Роман И. С. Тургенева «Новь» в Китае: переводы и значение

Abstract

After the publication of I. S. Turgenev’s novel “Virgin Soil” (1877), in which the author touches on the topical social theme of the 1870s (the failure of the mass populist movement “going to the people”), an acute literary controversy arose around the work. In general, criticism in Russia and abroad considered the novel a creative failure of the writer. For this reason, with all the interest in the Russian classic’s creative work, this novel has been relatively little studied in China. The aim of the paper is to identify the reasons for the interest in Turgenev’s most ambitious work in China and to determine the “reception vectors” in their historical and cultural determinacy and chronology based on a comprehensive review of all the existing translations of the novel “Virgin Soil” into Chinese published in China from 1925 to the present. The paper offers the author’s periodisation for the history of the perception of Turgenev’s novel by Chinese readers in the context of socio-cultural and historical processes in the country. The research is original in that it is the first to systematise the history of translations of the novel “Virgin Soil” in China and the reviews of Chinese cultural figures on the novel. The research findings showed that the appearance of translations of Turgenev’s novel “Virgin Soil” is closely related to a number of socio-cultural and historical factors of each studied period.