A researcher at the Gorki Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Riftin, an expert on classical Chinese, has become that academy's first correspondent member. He has spent great energy delving into Chinese folk literature, Chinese classical novels and the culture of Chinese Muslims and Mongolians.

Gaining a familiarity with folk culture

As a student, Riftin made frequent trips to central Asia to study Chinese Muslim emigrant communities. This led to an interest in folk literature, and in central Asia, Outer Mongolia, Vietnam and many other places he has widely collected historical materials on folk literature. He laid the foundations of his academic reputation with a few books of a specialized nature: The Legend of the Great Wall and the Genre of Chinese Folk Literature, A Chinese Folk Literary Tradition--The Romance of the Three Kingdoms and From Myth to Classical Novels. All of these books were closely connected to folk literature.

"Old Russian Li" has steeped himself in folk literature, and his wide-ranging discussions on various legends and stories, on the different versions of these same tales and on the work in this area by scholars around the world have made a deep impression on R.O.C. scholars. His research has also made tracks in areas scholars have regarded as fresh and interesting. He has researched how the various kinds of characters are described in Chinese literature, trying to understand the world views of different places, ages and ethnic groups through Chinese proverbs. All of this work has opened up new vistas in the study of Chinese folk literature.

As exchange between Taiwan and the former Soviet Republics grows ever more frequent, we interviewed him to learn how a Russian sinologist views Chinese literature and to further mutual understanding. The interview itself follows.

Soap and li melon

Q: We know that you spent a lot of time in a central Asian villages of Chinese Muslims. Could you recount your experiences there for us?

A. When I was in my first year in the Oriental Studies Department of Leningrad University, I met a Tungkan Muslim. He told me that there were a number of farming villages in central Asia where the inhabitants were the descendants of Tungkan people who had fled from Kansu and Shensi after Tso Chung-tang quelled Muslim uprisings in the 19th century. To the present, they still speak the way people in Kansu and Shensi do, and they have passed down much of their folk literature.

When I heard about this, I became extremely interested. Among my classmates, there was also a Tungkan girl. Her language was quite different from Mandarin, and I very much wanted to study it. As soon as summer vacation came, I went by myself to central Asia, to a Tungkan village called Miliang River, and I told the leader of the farming collective there that I wished to labor together with the villagers and study the Tungkan language. I was assigned to the construction brigade as an assistant maker of mud blocks. The head of the brigade had fought in Manchuria in World War Ⅱand could speak Mandarin with a Pekingese accent. To help me study the local dialect, he used his own "folk method."

One day, getting off work, I came out of a pit of mud and needed soap to wash myself off. I said, "I want soap" but stressed the word incorrectly. He sent his son home, and he returned with a paddy chaff. I said I didn't want that, and he said I should say "yi-tzu" with the correct stress. Another time, someone was eating a kind of fruit, and he asked me what it was. In Kansu dialect, I replied, "I don't know. " "If you don't know," he said, "then I won't give you any to eat. It's called li melon. If you remember, you can eat some tomorrow." Forty years later, I still haven't forgotten how to say soap or li melon.

I was only a freshman then, and you can probably imagine the level of my Chinese. At the time, the school also lacked good conversation texts. When I first got to those Tungkan villages, I couldn't even say chopsticks. With my first stay of 45 days, my Mandarin and Kansu dialect made great bursts of improvement.

Strange sounds of Kansu-accented Mandarin

Q: Besides studying the Tungkan dialect, how were you most affected by living in Tungkan?

A: Originally I didn't dare have any expectations about what I would find. But it was there where I first heard stories about Meng Chiang-nu. There was one Tungkan girl who would tell me folk legends after work. "Liang Shan-po and Chu Ying tai," "The Story of the White Snake" and "Hsueh Jen-kuei Quelling the East" were all introduced to me by her.

At the time, none of my teachers were specializing in the study of Chinese folk culture. The materials that one could find in the library were also quite limited. My experiences in the village put me into direct contact with the great vitality of Chinese folk literature, after which I returned to the world of books. And these experiences did, of course, have a great impact on my deciding the direction of my research. From that point on, every summer vacation, I would go back to gather folk stories in central Asia. Sometimes I would go to farming villages of Kansu emigrants, sometimes to the villages of Shensi emigrants. I learned much that simply can't be learned in books. Later, I felt that I rather easily understood Chinese customs and habits. This is undoubtedly connected to those experiences.

