In the period that would come to be known as fin-de-siècle Russia — a French descriptor that refers to the late 19th and early 20th centuries — Chinese products, art motifs, and imagery became ubiquitous in Russian cosmopolitan society. At the time, most representations of Chinese people in theater and on packaging were stereotypical caricatures, and the Chinese characters in dime novels were frequently portrayed negatively.
But in his new book “Fin-de-Siècle Russia and Chinese Aesthetics: The Other is the Universal” (Oxford University Press), Yale’s Jinyi Chu argues that modernists of the time did not go along with that mainstream discourse. Rather, he shows how many Russian writers and artists turned to Chinese art, literature, and philosophy as a way of rethinking European norms and expanding their understanding of the universal.
Jinyi Chu reads an excerpt from ‘Fin-de-Siècle Russia and Chinese Aesthetics: The Other is the Universal’
Jinyi Chu reads an excerpt from ‘Fin-de-Siècle Russia and Chinese Aesthetics: The Other is the Universal’
The book is about their “raptures, their dismays, their struggles, their epiphanies, in many accidental and preordained encounters with the aesthetics that they understood as Chinese,” Chu writes, “and the ways that such aesthetics, in turn, shaped fin-de-siècle Russian literature, art, and philosophy.”
An assistant professor of Slavic languages and literatures in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Chu said the book, his first, grew out of the dissertation he completed at Stanford University. A scholar of Russian and Chinese literature from this period, Chu is also a translator of Russian, Chinese, and English.
Chu sat down with Yale News to talk about Tolstoy’s fascination with the “Dao de Jing,” poetry translation as competition, and rethinking a Chinese ghost story. The interview has been condensed and edited.
The book’s subtitle — “The Other is the Universal” — is central to your arguments in the book. Would you explain?
Jinyi Chu: I like the title a lot, so I’m glad you’re asking about it. The book’s content is about late 19th-century, early 20th-century Russian culture’s encounter with Chinese culture. Or what they understand as Chinese. In this encounter with something unfamiliar to them, together with culture from other parts of the world, the worldviews of Russian writers, artists, and philosophers — like other European artists, writers, and philosophers — are reshaped by this new exposure to the newly accessible world culture. And that revises the ways in which they imagine what art should be, what poetry should be, what the universal understanding of many concepts should be.
I put “the other is the universal” in the title because, for this generation of modernists, to seek a renewed understanding of human civilization, they constantly need to revise what they understand as “the universal.” And this revision happens in this constant encountering with “the other.” A higher universal is always to be found in the other instead of in the self.
What was it about this period that compelled these writers and artists to explore perspectives that offered alternatives to European norms?
Chu: This is the time when access to world cultures is facilitated by the expansion of colonialism and the development of shipping and travel technologies. They’re really living in a more geopolitically, technologically, and culturally connected world, so that any centralized concept of national culture becomes just unimaginable. No culture really forms itself in isolation. Any culture is always in constant dialogue with other cultures. To understand the Russian culture of this period, you have to understand it through these conversations with other cultures. For Russia to adopt its own modernism, it adopted sources from all over the world, instead of just Europe.
People who study Anglophone or French or German modernism know very well that Ezra Pound reinvented English poetic language by translating Chinese poetry in “Cathay.” He didn’t really know Chinese. He used a lot of the notes of Ernest Fenollosa [an American Japanologist] and translated them more literally and kind of inventively. The translation is really kind of weird. In doing so, he created a refreshing new English poetic language. My argument is that this happened in Russia, too. We just don’t talk about it.
You break down some Russian translations of Chinese poetry from this time and show how very different the translations were from the originals. You use the term “creative translation.” Would you elaborate?
Chu: Translators across the world at the time didn’t really follow what we understand as translation. We expect that translation should be somehow accurate. And translation is often regarded as a derivative, a secondary art to the original work. But the late 19th-, early 20th-century modernists were making their art with a different premise of translation. That is, translation is supposed to be in competition with the original. In competition with the original and with other translators in other languages. Meaning, with the same concepts or motifs in a poem that we are writing in Russian, we can outdo what you did in French or in German or in English. The translation culture is an underrepresented portion of their modernism that we don’t always consider.
