Open Access“Old” and “new” China in the literary reception of S.A. Auslaender: A short novel for children “Some remarkable incidents from the Life of Li Xiao”
Author(s) -
Yang Li-ping,
И.Н. Арзамасцева
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
literatura v škole
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 0130-3414
DOI - 10.31862/0130-3414-2020-4-68-80
Subject(s) - victory , china , literature , humanism , history , art , aesthetics , art history , philosophy , politics , law , theology , archaeology , political science
In the mid-1920s the Soviet children’s press issued a lot of literature works about modern China, which was experiencing the storms of revolution. The aim of the research is to describe the artistic concept of “old” and “new” China in the short novel by S.A. Auslaender “Some remarkable incidents from the Life of Li Xiao”. The short novel is studied, on the one hand, against the close background of the Soviet publishing request for children’s works about the Chinese revolution, and on the other hand – against the contrasting background of the author’s early modernist experience. Auslaender turned to the “Far Eastern” model of the transition from symbolism to “beautiful clarity”, the materiality of art, proposed by M.A. Kuzmin. At the same time, he used this model to create a dual picture of revolutionary China – as the victory of the popular movement and as the victory of “demons” (according to F.M. Dostoevsky’s concept). The main idea of Auslaender is in the artistic understanding of the symbols of China (the Buddhist temple, the folk theater, the little bell) in the aspect of the problem of humanism and revolution. The central symbol in the story is a woman, represented in a series of images. The writer turns to the ideas of M.A. Kuzmin’s that are close to him and the ideas of A.A. Blok’s and N.S. Gumilev’s that he finds ambiguous, as well as those of Vs. Ivanov’s. The writer creates a literature piece with an implied propagandistic idea about the revolution as the highest phase of people’s life; however, he creates the counter movement of meanings, denying terror and the revolution itself. The “new” China is embodied only in the image of a girl, reminiscent of the heroines of N.G. Chernyshevsky’s utopia. S.A. Auslaender has built a multilevel dialogue with his growing readers. The short novel about Li-Xiao is one of those works of Soviet children’s literature that meets the new criterion of assessment, this is a book for “growing up”.