Rainer Grübel

• The article considers the circulation and the role of the motifs China, the Chinese man/woman and the Chinese as concepts of the other/strange(r), which negatively correspond to the concepts of the self in the work of the Russian poet, writer, artist and producer of performances Dmitrij Prigov. These phenomena and their historical development are of special interest in the present context of the Russian war against Ukraine, the Western sanctions against Russia and the growing political, economic and military approximation of Russia to China. In its analytic design the article discerns in Prigov’s China-text a broader geo-esthetical from a smaller geo-poetical horizon and distinguishes the theme- and sense-orientated phenomenon of stereotype, reducing (the concept of) a culture or a nation to special, often discrediting it, semantic features (as topoi), from the phenomenon of the imagotype, which is orientated to the poetical and/or esthetical construction of an artifact and relates the specialty of the other to certain sounds, intonations, colors, textures. Reconstructing the development of the motifs of China, the Chinese man/woman and the Chinese in Prigov’s China-text from the 1970s up to the posthumously in 2013 published novel “Katia, the Chinese”, the article shows that the evolution of the imagotypes and stereotypes of China, the Chinese man / woman and the Chinese as concepts of the other/alien is correlated with the development of the geopolitical relation of Russia and China.