Poverty in modern Chinese realism: from Russia, with squalor

This book shows that early twentieth-century Chinese writers drew upon Russian texts about the socially downtrodden to describe poverty, in a bid to enrich Chinese culture by creating a syncretic new realism. Modern Chinese realist writers turned to the topic of material poverty—peasants suffering from famine, exploited urban laborers, homeless orphans—to convey their sense of textual poverty and national backwardness. The combination of a radically new subject matter and experimentation with diverse literary resources, indigenous and foreign, generated major innovations in narrative technique. Depicting poverty allowed writers to revolutionize the nascent forms of modern Chinese narrative, innovating strategies of representing the nation, the social other, time, and space, while problematizing their deployment of squalor for aesthetic purposes. This book examines why Russian literature, itself long preoccupied with a problem of belatedness vis-à-vis Western Europe, occupied a privileged place for Chinese intellectuals of this era. Comparing Chinese fiction about poverty to Russian intertexts by Gogol, Andreev, Chekhov, Turgenev, and others, the book shows how Chinese writers drew and innovated upon themes (such as madness or human animality) and formal elements (such as metonymy). The book’s multi-scalar approach emphasizing close textual analysis situates modern Chinese realism in the trans-Eurasian axis of world literature.