Deconstruction of V. Mayakovsky’s satirical play “The Bedbug” in a romantic-utopian and a postmodern version in Chinese reception

Abstract

The study aims to identify the influence of V. Mayakovsky’s satire on Chinese drama. The paper examines the works of Chinese authors created under the influence of V. Mayakovsky’s satirical play “The Bedbug”. In Tian Han’s play “The Ballad of the Ming Tombs Reservoir” and in Jin Shan’s eponymous film, the idea of moving into the future determines the plot and the compositional structure. Meng Jinghui’s drama “The Bedbug” (the 2000, 2013 and 2017 productions) repeats the main plot of V. Mayakovsky’s play and retains many lines from the original work. This is the first staging of Mayakovsky’s play in China. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that Mayakovsky’s influence on Chinese drama is for the first time being considered from the cultural and historical perspective and reflects the dynamics of perception of Mayakovsky’s satire in China starting with a romantic-utopian view, associated with the concept of the “Great Leap Forward” (Tian Han), to a postmodern view (Meng Jinghui). The study of the Chinese-language material on the reception of Mayakovsky’s satire, which remains unexplored in Russia, will make it possible to expand the understanding of the attitude to the creative work of the Russian futurist poet and playwright abroad not only among literary scholars, but also the reading public. The study found that the satirical comedy by the Russian poet of the turn of the 19th-20th centuries in the deconstructed versions reflects the problems of the formation of Chinese society in the 20th-21st centuries.