It was funny that when I went back to school, many teachers scolded me for having "strangely accented Chinese," and today many Chinese ask me if my teacher was from Shantung. But once in Taipei when I made a call to Professor Chin Jung-hua of Chinese Culture University, as soon as I spoke, he asked, "Excuse me, Mr. Li, how many years were you in Kansu?" It's truly a case of going abroad to be fully understood.

A pissing contest for Chu Ying-tai

Q: It sounds that way. Are the folk stories you heard in the Muslim villages of central Asia also common and widespread in Chinese society?

A: I'll cite an example from Canada. There is an area over there where immigrants from Russia and the Ukraine settled over 100 years ago. Researchers have discovered that traditional folk songs have been passed down there in a more complete form than they have been in Russia and Ukraine themselves. People who have left their homeland are always especially nostalgic for their own past. Hence, some traditions may change in the land of their origin while being consciously preserved by emigrants in foreign cultural surroundings. Likewise, the Tungkan people of central Asia left China to live among other people, and that kind of environment has been of help in preserving the original form of their folk tales, allowing for historical materials to be gathered there in a form closer to the original.

For example, the Tungkan version of "Meng Chiang-nu" says the emperor has four treasures, whereas the Chinese version describes only one. You might not believe this, but in the story of Liang Shan-po and Chu Ying-tai as it is told by the Tungkan people, the teacher's wife gets so suspicious that Chu Ying-tai is a girl that she asks her husband to make all the students enter a pissing contest.

Q:How do coming up with more of these kind of details help in the study of folk literature?

A: If you're interested, I'll start by talking about folk literature itself. Most people will say that spoken or sung folk literature serves the purpose of instructing, encouraging and consoling the illiterate masses. There's nothing wrong with this, but one ought to take it a step farther. Written literature does in fact develop from folk literature. Its writers are in fact the masses, andt is thus easier for them to create lively new forms, which in turn stimulate written literature to renew and transform itself.

Stimulating written literature

Folk legends often preserve many stories whose original forms in the classics have been lost. They are more original, vigorous and down to earth. Take my favorites--for example, the legend of The Three Kingdoms. As the story is told, when Chang Fei and Kuan Kung first meet, heated words lead to a fight, and when no victor is apparent, they make a pledge of brotherhood. But later, The Folk-Book Pinghua of the Three Kingdoms, which had been transcribed from oral accounts, was revised. The Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Lo Kuan-chung further revises the account in The Folk-Book Pinghua of the Three Kingdoms, and the aggressiveness in the fight between Chang Fei and Kuan Kung was reduced to a minimum. It became instead a boulder-lifting competition between the pork seller Chang Fei and the tofu seller Kuan Kung.

The folk legends relating to the Three Kingdoms that have been collected by many contemporaries in Hupeh have collectively been called "anti-Three Kingdom" because the stories reverse the verdicts in The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. The wellknown three sworn brothers of the peach garden in The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, for example, are all very righteous. You might be shocked to hear that Liu Pei once harbored suspicions that his wife was having an affair with Kuan Kung.

Understanding how folk literature makes the journey to written literature is the focus of my research, and understanding the original forms of the stories in such Chinese classics as The Three Kingdoms and All Men Are Brothers is especially interesting. In the process of carrying out this kind of research, it is of course necessary to make an extensive collection of original folklore materials. Folk legends are especially important if you want to understand the development, evolution and special character of these novels. Legends gathered in various areas may be more or less the same, and while the literary significance of these differences may be insignificant, for research about the details of stories, even a small difference, like someone's physical appearance, is worthy of notice. And you've got to know that the Chinese are very fond of changing the details, especially the principal people through whom the stories are passed down, the storytellers. Their brains are always turning, and they're always thinking about how to get the attention of their era's audience--and they are the source of still more stories of interest.

Avoiding a string of set-ups

Q: Could you talk more about how you researched and investigated the connections between folk literature and classical novels?

A: Once, when the Chinese Oral Performance Literature Society was holding a meeting in America, my 500-page book, The Relationship Between the Romance of the Three Kingdoms and the Folk Tradition, was the topic of a special discussion. They were interested in my detailed research into how Lo Kuan-chung made use of The History of the Three Kingdoms and Yuan drama, as well as how he was influenced by folk literature. For example, the eighth and ninth chapters of The Romance of the Three Kingdoms describe a string of set-ups. I split up the story into small sections -- Wang Yun and Tiao Chan's meeting in the yard is one section and Lu Pu and Wang Yun's talk is another. In all there were 18 sections, and I discovered that 16 of them had their origins in earlier material. Lo Kuan-chung only created the two sections focusing on benevolent Confucian thought.

