This original, erudite, somewhat diffuse book explores how Russian modernist writers and artists at the turn of the twentieth century, an age of increasing global connectedness, looked to Chinese art, literature and philosophy as a resource for rethinking European aesthetic norms and expanding the understanding of a cultural and philosophical universal. The subtitle “The Other is the Universal” captures the central argument that certain artists found in a Chinese “other” a higher alternative to “Europe” as a universal. Writers and artists such as Lev Tolstoi, Innokentii Annenskii, Nikolai Gumilev, Voldemārs Matvejs, and Aleksei Remisov—all critics of the Russian cultural establishment—found in China an aesthetic resource that was exotic, fantastic, and defamiliarizing. After an introduction in which Jinyi Chu sets out this thesis in a broad conceptual and comparative perspective, Ch. 2 begins with Tolstoi, not often treated as a modernist, exploring his engagement with Laozi’s Dao De Jing at the time when he was also retranslating and re-editing the Gospels. It offers an illuminating account of his encounter with the Daoist concept of wuwei (“not doing,” or non-interference), which seemed to offer a way out of a world of imperialism and nation-state conflict. The subject is relatively well known, but the author explores with subtlety Tolstoi’s understanding of the kinship of Dao, Logos, and God against the background of his polemics with the Russian Orthodox Church. Chapter 3 explores what Chu calls “metaexoticism”—the self-critical use of the exotic to decenter a European aesthetics—via essays by Maksimilian Voloshin and Victor Segalen on exoticism and China. Such writers challenged contemporary Orientalism in favor of a modernist urge to destabilize aesthetic norms that partially adumbrates later techniques of defamiliarization. Chu extends this analysis to the visual arts, focusing on the way that Ilʹia Mashkov, Petr Konchalovskii, Natalia Goncharova, and Voldemārs Matvejs used overt exaggeration, essentialization, and exoticization, which they associated with a Chinese “other,” to decenter European universal in the visual arts. The book includes some excellent reproductions of specific artworks. Chapter 4, “Russian Cathays,” argues that the literary fashion of translating and inventing Chinese poetry, evident in the work of Ezra Pound, Judith Gautier in France, and Klabund in Germany, extended also to Russia, being most evident in anthologies of Chinese poetry. These relied on European translations from Chinese and were produced in direct dialogue with other western-language translations. The chapter includes a brilliant discussion of the renditions of Konstantin Balmont and Hervey de Saint Denis of the famous poem, “Crows crying at night” by the eighth century poet, Li Bai.

Chu shows that fin-de-siècle translation not only rejected faithfulness to the original, but also relished competition with the original and with translations in other European languages, the better to impart new meanings. Chapter 5, “The Transnational Fantastic,” explores the literary genre of the “fantastic” as a location for a Russian endeavor to transcend the national boundaries of emotions and aesthetics. It draws on Tzvetan Todorov’s structuralist theory of the fantastic to analyze Aleksei Remizov’s adaptation of a story by the writer Pu Songling (1640–1715), who is best known for his collection of ghost stories, known in English as Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio). In “Dobryi Pristavnik,” Remisov expunges all Chinese traces from Pu’s story of skull and heart transplants and replaces them with “modern” and “Russian” elements. Chu suggests he was trying to imagine the unity of the experiential worlds of the Europeans, Russians, and Chinese under newly globalized cultural political and economic conditions. Chapter 6 is an epilogue that reflects on the fin-de-siècle afterlife of Russian culture’s engagement with China during the Soviet period, focusing primarily on Anna Akhmatova’s mid-twentieth century translation of Qu Yuan’s Li Sao (Overcoming Sorrow), wherein China becomes a geopoetic bridge connecting the Soviet present to the fin-de-siècle, a time and space that can never be retrieved.

There is a conceptual and thematic breadth to the book that is both innovative and remarkable. Particularly impressive is Chu’s smooth handling of translations in some five languages. However, given the rather disjointed subject-matter, I would have liked more historical contextualization of how the cultural engagement with China connected to a context of intensified competition between Russia, Great Britain, and Japan—there is no reference to the 1905 Revolution—and perhaps, too, to some comparison of how the aesthetic engagement with China’s alterity compared to other China-related discourses in Russia of the time, such as that of commercialized chinoiserie or the political discourse of the Yellow Peril.