Chinese Europe: Alexander Herzen and the Russian Image of China

Abstract

Chinese Europe: Alexander Herzen and the Russian Image of China Susanna Soojung Lim W H E AT O N C O L L E G E , M A S S A C H U S E T T S Alexander Herzen (1812-70), aleading nineteenth-century Russian thinker, memoirist, journalist, and novelist, spent the majority of his active professional life in exile in Europe, primarily England. Portrayed to genera¬ tions of Russians as the “father of Russian socialism,” Herzen is also known for his astute observations of the European scene and his reflections on Rus¬ sia’s relationship to the West. On the significance of Europe for Russia, he once declared, “We need Europe as an ideal, areproach, agood example; if she were not these things it would be necessary to invent her” (11:66). Yet Herzen’s thoughts on the West also lead us to an unexpected, reverse, direction: to the Far East and China. The present study examines the idea of China in the writings of the Russian thinker, in particular its sig¬ nificance as the source of adistinctive Russian discourse on China and Japan, one in which these Far Eastern nations figure not as clear signifiers of the exotic “Orient,” but rather as potent metaphors for considering Russia’s own place in history and its relation to the West.^ The first part discusses some specifics of Russian perceptions of China leading up to Herzen, fol¬ lowed by an analysis of his original contribution to the predominant nine¬ teenth-century idea of China. It then concludes with an examination of Herzen’s influence on Fyodor Dostoevsky and the Russian Symbolists. Beginning in the nineteenth century, the image of China in Russian thought and literature functioned as adual metaphor. On the one hand, it representedstagnationandconservatism,servingasastand-infortheRuss¬ ian self, in the way European thinkers used it to criticize their own societies. Ontheotherhand,beginninginthe1840s,Chinaalsobecameasymbolfor the other, the West. This counterintuitive conflation of China and Western Europewasshapedbywriters’awarenessofRussia’speculiarstatusbetween E a s t a n d W e s t . Thepasttwodecadeshaveseenagrowingnumberofstudiesdevotedto the question of Russia and the East in the theoretical context of postcolo¬ nialism and Orientalism. These studies have focused on the ways the Russian state and its intellectuals, writers, and artists have understood and described the empire’s eastern and southern peripheries.The need to readjust Edward Said’s notion of Orientalism when considering the Russian experience of the East has been noted by several critics.According to Mark Bassin, Russia’s ambivalent position is characterized by “a sort of existential indeterminacy between East and West, averitable geo-schizophrenia” (1998, 58); IntertextSy Vol. 10, No. 12006 ©Texas Tech University Press 5 2 I N T E R T E X T S Nathaniel Knight, in questioning the direct applicability of Said’s theory to Russia, writes that “when Russian scholars turned to the East it was often with asharp awareness of their own supposed backwardness and inferiority in the face of the grand civilization of Britain, France and Germany.” (77) This national insecurity has shaped Russian orientalist discourse: schol¬ arship on the treatment of the Caucasus in nineteenth-century Russian liter¬ ature, for instance, has shown how the creation of the south as Russia’s own Orient was significantly motivated by the desire to underscore Russians’ sim¬ ilarity to Europeans as colonizers and orientalizers.^ Like the use of the Cau¬ casus, the use of China reveals Russian perceptions of its “own supposed backwardness and inferiority in the face of the grand civilization” of Western Europe, but in adecidedly different manner. China in the writings to be examined below functions as astand-in not for an exotic or Romantic other that satisfied Russian imperial needs, but as afamiliar and contemptible Western other, and consequently as aweapon for critiquing the evils of Western modernity and stressing Russia’s distance from Europe. Russian thinking on China, then, becomes acomplex interaction among three ideas: Orientalism, Occidentalism^, and Russia. From Kitaishchina to “Chinese Europe” Although Russia was the first “western” nation to sign aformal treaty with China in 1689 (Treaty of Nerchinsk), its engagement with the Middle King¬ dom as atopic of cultural and intellectual life developed in the eighteenth century and simulated...