Internationalist Aesthetics: China and Early Soviet Culture by Edward Tyerman

Abstract

Reviewed by: Internationalist Aesthetics: China and Early Soviet Culture by Edward Tyerman Rachel Morley Internationalist Aesthetics: China and Early Soviet Culture. By Edward Tyerman. New York: Columbia University Press. 2021. xi+353 pp. £28. ISBN 978–0–231–19919–3. Internationalist Aesthetics is ambitious, sophisticated, and wide-ranging. Meticulously researched, it draws on materials housed in eight different archives in Moscow and St Petersburg and a wide range of primary and secondary sources, from newspapers to films, in English, Russian, and Chinese. Tyerman's use of Chinese sources is among the book's greatest strengths; it is a major source of the [End Page 278] originality of his analysis of early Soviet cultural production. 'The book's substantial, if occasionally repetitive, Introduction provides historical and political context, establishes Tyerman's concept of early Soviet artists as 'mediators' between China and Soviet Russia, and defines the titular phrase 'internationalist aesthetics', which refers not to a set of formal artistic rules but rather to 'a series of experiments with different forms' through which Soviet artists pursued their aim of 'connecting Soviet and Chinese subjects within a single revolutionary present' (p. 21). Comprising four chapters, each devoted to a different artistic medium, the book takes the reader from the mid-1920s to the decade's end. Its overarching aim is to illustrate how different forms of early Soviet culture represented China while expressing an internationalist subjectivity. Its central figure, the 'star' of each chapter, is Sergei Tretʹiakov, the Soviet avant-garde writer, theorist, and aspiring film-maker, who spent eighteen months teaching Russian at Beijing University during 1924 and 1925 and whom Tyerman describes as 'the decade's most prominent mediator of China for a Soviet audience' (p. 5). Chapter 1 examines Soviet 'travelling writers' (p. 38), who visited China in the mid-1920s and described what they saw there in newspaper reports, travel notes, and ethnographic articles. They also produced poems and stories, in order to 'transmit China as it really is, without distortion' (p. 47, emphasis original). Focusing on Tretʹiakov and Boris Pilʹniak, the two most prominent writers, while also considering less familiar figures (Aleksei Ivin, Galina Serebriakova, Zinaida Rikhter), Tyerman offers close readings of Chzhungo, Tretʹiakov's 1927 collection of articles on China; his poem 'Roar China' ('Rychi Kitai', 1924); and Pilʹniak's 'Chinese Story' ('Kitaiskaia povestʹ', 1926). He adopts a comparative approach, highlighting differences in the writers' pursuit of internationalist aesthetics while dwelling especially on similarities, such as their focus on 'sight' and 'sound'. Thus, the eyewitness account, which emphasizes 'sight', emerges as an important genre for replacing orientalizing accounts of China with evocations of its revolutionary modernity; while 'sound' and devices such as onomatopoeia are revealed as key tools of internationalist aesthetics, enabling writers to overcome linguistic barriers and to communicate to Soviet readers an authentic picture of modern China. Chapter 2 examines stage productions, offering a comparative analysis of two works that brought China to the Soviet stage in the 1920s: Tretʹiakov's 'docudrama' Roar, China! (Rychi, Kitai!), premiered by Vsevolod Meierkholʹd in 1926, and the ballet that it influenced, The Red Poppy (Krasnyi mak), which was staged by the Bolshoi Theatre the following year. Chapter 3 focuses on China in early Soviet cinema (as a theme and, briefly, as a market for Soviet films). Tyerman considers various genres: the animated agitprop China on Fire (Kitai v ogne, 1925), the first Soviet film about China; Vladimir Shneiderov's expedition film The Great Flight (Velikii perelet, 1926); Dzhungo, the unrealized three-part melodrama which Tretʹiakov planned with Sergei Eizenshtein and Eduard Tisse in 1926; the documentary Shanghai Document (Shankhaiskii dokument, 1928); and the non-extant comedy The Chinese Mill (Kitaiskaia melʹnitsa, 1928), analysed through Isaak Babelʹ's screenplay. Highlighting cinema's affective power, Tyerman argues that its [End Page 279] inherent privileging of the visual over the verbal enabled cinema to offer Soviet audiences a '"face to face" encounter with China' (p. 135), making it the perfect vehicle for internationalist communication. Finally, Chapter 4 concentrates on Den Shi-khua, the 'bio-interview' (p. 188) that Tretʹiatkov assembled from interviews which he conducted with a Beijing student...