Translating the Socialist Dream: Ilya Ehrenburg and Competing Visions of Soviet Revisionism in China.

This paper examines the discursive ways in which Ehrenburg and his works interacted with China's socialist movements from 1929 to 1976. Ehrenburg's complex and ambiguous position between East and West and between socialism and liberalism had made him a source of intensive ideological and literary contention in both the Soviet Union and China. This paper analyzes four phases of Ehrenburg's relationship with China: Lu Xun's criticisms of Ehrenburg's alienation from the revolution, Ehrenburg's close partnership with China in the anti-American World Peace Movement, his politics of "thaw" in the Sino-Soviet Split, and the official and underground curation and consumption of his memoir in the "internal publishing materials". Throughout the decades, Ehrenburg's unique status as a writer that existed "internal" to the socialist system but also maintained extensive "external" connections to the West created complex and unintended ideological consequences in China. While Ehrenburg had elaborated his ideal socialist dream to be a socialist society compatible with artistic freedom and cosmopolitanism, this vision at times was both embraced and rebutted in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]