The Narrow Cage and Other Modern Fairy Tales

These are a few of the labels that have been variously applied to the fascinating yet largely forgotten personality that is Vasily Eroshenko. As a social activist and writer of political fairy tales, he sought to critique the oppressive institutions and conditions that incite violence and conflict around the world, and he urged people, young and old, to radically transform their societies. Despite the high level of fame—and infamy—he achieved in his adopted homes of Japan and China during the early twentieth century, he remains virtually unknown to enthusiasts of world literature. Because his tales are bound up with his fascinating life, and the fascinating lives of the people he interacted with, it is necessary to take a close look at his biography.

Vasily Yakovlevich Eroshenko was born in an affluent landowner’s family on January 12, 1890, in Obukhovka, a Ukrainian village in the Russian Empire. His father, a loyal subject of the tsar, ran a general store and maintained good relations with his fellow villagers as well as with the local gentry. The third child, Vasily was blinded at the age of four as a result of complications from measles. He described this traumatic event in his semi autobiographical “Some Pages from My School Days” as having forced him to forsake “the realm of beautiful colors and brilliant sunlight.”¹ From childhood on, he formed clear anarchistic convictions, claiming that his blindness had taught him “to doubt everything and everyone; to suspect the words of teachers as well as the slogans of authority.”² At the same time, his blindness also taught him the value of cooperation and collective action. Throughout his life, he strove to fashion his deep-seated insecurities into a powerful motive for change.

At the age of nine, he was sent away to study at the Moscow School for the Blind, a prestigious imperial boarding school where he received a conservative education in the arts, sciences, religion, music, and basket-weaving. Although he later recounted that the school was “entirely cut-off from the world,” an authoritarian prison where “students were at the mercy of their teachers,” it was not impervious to outside influences.³ During his school years, he immersed himself in the works of political writers like Leo Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky, Leonid Andreyev, and Mikhail Artsybashev, and became aware of aspects of Russian society that outraged his conscience. It was also during this time that he began to show a marked talent for memorization and telling long tales.⁴

After graduating, Eroshenko pursued a career in music and found work playing second violin for a blind orchestra in Moscow. Around 1911, he encountered the Esperantist Anna Sharapova, who introduced him to the international auxiliary language of Esperanto. Invented by Polish ophthalmologist L. L. Zamenhof in 1873, Esperanto was intended to relieve the “heavy burden of linguistic differences” that its creator saw as engendering social conflict on local, national, and international levels.⁵ With its simple grammar and “international” vocabulary, it was promoted as a tool for nonhierarchical communication and was motivated by an “internal idea” of “brotherhood and justice among all peoples.”⁶ For Eroshenko, Esperanto allowed him to transcend the linguistic barriers that made navigating the world as a blind person a doubly intimidating experience. Furthermore, with its foundational texts of the Old Testament and the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen, it equipped Eroshenko with a moral and poetic vocabulary that was to resound in his political and artistic endeavors later in life. The profound effect that Esperanto would have on his identity, worldview, and art cannot be overstated. As he himself remarked to an audience in 1922, “keep always in your mind that my country is the world, humanity is my nation and my beloved tongue is Esperanto. Remember this thing and you will have the key to all my philosophy in all my writing and speeches.”⁷

With encouragement from Sharapova, Eroshenko decided to further his musical education in London under the auspices of the Universal Esperanto Association (UEA). Aided by Esperantists across Europe, Eroshenko traveled by himself to London in 1912, where he was granted two months’ board and tuition at the Royal Normal College for the Blind. Although financial difficulties compelled him to return to Moscow within the year, he left England with a solid command of English and lasting connections with the European Esperanto community. Moreover, he even managed an impromptu visit to Anarcho-Communist Pyotr Kropotkin, who was then living in exile in the suburb of Harrow. Recounting his journey for the Russian Esperanto journal, La Ondo de Esperanto, Eroshenko gleefully exclaimed that “Aladdin’s lamp could not have helped me more than the little green star of Esperanto.”⁸

Back in Moscow, Eroshenko drifted from his intention to work as a musician, and a feeling of wanderlust drove him to set down plans for his next journey. In London, he had heard about the respect accorded to the blind in Japan, and how they were encouraged to study as professionals in massage therapy and acupuncture. Intrigued by the economic freedom and social respect that such a life appeared to promise, he began taking Japanese lessons through the Japanese Consulate in Moscow. In 1914, again with support from the UEA, Eroshenko set out across Siberia to Japan, where he enrolled at the Tokyo School for the Blind, to study massage therapy and classical Japanese literature. Once settled in his new environment, he began expanding his network at Esperanto meet-ups and by teaching the language to his classmates.

Esperanto had seen nearly a decade of contention since its introduction to Japan one year after the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905. Hailed as one of the biggest fads of 1906 by the leading national newspaper Asahi Shimbun, it was embraced by seemingly unrelated groups, including anarchists, imperialists, missionaries, artists, and shopkeepers.⁹ Perhaps because it claimed no affiliation with any one “culture” or “civilization,” words strongly associated with European class- and race-based prejudices, the new “world language” quickly formed links with progressive politics in Asia, with socialists and anarchists as its most vocal supporters. Naturally, this association between Esperanto and radical thinking deeply disturbed the nation’s elites, especially after the High Treason Incident of 1911, an alleged left-wing plot to assassinate Emperor Meiji. The ensuing clampdown of this incident was said to have ushered in a “winter period” for Japanese anarchism, socialism, and adjacent movements, including the Esperanto movement.

