Reception of Russian Literature in China’s Contemporary Digital Space

Abstract

This article studies translated Russian literature as a factor of the development of contemporary Russian-Chinese intercultural communication. The authors examine the main traits of the reception of Russian literature in contemporary China, the mechanisms of the transformation of the interest of the Chinese public at large in the works of Russian writers, and the reasons for the sustainable role of Russian classic literature (A. Pushkin, M. Lermontov, N. Gogol, I. Turgenev, F. Dostoyevsky, L. Tolstoy, A. Chekhov, M. Gorky, M. Sholokhov, and N. Ostrovsky) as a basic element of the image of Russia. The authors identify the reasons why the Russian literature of the second half of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries whose translations are available in China (some of them have received the Best Foreign Novel of the Twenty-First Century award) has not managed to change the established structure of priorities remaining at the periphery of contemporary processes of intercultural communication. It is demonstrated that the reception of classical and contemporary Russian literature in China has followed two scenarios, i.e. “profound” and “superficial”. The study of works of Chinese literary critics and cultural figures (Liu Wenfei, Wang Jiezhi, Cui Guoxin, etc.) makes it possible to identify the main criteria for the selection and perception of literary works in the conceptual, ethical and stylistic domains, and the domains of plot and imagery. It is emphasised that 21st-century Russian literature, which has lost its function as a model for emulation and a standard for copying, is interesting to Chinese specialists and readers as a corpus of texts that reflects aesthetic issues and ethnocultural regional traits without generating qualitatively new worldviews. The authors present the results of the quantitative and qualitative analysis of digital resources (Baidu, Sogou, etc.) that reveal the main features of the contemporary perception of Russian literature by Chinese Internet users.