Reporter | Zhao Yunxian
Edit | Yellow Moon
Lu Xun, a great writer, this is a proposition that almost everyone in China knows. However, becoming a writer and devoting himself to artistic creation was not within Zhou Shuren's planning and ideals. From Zhou Shuren to Lu Xun, this process seemed to be unsure of himself. Lu Xun, who had experienced various disputes, struggles and attacks in the 1920s, wrote in the preface to the "Self-Selected Collection" in 1932: "Later, the group of "New Youth" dispersed, some rose high, some retreated, some advanced, and I experienced that once again the partners in the same battle would still change like this, and ended up with the title of 'writer', still walking around in the desert..."
In the 1920s, the "dispute between problems and doctrines" intensified, and "New Youth" moved to the south, and Lu Xun lost his position and colleagues. The last time something similar happened was in Tokyo in 1907. At that time, he organized the "New Life" magazine with Zhou Zuoren, Xu Shousheng and others, but the whole plan was aborted by the "disappearance" of the contributors and the "escape of capital", and then it was the "boredom of not tasting experience" as described in the preface of "Scream".
He was given the title of "writer" and still walked around in the desert. For Lu Xun, literature and art are always meant to be "for life" rather than "for art", abandoning medicine and practicing literature is aimed at changing the spirit of the Chinese people, and literature and art are only a means and way. Therefore, to understand Lu Xun only from the identity of "writer" may misunderstand and narrow his thoughts and actions, as well as his importance and enlightenment as the spiritual leader of Chinese literati and intellectuals since the 20th century. Zhou Shuren became Lu Xun, not just by taking a pen name when publishing "Diary of a Madman". After nearly thirty years of brewing, collecting and examining evidence, Chen Shuyu, former deputy director of the Beijing Lu Xun Museum, and Jiang Yixin, director of the research office of the Beijing Lu Xun Museum, compiled more than 100 novels that Lu Xun had read into "The Stone of His Mountain" and published it. On the occasion of the 140th anniversary of Lu Xun's birth, they and Liu Chunyong and Song Shengquan, two literary scholars, started from this book and discussed Lu Xun's reading history and the ideological changes behind it, in order to understand why Zhou Shuren became Lu Xun.
<h3>Put Lu Xun in the "Great Circulation of World Literature" to examine</h3>
The Stone of His Mountain is divided into four parts, the first part is a Russian novel, the second and third parts are the vernacular version of the "Collection of Extraterritorial Novels" translated by the Zhou brothers, and the fourth part is other scattered articles. Turning to the table of contents of "The Stone of His Mountain", many of the writers Lu Xun has read are familiar to the contemporary public, such as Pushkin, Chekhov, Maupassant, and Natsume Shushi. Why did it take thirty years to compile this book list? Much has to do with the way Lu Xun came into contact with these novels.
Lu Xun's contact with modern novels was basically after he went to Japan to study. According to Chen Shuyu, there was a series of publications in Japan at that time called "Novel Translation Series", which published foreign novels translated from Japanese, and Lu Xun selected more than a dozen Russian novels to make a briefing when he was in Tokyo, and his Russian literary journey began with Japanese as an intermediary. During the Meiji period, a large number of foreign literature was translated in Japan, but the translation was mostly rough, the plot was deleted, added or subtracted, and sometimes even the author's nationality was mistaken, and the title of the novel was often changed without authorization, for example, a novel by Turgenev was renamed "The Legend of the Demon Woman" because of the beautiful heroine and the love of showmanship, and a novel called "Fatalist" was actually a section of Lermontov's "Contemporary Heroes". Chen Shuyu said that it was not an easy task to find out what these Japanese-translated Russian novels were and what versions were used at that time, and then ask Russian experts to translate them, and more than ten or twenty years have passed, among which it is another job to convert the "Collection of Novels Outside the Territory" into vernacular.
Song Shengquan believes that "The Stone of His Mountain" explains the emergence of "Diary of a Madman" and also reveals the source of Lu Xun's modern novel literacy, "If you look at the most popular publications in China at that time, such as "Novel Monthly" and "Novel Series", you will find that the above text is too different from "Diary of a Madman". This is consistent with Lu Xun's statement in "How I Started a Novel" that he "read a lot of short stories" and that "I have not read a single one such as 'novel writing'". She also pointed out that the Japanese translation of Russian novels provides a new perspective for us to study the relationship between Lu Xun and foreign novels: in the past, I always liked to talk about how Lu Xun and the literature of a certain country were, but considering the historical environment at that time, it was actually more important to put Lu Xun in the "great circulation of world literature", such as how Russian literature came to Japan, how Chinese students in Japan accepted it, how it became Chinese, what French literature looked like in Japan in the Meiji period, and so on.
<h3>Night and the birth of the literary scholar Lu Xun: "Without yuyu, there is no possibility of choice."</h3>
Mao Zedong defined Lu Xun with three identities— "great writer, revolutionary and thinker." Lu Xun in the middle school textbook only bears these three identities through novel articles, for example, when discussing the relationship between Lu Xun and novels, most of them start from the publication of "Diary of a Madman", and the introduction of Lu Xun's life by language teaching is not very much, which is very consistent with Lu Xun's "ended up with the title of a 'writer'". But as Liu Chunyong said, Lu Xun's earliest career in fiction began with translation, "he has been translating all his life, before becoming a novelist, he did not write novels before he died, but he was still translating Gogol's Dead Souls."
"Lu Xun became a novelist by accident." Liu Chunyong said. He believes that Lu Xun was greatly influenced by Liang Qichao's theory of "novels and group governance". Liang Qichao, in "On the Relationship between Novels and Mass Governance", regards novels as tools for enlightenment, which can be used to awaken national consciousness. During the Sendai period, after experiencing the crampedness and numbness of the Chinese under the Russo-Japanese War, Lu Xun turned to literature and art to seek shouting and resistance, and naturally tended to look at works from Russia, Poland, India and other places. Although he had a cold attitude toward enlightenment after he failed to devote himself to literary and artistic activities, he never erased the hope of smashing the iron house, so he responded to the instructions of his friends and wrote more than ten "novel-like articles" for "New Youth", which were collected as "Screams".
The importance of the Sendai period to Lu Xun is often attributed to the slide events written in Mr. Fujino, and Jiang Yixin adds another importance of this period. In the Russo-Japanese War, not only did Chinese's reaction directly prompt Lu Xun to realize that "if the spirit is not transformed, it is useless to strengthen the body", but the war itself also prompted Lu Xun to understand these countries through literature. In the process, "he instead gained a sense of artistic pleasure, a spiritual communication," and decided to return to Tokyo to read the world. In the three years in Tokyo, Lu Xun spent a lot of effort reading and translating novels, and his translation work with Zhou Zuoren even attracted the attention of the Japanese cultural circles.
At the end of the event, when talking about why Zhou Shuren became Lu Xun, Song Shengquan specifically mentioned Lu Xun's "Yu Yuxin". She believes that talking about Lu Xun's birth cannot avoid the night, and if Lu Xun were to study at the German School in Tokyo and get a degree, it is difficult to imagine what would happen to modern Chinese literature, because Lu Xun is a person who loves the night, and he writes about the night many times in his works. According to Zhou Zuoren's recollection, he was also a person who worked hard at night, and it can be said that the process of Lu Xun becoming a literary scholar was completed at night. "Without Yu Yu, there is no possibility of choice," Song Shengquan said.