Wednesday, February 26th, 2014 Refractions of China in Russia and Russia in China: Translation and Material Culture

Description

Dr Mark Gamsa is Senior Lecturer at the Department of East Asian Studies, Faculty of Humanities, Tel Aviv University, Israel. He has earned his DPhil at the University of Oxford in 2003 and has held visiting positions at the European University Institute in Florence and the University of Latvia. His publications include The Chinese Translation of Russian Literature: Three Studies (2008), The Reading of Russian Literature in China: A Moral Example and Manual of Practice (2010), as well as articles on Chinese history, politics, literature, and Chinese-Russian relations.

In his talk, Mark Gamsa will identify and analyze signifiers of China in Russia and vice versa. Some “refractions” of the Chinese world in Russian life became domesticated in Russia to the extent that no memory was retained of their Chinese origin, while others designated “China” as an exotic and mysterious land. Trade with China had a key role in shaping the Russian image of the other country through material culture, a process in which Chinoiserie played a part as well. In China, the image of Russia was enhanced and besmirched in turn in the course of the twentieth century by being closely associated with Russian Communism; at the same time, the idea of “Russia” was fashioned by literature, classical music and film. Whether helped or obstructed by the powerful political connection, expressions of Russian thought and cultural production came to occupy an in-between space in the Chinese imaginary as things both alien and instinctively familiar.
If these broad conclusions are correct, they may be carried further: the two cultures shared a zone of contact, in which the supposedly foreign was often surprisingly recognizable. Similar “contact zones” are better documented between other cultures with a long history of interaction; their contours have been mapped out for relationships such as those between Russia and Poland or Russia and France. It may be that the shadow of racial alterity still makes locating a Russian-Chinese field of contact – a conceptual meeting place, next to the geographical “middle ground” of border areas between the two states – seem the less natural task. Literature, language and translation are of special interest in this undertaking because of functioning as cultural vessels and bridges, and will provide us with many examples of the refractions figuring in the title of this paper.