The Image of the Homeland in the Lyrics of the Poet of Northeastern China Mu Mutian (Based on the Poems from the Collection Drifting Heart)

Abstract

The relevance of the study is determined by the interest of modern humanities in the processes of the formation of ethnic and national consciousness in China in the first half of the 20th century, which determine the images of perception of a foreign culture and self-perception. The novelty lies in the appeal to the half-forgotten work by Mu Mutian, practically unknown to the Russian-speaking reader. The problem lies in the definition of the connotative meanings of the image of the homeland in the works by Mu Mutian, reflecting the fusion of archetypal ethnic ideas and new attitudes of national consciousness. Research methodology is based on the lexical and semantic analysis of the poet’s literary texts, which represent different connotations of the image of the homeland. The research methods we applied involved biographical, cultural-historical and structural-semantic ones. The authors also turned to the comparative analysis of the translation and the original of the poems studied. The authors came to the conclusion that the image of the homeland in the poems included in the collection Drifting Heart by Mu Mutian is often manifested allegorically. The name Drifting Heart fully reflects not only the emotional state of the emigre poet during the period of writing poems but also the processes of the formation of the basic frames of the national consciousness of the Chinese after the Xinhai Revolution during the civil war. Despite the fact that Mu Mutian’s artistic perception of the world during the period of exile is closely connected with the Japanese aesthetic principle of mononoaware, aestheticizing sadness, and is also inseparable from the symbolist craving for “decline”, the poet fuses the “Chinese” vision of these principles and projects them onto ideas about his native places, the homeland of his ancestors under the rule of Japan, declares faith in the revival of China as a single state.