By the time Eroshenko arrived in 1914, the Esperanto movement was beginning to show clear signs of a revival. Although he did not come espousing any particular political ideology, he repoliticized the movement by virtue of his double status as a Russian and Esperantist. To those who had but a decade prior participated in the non-war movement—a massively popular antimilitarist campaign formed in response to the Russo-Japanese War—the nationally and linguistically unmoored Eroshenko seemed to embody the part-Tolstoyan, part-Japanese concept of the heimin, or transnational “common man.”¹⁰ In fact, one of Eroshenko’s first speaking engagements in Japan was for the Heimin Kōenkai, a lecture series organized by anarchist Ōsugi Sakae, at which Eroshenko spoke in Esperanto about his meeting with Kropotkin in London. Unsurprisingly, the confluence of anarchism, Esperantism, and heiminism surrounding Eroshenko raised the suspicion of the Special Higher Police (SHP), which devoted its best resources to reporting on his activities.¹¹

Over the next two years, Eroshenko formed important friendships with an array of progressive individuals who were working in different circles to solve pressing social problems and foster international solidarity on a nonstate level. Among these were the future president of the Japanese Blind Association Torii Tokujirō, American Bahá’í missionary Agnes Alexander, playwright Akita Ujaku, feminist journalist Kamichika Ichiko, educational reformer Katagami Noburu, and entrepreneurs and literary patrons Sōma Aizō and Sōma Kokkō. Perhaps the most significant friendship he had was with Akita, who shared his artistic beliefs and was inspired by his dedication to promoting pacifism through Esperanto. Immediately after their introduction in 1915, the two became constant companions at the theater, lectures, and literary gatherings, and collaborated on different projects. When the ruble collapsed in 1916, and Eroshenko could no longer receive assistance from his family, Akita was one of a handful of friends who helped mitigate his situation, setting him up with a lecture tour and encouraging him to write stories, which he then translated and submitted to literary magazines. Although Eroshenko’s fame as a storyteller was still some years off, these early works, including “Easter,” “Raining,” and “The Tale of the Paper Lantern,” each filled with romantic melancholy, won him his first public recognition as a “poet.”

Hoping to establish a school for the blind in Southeast Asia, Eroshenko left Japan in July 1916, and spent the next three years traveling around Thailand, Myanmar, and India. During this transient period, he worked variously as a masseur and a teacher, published a polemic on the treatment of the blind in Europe, and collected folklore. When news of the Russian Revolution reached him in 1917, he decided to return to his homeland. Not only was he eager to participate in the ongoing political struggle, but he was becoming increasingly concerned for his family, with whom he had lost contact during the course of World War I. However, with British authorities eyeing all Russians within its colonial borders as potential subversives, securing safe passage to Russia proved not to be an easy task. Consequently, Eroshenko spent a hectic year evading the police, traveling between Myanmar and India, until he finally was arrested on the grounds of suspected Bolshevism in November 1918. When he requested deportation to Russia, the British apparently told him he would have to go back the way he came, and so he was put on a steamer bound for Japan.¹²

After Eroshenko returned to Tokyo in July 1919, he fell back into his former life among the Esperanto community, reunited with friends like Akita and Kamichika, and moved into the Sōmas’ atelier at Nakamuraya Bakery. Eroshenko had briefly lodged at Nakamuraya in 1916, where he had formed a familial attachment to his literary patron Sōma Kokkō, whom he referred to as his “mamochka.” Speaking to a crowd of Esperantists at a welcome-back event, he expressed his joy at being among friends who truly understood and loved him.¹³

Of course, much had changed over the past three years. Although World War I had brought unprecedented gains to Japanese industrialists, the overcranked economy was repeatedly shocked by recessions and depressions. Meanwhile, the socialist movement was developing with remarkable speed and unity, partly because of revolutionary victories in Russia. In 1918, female laborers in Toyama Prefecture staged protests against skyrocketing rice prices, stirring a nationwide revolt that effectively toppled the Terauchi administration. In 1919, Japanese progressives expressed solidarity with the anticolonial March 1 and May 4 movements in Korea and China. At the country’s top universities, radical student groups like the Shinjinkai and the Gyōminkai were formed, and several political journals began publication, including Warera, Kaizō, and Kaihō. Topping off this political activity, the Japan Socialist League was established in 1920. If Eroshenko could not participate in the revolution in Russia, he could at least participate in the one taking place in Japan.

Through his Esperanto network, Eroshenko was introduced to highly political students like Takatsu Seidō and Ono Kenjirō, who encouraged him to attend lectures at Waseda University and to further his understanding of Marxist theory. Takatsu also invited him to attend Gyōminkai events and meetings at the Kosmo Club, a collective of Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Russian activists working to undermine Japan’s ongoing colonial efforts in East Asia. Gradually, Eroshenko began to add a socialist zeal to his humanitarian convictions, becoming active in revolutionary circles that did not always share the same objectives as those held by the more pragmatic circles with which he had formerly been associated. Consequently, as his friendships with people like Takatsu and Ono deepened, he fell out with older friends, particularly the Bahá’ís. To be sure, Eroshenko was not an easy man to be around. When confronted with opinions that ran counter to his own, he could be stubborn, condescending, and chauvinistic. Even Sōma Kokkō referred to him in her autobiography as a “quarrelsome egoist.”¹⁴ Finding the right balance of cynicism, egoism, and cooperation would prove to be lifelong struggle.

