Winner, 2022 AATSEEL Best Book in Literary Studies, American Association of Teachers of Slavic and European Languages

Honorable Mention, 2022 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies, Modern Language Association

Following the failure of communist revolutions in Europe, in the 1920s the Soviet Union turned its attention to fostering anticolonial uprisings in Asia. China, divided politically between rival military factions and dominated economically by imperial powers, emerged as the Comintern’s prime target. At the same time, a host of prominent figures in Soviet literature, film, and theater traveled to China, met with Chinese students in Moscow, and placed contemporary China on the new Soviet stage. They sought to reimagine the relationship with China in the terms of socialist internationalism—and, in the process, determine how internationalism was supposed to look and feel in practice.

Internationalist Aesthetics offers a groundbreaking account of the crucial role that China played in the early Soviet cultural imagination. Edward Tyerman tracks how China became the key site for Soviet debates over how the political project of socialist internationalism should be mediated, represented, and produced. The central figure in this story, the avant-garde writer Sergei Tret’iakov, journeyed to Beijing in the 1920s and experimented with innovative documentary forms in an attempt to foster a new sense of connection between Chinese and Soviet citizens. Reading across genres and media from reportage and biography to ballet and documentary film, Tyerman shows how Soviet culture sought an aesthetics that could foster a sense of internationalist community. He reveals both the aspirations and the limitations of this project, illuminating a crucial chapter in Sino-Russian relations. Grounded in extensive sources in Russian and Chinese, this cultural history bridges Slavic and East Asian studies and offers new insight into the transnational dynamics that shaped socialist aesthetics and politics in both countries.

"Tyerman carve[s] out huge new areas of inquiry . . . The scholarship is fine-grained." - Times Literary Supplement

"Ambitious, complex, and skilfully executed, Tyerman’s study is a true journey of discovery." - Australian Book Review

"A phenomenal intellectual achievement . . . Internationalist Aesthetics is a staggeringly erudite, formidably argued and fundamentally important book." - Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema

"A timely interdisciplinary study . . . abounds in rich factual and theoretical interpretations." - Journal of Asian Studies

"Ground-breaking, erudite and sophisticated . . . an impressive example of scholarship that cuts across, and brings into conversation, multiple fields, disciplines, and intellectual and aesthetic debates to shed light on the significance and use of China in the formation of early Soviet revolutionary culture of the 1920s." - China Quarterly

"This masterfully curated tour of the many Chinas documented, imagined, and crafted by some of the most creative minds in the Soviet cultural milieu of the 1920s is a definitive treatment of a topic that so far has evaded systematic elucidation." - The Russian Review

"Internationalist Aestheticsis a well-crafted and insightful study that will inspire future scholarship." - Twentieth-Century China

"Original and highly revealing . . . [this book] represents a welcome addition to the study of Chinese-Russian cultural relations." - The Chinese Historical Review

"Ambitious, sophisticated, and wide-ranging." - Modern Language Review

"This is a very close textual analysis of important sources, some of which are not easily accessible, and
thus this study will be useful for those interested in these sources." - Pacific Affairs

"[A] remarkable book, the first of its kind in English . . . Tyerman’s splendidly detailed and yet very readable study deserves the attention of Sinologists as well as Slavists. It should find a place in many libraries." - Slavonic and East European Review