The dialectic of “Truth” and “Fiction” in Chinese and Russian biographical studies: a comparative analysis of the concepts of Yang Zhengrun and A.A. Kholikov

Biographical studies, situated at the intersection of history and literature, constantly confront the fundamental problem of the boundary between factual reliability and artistic fiction. In the era of “post-truth”, marked by a tendency toward scandalization and deliberate distortion of the images of classical authors in biographical texts, the substantiation of ethical norms and methodological principles for working with fiction acquires particular relevance. The relevance of this study is determined by the key problem for contemporary humanities—the boundary between factual accuracy and artistic invention in biographical studies, a discipline at the crossroads of history and literature. The aim of this article is to compare two influential approaches to solving this problem, as presented in the works of Chinese scholar Yang Zhengrun (Modern Biographical Studies, 2009; English translation A Modern Poetics of Biography, 2025) and Russian researcher A.A. Kholikov (Writer's Biography as a Genre, 2014). The objectives include revealing the essential characteristics of Yang Zhengrun's “paradigm of theoretical construction” and Kholikov's “paradigm of genre-specific deepening”, systematizing the types and boundaries of biographical fiction, and identifying differences in the understanding of the nature of biography within Chinese and Russian academic traditions. The methodology is based on comparative and textual analysis within the framework of cross-cultural academic dialogue. The study demonstrates that Yang Zhengrun proposes a universal, meticulously elaborated typology of biographical fiction (supplementing, expanding, transferring, and explicit) and formulates the universal ethical principle of the “biographer's oath”. In contrast, A.A. Kholikov focuses on the specific genre of the writer's biography, and through a comparative analysis of B.K. Zaitsev's artistic biography and A.N. Veselovsky's scholarly biography, demonstrates how the purpose of the life writing and the identity of the biographer determine the extent and form of admissible fiction. The main conclusion is that Yang Zhengrun's theoretical universalization and A.A. Kholikov's genre-specific concretization represent complementary rather than mutually exclusive paradigms. The prospect for future research lies in the synthesis of these approaches, the dialogue between which contributes to the further institutionalization of biographical studies as an independent scientific discipline with its own theoretical foundation and methodological apparatus.

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