The Title of the Collection of Yu Dafu «沉沦» (1921) as an Image of Perception and Self-perception

Abstract

The relevance of the research is determined by the interest of modern literary criticism to the issues of reflection in the artistic word of the processes of perception of each other by ethnic groups. The novelty of the work is defined by the appeal to the previously unpublished in Russia and not studied text of the collection by Yu Dafu Chen Lun as a source of reconstruction of the image of Japan’s perception by the Chinese intelligentsia of the 1920s‒1940s and self-perception. The problem of the research is to reconstruct the semantic content of the Chinese lexeme 沉沦 (Chen Lun) as an artistic concept of the image of Japan’s perception and self-perception of the Chinese living there. The purpose of the work is to explicate the ideological and psychological mechanisms of creating images of perception and self-perception of the Chinese in the prose of Yu Dafu as a representative of the Left Wing of Chinese literature in the 1920s‒1940s. The methodology of the work is based on a comparative analysis of the ideological and thematic content of the book and the semantics of the title of the collection, translations of these titles into Russian and English in different historical periods. The author uses historical-literary, comparative-historical methods, lexical-semantic analysis, comparative analysis of translation and translations with the original, conceptual analysis. On the basis of a comparative analysis of Russian and English translations of story titles (Omut – Whirlpool), a lexical and semantic analysis of the word 沉沦, key concepts and ideas of the collection, the author proposes another version of the translation into Russian as Pogryazshie (Drowned). The heroes of the Yu Dafu collection are young reflective Chinese intellectuals who came to Japan in the mid-1910s, have ambivalent feelings: the desire to see in Japan and the Japanese a model for self-improvement, and at the same time – dislike for the “higher” culture in relation to China. This study helps to reconstruct with psychological certainty the image of perception of Japan and the Japanese by revolutionary-minded Chinese youth of the 1920s, to explicate their image of self-perception, ideas about their own ethnos and ways of development of the Chinese state and Chinese ethnicity in this historical period.

Keywords

• literary images of perception
• poetics of translation
• china