From June 25 to 27, 2026, a delegation of six faculty members from the School of Liberal Arts, Nanjing University visited Saint Petersburg to participate in the Twelfth International Conference on Issues of Far Eastern Literatures. Dedicated to the 130^th anniversary of the birth of Yu Dafu (1896-1945), the conference was co-organized by Saint Petersburg State University and Nanjing University, marking another milestone in the academic partnership between the two institutions.

The conference opened on the morning of June 25 in the Aula Magna of the Main Building of Saint Petersburg State University (hereinafter referred to as SPbSU). Professor Alexander Storozhuk of SPbSU served as chairman of the opening ceremony. Greetings were delivered by Professor Michail Piotrovsky, Dean of the Faculty of Asian and African Studies at SPbSU and General Director of the State Hermitage Museum. Professor Dong Xiao, Dean of the School of Liberal Arts at Nanjing University, addressed the assembly as the Chinese co-organizer, expressing the university’s commitment to fostering scholarly exchange between China and Russia. The opening ceremony was also attended by Ms. Zhang Xiaoqing, Deputy Consul General of China in Saint Petersburg and an alumna of Nanjing University.

Following the opening remarks, the plenary session featured four keynote speeches. Professor Alexey Rodionov of SPbSU delivered a talk on the translation and study of Yu Dafu’s prose in Russia. Professor Zhang Guangmang of Nanjing University then presented his keynote address, Desire, Redemption, and Self-Adjustment: Yu Dafu’s Novels and the Spiritual Growth of Modern Intellectuals. Zhang argued that Yu’s writing on desire is marked by a condition of “double alienation,” in which individual passion is placed under the intersecting oppressions of ethnicity, class, and gender. The theme of redemption in Yu’s novels, Zhang contended, often degenerates into a kind of self-destructive performance. In his later works, however, Yu Dafu gradually turned toward inner adjustment and trauma transformation, constructing a healing mechanism of what Zhang described as “geographical poetics” and “aesthetic sublimation.” This mental trajectory from the catharsis of desire to poetic adjustment, Zhang argued, offers contemporary readers inspiration for rebuilding what he called a “spiritual temple on the ruins of desire.” Two further keynotes were given by Professor Jasur Ziyamuhamedov of Tashkent State University of Oriental Studies and Professor Yamini Anish Shah of Somaiya Vidyavihar University in Mumbai. The plenary session was conducted in Russian, Chinese, and English with simultaneous interpretation.

The academic program was organized across five parallel panels. Panel One, titled Yu Dafu and His Contribution to Chinese Literature, served as the thematic core of the conference. During the second session of this panel, Professor Wang Binbin of Nanjing University delivered a paper titled Once Drunk, I Whipped My Famed Steed: On Yu Dafu’s Classical Poetry. Wang noted that Yu’s classical poetry is arguably superior even to his celebrated prose, with about six hundred poems extant in Zhan Yayuan’s annotated collection. Focusing on poems associated with wine, Wang offered detailed readings of poems embedded in Yu’s novel Sinking and challenged the conventional annotation of Yu’s poem To Lu Xun. Wang demonstrated that its opening line alludes not to Lu Xun’s native Shaoxing yellow wine or his story In the Tavern, but to a polemical exchange between Lu Xun and the Creation Society, thus reframing Yu’s classical poetry as a form of literary intervention engaged with the intellectual battles of its time.

In the same panel session, Dr. Liu Chao of Nanjing University presented Illness as Metaphor in Yu Dafu’s Short Stories and His Pondering over China’s Modern Experience. Drawing on Fredric Jameson’s concept of national allegory, Liu examined a series of stories in which protagonists suffer from tuberculosis while their psychologies grow ever more afflicted. Liu argued that Yu Dafu insightfully discerned the potential risks of scientism and materialism, casting doubt on wholesale Westernization and the Eurocentric mode of modernization, and instead envisioning what Liu described as pluralized modernities.

The third session of Panel One featured Dr. Gao Ziwen of Nanjing University, who spoke on The Practice of Positive Drama: The Contemporary Stage Adaptation of Yu Dafu’s Novels. Gao offered a markedly critical perspective, arguing that contemporary stage adaptations almost completely abandon the tragic elements of Yu’s original works and instead foreground the revolutionary spirit and intellectual responsibility. He traced this tendency to the concept of “positive drama” introduced from the Soviet Union in 1954, arguing that contemporary creators still operate under Red Era artistic concepts that treat propaganda and education as the core goal of adaptation.

Beyond Panel One, Professor Li Zhangbin of Nanjing University presented in Panel Three, which addressed trends in twentieth and twenty-first century Chinese literature. His paper, Narrative or Lyric: A Reassessment of Language and Genre in the Poetic Shift of 1990s Chinese Poetry, examined the shift from the lyric mode of the 1980s to the narrative mode of the 1990s. Li argued that the break was hasty and came at the cost of neglecting dimensions of poetic craft such as the capacity of language to evoke affective response through sound and rhythm. He challenged the “reductionist” linguistic outlook of the narrative turn, arguing that lyricism is not an outdated product of a bygone era but a core dynamic mechanism in the generation of poetic language.

Professor Dong Xiao, in addition to his role at the opening ceremony and his service as chair of the first panel session, delivered a paper in Panel Four on the significance of Nikolai Berdyaev’s work The Origins and Meaning of Russian Communism for China. Dong argued that Berdyaev’s analysis of the relationship between the communist movement and Russian history offers valuable insight for understanding China’s own communist movement, particularly its intrinsic links to the May Fourth New Culture Movement, Chinese national characteristics, and the developmental patterns of Chinese history.

The closing ceremony took place on the afternoon of June 27 in the Aula Magna. Professor Wang Binbin of Nanjing University and Professor Alexey Rodionov of SPbSU delivered closing remarks on behalf of their respective institutions. Both speakers reflected on the richness of the scholarly exchange and expressed the hope that the collaboration between the two universities should continue to be promoted.

The successful participation of the delegation reaffirmed the breadth and vitality of literary studies at Nanjing University and its presence in global conversations on Chinese literature. The theme of this year's conference was centered on Yu Dafu, a writer whose own works cross boundaries of genre, language and tradition, and it seemed especially fitting for an event that brought together scholars from China, Russia, Uzbekistan, India, Belarus and many other countries.

July 2, 2026