The Ethnic Avant-Garde: Minority Cultures and World Revolution

The preceding chapter followed Vladimir Mayakovsky on his 1925 American travels. This one begins with another Soviet futurist, Sergei Tret’iakov, traveling to China in 1924. A poet, playwright, and photographer, he had weathered the Russian Civil War in Vladivostok, there cofounding the Far Eastern futurist group Tvorchestvo (Creation), and then in 1922 had settled in Moscow, joining Mayakovsky’s Left Front of the Arts (LEF).¹ He spent two years in China, where he taught Russian literature at Peking University and wrote several works based on his observations there. One of them, a play called Roar China, is the focus of this chapter. Though little remembered now, this indictment of Western imperialism in 1920s China was one of the most successful, internationally performed works of its time. After debuting at Moscow’s Meyerhold Theater in 1926, where it ran for four years, it was part of that theater’s 1930 European tour and also appeared around the world—including in New York, where it was produced by the respected Theatre Guild company in 1930.

Staged at the behemoth Martin Beck (now Al Hirschfeld) Theatre, this Soviet play—and not, as is usually claimed, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1959 musical Flower Drum Song—was the first major Broadway production to feature a predominantly Asian American cast. Thus, we can use Roar China to extend the Moscow-centered ethnic avant-garde to Asian Americans, a group not typically associated with interwar socialist culture.² More broadly, though, Roar China reveals an ethnic avant-garde that, in tandem with the Soviet avant-garde, was forced to adapt to the increasingly restrictive political climate of the late 1920s and early 1930s. In the case of Tret’iakov and his fellow futurists at LEF, adaptation came in the form of a quixotic and contradictory technique called factography—the transformation of both art and reality through the “precise fixation of facts.”³ This technique and its literary component, “the literature of fact,” marked the Soviet avant-garde’s gradual turn from iconoclasm, that is, from eccentric works like Tatlin’s Tower and Mayakovsky’s American writings. From this perspective, the chapter marks the beginning of the end of both the ethnic and Soviet avant-gardes. However, in line with the various Towers of Babel that we encountered in the previous chapter, factography still cast the non-European Other in a radical, experimental light. Indeed, this technique can be seen as offering a positive alternative to the ethnic avant-garde of Mayakovsky and McKay, Hughes and Eisenstein, in that it explicitly eschewed exoticism in favor of ethnographic precision. To be sure, the lens opened by this turn from iconoclasm to factography is not as estranging as those offered by the likes of Tatlin or Mayakovsky. Still, Roar China presents another avant-gardist path not taken, one that reveals Asian America’s forgotten Soviet legacy.

The chapter begins by describing the emergence of factography within Soviet avant-garde circles of the mid to late 1920s, using the various manifestations of Roar China to illustrate this technique. Just as in the introduction and chapter 1, I draw both contrasts and connections between the avant-garde and vanguard, in particular, between Roar China and the Comintern’s disastrous policy toward China. The chapter then focuses on how factography translated abroad, comparing the 1930 New York production to the Moscow original. As will become apparent, both the play and factography benefited from the inclusion of Asian American actors, mostly Chinese and Korean immigrants living in New York. However, in the move to New York, key factographic elements were dropped, and the technique began to fade from memory. After discussing additional echoes of Roar China through the 1930s, I use Langston Hughes’s 1937 poem by the same name to mark the abandonment of factography in the face of socialist realism and Stalinist terror.

However, beyond this predictable arc from avant-gardism to socialist realism, the main goal here is to salvage something positive from this suppressed, forgotten technique. Specifically, Roar China presents an antiexoticist iteration of the Moscow-centered ethnic avant-garde, here bearing a clearer political vision than in the previous chapter. Again, this can be attributed to growing political and aesthetic constraints in the Soviet Union, but just as in the previous chapter’s discussion of Mayakovsky and Hughes, we will find non-Soviet artists claiming and adapting Soviet culture. Through their many reworkings of Roar China and factography, these artists were able to smuggle the ethnic avant-garde out of the USSR and into the postwar years.

Tret’iakov arrived in China soon after Sun Yat-sen announced that his fledgling republic would look to the Soviet Union for assistance against Western imperialism. In response, the Comintern sent financial and military aid to bolster Sun’s project of national consolidation. It also sent a wave of military and political advisers, and though not a formal Comintern agent, Tret’iakov can be regarded as part of this Soviet outreach to China.⁴ After the prospects for European revolution dimmed, Moscow and the Comintern increasingly looked eastward, and given its precarious, semicolonized status, China seemed particularly ripe for upheaval. However, the Comintern—increasingly beholden to Stalinist realpolitik from the mid-1920s—deemed that the country still had to pass through a bourgeois nationalist stage before advancing to socialism. That is, even though the Bolsheviks had justified the outbreak of revolution in their own “backward” country, they came to apply a more conservative line to others—a reflection of the Comintern’s increasingly rigid, evolutionist take on history, as well as Trotsky’s declining authority. Thus, Moscow instructed the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to ally itself with Sun’s Nationalist Party, or Guomindang, and to maintain this alliance with Sun’s vehemently anticommunist successor, Chiang Kai-shek. The result was the near liquidation of the CCP in 1927, when Chiang abandoned the alliance and massacred thousands of communists in Shanghai—the topic of André Malraux’s 1933 novel La condition humaine.⁵

As spelled out in the introduction, the Soviet avant-garde can be seen as connected to but apart from the Comintern—Tret’iakov as the former’s representative to China. He was not the only avant-gardist drawn there. His close friend Sergei Eisenstein was as well, and in 1925–1926 he and Tret’iakov planned a never-realized sprawling film epic on Chinese history, similar in concept to ¡Que viva México!⁶ As might be expected in light of the Mexican project, Eisenstein was drawn to the “exoticness” of China: from the 1920s through the 1940s, he wrote essays embracing what he viewed as the visual and nonrational bases of the Chinese and Japanese cultures. For instance, he celebrated how Chinese ideograms created meaning through the collision of images—the product of a “primitive thought process” that, he claimed, anticipated his own views on montage. As Katerina Clark has shown, for him Chinese ideograms also pointed to the overcoming of linguistic divides demanded by a Moscow-centered world order. In his words, ideograms provided “a unique model for how, through emotional images filled with proletarian wisdom and humanity, the great ideas of our great land must be poured into the hearts and emotions of the millions of nations speaking different languages.”⁷ Of course, this exoticist embrace of the Chinese language is now legible to us: Eisenstein here brings to mind both Ezra Pound’s own embrace of Chinese as well as the ethnic avant-garde’s search for a unified language via past-present constellations.

