Image of Perception of the Chinese in Maksimov’s Book “In the East: A Trip to Amur: Travel Notes and Memoirs”, 1860–61

Abstract

The article presents a study of the way Chinese people are perceived in S.V. Maksimov’s book “In the East: A Trip to Amur: Travel Notes and Memoirs”, which was one of the first writings of the kind produced by writers of the Russian Far East. I highlight the peculiarities of the narrative strategy of the writer-ethnographer, focusing on the use of two narrating instances in creating an image of perception – a direct observer-onlooker and a statesman-minded researcher who knows the historical and political situation. Everyday observations on the life of the Chinese population of a border town by and large cause the feeling of aversion in the “observer-onlooker” whose philistine mind tends to absolutize aspects such as bribery as the basis of the management system and business relations, the pursuit of sensual pleasures, or the sybaritism and disposition to theft. At the same time, the statesman-minded researcher, who is keen on searching for universals of human communication, discovers the most important (in his opinion) feature of the national character of the Chinese: patriotism as love and devotion to their native land, native culture, and their people. Maksimov, who juxtaposes patriotism to the tendency of Russians abroad to melt in a foreign culture, implicitly asserts love for the native land and native culture and history as the main condition for understanding and inculcating the sense of “nationality”; that is, he sees it as the basis of ethnic identity and ethnicity capable of influencing the foreign and domestic policies of Russians in their communication with the Chinese. I argue that Maksimov’s travel notes are valuable not only as a purely ethnographic source for academic research on historical realities of the mid-19th century and Russian-Chinese interaction and relationships, but also as a literary genre that set a trend in the formation of a distinctive artistic-ethnographic style in the writings of later authors of Russia’s Far Eastern frontier, such as V.K. Arsenyev, N.A. Baykov, P.V. Shkurkin, and V. Marta.