There is a famous sinologist in Czechoslovakia, Jaroslav Prusek, who holds that stories told by Chinese storytellers have not been influenced by the texts of such classical novels as All Men Are Brothers and The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Some of his students disagreed, but they lacked detailed research to support their views.

Later in the mainland, in Yangchow, Shanghai and Soochow, I discovered three relatively late books of Three Kingdom stories for storytellers, which I analyzed. For example, there is a scene when Chu-ko Liang is going to visit the sick Chou Yu, where he hesitates for a moment before step ping in front of the curtain, thinking about whether he should go in or not. In The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the description fits on one page and is very simple--only some ten odd movements. The book for storytellers, on the other hand, has a long involved description of nearly 100 movements: Chu ko Liang raises his right foot, then raises his left foot. . . . I analyzed the movements and then made drawings and discovered that all of the movements in the novel are also in the storytelling book, which proves that the latter is derived from the former. This is reversing things--investigating how The Romance of the Three Kingdoms has influenced folk literature.

From ancient myths to classical novels

Q: How has your research into Chinese folk literature affected the way you view Russian or other literatures?

A: In researching changes in the description of the characters Fu-hsi and Nu-wa from ancient times to K'ai-p'i yen-yi, the sixteenth century Ming novel about creation, I discovered that Chinese literature has a very clear development and continuity that other literatures lack. For example, contemporary Egyptian and Greek literature has nothing to do with the classical literatures of those countries. In my own country, there is no written record of Russian folklore before the eighteenth century. As a result, literary scholars have lately been posing all sorts of theories and questions--such as "How long can a plot last? Can it last 1000 years?" or "What is the lifetime of an adjective?" There are many different opinions. The literature of many countries can not be used to do this kind of research, but we can make investigations with Chinese materials. Fu hsi was half man and half beast in ancient China and became completely man by the Sung Dynasty. We can investigate how this change came about and its relationship to social evolution.

Q: In the process of delving into Chinese folk literature, I'm sure you've had the delight of discovering new materials.

The many joys of investigating folk culture

In Germany, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Vietnam and Outer Mongolia, I've found new materials, such as a Ming edition of All Men Are Brothers, three collections of Ming dramas, a manuscript of The Dream of the Red Chamber and legends about Nu wa that are more archaic than any in ancient Chinese literature. A Shanghai publisher has published my facsimile edition of three Ming drama collections that I found in Europe. A Selection of Muslim Stories two Tungkan friends of mine and I edited was entitled A Collection of Tungkan Folk Tales. There were virtually no collections of Muslim folk stories before the Cultural Revolution on the mainland.

Of course, it's very time consuming to do this kind of work. In the Danish Royal Library I spent a week just looking at the microfiche catalogue and taking notes, but I really love this kind of work. Lev N. Menshikov, an expert on Tunhwang, and I have introduced a manuscript of The Dream of the Red Chamber I found in the Leningrad Oriental Research Institute. It has since become a rather important research material. You can say I've toiled a bit for the sake of Chinese literary scholarship.

Q: Could you speak about your experience of researching oral literature in Outer Mongolia?

A: During the Cultural Revolution, I went to Outer Mongolia five times to do research. There are many Mongolian books which were translated from classical Chinese novels. I was interested in how the Mongolians would go about translating and introducing Chinese novels. The Mongolians very early on had woodcut printing, but they only printed Buddhist texts. Everything else is handwritten manuscripts. Several stories lost in Chinese are still around in Mongolian. In the home of a scholar in Outer Mongolia, I found the novel, Empress Chung, which speaks of the ugly but bright wife of Hsuan Wang of the State of Chi, a book that is all but unknown in China.

A brain full of stories

In the southern part of Inner Mongolia in the eighteenth century, there were a number of regions already largely signified. Many Mongolians were as fluent in Mandarin as in their mother tongue, and they told many Chinese stories--such as "Han Tien-ming Quelling the West" and "Five Dragons Stealing Treasure."

This is not to say that Mongolia has lacked its own oral literature. Their spoken and sung literature has reached a level of extremely high refinement. When they recount their epics, they use a ma-t'ou-ch'ing [a stringed instrument with a scroll carved like a horse's head]. There are more than 30 melodies for singing or reciting Chinese stories, and the Mongolians are extremely sophisticated about matching plot and tune.

As long as I have the time, I enjoy being exposed to every kind of folk literature of all nations. When I read novels, I often think how this plot came from that folk story. Knowing the origin makes me very happy. For folk literature in particular, it is not enough to look only at the books in your own area of research. The more broad your investigations, the more you will come to understand the origins and development of stories and the differences in how peoples think.

