China in B. Poplavsky’s Poem Poetry

The Russian poets’ appeal to Chinese culture is a topic that has not been sufficiently studied, which is caused by several reasons: the complexity of interpreting Chinese realities, the peculiarities of their functioning in Russian texts, the correlation of the analyzed text with the ‘eastern’ extra-textual historical and geographical reality. Emigrant poetry also remains poorly studied. The aim of this study was to examine the Chinese text in B. Poplavsky’s poem Poetry (1925). The authors resort to mutual reception, exploring the vision of the cultural features of the Russian text in the translation of B. Poplavsky’s poem into Chinese, made by Wang Jianzhao (汪剑钊 Wāngjiànzhāo) – “诗” (shī, Poetry). The following conclusions were made as a result of the study: the identified Chinese images and symbols in B. Poplavsky’s poem Poetry go back to the mythology and philosophy of China. In particular, the poet borrowed the image of a hare from the cycle of myths about the shooter I. The worldview of the lyrical hero of B. Poplavsky’s poem is close to the philosophy of Zhuang Tzu, who claimed that reality is an illusion of what is happening. The distinctly sounding theme of the Chinese Nothing, an unusual peace symbolizing death, contrary to Russian peace, which canonically meaning eternal life, runs through the entire text of the poem.