In response to the calling of his times , Lu Xun abandoned medicine to pursue writing, and became a great litterateur in modern China. Lu Xun’s works, such as Call to Arms and Wandering, have been considered an encyclopedia of Chinese society. Lu Xun felt the need to change the mindset of the people and social system. He eventually became a notable contemporary ideologist and revolutionist, as well as an enduring literary fighter.
Background
Lu Xun was one of the major Chinese writers of the 20th century. Considered by many to be the leading figure of modern Chinese literature, he wrote in Vernacular Chinese as well as Classical Chinese. Lu Xun was a fiction writer, editor, translator, critic, essayist and poet. In the 1930s he became the titular head of the Chinese League of the Left-Wing Writers in Shanghai.
Lu Xun's works exerted a very substantial influence after the May Fourth Movement to such a point that he was highly acclaimed by the Communist regime after 1949. Mao Zedong himself was a lifelong admirer of Lu Xun's works. Though sympathetic to communist ideas, Lu Xun never actually joined the Chinese Communist Party. Like many leaders of the May Fourth Movement, he was primarily a leftist and liberal.
The Shaoxing Zhou family was very well-educated, and his paternal grandfather Zhou Fuqing held posts in the Hanlin Academy; Zhou's mother, née Lu, taught herself to read. However, after a case of bribery was exposed – in which Zhou Fuqing tried to procure an office for his son, Lu Xun's father, Zhou Boyi – the family fortunes declined. Zhou Fuqing was arrested and almost beheaded. Meanwhile, a young Zhou Shuren was brought up by an elderly servant Ah Chang, whom he called Chang Ma; one of Lu Xun's favorite childhood books was the Classic of Mountains and Seas.
His father's chronic illness and eventual death during Lu Xun's adolescence, apparently from tuberculosis, persuaded Zhou to study medicine. Distrusting traditional Chinese medicine, he went abroad to pursue a Western medical degree at Sendai Medical Academy (now medical school of Tohoku University) in Sendai, Japan, in 1904.
By 1936, Lu Xun's lungs had been greatly weakened by tuberculosis. He was a chronic smoker. In March of that year, he was stricken with bronchitic asthma and a fever. The treatment for this involved draining 300 grams of fluid in the lungs through puncture. From June to August, he was again sick, and his weight dropped to only 83 pounds. He recovered some, and wrote two essays in the fall reflecting on mortality. These included "Death", and "This Too Is Life". At 3:30 am on the morning of October 18, the author woke with great difficulty breathing. Dr. Sudo, his physician, was summoned, and Lu Xun took injections to relieve the pain. His wife was with him throughout that night, but Lu Xun was found without a pulse at 5:11 am the next morning, October 19. His remains were interred in a mausoleum within Lu Xun Park in Shanghai. Mao Zedong made the calligraphic inscription above his tomb. He was survived by his son, Zhou Haiying. He was also posthumously made a member of the Communist Party for his contributions to the May Fourth Movement.
STYLE AND THOUGHT
Lu Xun was a versatile writer. He wrote using both traditional Chinese conventions and 19th century European literary forms. His style has been described in equally broad terms, conveying both "sympathetic engagement" and "ironic detachment" at different moments.
His essays are often very incisive in his societal commentary, and in his stories his mastery of the vernacular language and tone make some of his literary works (like A Q Zhengzhuan, 阿Q正傳, The True Story of Ah Q) very hard to convey through translation. In them, he frequently treads a fine line between criticizing the follies of his characters and sympathizing with those very follies. Lu Xun is a master of irony (as can been seen in The True Story of Ah Q) and yet can write impressively direct with simple engagement (My Old Home, A Little Incident).
Lu Xun is typically regarded by Mao Zedong as the most influential Chinese writer who was associated with the May Fourth Movement. He produced harsh criticism of social problems in China, particularly in his analysis of the "Chinese national character". He was sometimes called a "champion of common humanity."
Lu Xun felt that the 1911 Xinhai Revolution had been a failure. In 1925 he opined, "I feel the so-called Republic of China has ceased to exist. I feel that, before the revolution, I was a slave, but shortly after the revolution, I have been cheated by slaves and have become their slave." He even recommended that his readers heed the critique of Chinese culture in Chinese Characteristics, by the missionary writer Arthur Smith. His disillusionment with politics led him to conclude in 1927 that "revolutionary literature" alone could not bring about radical change. Rather, "revolutionary men" needed to lead a revolution using force. In the end, he had a profound disappointment with the new Nationalist government, which he viewed as ineffective and even harmful to China.
Career
Returning to China in 1909, Lu Xun began teaching in the Zhejiang Secondary Normal School, the predecessor of Hangzhou High School, Shaoxing Chinese-Western School Middle school of Shaojun , the predecessor of Shaoxing №1 High School) in his hometown. With the establishment of the republic, he took a post in the Ministry of Education in Nanjing and moved with the Republican Government to Beijing, where he began to write. Lu Xun remained at the Ministry of Education until 1926 becoming first a section head and then Assistant Secretary. In 1920, encouraged by some fellow associates, he took up part-time teaching positions at the Peking University and Peking Women's Teachers College.
