Following the victory of the reactionary forces, free speech was totally suppressed, all opposition forces were branded as Communists or counter-revolutionaries and were ruthlessly persecuted and "purged." Revulsion at these events drove Lusin farther and farther to the Left. In 1930 he joined the League of Left Wing Writers and soon came to be known as the foremost revolutionary writer of China in Leftist circles both in Europe and America. Articles by and about him appeared, for instance, in the New Masses and China Today. (It was in the latter magazine, incidentally, that Ah Q was first introduced to the American reading public.) Since his death he has been, ironically, deified by the Communist literati as their patron saint; the principal cultural institution at Yenan, capital of the Chinese Communists, is named after him. But Lusin was a revolutionary only in the sense that all great writers of the past of any vitality and influence were revolutionaries. No one familiar with his writings—even though the extent of his familiarity does not go beyond the present collection—could conceive of him as a revolutionary in the orthodox Stalinist, or even the Marxist, sense.
Lusin had only a very modest conception of his role as a writer. He regarded his own utterances as "cheers from the sidelines," always making certain, to be sure, that he was in the right cheering section as measured according to the three principles that he had laid down for himself. He never thought of himself as an "artist" or his short stories as "art."