Tret’iakov, however, was a different kind of avant-gardist, rejecting Eisenstein’s exoticism, that is, Eisenstein’s emphasis on Chinese “backwardness.” In his writings on China, Tret’iakov’s goal was to present China “as it really was,” eschewing the exotic and revealing the most pressing issue facing the country—according to him, Western imperialism. In short, Tret’iakov offered an alternative model for the Soviet-centered ethnic avant-garde, one that broke from fanciful, mythological notions of revolutionary history and non-Western cultures. Instead, his emphasis was on contemporary China, and accordingly, Roar China was based on actual events that occurred in Wanxian, a small town on the Yangtze River, in June 1924: an American businessman named Ashlay got into a scuffle with Chinese boatmen and ended up dead in the river. In response, the captain of the British gunboat HMS Cockchafer ordered that the guilty man be found and put to death—or else that two random members of the boatmen’s union be put to death. Failure to comply would result in the annihilation of the town. After two days, according to Tret’iakov, “two boatmen were executed, sacrificed to the red-headed god of British ruthlessness. These are the facts: I have hardly had to change anything.”⁸

Despite this seeming transparency, Tret’iakov endeavored, in Devin Fore’s words, “not simply to depict life, but to create it anew in the process.” That is, he was a steadfast avant-gardist in Peter Bürger’s sense of the word, committed to bringing art into life—a definition that Bürger substantiates through, for example, cubism’s incorporation of newspapers into painting. Accordingly, Tret’iakov described Roar China as an “article, only it reaches the audience’s consciousness not from the pages of a newspaper but from theatrical stageboards”—in short, the incorporation of newspapers into theater. For Bürger, the works of the historical avant-garde abandoned organicity in favor of fragments, the aim being to highlight the “principles of construction that determine the constitution of the work.” Accordingly, Tret’iakov opposed art and literature as passive reflection and maintained an open-ended, dynamic understanding of “facts”—for him, the result of action, process, and operation.⁹ It is this self-critical open-endedness that keeps factography interesting amid its muted iconoclasm, allowing for innovative presentations of workers, peasants, and Chinese people—Tret’iakov’s subjects of choice.

To understand this iteration of the Soviet avant-garde, Walter Benjamin again comes in handy. In a 1934 Paris lecture titled “The Author as Producer,” he singled out Tret’iakov as exemplifying the ability to overcome the seeming opposition between political tendency and artistic quality, namely, by being not just an author but also a producer. Benjamin was referring to Tret’iakov’s 1928 stint at a kolkhoz, where he called mass meetings, collected funds for tractors, and edited a small newspaper. But Tret’iakov’s writings from the mid-1920s also comply with Benjamin’s more formal prescriptions for overcoming this opposition: combining different media such as writing and photographs, turning readers and spectators into collaborators, and, in the case of theater, employing montage and interruption. (Benjamin uses Brecht here as an example, and Tret’iakov happened to be Brecht’s Russian translator and collaborator.¹⁰) In short, Benjamin viewed such techniques as dissolving the conventional separation of tendency and quality, as granting art an organizing function without reducing it to propaganda. Maria Gough nicely sums up his stance: “In order to formulate an efficacious concept of tendency, Benjamin dissolves its conventional opposition to quality by redefining quality itself as a matter of literary tendency, and the latter, in turn, as a matter of progressive or regressive literary technique.”¹¹

However, Benjamin’s embrace of Tret’iakov was a bit too generous—perhaps reflecting his awareness that, in 1934, Moscow had enshrined socialist realism, consummating the Soviet avant-garde’s decline.¹² Indeed, factography is best understood as a defensive measure that had sought to prevent this outcome. By the mid-1920s, efforts to fuse avant-garde and vanguard had apparently fallen flat: LEF had failed to make its art and writing an integral part of postrevolutionary society. As a case in point, art historian Benjamin Buchloh notes the painter El Lissitzky’s outreach to factory workers in the early 1920s:

This paradox complemented the contradiction that had become apparent several years earlier when Lissitzky had placed a suprematist painting, enlarged to the size of an agitational billboard, in front of a factory entrance in Vitebsk. This utopian radicalism in the formal sphere—what the conservative Soviet critics later would pejoratively allude to as formalism—in its failure to communicate with and address the new audiences of industrialized urban society in the Soviet Union, became increasingly problematic in the eyes of the very groups that had developed constructivist strategies to expand the framework of modernism.¹³

Thus, avant-gardists like Lissitzky—encountered in the introduction praising Tatlin’s Tower as a new Sargon Pyramid—had grown troubled by a perceived gulf between them and the masses. Their formal innovations seemed increasingly at odds with Soviet audiences and realities. In response, techniques like factography were aimed at accessibility and the transformation of social institutions. At the same time, however, the LEF group remained opposed, in Tret’iakov’s words, to “art in its aesthetic-stupefying function.”¹⁴ That is, the factographers were still intent on defamiliarization, on creating works that would change how the masses perceived a postrevolutionary world. They were particularly against art as mere representation, or as Leah Dickerman puts it, “the reflection model of realism…presupposing a stable and transhistorical concept of truth,” which in turn pointed to an “emergent model of socialist realism.”¹⁵ Tret’iakov and his circle sought a middle ground of sorts, art that was legible to workers, but that also destabilized perception and undercut received notions of the real.

