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Article Excerpt
Alexander Herzen (1812-70), a leading nineteenth-century Russian thinker, memoirist, journalist, and novelist, spent the majority of his active professional life in exile in Europe, primarily England. Portrayed to generations of Russians as the "father of Russian socialism," Herzen is also known for his astute observations of the European scene and his reflections on Russia's relationship to the West. On the significance of Europe for Russia, he once declared, "We need Europe as an ideal, a reproach, a good example; if she were not these things it would be necessary to invent her" (11:66).
Yet Herzen's thoughts on the West also lead us to an unexpected, reverse, direction: to the Far East and China. The present study examines the idea of China in the writings of the Russian thinker, in particular its significance as the source of a distinctive Russian discourse on China and Japan, one in which these Far Eastern nations figure not as clear signifiers of the exotic "Orient," but rather as potent metaphors for considering Russia's own place in history and its relation to the West. (1) The first part discusses some specifics of Russian perceptions of China leading up to Herzen, followed by an analysis of his original contribution to the predominant nineteenth-century idea of China. It then concludes with an examination of Herzen's influence on Fyodor Dostoevsky and the Russian Symbolists.
Beginning in the nineteenth century, the image of China in Russian thought and literature functioned as a dual metaphor. On the one hand, it represented stagnation and conservatism, serving as a stand-in for the Russian self, in the way European thinkers used it to criticize their own societies. On the other hand, beginning in the 1840s, China also became a symbol for the other, the West. This counterintuitive conflation of China and Western Europe was shaped by writers' awareness of Russia's peculiar status between East and West.
The past two decades have seen a growing number of studies devoted to the question of Russia and the East in the theoretical context of postcolonialism and Orientalism. These studies have focused on the ways the Russian state and its intellectuals, writers, and artists have understood and described the empire's eastern and southern peripheries. The need to readjust Edward Said's notion of Orientalism when considering the Russian experience of the East has been noted by several critics. According to Mark Bassin, Russia's ambivalent position is characterized by "a sort of existential indeterminacy between East and West, a veritable geo-schizophrenia" (1998, 58); Nathaniel Knight, in questioning the direct applicability of Said's theory to Russia, writes that "when Russian scholars turned to the East it was often with a sharp awareness of their own supposed backwardness and inferiority in the face of the grand civilization of Britain, France and Germany." (77)
This national insecurity has shaped Russian orientalist discourse: scholarship on the treatment of the Caucasus in nineteenth-century Russian literature, for instance, has shown how the creation of the south as Russia's own Orient was significantly motivated by the desire to underscore Russians' similarity to Europeans as colonizers and orientalizers. (2) Like the use of the Caucasus, the use of China reveals Russian perceptions of its "own supposed backwardness and inferiority in the face of the grand civilization" of Western Europe, but in a decidedly different manner. China in the writings to be examined below functions as a stand-in not for an exotic or Romantic other that satisfied Russian imperial needs, but as a familiar and contemptible Western other, and consequently as a weapon for critiquing the evils of Western modernity and stressing Russia's distance from Europe. Russian thinking on China, then, becomes a complex interaction among three ideas: Orientalism, Occidentalism (3), and Russia.
From Kitaishchina to "Chinese Europe"
Although Russia was the first "western" nation to sign a formal treaty with China in 1689 (Treaty of Nerchinsk), its engagement with the Middle Kingdom as a topic of cultural and intellectual life developed in the eighteenth century and simulated Western precedents. From the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth, European knowledge was for Russians the main source of reference on China. Western debates on the nature
of China and the fundamental evolution of its image from the period of the Enlightenment to Romanticism played a significant role in Russian reflections on national identity and history.
The age of the Enlightenment was an age of sinophilia, of an admiration of China rooted in the firm belief in Reason and its universal quality. Basing their conclusions on Jesuit reports, thinkers like Leibniz and Voltaire described China as an ideal example of the enlightened, rational state. This mostly positive discourse on China by the great philosophes was part of the ideas and culture of the Enlightenment imported to Russia, whether in the form of philosophical writings or more ephemeral chinoiserie. However, Russians were not completely comfortable with the China text Western Europe handed down to them. Barbara Maggs, who has meticulously documented the various Russian writings on China, finds that Russians were ambivalent in their reception of the Middle Kingdom, caught between the desire to emulate the positive European evaluation and the practical concerns that grew out of increased geopolitical contact (5-7).
A case in point was the Empress Catherine. Anxious to present herself as an enlightened monarch and impress the philosophes, she agreed with Voltaire in their correspondence about the merits of China. The empress also used the image of the wise Chinese monarch in her edifying tale, "The Tale of Prince Fevei" [Skazka o tsareviche Fevee, 1783]. Perhaps under the influence of Voltaire's "The Orphan of China" [L'Orphelin de la Chine, 1755], Catherine in her tale contrasted the Chinese emperor with a less civilized eastern people, the Siberians.
Nevertheless, with regard to imperial expansion Catherine considered the Middle Kingdom Russia's rival, an attitude seen in the following words attributed to her by the poet Gavriil Derzhavin: "I shall not die until I have ejected the Turks from Europe, suppressed the pride of China, and have established trade with India" (6:632).
The Enlightenment construct of China, however, was severely questioned by Romantic thinkers, and China's lofty image suffered accordingly. The China of Voltaire and Leibniz, with its stress on reason and universalism, came to represent...
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