Lu Xun (1881 -1936) was a great modern
Chinese man of letters, thinker and revolutionary, and also the founder of
modern literature in China.
Lu Xun was born in Shaoxing, in Zhejiang
province, into an impoverished but educated gentry family. He received a
traditional education before he attended Jiangnan Naval Academy (1898-99) and
School of Railway and Mines (1899-1902) in Nanjing. In 1902 went to Japan where
he studied Japanese language and then medicine at Sendai Provincial Medical
School. In 1906 he dropped out of the school to devote himself entirely to
writing. He studied privately and returned in 1909 to China. In 1910-1911 he was
a teacher in Shaoxing. From 1912 to 1926 he held a post in the ministry of
education in Beijing. He was Chinese literature instructor at National Beijing
University (1920-26), and also taught at Xiamen (Amoy) University (1926) and
University of Canton (1927).
The literary style of modern Chinese fiction
was formed based on foreign fiction and the reformed traditional Chinese
storytelling scripts. Lu Xun was a great pioneer in this reform. A Madman's
Diary, a short story published in New Youth (a progressive journal of
that time) in May 1918, had epochal significance, marking the beginning of a
brand new literary era. This story attempts to expose the maladies of feudal
patriarchy and the feudal code ethics. However, in the novel, Lu Xun doesn't
describe the harms of feudal patriarchy and the oppression born by the madman in
detail, instead he points to the cruel nature of feudal ethics through
describing the mad man's eyes, his derangement and frenzied words. A Madman's
Diary denounces the cannibalistic ethics of feudal society with a most
sobering realistic spirit. Artistically, this novel is shaded with subtle
symbolism. Before A Madman's Diary was published, poetry and prose
written in the vernacular had already appeared. But it was A Madman's
Diary that contained true revolutionary thought and seamlessly blended a
thoroughly anti-feudal spirit and new art forms. A Madman's Diary is
regarded as the first piece of modern Chinese fiction.
Lu Xun's short stories are brought together
in two collections -- Call to Arms and Wandering. Call to
Arms includes 14 works written between1918 and 1922. Works in this
collection were marked by the strong patriotic and revolutionary passion that
prevailed in China during the May 4th Movement. Wandering is made up of
11 stories, reflecting Lu Xun's spiritual depression in the mid-1920s and his
unending search for the truth. Lu Xun cares about peasants' lives very much.
Many stories in Call to Arms and Wandering truthfully depict
peasants' tragic lives after the Revolution of 1911.
The True Story of Ah Q, which is included in Call to Arms, is Lu Xun's most representative
work. The story is set in Chinese society around the Revolution of 1911. The
novel, through describing Ah Q's tragic story of oppression, trying to resist
oppression and being killed by the reactionary forces, reveals the class
confrontations in the rural areas at that time and criticizes the bourgeoisie's
tyranny to and alienation from the masses in leading the 1911
Revolution.
Kong Yiji
describes an intellect inflicted by the imperial examination system. The story
is written with a laconic and simple structure and in concise language. It
castigates the evil of the examination system in trampling and destroying
people's lives.
Hometown
is a short story
known to every household in China. Through the author's first-person witnessing, of
especially boyhood friend Runtu's experience, the story exposes, before reader's eyes,
a picture of the tragic lives led by Chinese peasants in the 1920s. The
story points to the countless tragedies peasants were forced to endure due to
hunger, too many children, heavy taxes, wars, bandits, corrupt officials and cruel
landlords. The author's sympathy for and concern about the benumbed peasants and
their sufferings has stirred the readers' hearts generation after generation
of readers' hearts.
By learning from the concise, flexible
and varied structure of foreign fiction, Lu Xun broke away from the exclusive
form of traditional Chinese fiction, which had been written only in chapters,
to create a new form for modern Chinese fiction. Therefore, Lu Xun is regarsed
as the father of the modem Chinese fiction.
Lu Xun wrote stories, poetry, essays,
literary criticism and literary history, most of which reflected the lives of
Chinese people in the early 20th century. Some of his works are:
Gu Shi Xin Bian (Old Tales Retold)
Na Han (Call to Arms)
Pang Huang (Wandering)
Ye Cao (Wild Grass)
A Madman's Diary (1918)
Kong Yi Ji (1919)
Medicine (1919)
A Small Incident (1920)
Storm in a Teacup (1920)
The Story of Hair (1920)
Tomorrow (1920)
My Old Home (1921)
The True Story of Ah Q (1921)
Double Fifth Festival (1922)
Village Opera (1922)
The White Light (1922)