| This study focuses on representations of East Asia in Russian thought and literature, beginning from the 1830s to the 1920s. It examines images of China and Japan in the works of various Russian thinkers, philosophers, novelists and poets, with a particular focus on their role in shaping views on Russian national identity, their relation to the Russian Idea. It attempts to shed light on a unique Russian construction of East Asia shaped at the juncture of literature, history, nationalist ideology and religious thought.; Chapter one examines images of East Asia in the nineteenth century, including Alexander Herzen and Aleksei Khomiakov's thinking on China in the 1830s and 40s, Ivan Goncharov's journey to Japan and China in the 1850s, and the notion of the yellow peril in the writings of Dostoevskii, Leontiev, Bakunin, V. Vasiliev and Grigorii Danilevskii. Chapter two focuses on the interpretation of China by two representative turn-of-the-century thinkers, Vladimir Soloviev and Nikolai Fedorov. Chapter three is a discussion of the impact of the Russo-Japanese War on fin de siecle Russian writers, in particular the symbolists, and the further development in the twentieth century of perceptions of East Asia. Chapter 4 analyzes the image of Japan in the works of the futurist Velimir Khlebnikov, followed by the conclusion.; In treating East Asia as a distinctive category in Russian Orientalism, this dissertation seeks to outline the existence of a Russian genealogy or tradition of thinking on East Asia, one which betrays deep ambiguities not only in relation to the region, but also in relation to Western modernity and progress, thus resulting in a complex interaction of three ideas: Orientalism, Occidentalism and Russia. |
