Fin-de-siècle Russia and Chinese Aesthetics

The Other is the Universal
Erscheinungsjahr 2024
ISBN: 978-0-19-892039-7
Verlag: Oxford University Press

Buch, Englisch, 188 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 160 mm x 240 mm, Gewicht: 480 g

Many are familiar with European modernists' interest in Chinese art and poetry, however less well known is that Russian literature and art at the turn of 20th century also flourished in a sustained dialogue with China. In Fin-de-siècle Russia and Chinese Aesthetics, Jinyi Chu reconsiders the place of Russia in the genealogy of global modernism by exploring the enduring impact of China on pre-revolutionary Russian culture. This book argues that fin-de-siècle Russian ideas about increasing global cultural and socioeconomic interconnectedness emerged from their unsettling encounters with China.

Drawing on literary texts, paintings, advertisements, official documents, and archival work in Russia, China, France, and the United States, Chu reconstructs surprising stories about cultural interactions. From Innokenty Annensky's encounter with a Tibetan monk in Paris, Aleksei Remizov's adaptations of Chinese ghost stories, and Lev Tolstoy's translations of the Daoist canon, to Ilya Mashkov's fauvist painting of a Chinese fairy, this book presents a new cultural history of fin-de-siècle Russia in relation to the East.

Fin-de-siècle Russia and Chinese Aesthetics casts new light on the intricate relationships between geopolitics and transnational aesthetics. It moves beyond the idea that Russian literary and artistic representations of China were simply manifestations of Russia's imperial ideology and Eurasian cultural identity. Instead, Chu shows that literature and art actively renegotiate and destabilize the preconceived world order at a time of intensifying geopolitical and cultural transformation when China shifted from Russia's rival in Inner Asia to a target in the competition of global imperialist powers.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Chu, Jinyi

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Asiatische Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Europäische Länder
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Europäische Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

- 1: Introduction

- 2: The Universal Truth

- 3: Meta-Exoticism

- 4: Russian Cathays

- 5: The Transnational Fantastic

- 6: Epilogue: The Untranslatable is the Universal

- Bibliography

- Index

Über Autor(innen)

Jinyi Chu is Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University. He holds a PhD from Stanford University. Chu's research focuses on Russian modernism, socialist culture, Russo-Chinese relations, and translation studies.