Russian Perceptions of Japan and China in the Aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution: A Comparative Case Study of Boris Pil'niak's Travelogue
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article joins the debate on Russian national identity and the role of the Orient in its construction. It analyzes Boris Pil'niak's travelogues written in the mid-1920s from Japan and China. Pil'niak was one of the most widely read writers in post-revolutionary Russia and one of the first Soviet writers to travel to China and Japan. While explicitly refusing to identify himself with the Marxist-Leninist ideology, Pil'niak was sympathetic to the revolutionary cause and professed a nationalist version of Bolshevism. By focusing on the writings of one of the prominent writers of the early Soviet era, this article seeks to shed some new light on the role of Japan and China as “others” in Russian national identity in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution. The article critically examines and compares the two constructs. It argues that despite the seemingly internationalist nature of the narrative on China, Pil'niak reproduced the modernist hierarchy in the Russia/China nexus through a temporal difference between the two nations. Contrastingly, in the case of Japan, this article argues that Japan's modern features made it impossible for the author to deploy the modernist hierarchy and his attempt to narrate the difference between Russia and Japan forced him to identify the former with the West.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".