Mei Lanfang's 1935 Visit to the USSR as a Moment of Professional Reflection in Chinese Classical Theater

This article examines Mei Lanfang’s visit to the Soviet Union in 1935. In the scholarly literature, this event has generally been interpreted in two ways: either as a case of cultural influence or as a cause of the loss of national tradition. Both positions share a common premise: Eastern and Western theater are treated as stable, pre-given systems. This article proposes a different approach. The 1935 visit is understood as a historically specific moment of professional reflection. It was precisely at this point that the performative foundations of the Chinese classical stage were called into question, not from the outside, but from within theatrical practice itself. The Russian theatrical school functioned as an “other mirror”: the encounter with a different tradition exposed contradictions that had accumulated within Chinese classical theater by the beginning of the twentieth century. The primary analytical tool is theatrical semiotics: the performative crisis is examined as a rupture in the relationship between the stage sign, its motivation, and the situational context of the role. Historical-theatrical analysis of archival materials provides the empirical foundation of the study. The scholarly novelty of the article lies in the following. On the basis of archival materials from the State Archive of the Russian Federation — specifically documents from the VOKS collection recording the professional observations of Soviet masters of the stage — the 1935 visit is interpreted for the first time as a mechanism of professional reflection, rather than merely a fact of cultural influence. The study establishes that the crisis of Chinese classical theater at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century was manifested in a rupture between established stage signs and their performative motivation. Traditional devices continued to be reproduced formally, yet they had lost their causal and semantic connection with the concrete role and situation. It is demonstrated that this rupture — rather than political circumstances — determined the character of Mei Lanfang's interest in the Soviet theatrical school. The author arrives at the following conclusions. The contact between the two traditions led neither to methodological fusion nor to the destruction of one by the other. The encounter with the Russian school provided an external mirror through which the contradictions accumulated within Chinese classical theater became visible as an object of professional reflection. The role of the Stanislavsky system lay not in replacing national aesthetics, but in making visible the rupture between the stage sign and its performative motivation.