You discuss a short story published in 1919 entitled “The Kind Guard.” The Russian author, Aleksei Remizov, based his work on an 18th-century Chinese ghost story, you say, although he never acknowledged it at the time. What is significant about this adaptation?
Chu: I’ll begin with how I discovered the story. I was doing some research in Saint Petersburg. I was reading some Remizov and I found a story about this guy in medical school and he doesn’t do very well in class. He’s living very poorly in a home with his girlfriend. Eventually he goes to a graveyard at night on a dare and the ghost of one of his former professors appears and gives him a new heart. He then becomes much smarter.
I’m reading this and it rings a bell of this Chinese ghost story I’d read. I then learned that Remizov was connected with a sinologist, Vasily Alekseev, who was a prominent person at the time. So I began to read this Chinese ghost story collection all over again. And I found one in which everything was exactly the same as in the Remizov story, except for the setting.
The question for me was, why was this special to a Russian modernist? This story in the Chinese tradition is called “Liaozhai,” which means “strange stories,” or “anomalies.” The story is always about something fairly true — you have to almost believe it. The similar tradition Remizov was familiar with was the European fantastic tradition — from E.T.A. Hoffman to Nikolai Gogol to Edgar Allan Poe — of telling these kinds of stories. Not exactly mythological or fictional. By adapting this Chinese story, I argue, Remizov is testing the limits of the fantastic. By adapting this story to a completely Russian and modern setting, and removing all the Chinese features of the story, he’s keeping, to him, this pure Chinese fantastic tradition intact in its transnational journey without revealing the source. He’s showing that human beings across borders in different worlds can share a lot of emotions and feelings.
I was interested to learn that Tolstoy was so enamored of Laozi’s “Dao De Jing.” Did that happen after he was excommunicated from the Russian Orthodox Church?
Chu: Before and after. After he finished writing “Anna Karenina,” Tolstoy felt that he’d achieved nothing, his books were horrible, and nobody cared about them. He was searching for other sources that went beyond the 19th-century Eurocentric worldview. In this process he found many Eastern traditions and philosophies. This was also the time he was doing critical thinking about Russian Orthodoxy and the entire Western tradition. While he was retranslating, re-editing the Gospels, he was also translating the “Dao De Jing.” This happened before he got excommunicated, and then he continued to work on it after his excommunication in 1901.
He was particularly drawn to the concept of wuwei. Would you explain?
Chu: Wuwei is a concept that means “not doing,’’ or “non-interference.” The Dao’s philosophy is that there is a natural law that governs the physical world and the universe. And human beings interfere with this law and try to direct the course of history to a different place. Tolstoy was living in the late 19th-century world when there were a lot of geopolitical conflicts, and expansion of colonialism. He found this idea of not doing, of non-interference, applicable to the modern context. Europeans, for Tolstoy, had too much confidence in their human power, the civilizational power. That they could change the world, make industry, make big ships. Human beings were too arrogant compared with the natural law of governance.
Let’s end with one of the paintings in the book, a detail from which is on the cover: “The Lady with a Chinese Girl,” from 1910, by Ilya Mashkov. What should we notice in this painting?
Chu: Mashkov was a Russian modernist visual artist. What you see in the painting is a representation of a Chinese girl. But it’s not just a Chinese girl. There were lots of images of China in European painting as seen through a Western lens. This is really China through a Chinese lens, put on a Russian canvas to draw a contrast with European art. To show that the European way of painting or writing is just one version or one way of representing the world. It’s a kind of undermining of the centrality of Europe in their world. This is the awareness of “the other” and the awareness of the particularity of the self. In the same way as we’ve seen with poetry and with stories and translations. They’re all showing alternative ways of expressing truth, of constructing poetic language. And saying, we should synthesize all of this.