Q: You have collected New Year's popular pictures. Is this connected to your research on folk literature?

A: Of course. I have studied collections of popular Chinese New Year's pictures in such countries as the Soviet Union, Germany, Czechoslovakia and Austria for the reason that they are related to folk stories and traditions. In an antique store in Moscow I bought two rare New Year's pictures, "Three Kingdoms Against a Blue Background" and "Luo Chen of Nantang Against a Blue Back ground." Wang Shu-tsun, a famous mainland scholar of New Year's pictures, and I once compiled a selection of 200 of these popular New Year's pictures from collections in the Soviet Union. The Shanghai Ancient Book Publishing House has also asked me to compile a book on a selection of New Year's pictures on topics relating to history or customs. There are collections of New Year's pictures in the Soviet Union about the Sino-French and the Sino-Japanese Wars.

Q: After the Cultural Revolution on the mainland, relations with the mainland deteriorated. When we recently interviewed Lev N. Menshikov, he said that he didn't have a chance to go to mainland China until three years ago. How about you?

A: Before the Cultural Revolution, I was studying at Peking University. I was there for just a month and a half before the Cultural Revolution broke out. I left in confusion--so much so that I didn't have time to shave. When people asked me when I would I shave, I joked that I was waiting for the Cultural Revolution to end! But we were cut off from news, and so my beard just grew and grew.

Nevertheless, in the eighties I went to the mainland quite often. Today, even if I go to Szech-wan, I don't have any problems communicating. Down to the present, there are still some professors who say that my stays in those Tungkan villages were bad for my Chinese, but I think speaking Chinese with a Tungkan or a Kansu accent is alright--certainly a lot better than speaking Chinese with a Moscow accent!

Q: You've been in Taiwan more than two months now. Does life here suit you?

A: When I'm not in class, most of my time I'm in my dorm reading and writing essays. In Moscow, the biggest enemy I have is the telephone. Everyone knows I enjoy doing things, so there are too many people asking me to do this or that. Last year, Moscow Television wanted me to introduce the Peking Palace Museum, and I wrote the introductions to 14 of the segments myself. As a correspondent for the Sinological Research Center of the National Central Library, I had to report about Sinology conferences in Russia. When I went to the mainland the year before last, there were probably 100 things I was asked to do relating to publishing or writing. Last year when I came to Taiwan, there were probably 40 different things the publishers asked me to do. Thus, on the weekends I stay in my house outside of Moscow, where there's no phone and I can concentrate on my reading. Now National Tsing Hua University is like a house out of town.

[Picture Caption]

Busy with his work, Riftin has little time for leisure, but here he takes time out for a photo in Moscow's Red Square.

Last year when he came to Taiwan, Riftin lectured at the Chinese Department of Tamkang University, where he gave an introduction to sinology in the old Soviet Union.

After Riftin lectured at Tamkang University, one listener still has questions.

At St. Petersburg University, Riftin speaks of his experiences in Taiwan while putting on Tsou ornaments he brought back from Ali Mountain.

Besides maintaining the tradition of telling folk tales, the Tungkan villages of central Asia also have preserved many traditional crafts. Shown here is Tungkan embroidery--even the embroidered shoes have "stories."

Riftin is an enthusiastic collector of handicrafts related to folk tales. Shown are New Year's pictures related to Empress Ho Making a Scene in the Palace and The Dream of the Red Chamber.

His working base is Moscow, but on occasion Riftin visits the St. Petersburg Oriental Research Institute. Besides examining materials in the institute's Chinese collections, he also calls on fellow sinologists.

Last year when he came to Taiwan, Riftin lectured at the Chinese Department of Tamkang University, where he gave an introduction to sinology in the old Soviet Union.

After Riftin lectured at Tamkang University, one listener still has questions.

At St. Petersburg University, Riftin speaks of his experiences in Taiwan while putting on Tsou ornaments he brought back from Ali Mountain.

Besides maintaining the tradition of telling folk tales, the Tungkan villages of central Asia also have preserved many traditional crafts. Shown here is Tungkan embroidery--even the embroidered shoes have "stories.".

Riftin is an enthusiastic collector of handicrafts related to folk tales. Shown are New Year's pictures related to Empress Ho Making a Scene in the Palace and The Dream of the Red Chamber.

His working base is Moscow, but on occasion Riftin visits the St. Petersburg Oriental Research Institute. Besides examining materials in the institute's Chinese collections, he also calls on fellow sinologists.