Stories of the East in the Context of Artistic Ethnography by V. Mart of the Soviet Period

Abstract

The relevance of the research is determined by the interest of modern literary criticism in the methodological paradigms of studying texts of artistic and ethnographic content in thematic, genre-stylistic, receptive aspects. The novelty lies in the source study, textual, genre-stylistic analysis of the unpublished collection Stories of the East by V. Mart. The research problem lies in the poetological reconstruction of the history of the creative failure of the opportunist literate writer in the Soviet literature at the beginning of the 1930s. The research methodology is based on genre-stylistic, structural-semantic analysis, source analysis of manuscript texts from the point of view of their ethnographic orientation. Based on the experience of research published in the USSR and works of artistic ethnography of the writer, the authors establish the typological features of the artistic strategy by V. Mart. Research methods: historical and literary, structural and semantic, source analysis, mythological reconstructions. The authors state that the unifying principle of V. Mart’s collection Stories of the East is his “old-fashioned” attitude. It turned out that V. Mart collected variations of previously published “oriental” stories and only a few completely new works (Indian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese themes) into a single artistic space. When creating them, he mainly used typological techniques used in previous publications of the Soviet period: the contamination of traditional mythological plots and revolutionary maxims, the transposition of foreign cultural realities into Russian reality, simplified linguistic, ethnocultural, mythological commentaries, etc. The authors of the article came to the conclusion that the collection was compiled in the early 1930s; at the same time, neither artistic flaws nor problems with the reliability of the ethnographic material became the reason for the rejection of the manuscript for publication. Factography in depicting revolutionary events in China and other countries of the late 1920s played the fatal role of anachronism in the early 1930s, when the situation in the Northeast and Southeast Asia changed dramatically. The ethnographic “true stories” of Mart put together became convincing “sabotage” evidence of the defeat of the revolutionary movement in the East and the strategic mistakes of Soviet diplomacy in the region.