Modernity is usually understood as a temporal concept. It designates a period in time which is separate from what preceded it – the pre-modern – and is thus presumed to be based on a linear chronology. This implied linearity has produced multiple national modernities, because each culture has its own timeline and its own historical narrative about when and how it came to embrace the modern. The national fragmentation makes it difficult to think of modernity as one global phenomenon. In the academic context, the concept of modernity became a kind of Frankenstein’s monster, patched together out of many asynchronicities, heterogeneities, and incompatibilities – difficult to grasp as a whole. Xiaolu Ma’s book offers a compelling argument for approaching modernity through the concept’s very deficiencies: in her approach, asynchronicities, heterogeneities, and incompatibilities are neither glossed over nor smoothed out, but foregrounded, analysed, and exposed as modernity’s very operation, which we can better grasp if we approach it transpatially. Ma brings out the neglected transpatiality of the modern by rethinking the concept as a “chronotope” – a time–space configuration. In her book, instability of meaning is not a misunderstanding or miscommunication, but the very vehicle of transcultural exchange. Ma’s case studies show how this chronotope can be navigated as a process of multi-cultural transmission which is not linear but circular, not national but intrinsically transnational. Her historical and philological material demonstrating the formation of Chinese literary modernity through the reception of Russian literature via relayed translations from Japanese (but also from other languages) offers a solid foundation to the challenge of the ideological concepts of linear national modernities. Focusing on the period between the late Qing dynasty and the 1930s, Ma exposes Chinese modernity as a translingual and transnational phenomenon, which has been thoroughly intertwined with global processes of literary modernization, and especially with the cultural developments of China’s immediate neighbours, Russia and Japan.

Ma shows that translation has been the major conduit among cultural varieties of the modern. She re-evaluates a relayed translation via several languages (usually considered the most imperfect type of translation) as a process of transculturation which offers a key to understanding literary modernity as a heterogeneous process which can be fully understood only if we take all points of transmission into account. In relation to Japanese mediation in particular, Ma suggests that Chinese preference for translating Russian literature from Japanese translations was conditioned not just by the lack of Russian translators but above all by the fact of Japan’s long indebtedness to the Chinese literary tradition. Japanese translators, as cultural brokers, Asianized Russian literature into a system of genres, tropes, and styles familiar to the Chinese. So the Russian transmission to China via Japan has been facilitated via multiple historical circuits of Sino-Japanese literary exchanges.

In its opening chapter, the monograph provides a detailed account of a complex literary history which China shared with Russia and Japan, giving the reader an insight not only into the literary history of three neighbouring cultures but also into the history of their complicated interconnections. Each of the four chapters that follow focuses on a different instance of a culturally intermediated modernity in the East Asian region: through a choice of concrete examples and close readings in three languages, Ma shows several types and directions of transculturation of Russian literature into China via various political, ideological, literary, religious and commercial landscapes. Each chapter pursues a complexity and multiplicity of such relayed receptions. For example, Ma demonstrates that sometimes the reception has been moulded into the receptacles of pre-existing literary genres as a way of familiarizing the foreign. In the context of a larger discourse on sentiment, the popular Chinese “scholar-beauty” romance and “deflower and discard” stories provided a lens on the Russian romance in Pushkin and Lermontov. But the transculturation can also lead to creation of new genres, like the Chinese quasi-detective thrillers about the Russian nihilists which emerged via Western literary brokerage as a uniquely Chinese phenomenon and enjoyed great commercial success. But when assimilated to the Chinese traditional “knight-errant” biographies, Japan-mediated revolutionary nihilist narratives from Russia also gave birth to the positive social hero type in China. The emergence of the Chinese notion of Tolstoyan humanism out of Japanese Tolstoyan religion and Russian Tolstoyan anarchism is also pursued via multiple relays, transmission channels, and historical contexts which shed light on the different meanings and potentialities of Tolstoyism in China, ranging from traditional Chinese morality, to individualism, to revolutionary commitment. The relayed translation with its multilingualism also helps change the lens on such prominent phenomena of Chinese literary history as the literary style of Lu Xun. Ma shows how Lu Xun’s modernization, or vernacularization of Chinese literary language, emerged from his aesthetic experiments with “hard translation” via literal retranslation into Chinese of the German and Japanese translations from Russian.

The Chinese reception of Russian literature was not a one-way street. It is best visualized not as a stream but as a delta, with multiple spreading subsidiaries, where the main tendencies never preclude the transmission and epistemological value of exceptions, quixotic experiments, translators’ and authors’ invididual predilections and interpretations. Ma’s multifaceted, dynamic approach allows for a feedback loop among the cultures she studies and thus provides a better, even novel, understanding of the original Russian sources, as well as their Japanese intermediaries, and the Chinese literary history. Ma offers a generative work which in its introduction develops a strong conceptual framework for approaching world literature through complex, multiple, and above all mobile transnational venues. Moreover, she brings to the discussion a region that is little known to Anglophone scholars of modernity. Though rich in detail, the monograph never loses the grasp of its main line of argument: that global modernity should be understood as a mobile network of transcultural peregrinations of genres, styles, and ideas.