Russian Literature and Culture in the Prose of Chi Zijian and Wang Acheng: Intercultural Transformation and Border Aesthetics

Abstract

The subject of the study is the changes that Russian literature and culture undergo in the prose of two writers from Northeast China, Chi Zijian (b. 1964) and Wang Acheng (b. 1948), and the artistic forms in which these changes are fixed. The Russian presence in the region took shape long before the encounter with Russian books: the Chinese Eastern Railway, the emigration after 1917 and the Soviet specialists of the 1950s left their mark on Harbin’s architecture, everyday vocabulary and family histories. In Chi Zijian’s work the Russian element is represented both by literature and by everyday life; in Wang Acheng’s work, primarily by the urban culture of Harbin. The shared regional background makes the two authors comparable, while differences in biographical experience and narrative stance explain the different embodiment of the same material. Particular attention is paid to how the Russian material changes its meaning at the spatial, ethical and aesthetic levels. The study applies the comparative-historical method of V. M. Zhirmunsky and D. Ďurišin: documented contact relations are distinguished from typological convergences and from the author’s reinterpretation of the material. The research is based on a close reading, in the original, of the prose, essays and interviews of Chi Zijian and Wang Acheng in comparison with works by Turgenev, Dostoevsky and Rasputin. For the first time in Russian-language scholarship, the works of Chi Zijian and Wang Acheng are considered as two strategies of encoding Russian material. In Chi Zijian’s prose the Russian element enters the family, the body, the name and the private fate of a character; in Wang Acheng’s prose it settles in objects, streets, sounds and urban memory. The first strategy turns history into biography, the second turns biography into history. The transformation is described at three levels: the spatial level, common to both authors; the ethical level, where in Chi Zijian’s prose guilt is resolved through responsibility, care for the victim, search and labour; and the aesthetic level, where an elegiac tone comparable to Turgenev’s acquires the structure of “sorrow without despair”. A working concept of border aesthetics is proposed, and its relation to the concept of border aesthetics in border studies, to transculturation and to Lotman’s model of the boundary is defined.