Attending lectures and meetings left Eroshenko with few opportunities to earn a living. Besides, he was spending the allowance he received from Sōma Kokkō on feeding his activist friends. Noticing the toll that this lifestyle was having on his health, and recalling his talent for telling stories, Kamichika encouraged Eroshenko to write her a fairy tale that she could potentially sell to a magazine. The story that he brought to her was “The Sad Little Fish,” which they published in Shinkatei, a women’s interest magazine. Perhaps owing to the curious nature of this antireligious tale of ecological destruction, or the exotic air evoked by Eroshenko’s name, the “The Sad Little Fish” proved to be a big success, and more stories were commissioned. Remarkably, in one year alone, Eroshenko published more than fifteen tales and a three-act play, placing his works in women’s and children’s magazines, national newspapers, political journals, and Japan’s first proletarian literature journal, Tanemaku hito. Experimenting with the conventional tone and voice of the fairy-tale genre, he infused his quaint Andersen-esque narratives with unorthodox themes like police corruption, colonialism, social alienation, and intellectual dogmatism. And in brilliant twists of anarchist logic, he wrote from the perspective of plants, animals, and children to criticize the oppressive sociopolitical conditions created and maintained by adults.

When Eroshenko started writing political fairy tales in 1920, he was reflecting a certain trend in Japanese children’s literature. Since the 1910s, conservative values in the children’s book field were being challenged by a coterie of free-thinking writers centered around Ogawa Mimei, Suzuki Miekichi, and Kitahara Hakushū, who, through their journal, Akai tori, sought to nurture the innate virtues of children and to liberate the closed minds of adults. Their efforts were in direct opposition to the nation’s elites, who for decades had promoted traditional folktales like the legend of Momotarō as a justification for an aggressive colonial policy, broadly recognizing the role of symbolic narratives in the socialization of young minds. Therefore, whereas children’s literature was seen by the state as a tool for teaching to children, the editors at Akai tori recast it as tool for learning from them.¹⁵ Certainly, this upending of the socializing discourse was informed by the concurrent development of strong social justice movements, rapid industrialization, economic unrest, educational reform, and the introduction of new ideas from abroad. In his fascinating book Anarchist Modernity: Cooperatism and Japanese-Russian Intellectual Relations in Modern Japan, Sho Konishi reveals the extent to which Japan’s cultural revolution in children’s book publishing was driven by an anarchist impulse to reverse the flow of power in various binary relations. It is no wonder, then, that many children’s literature writers of this period—like Arishima Takeo, Akita Ujaku, Eguchi Kan, Ogawa Mimei, and Takehisa Yumeji—subscribed to radical leftist thinking.

Of course, no matter how strong the anarchist impulse was in driving this new wave of progressive children’s literature, the high cost of beautifully illustrated journals like Akai tori, along with the basic ideological imperative of its writers—the preservation of childhood innocence in the face of brutal social conditions—tended to reinforce the value system of a middle-class readership.¹⁶ In contrast, Eroshenko distinguished himself from his peers by pushing his anarchist impulse to its limit, questioning the value of innocence without social consciousness. This impulse can be seen in many of his tales, such as “By a Pond,” “The Martyr,” “The Death of a Canary,” and “Two Little Deaths,” where it is precisely the qualities praised by his contemporaries that lead his protagonists into dangerous traps set by capitalism, religion, and authoritarian systems. Although Eroshenko was indeed reflecting a politically driven trend in children’s literature, he also was expanding it, anticipating the arrival of a Japanese proletarian children’s literature in the late 1920s and 1930s.¹⁷

In addition to being a producer of fairy tales, Eroshenko became a sort of fairy-tale production himself. The fact that he always dressed in a Ukrainian peasant blouse and carried a balalaika, with which he sang romantic ballads and rousing political songs, aligned well with the popular image of him as a transnational common man.¹⁸ And like a fairy-tale hero, he was often described by his supporters with infantilizing literary signifiers, such as “ruddy cheeks,” a “soft feminine face,” and a “pure heart.”¹⁹ Furthermore, his wanderings were interpreted in quest-like terms, and his blindness as a powerful moral force, as evidenced by the following piece by liberal critic Hasegawa Nyozekan: “His sightless eyes cannot make him unhappy. The world he saw for but a short time with the heart of a small child was all that he has seen with his own eyes. Nevertheless, this made him happy. His eyes could not develop the distinction of skin color, the reason that man has tormented man. His eyes also cannot see the horrible colors that divide the world map and incite war. Now his eyes see the skin of man and the world map in monochrome, and he roams across a singular world.”²⁰

When Nakamura Tsune and Tsuruta Goro unveiled their paintings of Eroshenko in 1921 to domestic and international acclaim, the image of “the blind poet” and “partisan” from an idealized version of Russia was cemented in the public’s mind.²¹ Even after his years in Japan, Eroshenko continued to appear as a character in poems, plays, and short stories by well-known Japanese authors like Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Kusano Shimpei, Tsuji Jun, and Ehara Koyata.²²

