Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
No one will hear your voice
in the depth of the night
Whether you cry out or not …
MARIIA VIZI, Noktiurn 2 (Nocturne 2, 1970s)Histories of Russian literature have all too often ignored the Far Eastern emigration. Part of the reason for this neglect lies in the very nature of the emigration itself. Unlike the émigré communities in Paris, Berlin, and New York where in time the Russian community gradually became integrated with the native population, the Russian émigrés in China never assimilated. Essentially they remained outsiders to the country and culture which they inhabited, living an entirely Russian life with rare instances of understanding or assimilating Chinese culture. Apart from specialists and interpreters, ordinary Russians did not learn Chinese the way émigrés learned French, Czech, or Serbo-Croatian or the other languages of Europe. Estranged from Chinese life, the émigré population was similarly cut off from émigré life in Europe. Distance and political upheavals prevented many of their literary journals and newspapers from finding their way to the West. Thus it was that the Russians living in China from 1917 through the post World War II years found themselves torn not only from the country they had left but from the European émigré communities as well, a fact which may account for why so little critical attention has until recently been paid to this chapter in Russian literary history.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.