Factography was intended to serve these ends. For the visual arts, its emphasis on precise facts translated to a shift from painting to photography, more specifically, from nonrepresentational works that highlighted their own constructedness to iconic photos that seemed to render “aspects of reality visible without interference or mediation.”¹⁶ For writing, the literature of fact spelled a rejection of fiction in favor of reportage. Thus, in 1928 Tret’iakov proclaimed,

We see here the broad generic range of the literature of fact, which Tret’iakov envisioned not as a new genre itself but as a “method of utilitarian publicistic work on present-day socialist problems.” That is, the literature of fact was to capture the “reality” of socialist life in as objective a manner as possible, not reality as it was supposed to be—the prerogative, in the near future, of socialist realism. Tret’iakov called for reportage on such tasks as “raising literacy, doubling the harvest, collectivization of agriculture, raising the productivity of labor, and other everyday matters.”¹⁸ Likewise, he pressed for new books with titles like Forest, Bread, Coal, Iron, Flax, Cotton, Paper, Locomotive, Factory, eschewing hagiographies of revolutionary heroes.¹⁹

Factography was to enable art and literature to catch up to “enormously developing reality,” namely the massive transformations brought by Soviet industrialization.²⁰ It was to allow the viewer or the reader to “experience the extended massiveness of reality, its authentic meaning.”²¹ Again, though, this meaning was not to be achieved through passive reflection but rather the disruptive combination of facts that themselves were understood as emerging from action and process. Quoting Viktor Shklovskii, Dickerman notes that “the role of the factographic author was to return to a state of first sight—‘to see things as they have not been described.’”²² Accordingly, this technique privileged the fragment, lost details, and limited points of views—thus Tret’iakov’s earlier-noted preference for incomplete writings (e.g., the travel note and sketch). In addition, this technique combined various forms, styles, and genres; for instance, the literature of fact was to be “an explicitly photographic mode of writing,” and Tret’iakov presented himself as both a writer and photographer. However, the factographic photograph was often provisional, partial, or blurred.²³

To help illustrate these claims and intents, let us now turn to Roar China, which appropriately assumed multiple forms. The 1926 play was preceded by a 1924 futurist poem called “Roar, China!” which Tret’iakov describes in his introduction to it as “a first encounter with China—or more accurately with a Peking street…. The basis of the poem’s songs is ‘a sound signboard’ of the vagrant artisans and sellers of Peking, that is, either hawker calls or the sounds of different instruments.”²⁴ He then provides a partial index of these sounds, as well as images and terms:

The poem itself bears similar features, though with more emphasis on fragment. Note, for example, part one, “Walls”:

These examples point to the promise of the literature of fact. Tret’iakov’s effort to return to a “state of first sight” is evident in the opening index’s unconnected details and sounds, as well as in the poem’s short lines, evocative of Mayakovsky’s American writings taken up in the previous chapter. Once again, fragments are used to capture arrival in a new place, but Tret’iakov eschews Mayakovsky’s all-encompassing poetic voice. What we find here instead is the author’s own sense of disorientation as he tries to remove the barrier between self and reader, relaying his immediate impressions of arriving by cart and walking down the street. Unlike with Mayakovsky’s Cuba and Mexico, there are no traces of a premodern utopia. The countryside is exhausted rather than alluring; promise lies in the future rather than the past. Though Tret’iakov, like Mayakovsky, presents a place that is distant and estranging, for him it becomes comprehensible through this assemblage of facts.²⁷

However, these examples also point to the contradictions inherent to factography, namely, its claim but inability to overcome artistic mediation. Of course, the index’s selection of details to signify China is itself an instance of literary embellishment, that is, metonymy. Likewise, the poem makes consistent use of rhyme and alliteration—for instance, “pitai / Kitai” and “katai / Kitai” in the preceding excerpt. As he further developed factography and the literature of fact through the mid to late 1920s, Tret’iakov came to disavow such poetic flourishes and, indeed, poetry entirely in favor of photography, newspaper reportage, and kolkhoz sojourns. In a 1928 manifesto, he noted “a sharp decline in the readers’ appetite for verse” and recounted the following episode involving Vladimir Mayakovsky:

Tret’iakov’s staged newspaper story reports the 1924 incident as the basis for imminent revolution—the facts of the incident presented so as to bolster the transformation of reality. Indeed, in 1926, the same year that the play debuted at Meyerhold, art and life seemed to merge: two British gunboats (including the Cockchafer) destroyed the town of Wanxian, killing hundreds of civilians. “The direct cause of the incident was the British attempt to retrieve forcibly two merchant ships that, blamed for crushing two sampans carrying Chinese soldiers across the Yangtze, had been commandeered by the Chinese in late August.”³⁰ Roar China thus assumed a prophetic quality, which bolstered its success both at home and abroad. It was particularly popular among foreigners in the Soviet Union, with one Englishman calling it “the leading show piece of Moscow to which every visitor who devoutedly believed in the principle of the New Russia went to pay homage.”³¹ As Konstantin Rudnitsky recounts, Tret’iakov’s “aim was achieved”:

This brings us to Roar China as a departure from the avant-gardist representations of the Other presented in chapter 1. Again, the key here is Tret’iakov’s abandonment of exoticism, something he lays out in the play’s introduction:

Barefooted workmen, in grey and blue clothes, at first sight apathetic, working slowly; dignified officials dotted among them rustling in their black silk jackets; portly merchants; young intellectuals with glasses and Western hats—this is the true China which must be opposed to the old false and exotic ideas about China, with its wonderful vases, embroidered kimonos, phoenixes, dragons, pagodas, princesses, refined courtesans, cruel mandarins, dancers (who, by the way, do not exist in China, as China is not acquainted with the art of dancing); opposed, in a word, to all the harmful tomfoolery which is still believed in the West.³⁴

Particularly interesting here is the absurd notion that dancing did not exist in China. This is a far cry from Eisenstein’s subsequent embrace of Mexican dance, as well as Hughes’s embrace of Uzbek dance. As we saw, both sought to harness these “exotic” traditions for socialist revolution, and arguably Tret’iakov pushes too hard here against exoticism and any ensuing “denial of coevalness.” For instance, the play includes a monk who tries to sell to the boatmen “holy silk,” promising that the prayer written on it will protect them from bullets (66–67). While McKay, Mayakovsky, Eisenstein, and Hughes might have accentuated this scrap of premodern utopianism—this potential alignment of exotic past and revolutionary present—Tret’iakov has Stoker drive the monk away by daring him to wear the clothes of a boatman.

