THEATRICAL OBSERVATION IN SERGEI M. TRET'IAKOV'S CHZHUNGO

This close reading of Sergei M. Tret'iakov's reports on China in Chzhungo (1927, second edition 1930) analyses his future-oriented ethnography and his perspective of reversal that aims at the theatralisation of reality. He tried to integrate the effect of a dramatised trial into his judgmental, journalistic prose. Inspired by Chinese theatre as a source for avant-garde aesthetics, Tret'iakov presents China as a stage and likely borrows the idea of standardising new role models from Chinese theatre, which constitutes not only one of the shifts from old to new that he documents, but also an instrument and symbol of Tret'iakov's participant observation project. Oscillating between journalist and poet, Tret'iakov develops intergeneric journalism into a new form of literature.