Pidgin as the style in Russian prose of Harbin ('Gamblers' by P.V. Shkurkin)

The article presents a linguopoetic analysis of ethnographic short stories which compiled the cycle “Gamblers” (1926) by the Russian writer of the Harbin emigration P.V. Shkurkin. The Far Eastern Russian-Chinese pidgin is one of the brightest and richest pidgin branches of the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, widespread in the cultural and commercial exchanges. As a sinologist, Shkurkin actively used pidginized vocabulary instead of Russian equivalent words and phrases in “Gamblers”. The subject of this study is the Far Eastern Russian-Chinese pidgin in “Gamblers” as the characteristic of the ethnoculture of the Chinese-Russian border zone. The work also researches the vocabulary that reflected the impressions of Chinese about Russians. Shkurkin’s narrative style is characterized by the combination of pidgin and Chinese phraseological units. In addition, the author of “Gamblers” resorted to vocabulary of European languages which is specific to the Chinese population of the 1910–1920s. It is shown that in the Shkurkin’s short stories the language image is created. It is proved that pidgin is relevant to ethnographic prose, the image of the speech culture of the Chinese and Russian emigrants. The motivated use of pidgin by Shkurkin in the combination with other narrative lexical tricks contributed to the creation of a real appearance of China in the first decades of the 20th century.