However, what appears at first glance to be an abandonment of Benjaminian now-time in favor of linear modernization is in fact a more nuanced version of it. As indicated in the preceding passage, Tret’iakov’s China is indeed marked by multiple temporalities—plain workers’ clothing interspersed with traditional silk jackets, as well as intellectuals wearing glasses and Western hats. Accordingly, the play features a student who wears a traditional gray gown “on top of European trousers and shoes, horn-rimmed glasses and a Trilby hat” (51), details indicating that what drew Tret’iakov’s attention were precisely intermixtures of modern and premodern, East and West. He used such intermixture to disrupt the exoticism of his contemporaries—Western writers who, in his words, used “China as a piquant exotic spice for fiction” so as “to fend off the stench of poverty, illness, hatred, and human flesh ground in colonial millstones”; but also the exoticism of his avant-garde compatriots.³⁵ That is, Tret’iakov’s syncretism was distinct from Mayakovsky’s: through factography, one could be an ethnic avant-gardist without harking back to some exotic, mysterious past. In addition to its jumble of clothing styles, Roar China’s sudden leaps between British warship and Chinese wharf, Westerners and Chinese, point to a volatile mix of cultures and temporalities—anticipating postmodernist pastiche, but also echoing Trotsky’s notion of “combined and uneven stages of development.”

The play’s resonance with this theory of revolution indicates its propagandistic thrust, raising the possibility that political tendency here overshadowed artistic quality. Indeed, in a retrospective essay, Tret’iakov makes clear Roar China’s alignment with Comintern policy or, as he refers to it, “the Soviet point of view” on China—again, that the country’s primary problem was imperialism. As he explains, this view—the basis of Moscow’s insistence on the ill-fated CCP-Guomindang alliance—led to the play’s emphasis on “the theme of how foreigners foster Chinese hatred towards them” and not on the other major problems he noticed in China: “Revolutionary nationalists and generals fattened by foreigners. Labor and capital. Fathers and children.” That is, he consciously chose to eliminate “stratification among the Chinese masses, and China (from the loader to the governor) is placed in opposition to imperial guns as a unified lump. This was dictated by design.”³⁶ To be sure, this conscious design can be read as indicating the failure or duplicity behind factography and the literature of fact—ultimately beholden to a political program and providing only the illusion of unmediated reality. And yet, as indicated earlier, factographers were never so naive as to believe in unmediated facts but always viewed them as aesthetic phenomena. For them facts were never fixed or objective but open to manipulation. As indicated by Tret’iakov’s deliberate occlusions and emphases, facts could be construed so as to serve clear political ends.³⁷

But not just political ends: this flexible approach to facts also opened aesthetic possibilities. Strikingly, Roar China, particularly as it was staged in Moscow, fulfilled Benjamin’s prescriptions for a technique overriding the art-politics divide—namely, by turning spectators into collaborators and by employing montage and interruption. As Natasha Kolchevska points out, rather than offer a straightforward sequence, Roar China relies instead on “discontinuities, including retardation, reverse chronology, overlapping, and echoing.”³⁸ For instance, Ashlay’s drowning is presented in two separate scenes, from the perspective of both wharf and ship—an instance of theatrical montage. Indeed, several factographers had been trained in cinematic montage, and Tret’iakov himself had worked closely with Eisenstein on Battleship Potemkin, the pioneering exemplar of this technique. In turn, Eisenstein, who had directed three of Tret’iakov’s earlier plays, was originally slated to direct Roar China’s Moscow production.³⁹

The script’s montage effect was heightened by its staging at Meyerhold, which, as an experimental space, famously lacked a proscenium and eschewed realism. As one American critic described it,

Clearly this was no passive presentation of “facts” but an effort to shock and disorient the audience. The transitions between ship and wharf emphasized interruption, thus furthering the contrast between Westerners and Chinese. In addition, writes Kolchevska, Tret’iakov called for acting that was “hyperbolic, stylized, and ‘alienating’ for the foreigners”—something easily accomplished at Meyerhold given the director’s innovation of a “bio-mechanical” acting style that, in Alaina Lemon’s words, “aimed to deactivate those forms of realism that stimulated sympathy too habitually, to allow new ways to see social reality.” In contrast and as alluded to earlier, Tret’iakov suggested that the Chinese characters be presented using a “naturalistic, sober, and poignant” acting style—in short, a more “sympathetic” style, not at all associated with Meyerhold or avant-gardism.⁴¹

Tret’iakov’s acting instruction should thus give us pause. As we have seen, factography offered a technique that served both revolutionary politics and artistic innovation. It also sought to present the Other in a way that eschewed exoticism and “the denial of coevalness,” namely, by allowing for cultural intermixture and impurity. And yet Tret’iakov’s acting directions suggest that the Chinese could be portrayed only in a dated style. For all their nonexoticness, these characters were, in a sense, kept in the past—just as the Comintern deemed China itself still too “backward” for a Soviet-style revolution.⁴² This problem is compounded by the mentioned fact that the Chinese roles were performed by non-Asian actors, which raises the possibility that the play was an instance of white modernist minstrelsy. My sense, however, is that such judgments of Roar China would be too hasty, and that Tret’iakov was not interested in the spectacle of whites performing in blackface or yellowface. Rather, the use of Asian actors was likely not a possibility in Moscow, and the naturalistic acting may have served precisely to downplay racial crossing.⁴³ Also, in context this acting style was not merely retrograde but, again, heightened the montage effect of the performance as a whole. In any case, in subsequent productions, the play would feature not just portrayals of Asians but also by Asians—that is, the Chinese and Korean American actors who performed in Roar China’s New York production, as well as the Chinese actors who staged the play in China, both before and after the 1949 Revolution. At least in New York, the Chinese characters were also intended to have a naturalistic effect, which is additionally problematic given the strained historical relationship between Asian Americans and literary (if not dramatic) naturalism.⁴⁴ However, the use of Asian actors there proved “avant-gardist” in ways that neither the play’s American director nor Tret’iakov himself could have anticipated.

