Abstract: This article examines the Russian and Soviet avant-garde's engagement with China across the visual arts, literature, cinema and theatre from the 1900s to the 1930s. It argues that two forces shaped that engagement: a fascination with the East rooted in wider European trends but inflected in the Russian case by Eurasianism and its intellectual predecessors, and socialism notably as articulated by the futurists. Such figurings of China consistently produced creative misreadings, which the article interprets not as distortions but as the characteristic outcomes of cultural transfer. The article concludes with a glance at how the avant-garde was received in China through an analogous dynamic of misreading.
Mark Gamsa (Fri,) studied this question.