But Eroshenko’s life was hardly a fairy tale. Since his return to Japan in 1919, the SHP had regarded his surging popularity, particularly as a public speaker, as a threat to social order, collaborating with the British Foreign Office to report on his many activities and connections. One of their concerns lay in the sheer emotional support he seemed to elicit from the public. A Gyōminkai event on April 16, 1921, at which Eroshenko delivered an impassioned speech entitled “The Cup of Misfortune” drew in well over a thousand people despite heavy police presence. Action was finally taken when, after two arrests in 1921—first at a May Day march, and a week later at a Japan Socialist League convention—Eroshenko was arrested for a third time and was deported from Japan for harboring “dangerous thoughts.”²³ Writing for the Yomiuri Daily, Eguchi Kan described the horrific details of this third and final arrest, which took place in the middle of the night at Nakamuraya:

After trampling on the terrified man [Eroshenko], they [the police] grabbed him by his hands and feet and hauled him downstairs, where they shoved him repeatedly to the ground. Then, turning a deaf ear to his cries for help, they dragged him over the gravel streets of Shinjuku to Yodobashi Police Station. . . .

[At the station], the incredulous Japanese authorities are said to have continuously asked him if he really was blind. Unable to satisfy their fathomless doubt, they went so far as to forcibly pull back his eyelids. I wonder what they thought of their contemptible suspicions when at last they discovered he really was blind?²⁴

When the public learned of Eroshenko’s arrest and the fuzzy grounds for his deportation, there was a tremendous uproar. Newspaper articles and letters to the editor were written; a young girl wrote a poem expressing her sympathy for the poet; and funds were raised for his travel expenses. To the everyday observer, Eroshenko was simply a fairy-tale writer, if not a fairy-tale hero, who wore a humble rubashka, sang folk songs, and spoke on the need for transnational cooperation. According to a detailed police report on public opinion, his biggest sympathizers at the time of his arrest and deportation were women, socialists, and artists.²⁵

The Japanese public were not alone in expressing its contempt at the gross mistreatment of Eroshenko. Following the story from China, a soon-to-be-famous Lu Xun—he had not yet published his first collection of stories—felt compelled to translate the author’s most recent tale, “A Narrow Cage,” for New Youth, the flagship journal of the anti-imperialist, antitraditionalist New Culture movement centered around scholars and writers at Beijing University. His aim, as he saw it, was to “transmit the pained cry of one who had been abused” and so “elicit rage and disgust against those in power.”²⁶ Chinese intellectuals readily embraced Eroshenko’s tale of a tiger driven mad by the psychological prison of colonial oppression, reading into it the trauma they themselves had been dealt by foreign aggressors since the later decades of the nineteenth century. On a more creative level, Lu Xun was clearly drawn to Eroshenko’s poetic style and narrative techniques. In fact, Andrew F. Jones has argued that Eroshenko’s works bore an uncanny resemblance to Lu Xun’s own, particularly in their “recursive and ultimately unsustainable narrative structure, in which awakening is merely a dream, and the dream an awakening to disenchantment or death.”²⁷

On June 4, 1921, Eroshenko was deported from Japan; and two days later, he arrived in Vladivostok, then under the control of anti-Bolshevik forces. From there, he endeavored to travel by train and foot into Red Russia, making it as far as Iman, where the Chita government refused to allow him to cross the border on account of his not being a communist. After waiting for three weeks in a pest-ridden freight train while the Chita authorities looked into his personal file, Eroshenko headed south to Harbin, China. In Harbin, he lodged with Japanese expatriates, wrote three accounts of his recent trials, and began reaching out to the local Esperanto community for help. One person who responded to Eroshenko’s call was Hu Yuzhi, a UAE member in Shanghai. Hu invited Eroshenko to Shanghai, where he secured him a teaching position at the Shanghai Esperanto School. Thanks to Lu Xun’s efforts, coverage of Eroshenko’s arrival in the Chenbao Fukan, a literary supplement to the Beijing Chenbao, portrayed him as an international celebrity whose status was on par with that of Bertrand Russel, Rabindranath Tagore, and George Bernard Shaw, all of whom visited China during this period.²⁸

While in Shanghai, Eroshenko organized fundraising concerts for the Shanghai Esperanto School and began working on his first piece of Esperanto fiction, “The Tales of a Withered Leaf.” A cycle of dark prose-poems, “Tales” was an outpouring of grief for the Chinese people, whom Eroshenko viewed as victims of political corruption, cultural conservatism, and foreign imperialism. Although excessive in its attack on traditional Chinese values and practices, his commentary was entirely in line with the currents of the New Culture movement, which, in the words of New Youth editor-in-chief Chen Duxiu, had been warning “of the incompatibility between Confucianism and the new belief, the new society, and the new state” of China since 1916.²⁹ Grieving the shipwreck of his “ferry of happiness” and looking to insert himself into this movement, in 1922, Eroshenko accepted an offer from Cai Yuanpei, the dean of Beijing University, to teach Esperanto and Russian literature at the university. Knowing that Eroshenko did not speak Chinese, Cai reached out to Lu Xun and his brother Zhou Zuoren, both of whom could speak fluent Japanese. The Zhou brothers were more than happy to have Eroshenko stay with them at their home in Beijing.

