The focus of this ground-breaking, erudite and sophisticated book is the relationship between Soviet Russia and China as imagined and mediated by writers and theorists of the Soviet avant-garde in the 1920s. The book is made up of four chapters framed by an introduction and epilogue. The introduction lays out the main questions and conceptual foci that it seeks to explore, central of which is the concept of “internationalist aesthetics” of the book's title. It describes “internationalist aesthetics” in terms of the Soviet cultural aspiration to “render the world knowable as a site of a global struggle against capital, and to create a new kind of political subject with horizontal affinities across the lines of nation, race, and capital” (p. 7). At the same time, inherent in this aspiration is a recurrent tension between centripetal and centrifugal impulses, between the authority of the Soviet perspective and the need to recognize, and collaborate with, the foreign other (China) (pp. 7, 83, 91). The ways that this central tension plays out in the cultural field, across various forms, genres and aesthetic debates, constitutes the fascinating story of the book. This section also introduces the Soviet writer and theorist Sergei Tretyakov, a remarkable figure and mediator (he spent eighteen months teaching Russian at the Beijing University in 1924–1925) whose use of China in his literary and artistic innovations will serve to bring together the various analyses of the following chapters.
Chapter one examines how Tretyakov began his search for an internationalist aesthetics in relation to China through the genre of travel literature and the figure of the travelling writer as a mediator of the Sino-Soviet interchange. Particularly appreciated is the comparative reading of Tretyakov's travel sketches (Chzhungo, 1927) with the writings on China of a better-known Soviet writer, Boris Pilnyak, in a way that reveals the latter's limitations in perceiving the foreign. The highlight of this chapter is the analysis of the poem “Roar China!” wherein Tretyakov attempts to decode Chinese trade sounds in order to recode them within a Marxist-Leninist framework of revolutionary development.
Chapter two turns to the theatre and ballet as cultural media through which Soviet artists sought to produce for Soviet audiences a sense of internationalist connection with China. Here, as elsewhere in the book, culture is shown to be inseparable from mediation, and the chapter offers readings of two China-themed performances of 1927 – Tretyakov's play Roar China! and the Bolshoi Theatre's ballet production The Red Poppy – that foregrounds key debates of the Russian avant-garde as well as of translation studies: the conflict between naturalism and conventionality, domestication and foreignization.
Chapter three looks at how early Soviet cinema engaged with China. Again, we find Tretyakov at the centre of such efforts; a film trilogy he planned to make in collaboration with Sergei Eisenstein was never completed. This chapter presents an impressive discussion of several 1920s Soviet films across genres (animated, expedition, documentary) that aspired to reach Chinese as well as Soviet audiences. It concludes by considering the limitations of such internationalism through a script for a now lost film (The Chinese Mill) written by the Soviet master prose writer Isaak Babel.
Chapter four is a fascinating discussion of Tretyakov's innovations in biography/autobiography, based on his extensive interviews with a Chinese student studying in Moscow. Den Shi-khua (1926–1927, in pinyin, Deng Shihua), a new form of “bio-interview” propagated by Tretyakov, is the “most complex early Soviet publication on China” (p. 188). Tyerman's central argument of the tension between the centrifugal and centripetal culminates in this analysis of Tretyakov's collaboration with the Chinese student (“Deng”). The bio-interview is premised on the belief that Deng cannot yet write his own life without the expert mediation of a Soviet teacher. At the same time, Deng is shown to have in fact been beyond Tretyakov's control, developing his selfhood and agency in the process of this Sino-Soviet encounter.
The epilogue tells of the brutal ending of this 1920s flourishing of Soviet cultural experimentation centred on China. With Tretyakov, Pilnyak and others executed on charges of being Japanese spies by the 1930s, two Chinese figures in Soviet Russia, the actor Mei Lanfang and poet Xiao San, emerged as main intermediaries of the Sino-Soviet exchange.
Through analyses of little-examined cultural texts of the Soviet avant-garde, as well as notable references to Chinese texts (such as synopses of the unfinished film Go to the People by writer director Tian Han), Internationalist Aesthetics shows how in this crucial period of the development of early Soviet culture, China emerged as a prime testing ground for Soviet cultural experiments. This spirit of openness and enthusiastic experimentation vis-à-vis China reveals a Soviet Russia flush from the successful establishment of its new revolutionary state, the first in world history, confident about its ability to transform and mould the world. On one level, the book's story serves as a cultural counterpart to the political project of the Soviet-controlled Communist International (Comintern)'s aspiration for directing the global revolution process (pp. 3–4). It also illuminates the ways that Soviet Russia perceived and related to China and the world, through the prism of culture, prior to the isolation and xenophobia that came to characterize the Stalinist period. In sum, Internationalist Aesthetics is an impressive example of scholarship that cuts across, and brings into conversation, multiple fields, disciplines, and intellectual and aesthetic debates to shed light on the significance and use of China in the formation of early Soviet revolutionary culture of the 1920s. It is highly recommended to scholars and students of Russian, Soviet and Chinese studies, as well as history, cultural history, comparative literature, translation and transcultural studies.
