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Espionage as a strategy of literary and cultural politics

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Notes

  1. Saito does not document this famous story and I have not been able to find other sources, reporting the incident. Although the veracity of the episode remains disputable, it does not affect the validity of the arguments I intend to develop further.

  2. To be exact, he was wearing haori and hakama, official male attires.

  3. For a detailed analysis of such ideologues, see Hirakawa (1976).

  4. There are conflicting assessments as to the achievements of Maugham as an agent. Some believe that he was not competent as a spy, and much of what he did in Russia was meaningless. Some believe that he was dispatched to St Petersburg too late and given this, his work was significant. For detail, see Chap. 5 of Jeffreys-Jones’s Cloak and Collar (2002). The evaluation of Maugham’s achievement as a spy is irrelevant to the argument of the current paper.

  5. He was half Jewish, his mother being a Jew. The eccentric first name, Zangvild, is believed to have been taken from the British Jewish author, Zangwill Israel. The researcher-writer, Vitkovskii, refutes this theory, though (Elagin 1998, vol. 1, pp. 1–8).

  6. Translation is mine.

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Correspondence to Takayuki Yokota-Murakami.

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Yokota-Murakami, T. Espionage as a strategy of literary and cultural politics. Neohelicon 37, 449–455 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-010-0077-2

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