THE FORGOTTEN WAR: WORKS BY N. A. LUKHMANOVA ABOUT MANCHURIA

Abstract

Nadezhda Lukhmanova (1841–1907) was a novelist, playwright, publicist, lecturer. Today her name is almost forgotten, but at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries she was well-known throughout Russia: her artistic and dramatic works were widely in demand, she gave lectures in the capital and abroad, worked as a journalist in the leading St. Petersburg newspapers. At the age of 62, she took part in the Russian-Japanese war as a nurse of the Red Cross and war correspondent (Peterburgskaia gazeta, Yuzhniy Krai). During her stay in the war and later in Japan, Lukhmanova wrote not only travel notes and articles for newspapers, but also short plays, stories based on real events (Shaman, Black stripe, Tree in the Palace of Chizakuin, Li-Tun-Chi), stylization of Chinese and Japanese fairy tales (The Only Language Clear for a Woman, Human Soul, Typhoon, Golden Fox). The writer raised a variety of topics: the place and role of women in the war, the organization of hospitals, unjustified victims of war and the problem of moral choice, as well as ethnographic sketches devoted to the traditions and mode of life of Manchuria and Japan. And if its early records resemble ethnographic sketches, filled with wariness towards the local population and a lack of understanding of Chinese customs, then later, in fairy tales and diary sketches, the sense of guilt before the Chinese people for the bloody slaughter taking place on their land becomes more clearly apparent. The works of the writer were undeservedly forgotten for more than a hundred years and are just beginning their return to literary memory.