought the war, he went to Yan'an to speculate, and immediately changed his face, he became the most revolutionary, the most Marxist-Leninist, and in turn pointed fingers at others to rectify others, this kind of person who doesn't even want personality, if I learn from him, it will be a crime against the people. Hu Feng's words were somewhat extreme, but I didn't have a good impression of He Qifang, especially after listening to some friends who came back from Yan'an talk about his various actions in the "rescue movement" led by Kang Sheng, I felt even more disgusted. But I know in my heart that He Qifang's criticism of Hu Feng is not his personal behavior, and there is a larger political background behind him, which cannot but be taken seriously. I advised Hu Feng: "Old Hu, you can't fight them, forget it, don't be reckless, we are not as good as Mr. Lu Xun, Lu Xun was involved in the political whirlpool in the twenties and thirties, but he deeply understands China's political history and society, he can get in and out, and always has the initiative." And we can't, you don't understand politics but you want to go into the political whirlpool, that's too dangerous. Hu Feng was silent. I further persuaded him: "Don't engage in these disputes anymore, or hide in Shanghai and bury yourself in two things, write a memoir of Lu Xun, this is what you can do, Mr. Lu Xun has a lot of contact with you, and many of his words and deeds, if you don't write them, you will lose them, even as materials should be preserved." Besides, you can translate "Arabian Nights", and now that this complete work has a Japanese translation, it has two million words, and it is a classic, and it will take you a few years to translate it, isn't it just to avoid the limelight now?" Hu Feng thought so at the time, he may really feel physically and mentally exhausted, but deep down he is unwilling to be lonely. Later, when he moved his family to live in Beijing, I asked someone to borrow him the complete works of "Arabian Nights" in Japanese, but he finally did not translate it after bringing it.
This is the case with Chinese intellectuals, who will never be able to get rid of the "red dancing shoes" of political complexes.
Mr. and Mrs. Hu Feng
In August 1953, Hu Feng moved his family north and left the city of Shanghai, where he had been living hard since the victory of the Anti-Japanese War. Before leaving Shanghai, Xu Shihua, the owner of the Tu Society, had a treat at a Guangdong restaurant in Datong Restaurant on Huaihai Road. Before leaving, Ren Min and I went to help them pack up. After the busy work, our two families still left a photo in his old residence. In the background is a huge duffel bag and a damp wall, Hu Feng wears an open shirt and shorts, and sits wearily next to Mei Zhi, only a pair of deep eyes, still staring at the unknowable ahead.
On the day he left Shanghai, both of us went to the station to see him off. Zhou Erfu is the deputy head of the United Front Work Department in Shanghai, and he sent a car to help Hu Feng deliver his luggage, and he also went to the station to deliver it. I had a good acquaintance with Zhou Erfu a long time ago, that is, after the victory of the Anti-Japanese War, my wife and I went to Shanghai in 1946, first to Hu Feng's house to settle down, but happened to meet him and Liu Baiyu in the name of Xinhua News Agency reporters were sitting in the Hu family guest house, I brought a bottle of Xugou sorghum in a Japanese sake bottle from Xuzhou, and had lunch at Hu's house at noon that day, everyone drank and chatted together, talked and laughed, and the atmosphere was very harmonious. At this time, everyone just nodded politely, and after the car drove away, they went their separate ways. Afterwards, I talked to people I knew well, and I said: "Lao Hu has lived and worked in Shanghai for so many years, but I didn't expect that when I left, only us and Zhou Erfu came to see him off. This word later spread and became a great crime.