The visual construction of Vasily Eroshenko’s image in China: Media, memory, and “loneliness” through Chu Baoheng’s photography

Abstract This study examines how the blind Russian poet Vasily Eroshenko (1890–1952) was visually constructed in 1920s China through Chu Baoheng’s photography, transforming him from political exile to transcultural icon during the May Fourth Movement (1919–1924). Through formal visual analysis of six key photographs taken between 1921 and 1923, this research reveals how these images functioned simultaneously as documentary evidence, cultural allegory, and philosophical “metapictures” – images that reflect on the process of pictorial representation itself. The investigation proceeds through four analytical dimensions: the strategic framing of Eroshenko through translations and media following his 1921 expulsion from Japan; his photographic documentation at Stopani’s memorial in Shanghai as revolutionary allegory; his intimate portrayal in Zhou Zuoren’s traditional courtyard house and Beijing’s social spaces, revealing visual evidence of cultural integration and domestic harmony; and the iconic “poet on a donkey” image that crystallized the dialectical tension between these photographs of social belonging and the Zhou brothers’ textual accounts of “desert-like” loneliness. This contradiction illuminates May Fourth intellectuals’ complex negotiation between cosmopolitanism and nationalism. Eroshenko’s evolving portrayal from revolutionary exile to literati scholar reveals how transnational figures become screens for local intellectual projections about modernity. By examining how these photographs gained new significance across changing political contexts – particularly in Zhou Zuoren’s post-1949 reinterpretations – this study contributes to our understanding of visual media’s role in constructing cultural memory and articulating intellectual identity during China’s pivotal engagement with global modernity.