“Lunar New Year” by A. Parkau: cultural memory

Abstract

This article considers the Russian émigré literature in China in the aspect of implementing the principles of intercultural communication and interaction between the cultures of Russia and China. Scholars began to study it in the 1990s, and currently the work of many Russian writers from Harbin and Shanghai remains unexplored. Features of the interaction of national traditions are analyzed in the poem “Lunar New Year” (Chinese New Year) by the poet of the Russian diaspora — A. Parkau, published in the poetic book Unquenchable Fire. Her artistic world still is not in the focus of the scholars. The poem “Lunar New Year,” included in the Bitter Paths cycle, is the artistic description of the Chinese holiday. Its content is determined by Chinese culture, and its artistic form is determined by the Russian poetic tradition. The article traces the connections of the poem with Chinese culture and philosophy, on the one hand, and with the contexts of the Russian poetry of the 19th century, expressed in poetic meters, on the other. The authors of the article examine the compositional and semantic principles of organizing a book of poems and come to the conclusion that the analyzed poem is included simultaneously in several cycles — calendar, reflecting the life of nature, and social, expressing the existential ideas of emigrants, expressed with the motives of loneliness, and fear of death, among others.