Since its inception, the New Culture movement had made a project of establishing a vernacular literature that would raise the consciousness of the masses. Responding to various developmental and socializing discourses circulating the globe, New Culture critics like Lu Xun, Zhou Zuoren, Zhao Jingshen, Chen Bochui, and Hu Yuzhi turned to children’s literature as an incubator for such a project.³⁰ Specifically, they held up Eroshenko’s fairy tales as the model for a new type of children’s literature and as a tool for developing the nation through its youth. “After Andersen came Wilde, and after Wilde came Eroshenko,” remarked Zhao in the Chenbao Fukan: “so that through the eyes of literature, art is gradually progressing! . . . Perhaps we should use just such a progression—from Andersen to Wilde to Eroshenko—to lead children forward as they gradually mature from infancy to adolescence.”³¹

In February 1922, Eroshenko arrived in Beijing to much fanfare.³² The capital was the center not only of the New Culture movement but also of China’s anarchist and communist movements. As in Japan, each political group saw in Eroshenko the embodiment of their imagined Russia. Consequently, his lectures at Beijing University, where he was promised a generous salary of $200 a month, initially were well attended. At the Zhou residence, he was provided with a secretary and treated like family. When not teaching, he entertained Japanese, Chinese, and Korean anarchists, or he turned his hosts’ courtyard into a vegetable garden and petting zoo, with chicks, ducklings, and tadpoles. Given these ideal circumstances, one would expect that Eroshenko was very happy in Beijing. This, however, was not the case. “This place is so lonely,” he famously complained to Lu Xun, “As lonely as the desert!”³³ In Zhou Zuoren’s opinion, Eroshenko suffered from a double longing for Japan and Russia, observing that he “yearned for Japan like a lover; but having lost at love, was redirecting his affection solely at his mother [Russia].”³⁴ Indeed, like the spring breeze in his tale “The Isle of Dreams,” Eroshenko’s thoughts were flying off to “the faraway North, to the land of the Snow and the world-turning Spirit.”³⁵

Longing to hear the nightingales of his dear Ukraine, and eager to reunite with his family, Eroshenko left Beijing for Europe in the summer of 1922. Although he had left most of his belongings behind, the Zhou brothers did not expect their wayfaring friend to return anytime soon, and each published a literary reminiscence to commemorate his stay. Lu Xun’s piece, “The Comedy of the Ducks,” a parody of Eroshenko’s tale “The Tragedy of the Chick,” was a particularly heartfelt send-up of his foreign guest’s overambitious nature that is widely read by Chinese schoolchildren to this day.³⁶

After attending the Fourteenth Universal Esperanto Congress in Finland, Eroshenko returned to Russia for the first time in eight years. In Moscow, he met up with Wada Kiichirō, an anarchist from Japan, and together the two traveled to Obukhovka. Wada recorded an account of their turbulent journey in a travelogue entitled “With Eroshenko in Ukraine.”

Despite his suspicions about the Communist Party, whose policies he criticized as the worst of any state, Eroshenko had always envisioned revolutionary Russia, if not in practice, then at least in spirit, as a transformative “land of rainbows.” His vision, however, could not have been further from the truth. Like the anarchist Emma Goldman, who had left Russia a year earlier, he had hoped to find in Russia a newborn country wholly dedicated to the revolutionary cause. Instead, he found that the Bolsheviks had imposed a brutal surveillance state and had done little to raise the consciousness of the masses.³⁷ To make matters worse, his family had fallen on hard times: their land had been taken away and their house had been burned down. Not long after his visit home, Eroshenko channeled his bitter experience into a new tale entitled “Father Time.” A parable on the cyclically destructive tendency of mankind, it reflects his growing awareness that revolution without the fundamental change of social and economic relations would always lead to autocracy, if not tyranny.

When Eroshenko returned to Beijing in November, his former celebrity status had all but faded. While there had been initial enthusiasm for his university lectures, his students were left unimpressed, and enrollment dwindled. This low enrollment was due to several reasons—the first being that Eroshenko did not speak Chinese, a fact that, despite the efforts of his interpreters, must have put a wall between him and his students. Second, his criticisms of Bolshevism offended the pro-Bolshevik camp at the university. Third, and most important, he held a negative opinion of the Chinese intellectual class, criticizing students, teachers, writers, socialists, and anarchists in China for lacking what he saw as a spirit of self-sacrifice. As Xiaoqun Xu has keenly observed, “while criticizing capitalism and Western governments’ policies, he cherished Russian literature, theater, music, and visual arts, and scolded educated Chinese for lacking tastes in all these. . . . [Thus] coming from a different locus (and personal experience) in the colonial world order, [Eroshenko] would reach a position of dismissing Chinese culture and reinforcing the cultural power of the West.”³⁸

It might be said that Eroshenko was merely repackaging sentiments expressed by Lu Xun—and one need only read the latter’s stories “A Village Opera” and “Dragon Boat Festival” to sense this—but to reiterate Xu’s analysis, Eroshenko was indeed speaking from a different locus; and the alleged notion that he was unable to distinguish race did not change the fact that he was a white man criticizing Asian people for being “culturally backward.”

