Russian sentimentalism in the mirror of Chinese literary studies

Abstract

   This article focuses on a comprehensive review of Chinese literary scholars’ contemporary conceptions on the genesis, poetics, and typology of sentimentalism in the Russian literary culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. We are interested in five main thematic-typological models of the sought-after perception: (a) Consideration of Russian sentimentalism in the context of the Western European literary process; b) Analysis of the emergence and development of sentimentalism in Russia; c) Study of the system of sentimentalism views as a literary ideology; d) Study of the prospects of Russian sentimentalism in the literature of the nineteenth century and beyond; e) Overview of the problem of the so-called “Chinese sentimentalism” in the works on the history of Western and Russian sentimentalism, including those with a typological comparison of the Chinese understanding of sentimentalism and Western European views. One of the indicators of Chinese reception is the connection of several levels, several points of view, in one problem analysis. Also, of great importance is the simultaneous consideration of the socio-historical, moral-philosophical, and general culturological aspects of the issue in the studies of Chinese scholars. In general, it is this research base that becomes the main one when preparing Chinese philologists for analyzing the work of the major representative of Russian sentimentalism, Nikolai Karamzin. In the article we used such methods of research as: biographical, genetic, psychological, comparative-typological, historical-typological, as well as elements of the systemic approach.