ABSTRACT
Few writers are able to represent, with the arc of their entire literary career, the whole cycle of genesis, development and demise of Maoist literature as emblematically as Zhou Libo. Born in a modest family background in a Hunan village in 1908, a student of a modern high school in Changsha in the late Twenties, he befriended the future “cultural czar” of the PRC, Zhou Yang, in 1928, and soon decided to follow him to the revolutionary capital of Shanghai. There he continued his education – turning in particular to the study of literature and the English language – and took part, at the same time, in the underground political activities organized by the Communist Party. Arrested by the Nationalist police in 1933, he was admitted after his release a year later first by the League of the Left-Wing Writers and then by the Communist Party, both at the recommendation of Zhou Yang. During this period, he began to establish himself as a leftist literary critic and theorist, as well as a translator of foreign literature. His full-fledged revolutionary coming-of-age, however, occurred only with the outbreak of the Anti-Japanese War, when he eventually abandoned the urban comfort of Shanghai and headed for the rugged brave new world of Yan’an, where he arrived at the end of 1939, after having served at the front of the Sino-Japanese conflict in Hebei as interpreter and war correspondent. Appointed a teacher in the Lu Xun Academy (directed since 1940 by Zhou Yang), he delivered a course titled “Selected Readings of Literary Masterpieces,” and began, in the meantime, to try his hand at literary creation, writing his first short stories. It was his participation in the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art convened by the CCP in 1942, however, which finally opened the floodgate of his artistic creation. Following Mao’s instruction that writers must go among the masses to learn from the masses, he worked for six months, between 1946 and 1947, as a cadre of a land reform work team operating in a Manchurian village named Yuanbao, and subsequently immortalized the events in which he took part in his first novel, The Hurricane (Baofeng zhouyu), published in two parts first in 1947 and then in 1948. After the founding of the PRC, he successfully continued his career as cadre-author penning in 1955 the novel River of Iron (Tie shui benliu) – which celebrates the Communist struggles to build the national steel industry in the early years of the Republic. Between 1959 and 1960 he completed the novel Great Changes in a Mountain Village (Shanxiang jubian), a sweeping portrait of the collectivization movement in rural Hunan that is commonly regarded as his highest artistic achievement. Attacked during the Cultural 319Revolution, he resumed his writing at the beginning of the Reform Era, when he won an award for a short story celebrating the valiant struggle of the Eight Route Army during the Anti-Japanese War, “A Night on the Xiang River” (Xiangjiang yi ye). However, this was not the kind of writing to be favored in the “New Era” inaugurated by Deng Xiaoping in 1978. He died in 1979.
