Survival of the Unfittest on the Eastern Front

In 1911, F. T. Marinetti imagined war as “the only hygiene of the world.” Such social Darwinist visions are contested by modernism’s antimilitarist fictions. Focusing on Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk (1921–23), this chapter explores the dynamics of this contestation and its ramifications for understanding modernist epic. The eponymous protagonist of Hašek’s fiction, Švejk, is not a standard hero. Rather, he is imbecilic, alcoholic, lazy, rheumatic, “degenerate,” mongrel-like, and speaks an “impure” colloquial version of the national language. His only positive feature is how, ironically because of his stupidity, Švejk always manages to escape a terrible destiny, delaying his arrival at the Eastern Front. As this chapter describes, the story is a moral of survival of the unfittest, dramatizing how the underdog can succeed in a violent world and how the Czechs emerged from under the Austrian empire. Analyzing this alter-Darwinian nation-building, the chapter places Hašek’s work into relation with the larger genre of modernist epic. It shows that although Hašek was not invested in any modernist movement, and did not read Joyce or Stein, his text was nevertheless shaped in relation to the same underlying historical forces. It reveals, consequently, an encompassing narrative of evolutionary thought that different national modernisms can be coordinated against, which also crosses the cultural divide between high and low.

Realism, Form, and Representation in the Edwardian Novel

‘The real represents to my perception the things that we cannot possibly not know, sooner or later, in one way or another,’ wrote Henry James in 1907. This description, riven with double negatives, hesitation, and uncertainty, encapsulates the epistemological difficulties of realism, for underlying its narrative and descriptive apparatus as an aesthetic mode lies a philosophical quandary. What grounds the ‘real’ of the realist novel? What kind of perception is required to validate the experience of reality? How does the realist novel represent the difficulty of knowing? What comes to the fore in James’s account, as in so many, is how the forms of realism are constituted by a relation to unknowing, absence and ineffability. Realism, Form, and Representation in the Edwardian Novel recovers a neglected literary history centred on the intricate relationship between fictional representation and philosophical commitment. It asks how—or if—we can conceptualize realist novels when the objects of their representational intentions are realities that might exist beyond what is empirically verifiable by sense data or analytically verifiable by logic, and are thus irreducible to conceptual schemes or linguistic practices—a formulation Charlotte Jones refers to as ‘synthetic realism’. In new readings of Edwardian novels (including Conrad’s Nostromo and The Secret Agent, Wells’s Tono-Bungay, and Ford’s The Good Soldier), Jones revises and reconsiders key elements of realist novel theory—metaphor and metonymy; character interiority; the insignificant detail; omniscient narration and free indirect discourse; causal linearity—to uncover the representational strategies by which realist writers grapple with the recalcitrance of reality as a referential anchor, and seek to give form to the force, opacity, and uncertain scope of realities that may lie beyond the material. In restoring a metaphysical dimension to the realist novel’s imaginary, Realism, Form, and Representation in the Edwardian Novel offers a new conceptualisation of realism both within early twentieth-century literary culture and as a transhistorical mode of representation.

"Chairman Mao's Good Soldier" Lei Feng

The article examines the personality of "Chairman Mao's good soldier" Lei Feng — a soldier of the People's Liberation Army of China, who died tragically in 1962. On March 5, 1963, on the initiative of Mao Zedong, a political and ideological campaign was announced in China under the slogan "Learn from Lei Feng". In order to consolidate the positive image of Lei Feng in the mass consciousness of the people of the PRC, the possibilities of culture and art were widely used. The largest-scale political and ideological campaign under the slogan "Learn from Comrade Lei Feng!" acquired in the first years after the death of Lei Feng and during the "cultural revolution" (1966-1976). In 1977 Lei Feng's study campaign unfolded with renewed vigor. In the 1980s, the mass movement gradually began to fade. The CPC leadership made significant efforts to preserve it in 1980-1981, to revive it in 1987 and after the tragic events in Tiananmen Square (1989). Since 2012, there has been an increase in this campaign. Currently, Lei Feng is the personification of altruism, volunteering and helping others, carried out on a selfless basis. In this capacity, the image of Lei Feng is used in the public discourse of modern China. The Chinese media constantly refer to stories, the heroes of which are ordinary Chinese — "modern Lei Feng’". The cult of Lei Feng, persistently promoted by the CCP for decades, confronts the recently widespread facts of corruption in various (including the highest) echelons of political power.