Roar China opened in New York on October 27, 1930, amid all the fanfare and reviews befitting a large Broadway production. Sergei Eisenstein, who would be in Mexico by year’s end, was in the audience, and Langston Hughes apparently attended the November 3 performance.⁴⁵ On stage, the budding playwright Clifford Odets was among the actors. The director was Herbert Biberman, who had seen the Moscow production multiple times in 1927–1928 and who would go on to lead a successful film career. He is best known now as a leader of the “Hollywood Ten”—a group of industry leftists who were blacklisted and briefly imprisoned after refusing to answer questions before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947. In short, Roar China was very much part of the “Cultural Front” that emerged in 1930s America—the New York production anticipating the “laboring of American culture” that arose during the Popular Front years and then declined under McCarthyism. Indeed, as one might expect, Tret’iakov was a writer for the “living newspapers” staged by Moscow’s Blue Blouse troupe from the early 1920s, a theater form that made its way from the Soviet Union to the United States in the early 1930s and that became central to the New Deal’s Federal Theatre Project of 1935–1939.⁴⁶ Biberman, in turn, served as a conduit between Soviet and American theater. He was one of the many Jewish Americans who made the “magic pilgrimage” to the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s, and as Theatre Guild founder Lawrence Langer recounts, he “came into the Guild replete with such words as ‘Dynamic,’ ‘Agitprop,’ and some other resounding new words.”⁴⁷ “Factography” and “literature of fact” were likely among them.

However, what was most innovative about Roar China in New York was its use of predominantly Asian American actors—sixty-eight out of a total of ninety-two. As Walter J. and Ruth I. Meserve write, the 1930 production was “the first time in the American theatre that Chinese were removed from portraying traditional, stereotyped roles”—though, again, several Koreans were also present.⁴⁸ For the most part, these actors were nonprofessionals, selected by Biberman with the assistance of the Chinese Dramatic and Benevolent Association. Among them was H. T. Tsiang, who launched his long acting career with the play and would go on to write the pioneering Asian American proletarian novel And China Has Hands (1937). Other actors included restaurant and laundry workers, shopkeepers, and journalists. According to the New York Times, ten of the actors did not understand English, forcing Biberman to deliver instructions through an interpreter.⁴⁹

The use of amateur actors blurred the boundary between art and life, turning potential spectators into collaborators (à la Benjamin), and for sympathetic reviewers from the left press, this made the play all the more compelling. New Masses called the acting “superb,” asserting that “every mispronounced English word only carries added conviction.” Myra Page, writing for the Daily Worker, praised “the sincerity and intense earnestness” of the Asian actors: “To them [the play] is evidently a living embodiment of the wrongs and struggles of the four hundred millions of Chinese toilers who are today fighting on to victory.”⁵⁰ Accordingly, in a 1962 letter to Tret’iakov’s widow about the production, Biberman recalls,

To be sure, there is a hint of well-meaning condescension here—the Asian actors were passionate, not necessarily talented, and certainly rough around the edges. Less-partisan publications were not nearly as glowing. Time, which praised the New York staging but expressed skepticism about Tret’iakov’s claim to factuality, recognized Biberman for capably managing his “mob” of mostly Asian actors. The New York Times was more skeptical still, calling the play a failure as an expression of drama, and the Asian actors “the most unwieldly [sic] element in the production, throttling down China’s roar to a murmur.”⁵²

Still, there are clear indications that, thanks to the Asian actors, the production was able to fulfill some of the disorienting, interruptive aims of factography. Indeed, it seems that the actors’ performances were intended to be “unwieldly” for mainstream audiences, with the New York script rendering, for instance, “very” as “velly” in scenes featuring the Chinese characters using English with the Westerners.⁵³ That is, though certainly many of the actors were nonnative English speakers, the script sought to accentuate rather than hide this—a gesture, arguably, to Tret’iakov’s ethnographic precision, and likewise, the Moscow production used grammatically incorrect Russian to simulate the Chinese characters’ broken English.⁵⁴ However, in light of Tret’iakov’s interest in intermixture, it seems more fitting that, according to the New York American’s reviewer, the Asian actors were difficult to understand because of “their grievous South Brooklyn sort of English speech”—Brooklyn, not Chinese accents.⁵⁵ This wonderful, stereotype-defying detail provides a perfect distillation of factography’s aim—to present facts that undermined rather than affirmed received notions of art and reality. As another reviewer noted, the play gave the Asian actors an opportunity to belie “traditions concerning the stolid Oriental,” and indeed, after the lights went up at the premiere, several of the Asian actors stepped across the proscenium crying, “Roar, China!” to heightened applause—a marked departure from other, typically straitened examples of early Asian American performance.⁵⁶

This crossing of the proscenium—again, something lacking at Meyerhold—points to the New York production’s partial fidelity to factography. Accordingly, just as in Moscow, the Broadway production featured the everyday tasks of a Chinese port. During the intermission, several of the actors remained on the proscenium to perform these tasks, and curious audience members were allowed to climb up and speak with them.⁵⁷ Here again we see the divide between stage and world breached. More notable about Biberman’s production, however, were the flagrant departures from factography—beginning with those everyday port scenes, which were significantly abridged. The New York production ran just two hours, compared with three and a half in Moscow, and the redactions were primarily those “interludes of local color” that Biberman regarded as “stunning and rich” but ultimately distracting. In a further break from factography, the name of the British ship, HMS Cockchafer, was changed to HMS Europa, in effect deemphasizing the factual basis of the play. Formally, the New York production privileged dramatic seamlessness over the factographic fragment. In contrast to the Moscow production’s use of montagelike interruption to separate ship and wharf, in New York the “movement between the dock, the deck and the water is inter-related and continuous.”⁵⁸ Biberman was aided here by an elaborate stage design in which the British ship moved forward and backward atop a large pool of water, looming over the play’s action. The Chinese wharf, meanwhile, was set on the proscenium, and lighting effects were used to establish the two locations. For scenes on the ship, the proscenium could be submerged in darkness. For scenes on the wharf, the Europa could be likewise submerged, with sampans floated in front to conceal the ship’s presence. For the final scene, the ship moved forward, its cannons pointed down toward the proscenium. The two settings thus merged into one, setting the stage for the concluding execution and protest.

