Internationalist Aesthetics: China and Early Soviet Culture by Edward Tyerman

Abstract

Reviewed by: Internationalist Aesthetics: China and Early Soviet Culture by Edward Tyerman Emily Wilcox Edward Tyerman, Internationalist Aesthetics: China and Early Soviet Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2022. 353 pp. Hardcover ($140.00), softcover ($35.00), or e-book. In Internationalist Aesthetics: China and Early Soviet Culture, Edward Tyerman examines works of Soviet literature, performing arts, and film that, in his words, "mediated" China to Soviet audiences during the 1920s. He focuses on the period between 1924 and 1927, a high point of Comintern engagement in Chinese domestic politics before Chiang Kai-shek's anti-Communist purge in April 1927. Through this material, Tyerman successfully explores larger questions about the history of socialist internationalism and how cross-cultural solidarity is pursued through aesthetic choices in artistic production. The central figure in Tyerman's narrative is Sergei Tretyakov, once a Futurist and a founding member of Left Front of Arts, who "from 1923…emerged as a central figure in the left avant-garde in Moscow" (22) and became one of the leading voices on China in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. Tretyakov first visited China in 1920 while fleeing the Japanese occupation of Vladivostok on his way to Siberia. From early 1924, Tretyakov spent 18 months teaching Russian at Peking University, during which time he began writing extensively on China for Soviet readers, publishing more than 130 articles on China over the next four years. After returning to Moscow in 1925, Tretyakov also engaged in creative projects in a variety of other media that sought to bring "new knowledge of China" (23) to the Soviet masses. Works by Tretyakov form the core of Tyerman's analysis, placed in conversation with closely related projects that either present contrasting approaches or contextualize Tretyakov's work within larger discourses. Part of what makes Tretyakov interesting as a central figure in this study is that his work complicates understandings of Soviet representations of China in the 1920s as Orientalist. Discussing two essays by Tretyakov—"Whence and Whither" (1923) and "Loving China" (1925)—in the introduction, Tyerman explains that Tretyakov's self-stated aim was to promote "a new sense of the world" through "the overcoming of exoticism" in representations of China (23–24). Tretyakov openly critiqued stereotyped and fantastical views of China, which he analyzed as a form of commodity fetishism and reification. Tyerman shows how Tretyakov's work employed avant-garde aesthetics to develop an alternative to Orientalist perception: what Tyerman calls an "internationalist aesthetics" of solidarity, equality, and commensurability. According to Tyerman, this internationalist aesthetics also had "a specific political function: connecting Soviet and Chinese subjects within a single revolutionary present" (21; emphasis original). This new approach to China, Tyerman shows, was part of a larger critique of cultural Eurocentrism, which some Soviet writers described as a barrier to the globalization of revolution. It was also, Tyerman demonstrates, part of a new prioritization of the senses and direct bodily experience among the Soviet avant-garde. Building on Jacques Rancière's concept of the "distribution of the sensible" (20), Tyerman argues that Tretyakov used an avant-garde emphasis on bodily knowing and the senses—particularly sight and sound—to portray China as a dynamic, contemporary society. Internationalist Aesthetics thus contributes to recent conversations about the senses in literary and cultural studies. [End Page E-9] Internationalist Aesthetics is primarily a work of literary and cultural criticism, and it will appeal most to readers interested in early Soviet literature, performance, and film studies, as well as those interested in China's international representations, Sino-Soviet relations, the global avant-garde, and the politics and aesthetics of socialist internationalism. What I found most stimulating was Tyerman's readings of diverse approaches to internationalist aesthetics. In chapter 1, Tyerman contrasts firsthand accounts of China by two traveling Soviet writers, Tretyakov and Boris Pilnyak, who both espoused internationalism and used "experiments with observation, aural experience, and translation as methods for producing knowledge about China" (71), but with differing results. In Tretyakov's poem "Roar China" (1924), whose vivid blend of "factographic" writing and affective sonic imagery forms a high point of the chapter, we find a rousing acoustic portrayal of China on the...