Kuo Mo-Je

Born Nov. 16, 1892, in the village of Shawan, Leshan District, Szechwan Province. Chinese scholar, historian, and writer. Born into the family of a landowner. Graduated from the department of medicine of the University of Kyushu, Japan, in 1923. He participated in the Revolution of 1925–27 in China. From 1928 to 1937 he lived as an émigré in Japan, where he studied ancient Chinese history. During the anti-Japanese war of 1937–45 he did political work in the armed forces of the Kuomintang government. In 1949 he became president of the Academy of Sciences of China, and in 1954 vice-chairman of the Permanent Committee of the All-China Assembly of People’s Representatives. In April 1969, at the Ninth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, he was elected a member of the party’s Central Committee.

Kuo began to be published in 1919. He was one of the organizers and leaders (1921) of the Creativity literary society and the All-China Association of Literature and Art Figures for Repulsing the Enemy. His early poetry is represented by the collections The Goddesses (1921) and Stellar Space (1923), which are characterized by antifeudal sentiment and revolutionary romanticism. Poems of later years were contained in the collections The Vase (1927), The Return (1928), The Voice of War (1938), and The Cicadas (1948). After the formation of the People’s Republic of China (1949), the collections A Hymn to New China (1953) and Let All the Flowers Bloom (1958) were published.

Kuo Mo-je’s plays were written on historical and patriotic themes {The Mark of the Tiger, 1942, and others). In his works on history, a great deal of space is devoted to the question of the existence of slaveowning society in Chinaand to the deciphering and interpretation of various ancient inscriptions. Kuo Mo-je’s critical and publicistic articles and memoirs were part of the books Today and Tomorrow (1949), Boiling (1950), Song of the Stormy Wave (1959), and Travel Notes About the USSR (1946). He translated into Chinese German Ideology by K. Marx and F. Engels, On Criticism of Political Economy by Marx, part of War and Peace by L. N. Tolstoy, and Faust by J. W. Goethe and was the first to translate poems by V. V. Mayakovsky and other Soviet poets.