In the period that would come to be known as fin-de-siècle Russia — a French descriptor that refers to the late 19th and early 20th centuries — Chinese products, art motifs, and imagery became ubiquitous in Russian cosmopolitan society. At the time, most representations of Chinese people in theater and on packaging were stereotypical caricatures, and the Chinese characters in dime novels were frequently portrayed negatively.
But in his new book “Fin-de-Siècle Russia and Chinese Aesthetics: The Other is the Universal” (Oxford University Press), Yale’s Jinyi Chu argues that modernists of the time did not go along with that mainstream discourse. Rather, he shows how many Russian writers and artists turned to Chinese art, literature, and philosophy as a way of rethinking European norms and expanding their understanding of the universal.
Read more at….