Sino‐Soviet Confessions: Authority, Agency, and Autobiography in Sergei Tret'iakov's Den Shi‐khua

This article investigates Soviet factography's relationship to its historical context through a reading of Sergei s Den Shi‐khua: A Bio‐interview . Tret'iakov composed this biographical narrative on the basis of a series of interviews he conducted in 1926–27 with a student at Sun Yat‐sen University in Moscow. Critical readers tend to juxtapose Den Shi‐khua to the realist novel, the object of Tret'iakov's explicit polemics in the late 1920s. However, the framing of the text calls to mind another parallel in contemporary life writing: the autobiographical accounts of the self demanded for participation in Soviet institutions, from Party membership to university application. Under the influence of Michel Foucault, recent studies on the formation of Soviet subjectivity have interpreted these autobiographical practices as a “hermeneutics of the self” that sought to read the inner disposition of individuals towards the Revolution. Tret'iakov invokes these hermeneutic practices in his introduction, framing the interview process as a form of confession that compels Den to produce his life story in accordance with authoritative Soviet norms. This confessional hierarchy of power resounds with the political context that brought Tret'iakov and his interlocutor together: the attempts by Soviet Russia to shape and control the revolutionary trajectory of Nationalist China in the 1920s. Ultimately, however, this hierarchical relationship collapses when the book's conclusion suggests that Den may have concealed the truth about himself. The power of Soviet narrative norms is undermined, but the bio‐interview emerges as a mode of truth production that remains contingent and refrains from final judgement.