The seamlessness of the New York production would have struck Tret’iakov as heightening rather than dismantling aesthetic illusion—the play as a self-contained work, cut off from the world. The very presence of a proscenium in New York points to this disconnect: Biberman’s Roar China could be and often was appreciated as a clash between two merely theatrical spaces—upper (Europa) versus lower (wharf)—with technical wizardry enabling their final confrontation. The factographers’ suspicions would have been fanned by the fact that Lee Simonson’s fluid and multilevel design garnered praise even among those wary of the play’s anti-imperialist script: J. Brooks Atkinson called it “a triumph of representational scenery,” while Time’s reviewer conceded, “Any spectator will probably be moved by the scenic grandeur, the bold theatrics of the production.”⁵⁹ Thus, the New York production could be enjoyed for its spectacle independently from its politics. Biberman, in fact, toned down the latter: he removed Stoker’s final battle cry and replaced the Moscow production’s “hyperbolic, stylized, and ‘alienating’” acting styles for the foreigners with “a broad irony which…emerges from the characters themselves.”⁶⁰

Thus, Biberman removed many of the estranging touches that were the hallmarks of the Meyerhold production—for example, the contrasting acting styles (alienating versus naturalistic) used in the original. He explicitly did this to deflect charges that Roar China was mere propaganda, which as he later explained to Tret’iakov’s widow was also why he originally chose to work with Asian actors:

Interestingly, this concession to local taste gels with Tret’iakov’s suggestion that the Chinese roles be acted in a naturalistic way—though again, Tret’iakov’s use of naturalism served to heighten the original production’s montage effect and, perhaps, to minimize the spectacle of Russians playing Chinese roles. In contrast, the New York production apparently prescribed naturalistic acting for both the Chinese and Western roles. Naturalism here had a flattening effect—geared toward making the play easier to digest—and as George Lipsitz has noted, this was one of Biberman’s faults throughout his career: his view of mass art was limited “to that which [spoke] to great numbers of people, not what involve[d] them in changing their own worlds.”⁶² In short, by following the play from Moscow to New York, we are able to trace the partial passing of factography. Just as with the LEF group, Biberman was concerned about accessibility—but in his case, for “ruling-class” theatergoers rather than Soviet workers. He thus kept some of Tret’iakov’s factographic touches but dropped or downplayed others, and the result was a production that lost much of the original’s experimental edge. However, the use of Asian American actors went against Biberman’s concessions to accessibility, at least as indicated by the impression they left on the New York reviewers. Through a combination of lack of experience, (South Brooklyn) accented English, and passion about the subject matter, they escaped the bounds of naturalism and sobriety reserved for them, becoming the most memorable, unusual aspect of what was, at best, a moderately successful three-month run. Reminiscent of Hughes reworking Mayakovsky, these actors exceeded the roles assigned to them and thereby fulfilled the disruptive aims of factography, the prescriptions of Benjamin—despite the fact that they were not intended to do so.

This last section of the chapter proceeds as a factographic experiment of sorts. It juxtaposes additional echoes and fragments of Roar China so as to enable us to see anew both minority, non-Western cultures and the Soviet avant-garde—to draw additional unexpected links between the two. We are helped here by how mutable and well traveled the play proved to be. After New York, in the 1930s it was staged in Japan, Estonia (where one critic called it “the greatest event in the theatrical world”), England, Poland, and Canada. In 1942 it was produced in India, where it was adapted to expose “the persecution of the peaceful Chinese by the Japanese and the subsequent growth of revolutionary anti-Japanese attitudes in China.”⁶⁴ During World War II, the play appeared again in Poland, this time “in Yiddish at Tzchenstochov concentration camp, primarily a labor camp for the German war machine.” According to Meserve and Meserve,

The play first appeared in China just prior to the New York production—in Guangzhou in the summer of 1930, with over a hundred students filling in as extras. It was then staged in Shanghai in September 1933, “on the eve of the second anniversary of the Mukden Incident” (which led to Japan’s seizure of Manchuria). One newspaper article about the Shanghai production proclaimed, “With the approach of a second world war that aimed to partition China…should members of the nation not all cry ‘Roar, China!’?”⁶⁶ In an apparent reply to this call, it was around this time that the work assumed a new form, namely, black-and-white woodblock prints. As art historian Xiaobing Tang traces, throughout the 1930s “Roar, China!” served as the title for several newspaper and journal images that mixed populist appeal and representational realism. Tang describes these prints as attempts “to visually render a voice, to project it, and then to elicit an expressive response from the viewer.” They imaginatively transgress “the boundary between the visual and the aural” for the sake of turning the viewer into an agent.⁶⁷ We find here clear echoes of Soviet factography: the artists consciously cross the boundaries of genre and form—from play to image—in order to transform woodblock prints into rallying cries.

However, the Chinese iterations of Roar China depart from factography in one key way. Despite Tret’iakov’s ethnographic emphasis, many of the woodblock prints lack “markers and representational details of social, cultural, or national particularities,” even as they press for national action against Western and Japanese imperialism.⁶⁸ To follow Foster’s line of reasoning, this apparent “post-ethnic” turn eschews Tret’iakov’s reliance on Asianness as a source of agency, and perhaps this is why Roar China assumed a potency in China that it lacked elsewhere. Whereas even in Moscow the play kept the Chinese characters in check—again, through Tret’iakov’s instruction that they be presented in a “naturalistic, sober, and poignant” manner—this was evidently not the case in China, where the prints and stagings repeatedly urged immediate action amid the tumult of the 1930s. And of course, action was taken. Despite the Soviet Union’s persistently ineffectual policies toward China, the CCP completed its own revolution in 1949. As Meserve and Meserve point out, in the fall of that year,

