FINDING THE UNIVERSAL: MODERNISM AND CULTURAL ENCOUNTERS

by Dr. Jinyi Chu, Yale University

Macalester College

11:30 am - 12:30 pm, April 26, 2025

Zoom: https://macalester.zoom.us/j/98257839101 ; Meeting ID: 982 5783 9101

Description

This talk explores transnational roots for Russian modernism by focusing on its reception of Chinese culture. It shows that, beyond mere Orientalism, Russian artists and writers engaged with China in more serious ways than scholars have portrayed. Through analysis of diverse cultural artifacts, from Tolstoy’s translation of Daoist philosophy to Mashkov’s painting of Chinese fairy, from Annensky’s encounters with Tibetan Monk to Remizov’s retelling of ghost stories, this talk argues that modernist engagement with foreign aesthetics represents a quest for higher universalities, transcending the limitations of Eurocentric universalism. These Sino-Russian encounters represent a turn-of-the-century way of reconfiguring global interconnectedness. 

Short bio: 

Jinyi Chu is Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and a faculty fellow on the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University. He received his PhD from Stanford. Chu’s research focuses on Russian modernism, Russo-Chinese relations, global socialist culture, and translation studies. He is the author of Fin-de-siècle Russia and Chinese Aesthetics: The Other is the Universal (Oxford UP, 2024) and World-Feeling: Russian Literature and Geopolitics (in Chinese, Beijing: Salian Shudian, forthcoming in August 2025). Currently, he is working on a new book project, Aesthetics of Reform: China and the Soviet Union in the 1980s.