Lu Xun's life story

Lu Xun, 188 1, was born in Shaoxing, Zhejiang. Shaoxing is a place with profound cultural traditions, and many scenic spots have been preserved, such as the tomb of Yu Xia, the ancient hero of water control, the remains left by Gou Jian, the modern heroine Qiu Jin, who died peacefully, and so on. There are various theatrical performances and legends among the people. There are two "ghosts" that villagers talk about the most: one is "the ghost of revenge, which is more beautiful and powerful than all other ghosts"-female hanging; The other is a sympathetic "impermanence", with a straw rope tied around his waist, sandals on his feet and a banana fan in his hand. Local traditions and folk culture deeply influenced Lu Xun's life.

Lu Xun showed a lively character from an early age. Because grandma's family is in the countryside, Lu Xun also has a group of peasant children, rowing small white boats together in the dim moonlight and heading for the theater; On the way home, I was hungry, so I "stole" beans from my field and cooked them. Lu Xun also discovered the infinite interest of nature in the back garden named "Hundred Herbs Garden": green vegetable beds, purple mulberries; Crickets play the piano and oil flies sing in a low voice; Polygonum multiflorum Thunb, eaten in human form, can live forever; The legend of "beautiful snake" with the head of a snake and the body of a snake ... It is this free childhood that develops and cultivates the creativity and imagination of the future writer Lu Xun.

At the age of 6, Lu Xun bid farewell to the Herbal Garden, went to "Three Ponds and a Moon", studied under Founder, and learned from the old gentleman Shou Jason Wu until he was 17 years old. Here, he is familiar with Confucian classics and widely reads miscellaneous books outside Confucianism after class: novels, unofficial history, notes ... not only paying attention to history and personnel, but also observing nature. This opened Lu Xun's vast spiritual space and laid a profound knowledge foundation for Lu Xun's later ideological and literary development.

Lu Xun's childhood also had a shadow: 13 years old, his grandfather was imprisoned for some reason and had to rely on his family to visit relatives; Later, my father was seriously ill, and family life was in trouble from a well-off society. As the eldest son, Lu Xun had to frequent pawnshops and pharmacies, and felt the indifference and snobbery of the society in the discrimination and insults of people around him. His father died early because of the delay of quack, which gave a deep stimulus to young Lu Xun. He began to think about China's society, culture, world and people's hearts.

1898, 18-year-old Lu Xun left his hometown with eight silver dollars raised by his loving mother in various ways to find a new way out. First entered Nanjing Naval Academy, then changed to Railway Mining Institute. During his study, Lu Xun began to get in touch with modern natural science knowledge such as physics, mathematics and chemistry, and read foreign literature and scientific works. In particular, Yan Fu's translation of Huxley's Evolution of an Englishman brought him a surprise. He accepted a philosophy of self-improvement, self-reliance and autonomy from the theory of evolution, and at the same time strongly felt the crisis that the Chinese nation was in a backward position in the fiercely competitive world.

1902, Lu Xun traveled to Japan. Two years later, with the dream of "saving the country through science", he entered Sendai Medical College, hoping to return to China after graduation to treat patients who were misdiagnosed like his father. In Sendai, although he met a teacher who cared about himself as much as Mr. Fujino Genkuro who taught anatomy, he was discriminated against from time to time. In particular, once a slide show was put in the classroom to record the Sino-Japanese war. A Japanese detective for the Russian army was caught and beheaded by the Japanese army, and a group of Japanese stood next to him. Lu Xun was greatly stimulated and realized that it is more important to cure mental numbness than physical weakness. To change China is to change the spirit of China people first, and being good at changing the spirit is to promote literature and art, so Lu Xun decided to abandon medicine and join the literature. He had a heated discussion with his friends: What is the ideal human nature? What is China's national character lacking most? What is the root cause? The first batch of papers were published in 1903, 1907 and 1908, which put forward the idea that "founding the country" should first "establish people" and called for "soldiers in the spiritual world".

1909 after Lu Xun returned to China, he has been thinking painfully and was silent for nearly ten years. It was not until 19 18 on the eve of the May 4th Movement that, at the instigation of my friends, I began to write Diary of a Madman and published it in New Youth magazine. This is China's first modern vernacular novel. The novel uses the mouth of a "madman" to ask a bold question about thousands of years old tradition: "It has never been like this, has it?" Exposing the history of feudal society in China is a history of "cannibalism" and calling for "saving children". After the publication of this novel, it caused a great shock in the society. Lu Xun wrote many novels in succession, and later compiled two collections of novels, Scream and Wandering, which were published in 1923 and 1926 respectively.