The final straw came in December, after Eroshenko wrote a scathing review of a play put on by the Beijing University Experimental Theater Group. In it, he denounced the group for perpetuating what he saw as the “barbaric custom” that prevented women from performing on stage with men. He bemoaned the fact that there was “no good theater in China,” comparing the male students playing females to “monkeys imitating human beings.”³⁹ Needless to say, his criticisms were an affront to the young performers, and a war of words broke out in the Chenbao Fukan—one that sadly turned into an attack on Eroshenko’s blindness. Although the Zhou brothers came to Eroshenko’s defense, and Eroshenko offered a half apology for his review, it was too late—the damage was done. In January 1923, sensing poor enrollment, he canceled the rest of his lectures at Beijing University. In that same month, when he began to get harassed by the Japanese foreign press and the Chinese authorities about his connection to Ōsugi Sakae, he decided that it was time for him to return to Russia.

If he found some hope and contentment before leaving China, it came in the form of an unexpected visitor. The visitor was Gōzō Yoneda, a sixteen-year-old high-school dropout from Hiroshima, who had worked his way to Beijing in the hope of meeting his literary idol. Eroshenko befriended the young man and agreed to pay for his fare back to Japan in exchange for secretarial work. The result of this exchange was “The Red Flower,” the last fairy tale that Eroshenko was to publish in his lifetime. A literary mash-up of first-person narrative and third-person allegory, it told the story of a depressed artist and his idealistic young student experiencing a series of visions that culminate in the man passing on to the student the dying flame of his revolutionary spirit. As in the tale, Eroshenko can be said to have passed on his revolutionary spirit to Yoneda, who would later change his name to “Karl” Yoneda, and become a well-known labor organizer in the United States.

On April 16, Eroshenko packed his bags and left China for good. Despite the damage that had been done to his reputation among students at Beijing University, the Zhous were loath to see him go, and he continued to be remembered favorably by writers like Ye Shengtao, He Qifang, Xiao Hong, and Xie Bingying. In the foreword to a 1930 collection of Eroshenko’s fairy tales translated into Chinese, anarchist and novelist Ba Jin expressed: “Eroshenko is our familiar and esteemed friend . . . [He] took the sorrow of mankind as his own, loving mankind more than he loves himself. Like a musician, he put his love of man and his hatred of our social system into a chord played with a beautiful and sad style that has touched our hearts.”⁴⁰ More than a decade after his departure, literary critic Lin Yutang still considered Eroshenko to be relevant to Chinese readers, ranking him alongside Andreyev and Artsybashev as one of the most popular Russian writers in the country.⁴¹ Even to this day, several of his tales are widely accessible by way of Lu Xun’s ever-popular collected works.

For the next year, Eroshenko traveled around Europe, attending Esperanto congresses and trying to build a network of blind Esperantists. After returning to Moscow in the fall of 1924, he was invited to work as a Japanese interpreter at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East (KUTV), where he worked with Katayama Sen, one of the founders of the American and Japanese Communist Parties. Kazama Jōkichi, a student at the university, was surprised to see that Eroshenko had not flourished in Soviet Russia, recalling that “[h]e was dressed in ragged clothes and living in a basement. . . . While the Japanese police had labeled him a ‘Red,’ here in the Red City he was seen as a ‘White’ or a ‘Gray.’ ”⁴² Eroshenko’s criticism of the Communist Party eventually drew the ire of Katayama and the student body, and, perhaps for ideological reasons, he decided to leave the university in 1928. One can only imagine the hard feelings that this inspired, as he had long hoped to play an important role in Russia’s reconstruction.

From 1928 to 1929, Eroshenko lived on the Chukchi Peninsula, in northernmost Siberia, where his brother Alexander was working as a veterinarian. During his stay, he collected folklore and studied the situation of the local blind population, possibly for the All-Russia Association of the Blind, with which he was associated at the time. In the early 1930s, he began writing sketches, poetry, and essays inspired by his experiences among the Chukchi people, many of which were published in the braille periodical Esperanto Ligilo. These writings are said to be among Eroshenko’s finest contributions to Esperanto literature, and, moreover, they offer a strong rebuke of Soviet bureaucracy and European civilization, which he viewed as self-destructive and “fatally stupid.”⁴³ They are even more remarkable when one considers that they were written around the time of Stalin’s Great Purge.

Throughout the 1930s, Stalin and the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs initiated a series of show trials and covert executions to remove rival influences in the Communist Party. Amidst this culture of deadly paranoia, Soviet Esperantists were but one group that was singled out as a threat to party stability, particularly for their transnational networks, which were feared to be full of spies. Charged as “Trotskyite counter-revolutionaries” and “socially dangerous elements,” many Esperantists were sent to labor camps or summarily executed for little reason beyond possessing Esperanto literature or international correspondence.⁴⁴ This dire situation may explain why, in 1934, Eroshenko fled to Kushka, in Turkmenistan, where he worked for several years as a teacher at a school for blind children. Writing to a friend in 1940, he expressed the concern he had for his own safety as well as that of his Esperanto-speaking peers: “You must write to me in Russian. Esperanto is no longer in fashion. All of the central Esperanto institutions are closed, and many Esperantists have been arrested as spies and traitors. For this reason, I have stopped writing to my foreign friends. Only rarely do I receive copies of Esperanto Ligilo. Are you receiving anything from abroad?”⁴⁵ This period in Eroshenko’s life was not all bleak, however. The students at his school were fond of their globe-trotting teacher, who encouraged independent thinking, organized literary workshops, staged plays, and shared tales about people from all over the world.⁴⁶ In 1936, Eroshenko pioneered a variant of braille that corresponded with the Turkmen alphabet; and, in 1938, he made a trip to Leningrad, where he came in third place in an all-Russian chess tournament for the blind.

