Mei Lanfang in Moscow, 1935: Familiar, Unfamiliar, Defamiliar by Haun Saussy Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, vol. 18, no. 1 (Spring 2006), pp. 8-29

Mei Lanfang arrived with his opera troupe in Moscow in March, 1935, at a critical moment for Soviet art and theater: the beginnings of the imposition of an orthodoxy of "socialist realism" and the condemnation of such avant-garde movements as Formalism and Futurism. The reactions of the Soviet theater intelligentsia to Mei's performances, recorded at the time, show that their interpretation of Chinese theater made of it a covert means of defending such Formalist ideas as "defamiliarization" and the autonomy of art. Bertolt Brecht's theory of the "alienation-effect" in performance, developed at this moment, draws on both Mei's example and the Formalist precedent.

The Russian interpretation of Mei as a Formalist artist--or at least as Formalism's happiest example--pairs strangely with the critique of classical Chinese theater in China some two decades before Mei's voyage to Moscow. That critique had condemned the classical theater as a relic of an earlier stage of literary evolution. Classical theater was branded as being, among other sins, "formalist," that is, of failing to imitate prosaic reality as a proper modern genre of art should. The very techniques that so impressed Russian audiences by their non-representational modernity had been ridiculed by Chinese modernists for their failure to resemble real life.

This conflict of interpretations suggests the need for a history of the concept of modernity, a teleological concept that is all too easy to confuse with the particular ends to which it is harnessed.