Internationalist Aesthetics: China and Early Soviet Culture

Edward Tyerman

Published by Columbia University Press 2021

Internationalist Aesthetics

China and Early Soviet Culture

Edward Tyerman

https://doi.org/10.7312/tyer19918

Overview
Contents

About this book

Internationalist Aesthetics offers a groundbreaking account of the crucial role that China played in the early Soviet cultural imagination. Reading across genres and media from reportage and biography to ballet and documentary film, Edward Tyerman shows how Soviet culture sought an aesthetics that could foster a sense of internationalist community.

Author / Editor information

Edward Tyerman is an associate professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley.

Reviews

Nicolai Volland, author of Socialist Cosmopolitanism: The Chinese Literary Universe, 1945-1965:
This is a pathbreaking work. With great nuance and superbly insightful close readings, Internationalist Aesthetics shows the rise of this aesthetic, as well as its decline, and ponders its legacies for both Soviet culture and global cultural production.

S.A. Smith, author of Revolution and the People in Russia and China: A Comparative History:
This scintillating study explores the efforts of Soviet cultural producers in the 1920s to construct ‘China’ as a site for imagining a socialist 'international aesthetics.' With insight and sympathy, Tyerman conveys the idealism involved in this project while showing that it was undercut by assumptions about the universality of the Soviet experience.

Elizabeth Papazian, author of Manufacturing Truth: The Documentary Moment in Early Soviet Culture:
A tour de force of scholarship that examines the possibilities and contradictions of the radical early Soviet project of transforming subjectivity from a completely new perspective: the Soviet engagement with China. Relying on his broad and deep knowledge of two different cultural contexts, Tyerman reveals the Soviet aspiration to create an “internationalist, anti-imperialist community” through the transformation of sensory experience across cultures.

Katerina Clark, author of Eurasia Without Borders: The Dream of a Leftist Literary Commons, 1919–1943:
Edward Tyerman has produced the most sophisticated and rigorous study to date of Soviet-Chinese cultural interactions in the 1920s and beyond. Internationalist Aesthetics is a feat of both scholarship and conceptualization and is a must-read for all those seriously interested in leftist internationalism or transnational cultural encounters.

Roy Chan, author of The Edge of Knowing: Dreams, History, and Realism in Modern Chinese Literature:
In this book, Tyerman achieves nothing less than a full historical reconstruction of how “China” became mediated as an essential component of Soviet political and cultural imagining after the failure of hoped for revolutions in Western Europe. This is a landmark work of Sino-Soviet transnational cultural history.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
INTRODUCTION: CHINA AND EARLY SOVIET CULTURE Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. SIGHT, SOUND, AND SIMILARITY: SOVIET WRITERS TRAVEL TO CHINA Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	37
2. TRANSLATING CHINA ONSTAGE: ROAR, CHINA! AND THE RED POPPY Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	85
3. THROUGH AN INTERNATIONALIST LENS: CHINA IN EARLY SOVIET CINEMA Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	134
4. CONFESSIONS AND COLLABORATIONS: AUTHORITY, AGENCY AND FACTOGRAPHIC INTERNATIONALISM IN DEN SHI-KHUA Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	187
EPILOGUE: INTERNATIONAL LITERATURE, NATIONAL FORM, AND MISSED CONNECTIONS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	231
NOTES Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	247
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND SOURCES Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	309
INDEX Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	333

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Illustrations
- Other: 27 b&w figures

eBook

Published: December 21, 2021
ISBN: 9780231552981