Patterns of the world : Chinese fashion and cosmopolitan ideas in late Imperial Russia
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation examines Russian interactions with Chinese texts, artifacts, and migrants in intellectual and everyday life from the 1870s to the 1910s, when China was becoming increasingly visible in Russian literature, art, journalism, and daily life. It argues that writing about China became an indispensable means for Russians in the late imperial period to disseminate a variety of cosmopolitan and anti-cosmopolitan ideas and to address urgent cultural and political issues of the emerging global interconnectivity. "Cosmopolitanism, " for them, described two opposing but linked concepts: in a critical mode, the new material life created by the political economy of globlaization, and in an idealistic mode, a voluntary spiritual affilation to world culture. This discourse coincided with a shift in political relations between Russia and China, from bilateral antagonism to Russian rivalry with other world powers in the imperial partition of Asia. I analyze how writers mobilized modernist forms to explore aesthetic diversity, question ethical and political norms, especially narratives of western versus eastern civilizations. This dissertation challenges the widely-held view that Russians, monolithically, see the East through the prism of an age-old ambivalence about their identity between Europe and Asia. My chapters, which are roughly chronological, address both thematic and generic perspectives. The first chapter interrogates how Russia's "China" emerged in everyday consumer culture and political polemics; it describes the world my writers inhabited. Chapter two shows that as Lev Tolstoy translated the aphorisms of the Chinese philosopher Laozi, he constructed Laozi as a global philosophical ancestor, not an exotic Oriental sage. Chapter three rereads four major modernist poets, Maksimalian Voloshin, Innokentii Annenskii, Nikolai Gumilev, and Andrei Bely, and argues that in incorporating Chinese aesthetics into Russian poetry, they worked to denaturalize the universal status of European tradition. I reexamine the familiar association of exoticism in Russian modernist poetry with defamiliarization. In the fourth chapter, I show that Aleksei Remizov explores the translatability of cultural experience in his adaptations of Chinese ghost stories and his depictions of Chinese migrants. The dissertation situates the Russian Silver Age in the global context by examining Russians' understudied connections to European writers on China, such as Stanislas Julien, Judith Gautier, and Ezra Pound. Drawing on archival research in Russia, China, France, and United States, I hope to provide a newly detailed and nuanced intellectual history of Russia's place in global networks at the end of the imperial period.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2019; ©2019 |
| Publication date | 2019; 2019 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Chu, Jinyi |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Safran, Gabriella, 1967- |
| Thesis advisor | Safran, Gabriella, 1967- |
| Thesis advisor | Fleĭshman, Lazarʹ |
| Thesis advisor | Greenleaf, Monika, 1952- |
| Thesis advisor | Wang, Ban |
| Degree committee member | Fleĭshman, Lazarʹ |
| Degree committee member | Greenleaf, Monika, 1952- |
| Degree committee member | Wang, Ban |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Jinyi Chu. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2019. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2019 by Jinyi Chu
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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