Wudu Eluosi: Zhongguo xiandaixing wenti zhong de Eguo yinsu 誤讀俄羅斯﹕中國現代性問題中的俄國因素 (Misreading Russia: The Russia Factor in the Problem of China's Modernity) (review)

The title of this book does not give an adequate indication of its contents. The author, a professor of comparative literature at Beijing's Capital Normal University, will often attempt to extend the relevance of his insights to encompass the entirety of China's "reading" of Russia during the first half of the twentieth century. However, his book is primarily a fresh and innovative interpretation of modern China's reading (no quotes, this time) of Russian literature.

The introduction to Lin Jinghua's book, by professor Bai Chunren, starts out from a discussion of the key term wudu (misreading) about which the author himself would soon have more to say. Bai is no less outspoken than Lin will be, as he criticizes the simplification of Russian literature in China (pp. vii-ix). He argues that, in Russia of the early twentieth century, realism was secondary in importance to symbolism, and so were the intolerant ideologies of class warfare and revolution (p. x), and he regrets what he sees as China's failure to identify and appreciate the literature of the Russian "Silver Age" (a term roughly applicable to the period from 1895 to 1915). Bai's main argument is that the construction of an idealized Russia (a Russia "similar" to China) was followed in the PRC by the image of a vilified Russia (a Russia cast as the "opposite" of China; p. xii).

In his own preface to the book, Lin Jinghua presents a historical overview of Russia's perceptions of itself: Did Russia belong in Europe or in Asia? Surveying the positions of Russian writers on this much-debated question starting from the eighteenth century, Lin concludes that even those among them who objected to the course of Europeanization launched by Peter the Great, and who located the nation's roots in the East, did not wish to go as far to the east as China. The predominantly suspicious Russian view of China was carried into Soviet times, along with a cultural orientation toward Europe (p. 50). Moving now to the Chinese image of Russia, Lin argues that, having "chosen" Russia with May Fourth, China espoused a glorious image of this country; the second half of the twentieth century then proved that this image was very far from reality and had amounted to a huge misreading. In the author's retrospective of China's cultural orientation from May Fourth to the present, China began by doubting the West and tending toward Russia; later it fully embraced Russia while rejecting the West, then rejected both, before finally reassessing its image of Russia while orienting itself now toward the West (pp. 55-56).

The author's aim, he says, has not been to construct a system, though from the fresh rereading of old sources (the Chinese writings on Russia, up to 1950), which he proposes to undertake, a system might emerge (p. 62). He does not aim, either, at discovering or correcting "mistakes" in the Chinese understanding of Russia, and he does not intend to offer moral judgment. While his purpose is to describe how, why, and with what consequences Russia was misread in China, he does not wish to insist that this question could be approached only from the perspective of "misreading." He does insist that China constructed its image of "Russia" to fit its own requirements (p. 63).

The book is divided into two parts, each comprising two chapters. Part 1, "Identifying with an 'Idealized' Russia," begins by raising the questions: Why did China of the early May Fourth period "choose" Russia? Why was Russian literature given a higher standing than that accorded to the literature of any other nation (pp. 68-69)? In chapter 1, "'A Friendly Russia': Supplier of the Most Suitable Literary Source of Enlightenment," the author associates the...