The Golden Rose by Konstantin Paustovsky: Reception of Russia as a Conceptual Image in Modern Chinese Literary Culture

Recent literary studies in the field of environmental postmodernism have been telling about the philosophical and aesthetic concept “unity of human and nature”, as championed by Konstantin Paustovsky in his lyrical ecofiction novella The Golden Rose, as a focal point of the research efforts of Chinese academics. Chinese scholars of Russian Studies have raised a range of intertwined issues related to various snapshots of Russian realities depicted in the work. The article presents the findings of a systematic analysis of the reception in China of the conceptual image of Russia in the above text. The autobiographical notes of the novella also serve as the writer's travelogue. The narrative is built around the image of the Homeland as it appears in the poetic vision of the writer. Backed by his own interpretation of this image, he tries to make sense of the Homeland that is contemporary to him, giving the reader an opportunity to look at his native country through the lens of his personal impressions and experiences. This study provides a modern Chinese take on the structural components of this image, that is, its threefold “nature-people-language” model, and also shares a Chinese perspective on the concept of the “Russian world”, as it was advocated by Paustovsky, communicated through reminiscences and allusions found in the writings by the representatives of the Chinese “school of lyrical prose” that displays a close affinity with the stance adopted in The Golden Rose. Nature is the ideological and thematic backbone of the novella and serves as the starting point for the analysis of the narrative structure of the text and the philosophical reasoning behind it. The pervasive lyrical motif of happiness embodied in the above imagery reveals the concept of harmony among human beings with nature in Paustovsky's environmentally-minded aesthetics. The image of the Russian nature/culture reappears in the works by Chinese prose writers (Xu Lu, Zhang Wu), overlapping at different levels with the poetics of the Russian writer, which attests to the consistent unfolding of the main idea of Paustovsky: “humans in harmony with nature”. The image of the “treasury of Russian words” is the result of the writer's deep immersion into the natural world, the village life, and folk culture. Bringing Russian realities into harmony is achieved through the interaction of various components of the “nature-people-language” imagery systems. It can be argued that, in The Golden Rose, a polysemantic and genetically mosaic image of Russia was conceived and developed as another manifestation of Paustovsky's aesthetic concept of the unity of nature and the happy human. As a result, Paustovsky's Homeland is perceived by the Chinese readership as an idyllic “transcendental paradise” and a “rosy dream”. The traditions of the writer's lyrical ecofiction are reincarnated and further developed in the modern Chinese literature. This will be instrumental in opening up new perspectives for studying the perception of Paustovsky's oeuvre in China alongside the relationships between Russian and Chinese literatures in the 21st century.

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