Chinese Introduction to A Writer’s Diary by Fyodor Dostoevsky

This article focuses on the imagological study of the Chinese theme in the Introduction to Dostoevsky’s A Writer’s Diary in 1873. To date, the problem “Dostoevsky and China” and, in particular, the Chinese motives in A Writer’s Diary has never been a subject of a comprehensive study. The original idea of the article is that the Chinese theme of “Introduction” is not a random case of operating with Oriental images and stories (the Emperor of China, the Chinese bureaucracy, Chinese execution, etc.), but a logical manifestation of Orientalism and its mythopoetic structures. The term Russian Orientalism refers to a type of creative thinking that occurred in the context of Western Europe and Russia’s Imperial and colonial practices and based on a specific philosophical-poetic view of the world, virtually divided into Russia, the West and the Orient. The article explains why the image of China (but not other Oriental countries) served as the most convenient literary-journalistic technique of conversation about creativity, journalism and the level of reading and civic identity in the Russian Empire in the early 1870s. It also analyzes the reasons for the appeal of Dostoevsky not to the special data about the actual Qing Empire, in fact, a semi-colonial country on the brink of collapse after the opium wars and ethnic uprisings, but to the imaginary China of Russian Orientalism, the centuries-old Empire that nothing bad can happen with. The concepts of Orient, Oriental people, despotism, humiliation, depersonalization (“anthill”), united by the system of Russian Orientalism, determine not only the intention of “superiority” in relation to a variety of non-European cultures, but the basic orientations of cultural identity. The language of Orientalism referring to the Chinese theme gave Dostoevsky the necessary opportunities for the formulation of the problems of Russian identity: the writer creates an ambivalent image of the bureaucratic China, at the same time juxtaposed with the image of Russia and opposed to it (problematic complex of Orientalization and self-Orientalization). In connection with the problem of humiliation and violence the article discusses the concept of initiatic narrative: Dostoevsky comically plays with the metaplot of the initiation of the editor, but at the same time seriously believes that the renewal and development of the individual must be through overcoming challenges, through mandatory transfer of moral and physical suffering (the Evangelical motif of the deceased grain). For the first time in the framework of the Russian Orientalism theory, the Chinese images of “Introduction” are considered in the intertextual connection with N. Gogol’s “The Diary of a Madman” (1834): the article studies the genre-thematic, stylistic and conceptual relationship between these two texts.

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