Джереми Чэн (отличный переводчик и писатель) сделал с Янь Лянькэ интервью на пятьдесят страниц! Очень умные, хорошие вопросы, какие молодцы Paris Review, что опубликовали целиком. Даже если вы знать не знаете, кто такой Янь Лянькэ, стоит читать: здесь есть подробный рассказ о механизмах цензуры в современном Китае, об изнанке китайского литературного мира. И о том, почему китайская армия с завидной регулярностью родит замечательных писателей (Мо Янь, Янь Лянькэ, Май Цзя). И еще – чем собственно Янь Лянькэ и Мо Янь занимались в армии (а еще, еще оказалось, что в девяностые они вместе писали сценарий к сериалу “Белоснежная стена” | 《雪白的墙》 , и вообще ЯЛК в свое время активно писал сценарии для CCTV).
Лучше всё целиком читать, правда. Если что, у меня есть полная версия, пишите в лс, поделюсь. Но чтобы вы вообще не сомневались, я сделала несколько выдержек, которые особенно понравились.
О судьбе первого романа (когда армейское начальство заинтересовалось его писаниями и попросило дать что-нибудь почитать), Мо Янь свой сам сжег, а Янь Лянькэ мама помогла: I rushed to the phone and gave my brother a call, telling him to put my novel in the mail. He said, “You’ve been gone all winter, and Ma had to cook dinner, didn’t she? She needed paper for kindling to light the fire.” I’d left the manuscript in a box, and my mother found it and thought it was scrap paper. My brother said there were only sixty or seventy pages left, so I asked him to send those over and passed them to the instructor.
О литературной невинности (в двадцать лет ЯЛК узнал, что писатель может сочинять не только романы, а еще повести и рассказы): I didn’t even know the difference between short stories, novellas, and novels. That’s when I learned that not all fiction had to be book-length, and that it was okay for me to write short stories instead.
О книге, которая всё перевернула: It was only after the workshop that I picked up Gone with the Wind. It was the first time I’d stepped into a library, after China began opening up. The Chinese edition had a picture of Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara on the cover, and I thought, So that’s what foreigners look like. I had no idea they could be so beautiful. The novel had been published in three volumes, and I read them on three consecutive nights. Reading Gone with the Wind made me realize I had no idea what I was doing. How could I know what good literature was when I’d read only those few revolutionary novels? I started reading the nineteenth century classics—Tolstoy, Balzac, Hugo, Stendhal. The people in these books seemed real, unlike in our own novels.
О работе сценаристом: At one point I was writing a TV series for CCTV [China Central Television] between every book. <...> People in my hometown, including officials in the local government, used to come by during the new year and tell me they were fans of mine, not because of my novels but because my TV shows kept being shown on prime time. Of course, everything changed after my books were banned.
О том, как и зачем пишется “самокритика”: Essentially, I had to say that my understanding of the party’s artistic policies was insufficient, that I hadn’t been serious enough in my political study, that my head was full of all kinds of nonsensical ideas. But, to be honest, writing self-criticism is a sort of ritual. The point is the process—it has nothing to do with whether the self-criticism itself is well written or not. Each time my self-criticism was rejected, it indicated only that the higher-ups hadn’t made their decision about me yet.