RE-IMAGINING THE RUSSO-JAPANESE WAR
John W. Steinberg, "Was the Russo-Japanese War World War Zero?" An introductory essay
Rosamund Bartlett, “Japonisme and Japanophobia: The Russo-Japanese War in Russian Cultural Consciousness”
Few people in Russia expected war to break out with Japan in 1904, and even fewer understood why there should be military hostilities in such a remote part of their empire. Nevertheless, the surprise midnight attack on the Russian naval squadron in Port Arthur unleashed a torrent of patriotic feeling against Japan. Right-wing newspapers vilified Asian perfidy and noisy demonstrations were held in all major cities. Loyal subjects took to the streets with portraits of the tsar, and audiences in theaters all over Russia demanded that the national anthem be played. At a performance of Rigoletto at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow during Shrovetide, for example, the national anthem was played as many as three times by popular consent even before the curtain was raised, and a further three times before the commencement of the final act. The Russo-Japanese War indeed made a huge impact on Russian society. Placing the conflict in the context of Russia’s aggressive colonialist expansion in the Far East in the late nineteenth century, this article will examine some of the ways in which the war manifested itself in the nation’s cultural consciousness--from the dying Chekhov’s quixotic plan to serve as a doctor on the front, to the venerable Tolstoy's typically outspoken castigation of the havoc and carnage caused by the “cancer of imperialism.”
Naoko Shimazu, “Patriotic and Despondent: Japanese Society at War, 1904-5”
How did the Japanese public respond to the outbreak of the war in 1904? The imminent prospect of a war against Russia ignited a fierce domestic debate, splitting the country into prowar and antiwar factions. As in any society at war, Japanese society similarly revealed an uneasy mixture of conflicting emotions. On the one hand, the Japanese felt proud and patriotic as an Asian nation fighting against a European enemy. Victories were celebrated in almost every municipality throughout Japan by lantern parades, which became a regular feature of life in wartime Japan. In popular visual culture, “war” became the theme of the year, as magic lantern shows, panoramas, cinematography, photography, and woodblock prints all played an important role in constructing “images of war” for the Japanese public behind the lines. However, an uneasy relationship existed between the state and the people over expressions of wartime patriotism, as the state was apprehensive of excessive “uncivilized” behavior of the people. Moreover, the enormous socioeconomic costs of the war placed an intolerable burden on the lives of people, particularly the poor, whose principal breadwinners were sent to death on battlefield. The war in Japan concluded with the outbreak of civil disorder in the Hibiya Riots of September 1905, when the war-weary people vented their anger at the “unfair” peace terms of the Treaty of Portsmouth. This paper provides a brief introduction to wartime Japanese culture, in view of the social realities of wartime society.
David Crowley, “Seeing Japan, Imagining Poland: Polish Art and the Russo-Japanese War’
When, in the early years of the twentieth-century, Russia and Japan moved towards war, Polish hopes were raised that the brother “David” would fatally wound the Russian Goliath. Living under imperial rule and subject to vigorous campaigns of Russification, nationalist Poles took the view that the enemy’s enemy should become their friend. Missions were dispatched to Tokyo to secure support for the struggle to shake Poland free of the Romanovs. Unsuccessful, these initiatives might seem little more than a footnote in the history of diplomacy and conflict. However, the distant thunder of the war off Port Arthur and the Tsushima Straits was keenly heard in Polish culture. For Polish society--deprived of sovereign political institutions--culture was politics. Paintings, buildings, and poems were judged according to a vigorously maintained national index. It is not surprising, then, that “Japonisme”--a pan-European fashion--carried a particular political charge in this particular context. As this article will show, prominent artists, collectors, and writers used symbols of Japan to comment on the state of Poland. In Krakow, Feliks “Mangha” Jasienski walked in the city in the armor of a samurai warrior, and a local monument to Polish insurgency was represented by Stanislaw Wyspianski in a famous drawing cycle as Mount Fuji. The insistent and in many ways eclectic Orientalism of Polish culture under Russian rule appears to stretch the connections drawn by Said and others between Orientalism and empire. According to her Polish devotees, the source of Japan’s power of resistance lay not in her imperial social order but in her desirable alterity.
David Wolff, "Cultural and Social History on Total War's Global Battlefield" A commentary
David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, "Rewriting the Russo-Japanese War: A Centenary Retrospective" An historiographic essay
ARTICLE
Ilya Vinitsky, “Table Talks: The Spiritualist Controversy of the 1870s and Dostoevsky”
The 1850s through the 1870s, known in Russia as the Age of Realism, dominated by materialist and positivist tendencies, was also a time that saw the flourishing of various spiritualist and mystical circles, opposed to both materialism and the official Church. This spiritualist trend, however, is generally considered by literary scholars to be archaic, marginal, or peripheral in relation to the fundamental cultural issues of the time. Nevertheless, closer investigation shows that the role of the spiritualist trend in the ideological and social life of the “positivist” age was significant. One of the central issues of the time concerned the reality of the soul, its dependence on the body (matter), the means of acquiring knowledge about it, and the possibility of its existence after death. Physicists, physiologists, theologians, mystics, and, of course, writers took part in this debate. These intense and passionate polemics about the soul were in essence a battle among various ideological powers for the souls of contemporaries, who were seeking someone to believe, something to have faith in. The attempt of spiritualists to “resolve” this debate by radical means--summoning and interrogating the dead--created a fascinating and ideologically rich public scandal. The present article deals with a discussion of one scandalous episode that took place during the “spiritualist season” of 1875-76: one that illustrates the attitude of certain Russian writers toward Modern Spiritualism. I am interested in the immediate reactions of the authors who gather this one night in the drawing-room--Nikolai Vagner, Petr Boborykin, Nikolai Leskov, and Fedor Dostoevsky. These reactions, as I show, not only represent various points of view on the life of the soul that are typical of the ideological battles of the time, but also reveal the various psycho-metaphysical dominants of the work of the authors being examined.