Jinyi Chu
I am a scholar of Russian and Chinese literature and culture of the 19th and 20thcentury. Focusing on the interplay between geopolitics and transnational aesthetics, my research and teaching interests span Russian modernist poetry and prose, socialist culture, Russo-Chinese relations, science fiction, memory and memoirs, and translation studies.
My first book The Other is The Universal: Fin-de-siècle Russia and Chinese Aesthetics (Oxford UP, forthcoming 2024) shows that modernism in Russia emerged not merely under Western influence, but also from a sustained dialogue with Chinese culture. Drawing upon the Sino-Russian case, this book argues that modernist engagement with foreign culture is a search for a higher universal in the age of heightened global interconnectedness.
My second and ongoing book project Aesthetics of Reform: China and the Soviet Union in the 1980s offers a transnational account of how the idea of “reform” was aestheticized in Soviet and Chinese literature, film, and Marxist theory. It argues that the Soviet and Chinese reforms were more than mere westernization and marketization; they were urgent reimagination of the common socialist future beyond nation-state politics.
In addition to these two major projects, I also have authored peer-reviewed articles and public essays in both English and Chinese on the writing of Vladimir Lenin, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Vladimir Nabokov, Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, as well as science fiction in Russia and China and etc.
I am a translator of Russian, Chinese, and English. I have translated Joseph Frank’s biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky (English to Chinese) and Dmitry Merezhkovsky’s writing on Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (Russian to English), among many other literary and scholarly works.
My interview on YaleNews: https://news.yale.edu/2022/04/11/office-hours-jinyi-chu