Lu Xun later explained his creative pursuit, saying that his purpose in writing novels was to make people in China realize and "improve this life". Therefore, the materials used in the novel "are mostly taken from the unfortunate people in the morbid society, aiming at exposing suffering and attracting medical attention". He is most concerned about the "unfortunate" of the lower class, and has created many novels with farmers and intellectuals as the main description objects, which has opened up the description theme of modern literature in China. When observing and expressing the protagonists in his novels, Lu Xun always pays attention to the spiritual suffering of people (farmers and intellectuals) in a "morbid society". Therefore, in Medicine, he only hinted at the poverty of Hua Laoshuan's family with "quilt full of patches" and positively described their ignorance of eating human blood steamed bread. In Hometown, the most shocking thing is not the poverty of the leap soil, but the spiritual estrangement shown by his "grandfather". The profundity of Blessing describes the horror that Sister Xianglin felt under the rule of feudal theocracy. Lu Xun also severely revealed the mental trauma and crisis of intellectuals: under the pressure of strong feudal tradition, the heroes who fought alone in the Revolution of 1911 flew around in a small circle like flies, and then came back to stay in the same place to kill their lives in the depression of the Tang Dynasty (in restaurants); Young men and women who bravely rushed out of the old family during the May 4th Movement were confined to the peace and happiness of the small family, unable to resist the pressure of society and economy, and their love lost its strength and could only return to the old family (regret for the past).

Lu Xun also said that he wrote novels because he could not forget many painful memories of his youth. As a result, the numb China people (called "spectators" by Lu Xun) seen in Japanese slides in those years kept appearing in his novels: in Kong Yiji's place, the hero's misfortune (including his leg being brutally interrupted by Ding) did not arouse any sympathy from the people around him, and everyone just watched and made fun of him; In "Blessing", people rushed to listen to Sister Xianglin's "story" of "Amao was eaten by a wolf", not out of sympathy, but to satisfy their curiosity and seek some excitement in a boring life. Tired of listening, these people immediately spit on them and gave Sister Xianglin a cold, pointed smile. This is how people feel the pain of others, not only numbness, but also the cruelty of human nature. In medicine, Yu Xia, the real hero of the novel, consciously gave his life, firmly believing that "this great Qing world belongs to all of us". However, ordinary people are scrambling to "watch" him kill people, and the tea drinkers in the teahouse even chat with his victims. All the lofty ideals and bloody sacrifices of the pioneers became meaningless performances. Behind these descriptions, it is not difficult for readers to feel that Lu Xun is "looking" with a compassionate eye. His novels are a great interrogation of the souls of modern China people. Lu Xun reveals people's mental illness so mercilessly in order to expose the "pathological society" that causes mental illness. Lu Xun thus developed the theme of "cannibalism in feudal society", which not only destroyed human body, but also poisoned and chewed human soul.

There is no doubt that Lu Xun's masterpiece The True Story of Ah Q fully embodies the characteristics of "national self-criticism" (that is, what people usually call "transforming national character"). Lu Xun himself said that he wrote this novel to learn from "the soul of a silent nation" and said, "I am also afraid that what I saw (Ah Q) is not the predecessor of modern times, but later, even twenty or thirty years later". As a result, readers in China will always remember Ah Q wearing a felt hat. What Lu Xun discovered in him was the "spiritual victory method": Although Ah Q was at the bottom of underdeveloped society, he was an eternal loser in the conflict with Grandpa Zhao, fake foreign devils, and even Wang Hu and Little D, but he took an incredible attitude of defending and whitewashing his failed fate and slave status. Or "close your eyes": don't admit that you are backward, enslaved and addicted to unfounded self-esteem: "We used to be much richer than you. What are you! " Or "forget": I just took a crying stick from a fake foreign devil, and when it rang, I forgot everything, and I was "a little happy". Or vent it on the weak (little nuns and the like) and get satisfaction by passing on humiliation. Or "belittle yourself", willing to lag behind and be enslaved: "I am a bug-don't let it go?" After these failures, we delude ourselves and turn the real failure into a spiritual illusory victory in our self-fantasy: we can "win with satisfaction" by saying "My son beat Lao Zi". Even if he punched two mouths in his face, "it seems that he hit another one", it will be calm and the world will be peaceful. Once the opposite situation is created, it is also a dream to enslave others with anything they want. Because of Lu Xun, people finally realized that this "spiritual victory method" on themselves and others is one of the most serious ideological obstacles to the awakening and rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. So, at the end of the novel, at the moment when Ah Q walked to the giving ceremony, he suddenly felt the terrible wolf-like "eyes" biting his soul and shouted, "Help …" All China people were shocked when they read this. This novel was later translated into many foreign languages, and many foreign readers also found Ah Q in themselves or their compatriots. Romain rolland, a famous French writer, said that Ah Q reminded him of the peasants during the French Revolution. This may indicate that Ah Q's "spiritual victory law" reveals a kind of human spiritual phenomenon; Lu Xun's The True Story of Ah Q can be said to be a work written for mankind. It is not only the first China modern novel introduced to the world, but also a great representative of China modern literature standing on its own feet in the world literature.

