Description
Book SynopsisInternationalist 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.
Trade ReviewIn 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. -- Roy Chan, author of
The Edge of Knowing: Dreams, History, and Realism in Modern Chinese LiteratureEdward 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. -- Katerina Clark, author of
Eurasia Without Borders: The Dream of a Leftist Literary Commons, 1919–1943A 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. -- Elizabeth Papazian, author of
Manufacturing Truth: The Documentary Moment in Early Soviet CultureThis 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. -- S.A. Smith, author of
Revolution and the People in Russia and China: A Comparative HistoryThis 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. -- Nicolai Volland, author of
Socialist Cosmopolitanism: The Chinese Literary Universe, 1945-1965Tyerman carve[s] out huge new areas of inquiry . . . The scholarship is fine-grained. -- Caryl Emerson * Times Literary Supplement *
Ambitious, complex, and skilfully executed, Tyerman’s study is a true journey of discovery. -- Iva Glisic * Australian Book Review *
A phenomenal intellectual achievement . . .
Internationalist Aesthetics is a staggeringly erudite, formidably argued and fundamentally important book. -- Julian Graffy * Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema *
A timely interdisciplinary study . . . abounds in rich factual and theoretical interpretations. -- Victor Zatsepine * Journal of Asian Studies *
Ground-breaking, erudite and sophisticated . . . an impressive example of scholarship that cuts across, and brings into conversation, multiple fields, disciplines, and intellectual and aesthetic debates to shed light on the significance and use of China in the formation of early Soviet revolutionary culture of the 1920s. -- Susanna Lim * China Quarterly *
This masterfully curated tour of the many Chinas documented, imagined, and crafted by some of the most creative minds in the Soviet cultural milieu of the 1920s is a definitive treatment of a topic that so far has evaded systematic elucidation. -- Elizabeth McGuire * The Russian Review *
Internationalist Aestheticsis a well-crafted and insightful study that will inspire future scholarship. -- Emily Wilcox * Twentieth-Century China *
Original and highly revealing . . . [this book] represents a welcome addition to the study of Chinese-Russian cultural relations. -- Qiang Zhai * The Chinese Historical Review *
Ambitious, sophisticated, and wide-ranging. * Modern Language Review *
This is a very close textual analysis of important sources, some of which are not easily accessible, and
thus this study will be useful for those interested in these sources. * Pacific Affairs *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: China and Early Soviet Culture
1. Sight, Sound, and Similarity: Soviet Writers Travel to China
2. Translating China Onstage:
Roar, China! and
The Red Poppy3. Through an Internationalist Lens: China in Early Soviet Cinema
4. Confessions and Collaborations: Authority, Agency and Factographic Internationalism in
Den Shi-khuaEpilogue:
International Literature, National Form, and Missed Connections
Notes
Bibliography and Sources
Index
