“Imaginations of Russia” and the Introductions of Russian Literature into Modern China and Japan

Abstract

Abstract: The introduction of Russian literature into modern China and Japan occurred within a complicated nexus with the West, and was tightly connected to their respective anxieties about modernizationin and with the imaginations of Russia under the influence of such anxieties. As another Other to Meiji-era Japan aside from the West, Russia provided imagination as a meansto supplement, rethink and resist Western modernity. Due to its influence upon the West, Russian literature enabled Japanese intellectuals to compensate for the nostalgia produced by the process of Westernization/modernization. In comparison, Chinese intellectuals in the May Fourth period, who deemed the West as an absolute Other, constructed a “mirror image” of Russia by producing and repeating a discourse of “affinity” between China and Russia. In this sense, Russian literature obtained its justification and was introduced in China positively as an alien cultural resource. In brief, during their respective periods of modernization, facing a strong Western Other, China and Japan disparately utilized the imagination of Russia and Russian literature as resistant discourses, in their atlempt to seek an alternative to Western modernity.

Key words: Russian literature, Meiji-era Japan, imagination of Russia, modernity

Wang Shengqun. “Imaginations of Russia” and the Introductions of Russian Literature into Modern China and Japan[J]. Foreign Literature Studies, 2017, 39(6): 63-72.

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