Contemporary Chinese poetry and Russian modernist and postmodernist poetry: influence and analogy

Abstract

For the last thirty years, Chinese poetry mostly has been well-known for three schools, namely: “Misty Poetry”, “Intellectual Writing”, and “Folk Writing”. Russian poets of diff erent periods were among those who had a notable impact on the works of Chinese poets. Russian lyric poets praising freedom, love, and relationships with nature became the main source of inspiration for “misty” poets. “Intellectual” poets felt their being close to the Russian Silver Age poets: A. Akhmatova, A. Blok, B. Pasternak, M. Tsvetaeva. Their poems include examples of direct addressing to them. “Folk” poets created an enormous and diverse area of postmodernist poetic texts, which is in sync with Russian poets of postmodernism. In the fi rst part of the article, the authors review the contemporary Russian poetry, in particular the “second avant-garde” poetry, in relation with the contemporary Chinese poetry that was “moved in time” for some decades, but came across the same processes of rising and the dialogue with society (sometimes provocative), with the world poetry, processes of introspection and experimental search. The second part of the article deals with the aspects of infl uence, made by Russian poets of different periods upon Chinese poetry, and with the issues of further development of contemporary Chinese poetry.

Keywords

• contemporary poetry
• second avant-garde
• silver age
• conceptualism
• postmodernism
• “misty poetry”
• chinese
• russian