Chapter Seven National Identity and Race in Post-Revolutionary Russia: Pil’niak’s Travelogues from Japan and China

Abstract

This chapter sheds new light on the racial construction of Russian identity vis-a-vis Asia in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution. The notion of race in Russian public and academic discourses has probably been one of the most understudied aspects of Russian identity. The authors argue that racialism, which in prerevolutionary years existed mainly in the context of relations with yellow Asia, became an integral part of Soviet domestic discourse. The chapter focuses on the travelogues of writer Boris Pil'niak. Pil'niak's simultaneous appeal to both the class and the racialized nation in the creation of affinities and oppositions resonates perfectly with the domestic Soviet process of categorization. Like the Russia and Chinas of the Diary , Bolshevik discourse united the nations of the Soviet Union and simultaneously juxtaposed them with the bourgeois West. In Japan, Pil'niak finds a nation whose categorization is impossible within the Bolshevik parameters of identity. Keywords:Bolshevik discourse; Bolshevik Revolution; Boris Pil'niak's travelogues; China; Japan; national identity; Post-Revolutionary Russia; race; yellow Asia