Where the Dialogue Ends: Problems of Reception of Russian Literature in China

Abstract

The article is devoted to the phenomenon of the conflict of interpretations in the perception of the text by a foreign recipient. The study explores reasons for the difficulty of understanding unrealistic works in the Chinese readership and proposes a variant of improving the commentary as an intermediary text. The research is based on the methodological approaches and provisions of the theory of intercultural communication, discourse theory, receptive aesthetics and hermeneutics. As a result of the analysis of the judgments and assessments of Chinese students and specialists in Russian, we identified their main receptive difficulties: difficult understanding of the tropes, omission of allusions, lack of mastery of the language of a particular literary phenomenon. The reason for the latter is the absence of interpretive reading models, which have not been formed due to the long-term ignorance in China of Russian modernist literature. As a result, even today there are conflicts of interpretations, attempts to interpret an unrealistic text in a realistic paradigm. The outdated, ideologically «correct» intermediary texts should be replaced by a new type of commentary. Its model, proposed by the authors of this article, includes the following structural elements: information about the cultural and literary context; clarification of the semantics of words that are important for understanding the text; designation of national stereotypes that can lead to false interpretation and assessment of the text; step-by-step algorithm for working with text; list of references. Such a commentary will allow not only to remove lexical difficulties, but also to form interpretation skills