In May 1918, Lu Xun used this pen name for the first time and published the first major baihua short story, Kuangren Riji. He chose the surname Lu as it was his mother's maiden family name. Partly inspired by the Gogol short story, it was a scathing criticism of outdated Chinese traditions and feudalism which was metaphorically 'gnawing' at the Chinese like cannibalism. It immediately established him as one of the most influential writers of his day.
Another of his well-known longer stories, The True Story of Ah Q, was published in installments from 1921 to 1922. The latter would become his most famous work. Both works were included in his first short story collection Na Han or Call to Arms, published in 1923.
Between 1924 to 1926, Lu wrote his essays of ironic reminiscences in Zhaohua Xishi, published 1928, as well as the prose poem collection Ye Cao. Lu Xun also wrote many of the stories to be published in his second short story collection Pang Huang in 1926. Becoming increasingly estranged with his brother Zuoren, the stories are typically more melancholic than in his earlier collection. From 1926, after the March 18 Massacre, for supporting the students' protests which led to the incident, he went on an imposed exile to Xiamen, Amoy University, then to Zhongshan University at Guangzhou with his student and lover Xu Guangping.
From 1927 to his death, Lu Xun shifted to the more liberal city of Shanghai, where, at the instigation of the Chinese Communist Party, he co-founded the League of Left-Wing Writers. When it became apparent, however, that he would have little influence in the organization, he became disillusioned with its demands for literature to serve politics.
Most of his essays date from this last period. Xu Guangping gave birth to a son, Haiying, on September 27, 1929. She was in labor with the baby for 27 hours. The child's name meant simply "Shanghai infant". His parents chose the name thinking that he could change it himself later, but he never did so. In 1930 Lu Xun's Zhongguo Xiaoshuo Shilue was published. It is a comprehensive overview of history of Chinese fiction up till that time, drawn from Lu Xun's own lectures delivered at Peking University and would become one of the landmark books of Chinese literary criticism in the twentieth-century.
His other important works include volumes of translations — notably from Russian (he particularly admired Nikolai Gogol and made a translation of Dead Souls, and his own first story's title is inspired by a work of Gogol) — discursive writings like Re Fen, and many other works such as prose essays, which number around 20 volumes or more. As a left-wing writer, Lu played an important role in the history of Chinese literature. His books were and remain highly influential and popular even today. Lu Xun's works also appear in high school textbooks in Japan. He is known to Japanese by the name .
Lu Xun was the editor of several left-wing magazines such as New Youth and Sprouts. Because of his leanings, and of the role his works played in the subsequent history of the People's Republic of China, Lu Xun's works were banned in Taiwan until the late 1980s. He was among the early supporters of the Esperanto movement in China.
Views
Zhu Shuren, who wrote as Lu Xun, was the most significant literary figure of twentieth-century China. His stylistically brilliant stories and essayswere calculated to arouse China from the apathy, self-deception and inhumanity of a corrupt and exhausted tradition and to promote the development of a free, rational and mature society. His hope for a spiritual transformation was based on his reading of philosophy as well as history and literature.
With ‘Diary of a madman’ (1918), in the journal New Youth, he inaugurated Western fiction in China. From the time of the May Fourth Movement his individualism and renunciation of the past gave modernizing focus to the political and literary movements of the time. His stories condensed the ills of China into haunting images.
His genius for biting humour, undeceived vision, sceptical distance, passionate anger and terse exposition provided a complex literary texture to express his moral and social sensibility.
When he turned from stories to concentrate his main literary efforts on essays after 1926, the same gifts of style, sensibility and moral courage made
him Chinas leading commentator on contemporary affairs. His early outrage at the effects of Chinese family, language, morality, superstition and self-deceiving smugness was turned against the brutality, censorship and denial of individual rights under Guomindang rule. He was stunned by the violent Guomindang purge of Communists in 1927, and by 1929 he came to see the Communists as the only hope for Chinese renewal.
Although he read Marxist writings with great intensity and aligned himself with the Party, he never became a Party member. He remained individual and undisciplined, looking for a transformation of values at the heart of renewal, arguing for individual rights and free expression. He pursued the uneasy task of retaining Nietzschean individualism within Marxist social analysis.
His aesthetics rejected propaganda and slogans as art, along with art divorced from a social function. Art was directly perceived as beautiful, while conveying truth. Lu Xun’s ability to explore a sick society, to capture it in powerful symbols, to write with searing honesty, gave him great moral prestige with generations of intellectuals, including philosophers.
More systematic thinkers have benefited from his moral intelligence, his integrity and his social vision. Liberal critics valued these characteristics from the beginning. Communist critics were hostile and dimissive until he became an ally.
After his death they praised him as a hero.
Lu Xun was also a poet, a major historian of Chinese literature, a retriever of ancient tales, a collector of stone rubbings, and a collector and promoter of woodblock printing and other popular art.