Lu Xun's Scream and Wandering not only shocked people with its profound expression, but also attracted readers with its special format. It has long been pointed out that every novel of Lu Xun tries to adopt a new form, with few similarities, which fully shows Lu Xun's creativity and imagination. For example, his Diary of a Madman uses a "diary style" to organize the novel according to the psychological activity flow of a "madman". Kong Yiji cleverly chooses the "little boy" in the hotel to tell the story. As a bystander, it observes and describes the sadness and absurdity of Kong Yiji, the numbness and cruelty of the spectators (drinkers and bosses), and "he" himself gradually participates in the story, first "echoing laughter", then coldly refuses Kong Yiji's kindness to teach himself to read, and finally becomes a spectator. Medicine unexpectedly puts Yu Xia, the hero of the novel, behind the scenes, mainly describing people's reaction to his sacrifice, so that readers can complete his image in their own imagination. Novels with "first-person narration" such as Hometown and Blessing all tell two stories: while telling the story of "others" (the story of Runtu, the story of Yang Er's sister-in-law and the story of Xianglinsao), they also tell the story of "me", so they are full of lyricism, and the two stories permeate and influence each other, forming a complex structure. Lu Xun's conscious formal experiment made him a "pioneer in creating new forms" and deeply influenced later writers.

While writing Scream and Wandering, Lu Xun also created a collection of essays (written in 1926 and published in 1928) and a prose poem "Weeds" (written in 1924- 1926 and 65438+). These are two classics of modern prose, with different writing styles. When "Flowers in the Morning and Flowers in the Evening" was first published in newspapers and periodicals, it was always titled "Remembering the Past". Lu Xun probably recalled that summer night in a water town when he was young, enjoying the cool under a big tree and listening to the old people telling idle days and stories. "Morning Flowers and Evening Picks" is also talking about idle days, and it is a memory and review of childhood ("Morning Flowers and Evening Picks"). Therefore, in the course of Lu Xun's life, all the people and things that left traces flowed in Lu Xun's pen: the "impermanence" in folklore, his father's illness, the Herbal Garden and the Three Ponds, Mr. Fujino, and the nanny "Big Mom" that we didn't mention when we were young, Fan Ainong, an old friend with a bumpy life, and so on. Lu Xun's passionate love memories revealed the softest side of Lu Xun's spiritual world, which contained deep sorrow. Weeds is another kind of prose, a product of dreams: one third of the chapters in the book begin with "I dreamed". What is presented to readers is a strange world: the sound of "eating" is heard in the illusion of midnight (autumn night); "People don't know when to sleep" and "shadow" have a "farewell" (farewell to shadow); See the blue and white ice valley in Dead Fire, "It's hot, but it doesn't shake, and all the ice knots are like coral branches" (Dead Fire); "Dog" chased "Man" and questioned loudly, and "Man" desperately "ran away" (Dog's Argument) ... Lu Xun took his imagination of playing fairy tales as a child to the extreme, so as to express his subtle and unspeakable feelings, emotions and psychology and make a deeper philosophical thinking on life. Lu Xun told others that "my philosophy is all in Weeds", so readers have the opportunity to look into the depths of Lu Xun's soul through Weeds.

