The reception of Russian camp prose in contemporary Chinese literary studies

The article analyzes the reception of Russian camp prose in contemporary Chinese literary studies through the example of A.I. Solzhenitsyn, V.T. Shalamov, and S.D. Dovlatov. The relevance of the study lies in the fact that, despite more than forty years of attention to the Russian camp theme in Chinese academia, the degree to which these authors have been studied remains highly uneven, while a comparative understanding of the three lines of reception has not yet been sufficiently generalized. The purpose of the article is to identify the main patterns underlying the Chinese reception of Russian camp prose, to determine the differences in the degree of scholarly engagement with these writers, and to establish the factors shaping the scale and character of this process. The research material includes dissertations, peer-reviewed journal articles, and translated editions available in Chinese academic databases. The study employs historical-literary, comparative, reception-oriented, and bibliographical-descriptive methods. It is established that Solzhenitsyn has the most stable research tradition in China, whereas studies on Shalamov and Dovlatov remain relatively limited and have not developed into an academic tradition comparable in scale to that of Solzhenitsyn. The article shows that these differences concern not only the number of studies but also the nature of the research approaches applied to them: Solzhenitsyn has long been examined predominantly from socio-historical, religious, and anthropological perspectives; studies on Shalamov emphasize above all the humanistic dimension of his prose; attention to Dovlatov, in turn, is focused on marginality, irony, genre hybridity, and postmodern poetics. As a result, the article concludes that the translational accessibility of a text is one of the key conditions for an author’s inclusion in Chinese academic discourse and largely determines the intensity of subsequent scholarly research. At the same time, it establishes that over recent decades Chinese scholarship on Russian camp prose has moved from predominantly socio-political interest toward more complex and philologically nuanced forms of analysis. Further research may develop along several lines: a deeper study of the narrative poetics of Kolyma Stories, a systematic comparative analysis of the three writers, a stronger dialogue with international Slavic studies, and a further expansion of the translation base through the introduction of key Dovlatov texts, especially The Zone, into the Chinese literary and scholarly context.

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