The Search for an Anti-Imperial Aesthetics: Soviet Images of China, 1920–1935
150 Claremont Avenue Apt 4B New York, NY 10027
Boris Gasparov, Catharine Nepomnyashchy, Lydia Liu
My dissertation explores images of China produced in early Soviet culture across a range of genres and media: travel sketches, literary fiction, biography, drama, ballet, and documentary and fiction film. I contend that these images represent an important and ambiguous attempt to imagine aesthetically the redrawn global map demanded by Leninist internationalism. Reconfiguring notions of difference and similarity, Soviet images of China sought to replace the exotic image of the Far East with a commensurability based on universal structures of oppression, while also establishing a hierarchy of revolutionary seniority that positioned Moscow at the center of a new world order.
Literature and Revolution: 20th-century Russian Literature in Translation (Teaching Assistant to Ron Meyer, Columbia University, Spring 2011) Literature and Empire: 19th-century Russian Literature in Translation (TA to Cathy Popkin, Columbia University, Fall 2010) Tolstoy and Dostoevsky (TA to Liza Knapp, Columbia University, Spring 2010) Second-Year Russian 1 (Columbia University, Fall 2009) First-Year Russian 2 (Columbia University, Spring 2009) First-Year Russian 1 (Columbia University, Fall 2008)
Published: “Catastrophic Similarities: Boris Pil’niak’s Chinese Story.” Brown Slavic Contributions, Vol. XIV: Estrangement (Providence: Department of Slavic Languages, Brown University, 2013). Presented: “Chinese Confessions: Sergei Tret’iakov’s Den Shi-khua as Biographical Allegory.” Conference on “Russia in East Asia: Imagination, Exchange, Travel, Translation,” upcoming at Columbia University, February 2014. “Productive Rhythms: The Sounds of China through Soviet Ears.” Annual Conference of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL), Boston, January 2013. “Internationalism and the Exotic: Soviet Travel Writing on China in the 1920s.” Annual Conference of the American Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), New Orleans, November 2012.
Mosely-Backer Fellow at the Harriman Institute, Columbia University, 2012–13