Olga Bakich's biography of Valerii Pereleshin (19131992) follows the turbulent life and exquisite poetry of one of the most remarkable Russian émigrés of the twentieth century. Born in Irkutsk, Pereleshin lived for thirty years in China and for almost forty years in Brazil. Multilingual, he wrote poetry in Russian and in Portuguese and translated Chinese and Brazilian poetry into Russian and Russian and Chinese poetry into Portuguese. For many years he struggled to accept and express his own identity as a gay man within a frequently homophobic émigré community. His poems addressed his three homelands, his religious struggles, and his loves. InValerii Pereleshin: The Life of a Silkworm, Bakich delves deep into Pereleshin's poems and letters to tell the rich life story of this underappreciated writer.
One writer is stranded by the Second World War. Another flees multiple revolutions to live the rest of his life in Rio de Janeiro. Two others, public about their sexuality at home, choose self-exile. In Lost and Found Voices Luc Beaudoin offers a critical engagement with these four displaced authors: Witold Gombrowicz, Valerii Pereleshin, Abdellah Taïa, and Slava Mogutin. Not quite fitting into their respective diasporas and sharing an urge to express their queer desires, it is in their published works of literature, film, and photography that these writers locate their shifting identities and emergent queer voices. Their artistry is the basis from which Beaudoin traces their expressions of desire in language, culture, and community, offering a contextual queer reading that navigates their linguistic, cultural, artistic, and sexual self-translations and self-portrayals. Their choices are determinative: Gombrowicz masked his attraction to men in his works, keeping the truth hidden in an intimate diary; Pereleshin explored his lust in Brazilian Portuguese after being shunned by the Russian diaspora; Taïa writes in French to destabilize both the language and his status as an immigrant in France; Mogutin becomes a hardcore gay rebel in word and image to rattle assumptions about gay life. Bringing authors generally not familiar to an English-speaking readership into one volume, and including Beaudoin's own experience of living between languages, Lost and Found Voices provides provocative insights into what it means to be gay in both the past and the present.
Profiles the careers of Russian authors, scholars, and critics and discusses the history of the Russian treatment of literary genres such as drama, fiction, and essays
This book offers an intimate portrait of early twentieth-century Harbin, a city in Manchuria where Russian colonialists, and later refugees from the Revolution, met with Chinese migrants. The deep social and intellectual fissures between the Russian and Chinese worlds were matched by a multitude of small efforts to cross the divide as the city underwent a wide range of social and political changes. Using surviving letters, archival photographs, and rare publications, this book also tells the personal story of a forgotten city resident, Baron Roger Budberg, a physician who, being neither Russian nor Chinese, nevertheless stood at the very centre of the cross-cultural divide in Harbin. The biography of an important city, fleshing out its place in the global history of East-West contacts and twentieth-century diasporas, this book is also the history of an individual life and an original experiment in historical writing.
This groundbreaking volume critically examines how writers in Japanese-occupied northeast China negotiated political and artistic freedom while engaging their craft amidst an increasing atmosphere of violent conflict and foreign control. The allegedly multiethnic utopian new state of Manchukuo (1932–1945) created by supporters of imperial Japan was intended to corral the creative energies of Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Russians, and Mongols. Yet, the twin poles of utopian promise and resistance to a contested state pulled these intellectuals into competing loyalties, selective engagement, or even exile and death—surpassing neat paradigms of collaboration or resistance. In a semicolony wrapped in the utopian vision of racial inclusion, their literary works articulating national ideals and even the norms of everyday life subtly reflected the complexities and contradictions of the era. Scholars from China, Korea, Japan, and North America investigate cultural production under imperial Japan’s occupation of Manchukuo. They reveal how literature and literary production more generally can serve as a penetrating lens into forgotten histories and the lives of ordinary people confronted with difficult political exigencies. Highlights of the text include transnational perspectives by leading researchers in the field and a memoir by one of Manchukuo’s last living writers. “This first-rate collection offers the most comprehensive overview of Manchukuo literature in any language. Containing an abundance of very original research and analysis, with relevant references to diverse sources in Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean, and Russian, the essays will be welcomed by scholars dealing with literary, historical, political, and colonization issues in Manchukuo and its neighbors.” —Ronald Suleski, Suffolk University, Boston “Manchukuo Perspectives is an excellent contribution to the field. Manchukuo was a fascinating and fraught experiment. Colonialism, imperialism, modernism, and nationalism were just some of the many different forces at play there. With an impressive set of contributors bringing both breadth and depth to the study of these issues, this collection fills a void in our understanding of the cultural and literary production of Manchukuo wonderfully.” —James Carter, Saint Joseph’s University
Manchuria is a historical region, which roughly corresponds to Northeast China. The Manchu people, who established the last dynasty of Imperial China (the Qing, 1644–1911) originated there, and it has been the stage of turbulent events during the twentieth century: the Russo-Japanese war, Japanese occupation and establishment of the puppet state of Manchukuo, Soviet invasion, and Chinese civil war. This innovative and accessible historical survey both introduces Manchuria to students and general readers and contributes to the emerging regional perspective in the study of China.
An introduction to the history, culture, and politics of the worlds largest country, from the earliest written accounts of the Russian people to today.
Translating Chinese Art and Modern Literature examines issues in cross-cultural dialogue in connection with translation and modern Chinese art and literature from interdisciplinary perspectives. This comprises the text-image dialogue in the context of Chinese modernity, and cross-cultural interaction between modern literature in Chinese and other literatures. This edited collection approaches these issues with discrete foci and approaches, and the ten chapters in this volume are to be divided into two distinct parts. The first part highlights the mutual effects between literary texts and visual images in the media of book, painting, and film, and the second part includes contributions by scholars of literary translation.
The Development of Russian Verse explores the Russian verse tradition from Pushkin to Brodsky, showing how certain formal features are associated with certain genres and, at times, specific themes. Michael Wachtel's basic thesis is that form is never neutral: poets can react positively in terms of stylization and development, or negatively in terms of parody or revision, to the work of their predecessors, but they cannot ignore it. Keeping technical terms to a minimum and providing English translations of quotations, Wachtel offers close readings of individual poems of more than fifty poets. He aims to help English-speaking readers reconstruct the strong sense of continuity that Russian poets have always felt, transcending any individual age or ideology. Ultimately, his 1999 book is an inquiry into the nature of literary tradition itself, and how it coalesces in a country that has always taken so much of its identity from its written legacy.
A History of Women's Writing in Russia offers a comprehensive account of the lives and works of Russia's women writers. Based on original and archival research, this volume forces a re-examination of many of the traditionally held assumptions about Russian literature and women's role in the tradition. In setting about the process of reintegrating women writers into the history of Russian literature, contributors have addressed the often surprising contexts within which women's writing has been produced. Chapters reveal a flourishing literary tradition where none was thought to exist. They redraw the map defining Russia's literary periods, they look at how Russia's women writers articulated their own experience, and they reassess their relationship to the dominant male tradition. The volume is supported by extensive reference features including a bibliography and guide to writers and their works.
