Volume 55, Number 10 · June 12, 2008
Sentimental Education in Shanghai
By Pankaj Mishra
Fortress Besieged
by Qian Zhongshu, translated from the Chinese by Jeanne Kelly and Nathan K. Mao, with a foreword by Jonathan Spence
New Directions, 395 pp., $16.95 (paper)
In April 1924 Rabindranath Tagore arrived in Shanghai for a lecture tour of China. Soon after receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, Tagore had become an international literary celebrity, lecturing to packed audiences from Japan to Argentina. His message—that modern civilization, built upon the cult of money and power, was inherently destructive, and needed to be tempered by the spiritual wisdom of the East—had a receptive audience among many people in the West who had been forced by World War I to question their faith in science and progress. But when, traveling in the East, he exhorted Asians not to abandon their traditional culture, he was often heckled and booed.
Review, 3907 words
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