Overview

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.

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9780198920397

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Reviews

Erudite and original, this book will make a serious contribution to our understanding of Russian modernism in its self-reflexive dialogue with Chinese culture. In addition to fine-grained philological analysis, the reader would encounter some exciting detective work that uncovers significant yet so far overlooked intellectual affinities. * Galin Tihanov, Queen Mary University of London * With his deep knowledge of Chinese and Russian culture, Jinyi Chu is uniquely qualified to explore the modernist 'invention of China' in fin-de-siècle Russia. His book offers fascinating insights into the work of major Russian novelists and poets through his innovative interpretive lens of meta-exoticism. * Adrian Wanner, Penn State College of the Liberal Arts * Pushing beyond the Orientalist paradigm, Fin-de-siecle Russia and Chinese Aesthetics reframes the Russian modernist engagement with Chinese aesthetics as a search for an expanded sense of universalism that could overcome the false universality of a Eurocentric cultural order. Linguistically dexterous and intellectually daring, with a methodological range that encompasses religious philosophy, aesthetic theory, scrupulous philology, and translation analysis, Jinyi Chu's book makes a major contribution to our understanding of modernism as well as the cultural history of the Sino-Russian relationship. * Edward Tyerman, University of California, Berkeley *

Author Information

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.

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