Outlook

In March 2005, a film adaptation of Zweig’s Letter from an Unknown Woman by the accomplished actress and director Xu Jinglei was released in China. In fall 2013 the same novella by Zweig was adapted into an experimental play by the acclaimed avant-garde dramatist Meng Jinghui. To conclude the book, this outlook introduces these two works as examples of new and creative practices of cultural transfer. They testify to the continuity of Zweig’s success in China until today and show how discourses on the “Zweig-style female figures” have become an established site where notions of femininity are debated, reflecting and critically commenting on the new dynamics and pressures on Chinese society in the new millennium.

Zweig and the Chinese Love-Letter Fever

In the 1920s and 1930s China was swept by a “love-letter fever,” a craze for real and fictional romantic letters (qingshu). One of this trend’s most important representatives was the notoriously frivolous writer Zhang Yiping (1902-1946). This chapter places Zhang’s retranslation of Stefan Zweig’s Letter from an Unknown Woman of 1933 against the background of the young Chinese Republic’s ongoing struggles for modernity, when a multitude of theories on literature and its social functions were competing with each other. It also shows how Zhang used the prestige of a European writer in his feud with Lu Xun (1881-1936), one of China’s most influential writers. Taking the Chinese discourses as a starting point, a close reading of Letter from an Unknown Woman concludes the chapter. Beyond the framework of epistolary fiction and the love-letter genre the work reveals complex narrative strategies and literary dimensions which significantly complicate existing interpretations of Zweig’s most famous novella.

The Ideal Woman?

Zweig’s female protagonists have become famous in China as the “Zweig-style female figures” (Ciweige shi de nüxing xingxiang). Chapter Five asks what role the portrayal of femininity has played in Zweig’s poetics and their reception in post-Mao China. Employing a longstanding rhetoric that correlates the status of society and the status of women, Chinese critics argued that the depiction of suffering, emotional, and self-sacrificing female figures was the most powerful tool in Zweig’s critique of bourgeois society. Similar to female Chinese writers of the 1980s, such as Zhang Jie, feminist intellectuals thus started to return to a seemingly anachronistic concept of femininity. In this way, however, they were able to express their rejection of the Maoist gender policy and its promotion of gender sameness, thus also supporting a new regime that was eager to distance itself from its Maoist past. A discussion of how Zweig’s “women novellas” also crossed the Taiwan Strait and served the leadership under Deng Xiaoping in its new “peaceful” strategy to promote reunification concludes the chapter.

The Antibourgeois Bourgeois Writer

Despite the author’s bourgeois class background and the subject matter of his writings, Stefan Zweig’s novellas were among the very few foreign-language works that were still published under Mao Zedong’s strict communist rule. Analyzing the rhetoric of the academic articles and commentaries published with the translations, this chapter traces the trajectories of Chinese perspectives on Stefan Zweig’s works after the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949 and until the 2000s. Declaring Zweig’s novellas to be socio-critical literature, Chinese critics had developed a strategy during the Hundred Flowers Campaign of 1956 to make the writer acceptable to his communist censors. According to their interpretation, Zweig’s works fiercely attack the moral decay, emptiness, hypocrisy and brutality of bourgeois society in which women, in particular, suffer. Even after the Mao era came to an end, this way of reading Zweig’s novellas has persisted. Comparing European and North American narratives on Zweig that construct him as an “apolitical” and “nostalgic” writer, the Chinese reception in fact reveals an important socio-critical impetus, especially of the “women novellas,” that has been ignored in Western academia so far.

Introducing Zweig in Turbulent Times

Stefan Zweig’s works were first introduced in Republican China after the fall of the Qing Empire (1644-1911) during a period of transition, re-orientation, and civil war. This chapter focuses on two cases, Geng Jizhi’s (1899-1947) translation of the novella The Governess of 1927 and Sun Hanbing’s (1902-1940) translation of the novella Letter from an Unknown Woman of 1934. Geng Jizhi served as a diplomat of the Nationalist government at Chinese consulates in the Soviet Union and was one of the most important translators of classical Russian literature. Eager to introduce European notions of psychology and psychoanalysis to a Chinese readership during the New Culture Movement, he translated Zweig’s novella from a Russian source. Sun Hanbing, a professor of economics who had extensively studied in the US, based his translation on an English edition and attached not only an American but also a Soviet review to his translation. Active in Shanghai’s illegal Marxist circles he published the novella as a negative example of decadent bourgeois literature in a Marxist journal that was banned shortly after. This chapter therefore showcases the introduction of Zweig in China as a result of multiple interweaving linguistic, cultural, intellectual, and, in particular, diametrically opposed political systems.

Introduction

The 130th anniversary of Stefan Zweig’s birthday in 2011 triggered the latest “rediscovery” of the Austrian writer in Europe and North America, manifesting itself in various new editions and translations, exhibitions, graphic novels, radio plays, and movies inspired by his life and work, such as Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel or Maria Schrader’s Vor der Morgenröte. At the same heated debates about the writer’s literary merit flared up again. This introduction provides an overview of the international reception history of Zweig, whose works have been translated into more than sixty languages since the 1920s, while causing relentless aversion and controversy among scholars and critics. This chapter also explains why the Chinese reception with its wealth of unexplored material spanning almost the whole twentieth century serves as the ideal case study not only to re-read Zweig’s work but also to rethink our understanding of cross-cultural literary connections as complex “global systems of cultural transfer.”