Book Discussion: Fin-de-siècle Russia and Chinese Aesthetics, by Jinyi Chu

Session Submission Type: Book Discussion Roundtable

Brief Description

This is a book discussion roundtable for Jinyi Chu's new book Fin-de-siècle Russia and Chinese Aesthetics: The Other is the Universal (Oxford UP, 2024). In this book, Jinyi Chu reconsiders Russia’s place in global modernism and argues that fin-de-siècle Russian ideas about increasing global cultural and socioeconomic interconnectedness emerged from unsettling encounters with China. Drawing on literary texts, paintings, advertisements, official documents, and archival sources, Chu reconstructs many surprising stories about Russo-Chinese cultural interactions, from Lev Tolstoy’s translation of the Daoist canon to Ilya Mashkov’s painting of a Chinese fairy, from Innokenty Annensky's encounter with a Tibet Monk to Aleksei Remizov's adaptation of Chinese ghost stories. The book moves beyond the idea that Russian literary and artistic representations of China were simply manifestations of Russia’s Eurasian cultural identity. Instead, Chu shows that literature and art actively renegotiated and destabilized the preconceived world order at a time when China shifted from Russia’s rival in Inner Asia to a target in the competition among global imperialist powers.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 20th Century

Chair

• Jinyi Chu, Yale U

Roundtable Speakers

• D. Brian Kim, U of Pennsylvania

• Valeria Mutc, UC Davis

• Edward Tyerman, UC Berkeley

• Julia Vaingurt, U of Illinois at Chicago

• Liya Xie, Princeton U