As mentioned, Hughes attended the New York production in 1930. During his 1932–1933 Soviet visit, he in fact met with Tret’iakov, who made him “a present of an enormous poster, showing a gigantic Chinese coolie breaking his chains, and he gave me a copy of Roar China inscribed in English. When I left for the Far East, he and his wife came to see me off at the station.”⁷¹ It is unclear whether Hughes received Tret’iakov’s poem or play, though Hughes’s 1937 piece bears a few allusions to the latter, for instance, “Open your mouth, old dragon of the East, / To swallow up the gunboats in the Yantgse! [sic]”⁷²

At least visually, Hughes’s “Roar, China!” resembles Tret’iakov’s original poem, as well as his 1934 homage to Mayakovsky, “Cubes.” Each of these works consists of short lines and isolated details, and at first glance, this suggests Hughes’s ongoing engagement with Soviet futurism. Accordingly, in an apparent gesture to factography’s frequent combinations of word and image, the Volunteer for Liberty placed Hughes’s photo alongside the poem. Upon closer examination, though, we find that the poem marks an abandonment of factography’s key aims. Unlike Tret’iakov, Hughes makes no lofty claims to present China as it really is, despite his travels there after his stay in the USSR. Indeed, he reverts to the very exoticist tropes scorned by the Soviet author—“old lion,” “yellow dragon,” “wise old beast,” “porcelain-maker,” “maker of firecrackers.” In place of open-ended facts, Hughes uses such ready-made tropes to form agitational slogans, which follow the “correct” political tendency but mark a decline in artistic quality. Of course, we can read these tropes as reverting to another iteration of Soviet futurism, covered in chapter 1, in which the “exotic” referenced premodern utopias and forwarded an anti-imperial politics. Missing from these lines, however, is the estranging enchantment of Mayakovsky’s American writings, as well as that poet’s subversion of tropes like “Black Lion” (in his poem “Syphilis”) used to depict the Other. That is, while Hughes’s “Roar, China!” shares Mayakovsky’s and Tret’iakov’s anti-imperialist politics, its noncritical reversion to hackneyed stereotypes—e.g., China as “the old dragon of the East”—would have repelled both futurists. Thus, the 1937 poem usefully points to another possible end point for our journey: the passing of the Soviet avant-garde, both figuratively (i.e., a shift from an avant-gardist to a more received notion of reality) and literally. Hughes could not have known this, but just four days after the publication of his “Roar, China!” in Madrid, Tret’iakov was executed in Moscow as an alleged Japanese spy.⁷³ The year 1937 was, of course, the height of Stalinist terror. In 1940 Meyerhold was also executed.

Contra either of these extreme end points (the revolution of 1949, the terror of 1937), I would like to suggest a more subtle route for factography vis-à-vis the Other—namely, the American film Salt of the Earth (1954), directed by none other than Herbert Biberman. The harrowing story behind the film’s production is well known. After being shunned by the major studios as a communist, Biberman formed an independent company made up of other blacklisted Hollywood types and a multiracial crew—including African Americans, who had long been excluded by the industry’s discriminatory practices. In 1953 they shot Salt of the Earth in Silver City, New Mexico, despite sometimes violent harassment by local red-baiters; edited it at various secret locations in Southern California against studio and union efforts; but the combined forces of Washington and Hollywood, which deemed the film pro-Soviet propaganda, stymied widespread distribution.⁷⁴

What I would like to suggest is that Salt of the Earth offers a more auspicious—but nonetheless fraught—echo of Roar China than Hughes’s rendition of it. The film was based on a recent, prolonged strike that had involved predominantly Mexican American workers at a zinc mine near Silver City, and many of the strikers served as both script consultants and actors, with some playing themselves. That is, like Roar China, the film was torn from newspaper headlines and featured predominantly amateur, minority actors. Accordingly, just as with Tret’iakov, Biberman sought a dynamic presentation of the facts, explicitly eschewing both “hackneyed melodramatics” and naturalism’s “mere surface record of actual events.”⁷⁵ These preoccupations, of course, point to the film’s long-acknowledged resonance with Italian neorealism, which, as Masha Salazkina has shown, itself drew from Soviet avant-gardist discourses.⁷⁶ However, Biberman’s aim for a radical configuration of facts rather than passive representation also points to his factographic credentials, which are most evident in his depictions of Chicana/o culture and gender roles. Like Tret’iakov with China, he presents this community in a respectful but nonpatronizing way and, indeed, granted the workers and their families veto power over the script.⁷⁷ The result is a remarkably subtle depiction of the culture that eschews exoticism. As Deborah Silverton Rosenfelt writes,

In other words, the film tries to capture Chicana/o culture but never reduces it to an exotic spectacle, just as with Tret’iakov’s treatment of Chinese culture. Instead, local language and culture serve to distinguish the strikers from the white owners; the “fact” of ethnic difference (most pervasively, the main characters’ lightly accented English) bolsters class mobilization and, therefore, the transformation of reality. The film likewise focuses on the leading role of Mexican American women in the struggle: after an injunction bars the exclusively male workers from striking, their wives maintain the line while the men do domestic tasks—a role reversal that overcomes the workers’ tradition-bound chauvinism. Thus, just as with ethnicity, Salt of the Earth presents gender as dynamic and transformative. The film’s respectful depictions of difference serve to resolve “the conflicting claims of feminist, ethnic, and class consciousness” in order to alter—not simply reflect—reality.⁷⁹