While writing novels and essays, Lu Xun published essays in newspapers such as New Youth. Before and after the May 4th Movement, his essays during his stay in Beijing included Hot Wind, Grave (some of which were written at the beginning of the century), Gai Hua Collection, Gai Hua Collection and so on. 1August 926 to1June 927, Lu Xun went south because of the persecution of the reactionary forces in the north, and taught at Xiamen University and Guangzhou Sun Yat-sen University successively. Prose of this period is mainly included in the Collection of Justice. /kloc-at the end of 0/927, Lu Xun settled in Shanghai and began his life course in the last ten years, devoting his main energy to writing essays. He has published three books: Idle Collection, Two-hearted Collection, South-to-North Transfer, Pseudo-Free Book, Quasi-romance, Lace Literature, Essays on Chejieting, Essays on Chejieting II, Essays on Chejieting Final Edition and Offset Printing Collection.

Mr. Lu Xun once said that essays are "sensory nerves". As a newspaper style, its greatest feature is that it can respond to the social, ideological and cultural reality as quickly as possible and get the social response in time. Therefore, for Lu Xun, an intellectual who always cares about the fate of the country and the sufferings of the people, keeping close contact with his time is the most effective way. Lu Xun also said that the task of essay writers is to "react or fight against harmful things immediately", and therefore divided essays into "social criticism" and "civilization criticism". Lu Xun has been fighting all his life, with the ideal of "cultivating people", pointing the edge of criticism at the slavery and oppression of people in any form and scope (national slavery, class oppression, male discrimination against women, teenagers being destroyed by the old, the weak being violated by the strong, etc.). He said that he did it not out of personal passion, but for the "future" of China and mankind, so all his criticisms were "public enemies, not personal grievances". Lu Xun's essay 15 is a faithful record of China society from the May 4th Movement to the mid-1930s, and it is also a history of ideological and cultural development. As a writer, Lu Xun pays more attention to people's ideological, emotional and psychological reactions and changes behind historical events. Lu Xun once confidently said: "The souls of China people are now reflected in my essays." In this sense, Lu Xun's essays are a living "human history" of modern China people. If you want to really understand the society and history of China, especially the people of China, read Lu Xun's essays.

At the last moment of his life, Lu Xun also dedicated a collection of stories, New Stories (except for three written in the 1920s, most of which were written in 1934 and 1935, and published in 1936). This is Lu Xun's "new compilation" (new interpretation and new inspiration) of "stories" (ancient myths, legends and historical facts) in the 1920s and 1930s. The ancients who entered Lu Xun's literary world, or the heroes in ancient myths and legends: Nu Wa (mending the sky), Hou Yi (running to the moon) and Yu Xia (managing water); Or the sages in history: Confucius, Laozi (going through customs), Mozi (not attacking), Zhuangzi (coming back to life), Boyi, (picking Wei) and so on. In traditional texts, these people all live in halls and temples, which are sacred and inviolable. But in Lu Xun's works, they all return to daily life scenes, erase the glory of heroes and restore the true colors of ordinary people and mortals. Therefore, Running to the Moon does not write about the brilliant achievements of Hou Yi, a hero who shot at the sun, but tries to write about his "later" success and his experience of becoming an ordinary person: all the birds and animals in the world have been shot dead, and there is no place for them, so they can only run around all day looking for food; Being ignored and forgotten, students also plot against themselves, and finally even their wife (Chang 'e) flies away: this kind of thinking and performance of "pioneer fate" is thought-provoking. Mozi in "Non-Attack" did not become a hero after completing the historical achievement of stopping Chu and cutting Song, but suffered a series of unfortunate events: he was searched twice, and his broken baggage was taken away. "He was caught in heavy rain again, and he was driven away by two patrol soldiers who were in charge of Ge, and his nose was blocked for more than ten days." This last bitter humor is really unforgettable. The whole new story is full of Lu Xun's humor, but there is still innate sadness in his bones. At this time, Lu Xun was facing the threat of death, exhausted physically and mentally, but he was able to write such calm and free and easy words, which showed that his thought and art reached a new height.

193610 June19, the literary masters in China and the world put down their pens in this century; The thought giant stopped thinking. Thousands of ordinary people came to see him off, and his coffin was covered with a banner with three words written on it: "soul of china".