The fourth lecture was dedicated to one of the most scandalous and controversial works of Chinese fiction - "The Plum Branch in the Golden Vase", delivered by a lecturer, PhD student, Assistant Professor at the Institute of Asian and Transcultural Studies of Vilnius University. Balys Astrauskas.
"Plum Branch in a Golden Vase" by Jīn píng méi 金瓶梅 is a very large-scale, complex work, which is extraordinary not only in the context of Asian literature, but also in the context of world literature.
In the first part of the lecture, the speaker presented the interpretations of the title of the work and what meanings it conceals.
He then went on to explain why the novel has been criticised and why it has been controversial throughout the centuries. However, despite the criticism, it is an extremely profound and multidimensional work, which scholars classify as part of the customary genre (Chinese: Shìqíng xiǎoshuō 世情小说), which flourished in Europe in the nineteenth century, and which is the flagship of the Realist and Naturalist literary movements.
In China, a similar genre was already emerging in the early 17th century, represented by two novels: "The Plum Branch in the Golden Vase, which is considered to be the pioneer of the genre, and a second novel, The Dream of the Red Room. The latter is the artistic pinnacle of the Chinese customary novel genre.
B. Astrauskas went on to emphasise what is characteristic of the modern novel, what are its features and how the modern novel differs from traditional, older novels.
In this lecture, we also learnt about the three first modern (psychological) novels in the world and got an answer to the question why this novel is so important in the world context.
Jin Ping Mei is a psychological novel with an original plot, a complex narrative structure, well-developed protagonists and a clearly detailed social picture. The earliest known printed version is dated 1618 and may be the first edition of the novel.
The novel has been translated into Japanese and Korean. The first English translation appeared in 1939. David Tod Roy's English translation of The Plum in the Golden Vase, published between 1993 and 2013, is the most detailed (5 volumes, 3493 pages).
The speaker then discussed the authorship of the novel, which is shrouded in mystery. It is attributed to Lanling Xiaoxiao Sheng, a pseudonymous anonymous person.
However, despite the novel's scandalous characters and controversies, fans appreciated the work's polysemantic multi-layered nature, its masterly and meticulously thought-out plot full of intrigue and unexpected twists and turns, its meticulously developed characters and the anthropologically accurate relationships between them.
It is like an encyclopaedia novel, characterised by the depiction of all social classes, their manners and material culture, the portrayal of trade and economic relations, the workings of the courts and the police, religious practices and rituals, and, above all, it introduces the reader to the mindset and mentality of the period.
The plot of the novel, its structure and the main characters can be found on the Youtube channel https://youtu.be/FxeWivwobpg?si=GxhFu-IcKW9TCIal (in Lithuanian)