The outbreak of World War II in 1939 must have been disheartening to the humanist Eroshenko, but it hardly could have come as a surprise. In fact, he had foreseen its eventuality since the end of the last war, at which time he criticized international relations as an outright scam, in which groups of countries ganged up on other countries to stir up conflict and profit off the terrible results.⁴⁷ Besides predicting a war between Japan and the United States, he had ominously warned about the dangers of ethno-nationalism, arguing that ethnic biases were laid and maintained by “politicians, patriots and scientists . . . and should they become the core principles of a national education system or religious dogma, it will be near impossible to imagine to what absurd ends they will lead man.”⁴⁸ How exactly Eroshenko rode out the war remains a mystery, as by this time he was publishing infrequently and his correspondence was being intercepted by government agents.

After the end of World War II, Eroshenko briefly resumed his former life in Moscow, teaching at his alma mater, the Moscow School for the Blind. Then, in 1949, he returned to his native village to recover from a “tortuous and lasting” illness, which turned out to be cancer. On December 23, 1952, he died and was buried in his village cemetery, unrecognized as a storyteller in both Russia and Ukraine. Not even his friends in Japan or China were to learn the news of his passing until years later, when the Russian translator Vladimir Rogov noted his name in Lu Xun’s “The Comedy of the Ducks” and began looking into his life. According to family and friends, Eroshenko continued to write until his final days. Fortunately, some of his last works were preserved, but most of his personal archive is said to have been confiscated by the secret police and likely disposed of.

Today, when I read news of the ecological destruction of stolen indigenous lands by bankers and bureaucrats across the Americas; the removal of homeless encampments by militarized police forces in Toronto, Paris, and Tokyo; the brutal working conditions on the warehouse floors of mega-corporations like Amazon; and the rising tensions between capitalist empires like Russia, the United States, and China, I cannot help but recall Eroshenko’s 1921 speech, “A Cup of Misfortune,” in which he fiercely contests the conservative view that the world’s existential crisis is nothing more than the exaggerated fear of overly sensitive progressives: “It is said that a house will catch fire after the mice have left it. But in reality, the mice only leave because the house is already on fire. Likewise, it is said that a river will flood after the ants have left it. But in reality, the ants only leave because the river is already flooded. Well then, conservatives say that the world will descend into chaos after the socialists and workers start shouting. But in reality, the socialists and workers are shouting because the world is already in chaos!”⁴⁹

As in 1921, today the world is in chaos, and Eroshenko’s tales, written over a century ago, continue to have relevance, urging readers, young and old, to think about and act upon the many problems confronting their society. Drawing on what fairy-tale historian Jack Zipes has observed as the “subversive potential” of fairy tales, Eroshenko transforms his seemingly innocent narratives of plants, animals, and children into provocative commentaries that expose the exploitation, racism, and hypocrisy at the core of Western civilization. Of course, he was not alone in this effort, but rather was joined by countless men and women in the United States, Britain, Germany, India, Japan, China, and elsewhere, who, in different contexts, turned to children’s literature as a tool for raising the consciousness of the young. Considered in this light, both Eroshenko’s life and work speak to a remarkable transnational discourse that took place across the world in the early twentieth century. As it is only in recent years that scholars like Sho Konishi, Andrew F. Jones, and Ian Rapley have identified Eroshenko’s important contributions to this discourse, I look forward to seeing how his contributions will be incorporated into the phenomenal scholarship on radical children’s literature already put forth by Jack Zipes, Julia Mickenberg, Kimberly Reynolds, Evgeny Steiner, and many, many others.

Importantly, Eroshenko’s tales are also a cherished artifact of the world’s blind community, offering a unique and often-neglected perspective to the fairy-tale genre. Writing on the theme of disability as it appears in the ubiquitous fairy-tale “quest narrative,” author and disability rights activist Amanda Leduc astutely observes: “In fairy tales . . . disability often operates as an impetus back toward balance and the world of the ideal; if the disabled narrator can only successfully complete the quest, do what is required of them, and learn, their disability will be lifted from them and they’ll occupy an abled space in the world once more.”⁵⁰ When Eroshenko writes of disability in his tales—be it physical or psychological—he often subverts this quest narrative, presenting the argument that individual action is not enough to set the world right: collective action is required. Although he rarely depicts any character succeeding in the world, he makes it plainly and painfully clear that their tragic fates are undoubtedly due to the fact that society has failed to imagine their full participation.

Only in “An Eagle’s Heart” does Eroshenko fully upend the ableist quest narrative, presenting disfigurement not as a symbol for disability but for superhuman ability. In the tale, a falconer captures two eagle princes, whose parents kidnap his sons as retribution. When after many years the eagle princes and falconer’s sons are returned to their respective parents, they are completely changed. In particular, the falconer’s sons now exhibit the hard limbs, beak-like noses, and talon-like nails of the eagles who had held them ransom. Rather than being socially ostracized for their differences, the brothers are welcomed back into their community, imbuing it with a fiery revolutionary spirit that one day will allow it to overthrow its oppressors. Meanwhile, the eagle princes, who were socialized according to the limiting norms of human society, lose their pride and sense of freedom.