Again, compared with the 1949 or 1937 iterations of Roar China, Salt of the Earth presents a more nuanced echo of factography. Whereas the Shanghai production and Hughes’s poem point to familiar revolutionary and “totalitarian” teleologies, the film does not lend itself to such ready-made narratives. On the one hand, its depictions of the Other have made it an enduring touchstone of Chicana/o and feminist film, meaning that we can potentially use Salt as a Trojan horse of sorts, smuggling factography into postwar U.S. discourses of the Other. However, if the film gestures to factography, it also departs from it, albeit not to the extent of Hughes’s poem. That is, though its depictions of New Mexico evoke Tret’iakov’s treatment of China, it would be difficult to describe the film as a whole as factographic or, more broadly, avant-gardist. The fault here lies once more in Biberman’s emphasis on accessibility, in line with his efforts to mitigate Roar China’s experimental touches. As Rosenfelt notes, the film never uses the medium—“camera and editing room, sound track and visual images”—to complicate rather than emphasize its underlying themes. It is, ultimately, a “well made story” with a “tightly, carefully organized plot that leads to too tidy a denouement”—namely, a foiled home eviction, which prompts the lead male to thank the lead female for her perseverance.⁸⁰ That is, Salt of the Earth is marked by a seamlessness similar to that in Biberman’s Roar China. And though that production’s claim to factography was saved by the disruptive use of Asian American amateur actors, and although Biberman again used amateur actors based on his favorable Roar China experience, the Salt actors, in contrast, were remarkable for just how polished and professional they seemed.⁸¹ This was likely because they were playing themselves, as opposed to Chinese and Korean Americans playing coolies in China; a less-pronounced language barrier may have been another factor. In any case, this resulted in more plausible acting, but a complete absence of Roar China’s (unintended) subversion of naturalism. This is to emphasize once again the passing of factography. Fragments of this futurist technique are certainly present in Salt of the Earth—for example, in its nonexoticist, politically radical depictions of the Other. However, the film loses the blurred open-endedness of the factographic fact, which, as has been noted, is the key to this technique’s claim to formal innovation. Nonetheless, Salt does a better job than Hughes’s “Roar, China!” of carrying forward factography’s promise for minority, non-Western cultures, which explains the film’s embrace by Chicana/o and feminist audiences from the late 1960s onward. Biberman thus presents to us a third possible end point for our journey—the emergence of postwar U.S. identity politics.

However, rather than choosing among these three possible end points—1949, 1937, 1954—it seems more in keeping with factography to hold the various iterations and echoes of Roar China in juxtaposition, and to see what new narratives might emerge. That is, as part of my own exercise in factography, I would like to suggest that we look at each of these iterations as discrete facts that, taken together, can be seen as undergirding a new, unexpected grouping of artists and writers. Crossing multiple places, times, and backgrounds, this grouping is made up of all those who performed in, translated, or adapted Roar China—a grouping bound by Tret’iakov’s multifaceted work as well as by varying degrees of adherence to his fact-based futurist technique. However, this grouping is also bound by an underlying sense of tragedy and loss—the passing of factography and, more pressingly, the Soviet avant-garde’s figurative and literal demise.

Factography’s commitment to reporting the facts and combining disparate fragments—the more disorienting, the better—is well suited to the combination of allure and tragedy that I have in mind.⁸² The juxtaposition of, on the one hand, the international circulation of Tret’iakov’s Roar China and, on the other, the tragedy of his 1937 execution points to an artistic grouping bound by a particular work and technique, but also by a particular affect. We can call it revolutionary pathos or melancholy, a sense of loss but also endurance in the face of the failed utopias of the past—a willingness to try again. As Jonathan Flatley observes, it is precisely a sense of melancholy that motivates Walter Benjamin’s views on revolution—the endlessly piling ruin of the past as the driving force behind his efforts to cease history.⁸³ Benjamin did not, but we must count the interwar avant-garde as part of this ruin. The question now is how to look to it in a way that avoids lapsing into either apologia or defeatism. I return to this question in the next two chapters, but as a preliminary answer, I conclude with one more excerpt from Biberman’s 1962 letter to Tret’iakov’s widow in Moscow. At this point, these were both broken people: Biberman’s film never received wide distribution in his lifetime, and when he wrote this letter, he was in the middle of a ten-year lawsuit against the studios over their coordinated assault on Salt. He ultimately lost and made only one more film before dying in 1971.⁸⁴ Ol’ga Tret’iakova had herself been imprisoned in the late 1930s but was subsequently freed. Like many persecuted during the terror, her husband was posthumously exonerated during the Khrushchev thaw. In short, here we find two people corresponding in the wake of, respectively, McCarthyism and Stalinism—to be sure, two incomparable instances of state repression. However, in the wake of Roar China and Salt of the Earth, Biberman’s effort to link these two places is moving despite being characteristically accessible. In his closing words to Tret’iakova, we can discern an attempt to salvage past hope and camaraderie:

Finally, dear Mrs. Tret’iakova, this letter gives me the possibility, in some measure, to pay a very old debt of gratitude, in fact, several debts, which I will now list. Most of all I wanted to express my gratitude to all of the people from Moscow theater of the 1920s, who everyday generously presented me with warmth and inspiration from that great richness and diversity for which the inspired theater of that time was famous. Secondly, I am deeply grateful to the colossal creative genius of Meyerhold, for the countless number of the brilliant theatrical achievements of our time, which are as fresh in my memory as they were thirty years ago…. Thirdly, I want to express my gratitude to Sergei Tret’iakov for his play, which awakened in me that dormant affection for humankind that was in me; and which united this affection with my desire to express myself in theater, and uniting these elements, laid the basis of my worldview, which has supported me over the course of thirty years in art and life.⁸⁵

U Kitaia mnogo tiazhelykh sten.	China has many heavy walls.
Tsapaiut nebo zubami za kozhu.	They snatch the sky by the skin with teeth.
Kitai ustal	China is tired.
Kitaiu postel’—	A bed for China—
Mezh sten pustynia postlala lozhe.	Between the walls the desert laid a bed.
Zheltyi less—	Yellow loess—
Zemlianoe salo,	Earthen fat,
Chtoby koles	So that the rumble of wheels
Grokhotal’ ne briatsala.	Doesn’t cease to jangle.
Zhirnyi less	The rich loess
Rodit ris.	Bears rice.
Vodoemnykh koles	The reservoir wheels’
Vzmakh vverkh,	Upward stroke,
Vzmakh vniz,—	Downward stroke—
I zelenyi risovyi mekh	And the green rice fur
Rastet.	Grows.
Ris, pitai	Rice, feed
Kitai.	China.
Arba, katai	Oxcart, drive
Kitai.	China.²⁶