Remembering Sixty Years of Teaching Russian Language

Abstract

The history of Russian language teaching in China has attracted the attention of many researchers in recent years. Against this background the personal testimony of a participant in the processes through which the teaching of the Russian language in the PRC went through is invaluable to the historians of education. Current article contains the translation of a memoir sketch written by one of the oldest and distinguished scholars in the field of Russian studies in the PRC, lexicographer, linguist, and teacher Huang Shizeng. This memoir sketchis dedicated to his educational and scholarly work at the Department of the Russian Language at Tsinghua University from 1957 to the 2000s. Teaching Russian language in China has always been linked to the history of bilateral relations. As before, during the second half of the 20th century it reflected all their ups and downs: after the formation of the PRC and until the early 1960s, the Russian language was the most studied in the country. Then there was a period of relative decline, and a few years later, with the beginning of the “cultural revolution”, the teaching of foreign languages has undergone a crisis. Since the 1980s, when the Chinese Association of Teachers of Russian Language and Literature had been established and soon joined the International Association of Teachers of Russian Language and Literature, the modern restorative stage of teaching Russian in the PRC has begun. The department of Russian language at Tsinghua University, founded in 1952, was to pass through all these stages.