On a personal note, Eroshenko’s tales have served as a reminder to myself, a second-generation Ukrainian Canadian, that my heritage belongs to a diverse and ever-evolving world of liminal boundaries. These tales offer me the rare opportunity to promote a near-forgotten voice from the Ukrainian diaspora—somehow made possible by my ability to read Japanese and Esperanto and despite my inability to read Ukrainian (yet!). Beyond introducing Vasily Eroshenko (or Vasyl Yeroshenko, as his name is pronounced in Ukrainian) to a new audience, I hope this collection will act as a bridge between cultures, generate further interest in émigré literature, and challenge us to think about identity in new and interesting ways.

The present collection is intended to provide an overview of Eroshenko’s engagement with the fairy-tale form, with particular emphasis given to tales in which he employed subversive techniques and experimental prose styles to provoke and raise the political consciousness of his readers. Each tale has been selected for the various social and political injustices they highlight, the experimental techniques they exhibit, and the value they have as biographical or historical commentary. Some important tales like “The Land of Rainbows,” “The Ferry of Happiness,” and “The Wound of Love” have not been included, as the themes they explore are better expressed elsewhere; others like “The First Treasure” or “The Triplets” employ images and language that are not at all acceptable and are, in my opinion, failed works with little subversive potential; last, some tales have not been included because of the state of incompleteness engendered by twentieth-century censorship laws particular to Japan. As Heather Bowen-Struyk and Norma Field explain in their anthology of Japanese proletarian literature, For Dignity, Justice, and Revolution, “Since postpublication banning was the predominant form of censorship during the early twentieth-century, editors and authors worked hard to avoid this costly outcome by pre-emptively censoring their texts, using mostly Xs, ellipses, and sometimes Os in place of words that risked running afoul of the authorities.”⁵¹ Because tales like “The Young Angel’s Mistake” and “The Soul of the Universe” are severely mangled by this type of obfuscation, they have been left out. Perhaps space can be made for more tales, speeches, essays, and Eroshenko’s play “Peach-Colored Clouds” in a future collection.

Furthermore, just how many of Eroshenko’s unusual tales were originally written in Japanese remains unclear. In this collection, the semi-autobiographical “Some Pages from My School Days,” “The Mad Cat,” and “Tales of a Withered Leaf,” as well as the two prose poems included in the appendix, provide the Esperanto versions written by Eroshenko himself. While certainly written in Japanese, “The Tragedy of the Chick,” “Father Time,” and “The Red Flower” have survived only by way of Lu Xun’s meticulous Chinese translations.

In his autobiography The Straight Green Path, Eroshenko scholar Takasugi Ichirō remarks on some of the difficulties in compiling a collection of Eroshenko’s works, chief among them being that “while Eroshenko had an excellent understanding of Japanese, we must not forget that it was imperfect.”⁵² Compounded with this is the fact that his tales received varying degrees of assistance from transcriptionists. Although some of the tales appear quite polished, others not only contain typographical errors but also awkward syntax. With this in mind, I have pulled from a variety of sources to create my translations, including the original Sōbunkaku edition of Songs Before Dawn (1921), Lu Xun’s Chinese translations, Takasugi Ichirō’s Collected Works of Eroshenko, volumes 1–3 (1959), Miyamoto Masao’s Esperanto translations in A Narrow Cage (1981), and Eroshenko’s own Esperanto writings. Perhaps more than any other translator of Eroshenko’s work, I have been quite liberal with my edits while endeavoring to convey Eroshenko’s lyrical voice and impassioned political messages.

This collection features two parts: part I includes tales that Eroshenko wrote in Japan (1915–1921) and part II includes tales that he wrote in China (1921–1923). Several semiautobiographical pieces and prose poems also appear in the appendix to this collection, which I hope paint a picture of Eroshenko’s character and the world he lived in.

15. Konishi, Anarchist Modernity, 331. Another invaluable piece of English-language scholarship on this generation of writers is Elizabeth M. Keith’s dissertation on the history of Akai tori and its editorial policy. See Elizabeth M. Keith, Dōshinshugi and Realism: A Study of the Characteristics of the Poems, Stories and Compositions in Akai Tori from 1918 to 1923 (PhD diss., University of Hawai’i, 2011).

17. Writing for La Revuo Orienta in 1930, Hiraoka Noboru pointed to Eroshenko’s influence on the next generation of left-wing writers: “I believe there will come a day when the significance of his work on Japan’s modern proletarian literature and Japanese literature in general will be recognized.” See Hiraoka Noboru, “Washirii Eroshenko,” in La Revuo Orienta, no. 3 (March 1930), 76.

37. Dongyoun Hwang has observed that Eroshenko’s views on the failures of Soviet-style communism particularly influenced the thinking of Yi Jeonggyu, Jeong Hwaam, and other Korean anarchists based in China. See Dongyoun Hwang, Anarchism in Korea: Independence, Transnationalism, and the Question of National Development, 1919–1984 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016), 26.

48. Eroshenko, “Nova spirito en la mondo,” in Stranga kato, ed. Mine Yoshitaka (Toyonaka: Japana Esperanta Librokooperativo, 1983), 71. Eroshenko predicted a war between Japan and the United States in his political fairy tale “Onchō no ranpi” (Wasted Grace). See Eroshenko, “Onchō no ranpi,” in Eroshenko zenshu, vol. 3, ed. Takasugi Ichirō (Tokyo: Misuzu shobō, 1959), 276.