Lu Xun's Life and Intellectual Development
- Early Life
- born in Shaoxing in 1881 into a gentry family that had seen
better days
- educated in traditional manner, yet permitted by relatively
liberal adults to read non-conventional texts, including yeshi,
novels, Shanhai jing, etc.
- relatively happy childhood filled with play, storytelling,
and fantasy
- two traumatic events in the period: (a) in 1893 grandfather
arrested on corruption charges and the family descends further
into decline; (b) in 1896 father dies, Lu Xun later believes
because of quack Chinese medicine
- Science and Evolutionism (1898-1906)
- takes the "unorthodox" road and studies in Nanjing
westernized schools
- first study of Western subjects, including the sciences
- reads Liang Qichao and Yan Fu and other late Qing reformists
and nationalists
- earns a scholarship to study in Japan, first at a language
prep school, then studies medicine at Sendai University
- begins writing career with classical essays on science and
other subjects, including "Shibada zhi hun" (Soul of
Sparta, 1903), a treatise on the discovery of radium, and a piece
on Chinese geology
- Subjective Idealism (1906-09)
- slide viewing incident causes him to quite medical studies
and pursue literature
- tries to begin literary career by founding a journal (Xinsheng),
but it fails, and through translation of East European writers
(Yuwai xiaoshuo ji), which also does not sell
- classical essays: "Moluo shi li shuo" (On the Power
of Mara Poetry, 1908); "Wenhua pianzhi lun" (On cultural
aberration, 1907) show a strong shift toward subjective idealism
- but he continues to write favorably of sciene and evolution,
as in "Ren zhi lishi" (The history of man) and "Kexue
shi jiaopian" (Lessons on the history of science)
- Interim (1909-1918)
- returns to China to teach in Hangzhou and Shaoxing
- then moves to Nanking and Peking where he took up jobs in
the Ministry of Education
- did scholarship on traditional fiction, Xi Kang, stone inscriptions
- wrote first short story "Huai jiu" (Reminiscence),
in classical language
- May Fourth Iconoclasm (1918-23)
- becomes of leading member of the progressive intellectuals
who published in New Youth and taught at Peking University
- writes two collections of short stories (Nahan, and
Panghuang), collection of prose poems
- as well as many essays on a variety of cultural subjects
- obviously his period of greatest creativity
- Period of Disillusionment (1924-1926)
- continues to teach at Beida and Beijing Women's Normal College,
as well as hold his position in the Ministry of Education
- embroiled in conflicts at Women's Normal and with the conservative
members of the Xiandai pinglun and Crescent Moon societies
- flees Beijing because of warlord troubles
- works include stories in Panghuang, prose poems in
Yecao, historical tales in Gushi xinbian, autobiographical
essays in Zhaohua xishi, and many essays
- Transition to the Left (1927-30)
- began to get interested in Marxist writings and in particular
Marxist literary criticism (translates Plekhanov)
- attacked in the Revolutionary Literature debate (1928)
- vacillates between between different views of the role of
literature in a revolutionary period
- Committed Leftist (1930-36)
- lives in Shanghai with common-in-law wife, Xu Guangping
- figurehead leader of the League of Left-wing Writers
- wrote primarily in the polemical zawen essay form,
attacking the Nationalists, imperialism, conservative scholars...
- "The Making of a Chinese Gorki"
- following his death in 1936, Lu Xun was coopted by the CCP
and gradually transformed into a Chinese Gorki
- in the Cultural Revolution, Lu Xun was used by the leftist
Gang of Four as an icon of an unbending revolutionary spirit
- following the Cultural Revolution, he was transformed into
a humanist and a modernist
