?
И всё же, почему Россия вызывает у нас ностальгию?
The current international socio-political situation in connection with Russia
sets up Japanese intellectuals and Japanese society as a whole for a memoirreflexive,
nostalgic tone. What is Russia and the Soviet Union in the eyes of
the Japanese? Domestic history of culture in the broadest sense — classical literature,
classical music, science, cinema, space, cuisine — all this is subjected
to a cursory, brief, but panoramic review by one of the Japanese intellectuals
of our time. The specificity of the Japanese view of Russia in comparison with
the perception of the West and America, of course, is not without subjectivity
and features inherent in the post-war generation, which the author honestly
admits. An example of the complex synthesis of Russia and Japan in one person
is the figure of the almost forgotten writer Oizumi Kokuseki (1893–1957), half
Japanese, half Russian: the proposed essay begins and ends with him.