| Volume 5, Number 2, April 2008 |
The Awkward and Helpless Contemporary National Art Inundated by Globalisation and Pluralism
by 林木 Lin Mu
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Silent God and Attentively Listening Sisyphus
by 曾园 Zeng Yuan |
FROM the late nineteenth century onward, the Chinese, invaded and defeated due to lagging behind, have vented all their anger and frustration onto their own national culture, giving rise to the Westernisation Movement, Reform of 1898, New Culture Movement of
4 May and "Total Westernisation". All these move-ments
and campaigns took criticising national culture as their foundation and learning from the Western culture as their crucial task. Dr. Sun Yat-sen's Three Principles of the People ensued which drew on China and the West, but pure Western-bred Marx's Communism took the upper hand. These movements and ideology, whose rights and wrongs are not within the coverage of this article to evaluate, have led to the ruinous decline of national culture, but the most devastating and annihilating destruction un- precedentedly done to national culture came from the masterpiece of Mao Zedong, the self-prided...
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IN THE ERA of the planned economy, writing used to be a profession that deserved to be sought after. Although in the works of contemporary Chinese literature we can no longer find any reason that makes this profession attractive, still we can find the explanation for such an attraction in Russian writer Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita. In Part One, Chapter Five of the novel, with the title There were doings at the House of Griboedov, it is written: “In Moscow everyone looks forward to dining in Massolit (a writers' association), because Massolit had settled itself at Griboedov's in the best and coziest way imaginable.” “[…] and a Massolit membership card, brown, smelling of costly leather, with a wide gold border, is a card known to all Moscow.” As long as you have a membership card, you can order perch, starling, the fillets of thrush, quail à la génoise, etc. at surprisingly low prices...
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| Issue 5.2 |
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Elections
in Russian Society
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