Russian Literature in China: A Conflict of Interpretations, Its Causes and Ways of Overcoming (Based on the Material of the Reception of Russian Literature by Chinese Readers). Article I

The article is dedicated to the phenomenon of the conflict of interpretations in the perception of a text by a foreign recipient. The study explores reasons for the difficulty of understanding non-realistic fiction by Chinese readers. The research is based on the methodological provisions of the discourse theory, the theory of intercultural communication, hermeneutics, and receptive aesthetics. Typologically, the problems of the reception of the Russian text by Chinese readers can be caused by two main groups of reasons: (1) linguistic and cultural-historical, and (2) institutional. As a result of the analysis of the judgments of Chinese students and specialists in Russian, we identified their main receptive difficulties: difficult understanding of the tropes, omission of allusions, lack of mastery of the language of a particular literary phenomenon. The reason for the latter is the absence of interpretive reading models, which have not been formed due to the long-term ignorance in China of Russian modernist literature. The lack of understanding of Russian non-realistic writers' language and world-modeling presents the greatest difficulty for Chinese students when they get acquainted with modernist and postmodern fiction, and causes insurmountable confusion in the perception of such literature and refusal to read it. If foreign readers do not understand or contradictorily understand texts, the productive increment of meanings may not occur. The most important semantic elements are often lost or not recognized. As a result, there are conflicts of interpretations, attempts to interpret a non-realistic text in a realistic paradigm. The outdated, ideologically “correct” intermediary texts should be replaced by a new type of commentary. Its model, which we propose in this article, includes the following structural elements: information about the cultural and literary context; clarification of the semantics of words that are important for understanding the text; designation of national stereotypes that can lead to false interpretation and evaluation of the text; step-by-step algorithm for working with text; list of references. Such a commentary will not only remove lexical difficulties, but also form interpretation skills. The other group of reasons is associated with the institutional characteristics of the education system in China: the high intensity of training, preference for translations rather than original texts, the focus on the problem-thematic study of works, etc.

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