Lu Xun (1881 - 1936) was a Chinese short story writer, essayist, poet, translator and literary critic, widely regarded as the founder of modern Chinese literature. [1] Writing under a pen name adopted from his mother's family, he abandoned medical training in Japan to attack what he saw as the spiritual sickness of Chinese society, producing in "A Madman's Diary" the first major work of fiction in the modern vernacular language. [2] His stories and polemical essays made him the leading literary voice of the May Fourth Movement.
Early life and education
Lu Xun was born Zhou Shuren on 25 September 1881 in Shaoxing, Zhejiang province, into a scholar-gentry family in decline. [1] His grandfather was imprisoned for examination fraud and his father died after a long illness treated by traditional practitioners, experiences that left him with a lasting distrust of both the classical establishment and traditional medicine.
He studied at a naval academy and a school of mining and railways in Nanjing, then travelled to Japan in 1902 on a government scholarship, attending the Kobun Institute and afterwards the Sendai Medical College. [2] He later described abandoning medicine after seeing a lantern slide of Chinese onlookers watching passively as a countryman was executed, concluding that the more urgent task was to change his compatriots' minds rather than their bodies.
Fiction and the May Fourth Movement
Returning to China, he taught and worked for the Ministry of Education before publishing "A Madman's Diary" in the journal New Youth in 1918. [3] Framed as the journal of a man convinced his neighbours intend to eat him, the story presented Confucian morality as a system of cannibalism and was the first significant piece of fiction written in baihua, the modern spoken vernacular.
"The True Story of Ah Q" (1921-22) followed, its title character a poor labourer who reinterprets every humiliation as a spiritual victory. [1] The story was read as a portrait of national self-deception and became one of the most discussed works in twentieth-century Chinese letters. These and other pieces were collected in Call to Arms and Wandering, alongside the prose poems of Wild Grass.
Essays, teaching and politics
From the mid-1920s Lu Xun wrote comparatively little fiction and concentrated on the zawen, a short, sharply polemical essay form he made his own. [2] He taught at Peking University, Xiamen University and Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, and translated extensively from Russian, Japanese and European literature, promoting Soviet writing and the modern woodcut movement among young Chinese artists.
Political repression under the Nationalist government pushed him towards the left, and in 1930 he became a leading figure in the League of Left-Wing Writers in Shanghai, though he never joined the Communist Party and resisted attempts to subordinate literature to party direction. [3] He died of tuberculosis in Shanghai on 19 October 1936.
Legacy
Mao Zedong praised Lu Xun as a commander of China's cultural revolution, and his work was made a fixture of school curricula in the People's Republic, a canonisation that has sometimes flattened the scepticism at the heart of his writing. [1] He was later named among the figures honoured for outstanding contributions to the founding of New China. Museums in Shanghai, Beijing and Shaoxing are devoted to him, and his stories remain central to the study of modern Chinese literature worldwide. [4]
