◎ Theme: Why did Zhou Shuren become Lu Xun?
◎Time: 19:00, September 25, 2021
◎ Guest: Chen Shuyu Lu Xun research expert, former deputy director of Beijing Lu Xun Museum
Jiang Yixin is a scholar and the director of the research office of Lu Xun Museum in Beijing
"All that I rely on are the hundred or so foreign works I have seen before"
Jiang Yixin: Today (Lu Xun was born on September 25, 1881, Editor's Note), Mr. Lu Xun is 140 years old. At the age of 36, he wrote China's first epoch-making modern novel, The Diary of a Madman. Friends here, Lu Xun, who may have been the first to enter your field of vision, is such a novelist.
In fact, at that time, his real name was Zhou Shuren, who was a servant of the Ministry of Education of the Beiyang Government. He has the status of Director of the Fiction Unit and Audit Officer of the Committee on Popular Education. At that time, all novels created, translated novels, and even magazines that published novels in the country had to be sent to Zhou Shuren for review—well-written novels should be praised, and those with low style should be banned. In his spare time, Zhou Shuren also copied ancient books, did "Ancient Novel Hook Sinking", compiled "Legends of the Tang and Song Dynasties", etc., wrote the first history of Chinese novels, and taught this course in various colleges and universities such as Peking University. From this point of view, before the publication of "Diary of a Madman" in 1918, that is, before Zhou Shuren became Lu Xun, this person had read too many ancient and modern Chinese and foreign novels to count.
After becoming the father of new literature, that is, after Zhou Shuren became Lu Xun, he often received letters from literary youth to ask for the secret of composition. Lu Xun's answer was that there was no secret to creation, and said that he never read books such as novel practices, but only read more works. In 1933, when invited to talk about his creative experience, Lu Xun wrote the article "How Do I Start a Novel", and finally told the experience of a similar secret - "all that I relied on were more than a hundred foreign works that I had read before."
However, Lu Xun's novels are read too massively, and from the time he returned from studying abroad to before the publication of "Diary of a Madman", there was a so-called period of silence for nearly a decade, during which he was actually reading a lot of novels. So, how do we define what he calls "a hundred chapters"? This requires attention to "before" and "when I was a student"—the time phrase that Lu Xun mentions many times in various contexts actually refers to the seven years of studying in Japan from 1902 to 1909. We know that during the period of studying at the Jiangnan Water Teachers School and the Mining Road School attached to the Jiangnan Lushi School, it was Zhou Shuren's first contact with Western studies, and all his spare time was spent reading ancient Chinese vernacular novels such as "Dream of the Red Chamber". However, in the context of Lu Xun's later narration, "before" and "when I was a student" specifically pointed to the seven years of studying in Japan. The "100 pieces" refer to the foreign works he read in foreign languages during this period—first through Japanese translations, and later directly through German for the original Eastern European or other national novels.
So, how did Lu Xun spend his seven years in Japan? How did he study abroad? We know that Lu Xun was exposed to English at the Jiangnan Water Teachers' School and Japanese and German at the Lushi Academy's Minlu School, but they were still very simple. After qualifying for the first two years in Tokyo, he studied Japanese systematically at Hirobun Gakuin, with subject knowledge equivalent to a Japanese secondary school level. Two years later, he chose a profession, and according to him, he went to work as a military doctor during the war in order to treat patients who had been mistreated like his father. So he went to sendai Medical College in northeastern Japan to study medicine for a year and a half. After the "Slide Incident", he returned to Tokyo and concentrated on the literary movement, but the most important thing was to translate foreign works. He leaned toward the works of the oppressed nations of Russia, Eastern Europe, and the small Balkan countries, because he felt that this was the literature of life, of struggle, of strength, of sincerity. This period is the longest, lasting three years. Therefore, what influenced Lu Xun's spiritual direction during his study abroad era was actually massive reading. During these seven years, the continuous learning behavior was reading and translation.
"Steal from other countries and cook your own meat"
Jiang Yixin: In contrast, the Sendai period is a little less, but this year and a half, which seems to press the pause button on literary reading, is an indispensable bridge. Why? Zhou Shuren, a Qing dynasty student, made a qualitative leap in his foreign language at this time, whether it was Japanese or German, whether it was spoken or written. We all know that Mr. Fujino corrected Lu Xun's medical notes and corrected the blood vessels of his lower arm that he drew particularly well, but in fact, through the medical notes, most of Fujino's changes were about Japanese expression and rhetoric. Because Mr. Fujino had just been rated as a professor at that time, he was also the deputy class teacher, and Zhou Shuren was his first international student, and of course, the first Chinese student of Sendai Medical College, so Mr. Fujino was very responsible. At that time, there were not many textbooks and teaching aids, and the so-called medical notes were transcripts of the teacher's classroom dictations. Therefore, the lessons taught by the teacher must be listened to very carefully, and then they can be written down, and there is no reference book to refer to the revision. Therefore, Mr. Fujino's approval is also particularly serious. Zhou Shuren's Japanese speaking, listening, and writing have been greatly improved. In addition, he began to take regular German classes at Sendai Medical College, and the class hours were also very large, and the German level was also greatly improved.
This year marks the 140th anniversary of Lu Xun's birth, and there are many major cultural projects to pay tribute to the national soul. Among them, the "Complete Works of Lu Xun's Manuscripts" jointly edited by the National Library Press and the Cultural Relics Publishing House will also be published in seven volumes and 78 volumes, which is the most refined and complete collection of Lu Xun's manuscripts in history. Of these 78 volumes, I think the most special is the medical notes, typical of the modern asana notes written horizontally from left to right with a pen, which are in at least five languages, including Chinese, Japanese, German, English, and Latin. The other manuscripts can be said to be all traditional Chinese manuscripts written vertically by Lu Xun with a gold brush. Of course, small notes are not in the comparison.
From the medical notes, we can clearly see the uniqueness of Soju Sendai in the life process of Lu Xun's literature. With the improvement of foreign language proficiency, the stories that had not been read too much before suddenly became understood, and suddenly got rid of the intermediary restrictions of Japanese translation, and could directly read the original Eastern European stories in German, and the desire for world literature became stronger, and I wanted to read more, deeper and farther. In addition, the current affairs slides of the Russo-Japanese War were played in the bacteriology class, because the battlefield of the Russo-Japanese War was in northeast China, as long as it was a Chinese, seeing such a slide was not uninhibited, of course, it also deeply stimulated Lu Xun.
Therefore, with the internal drive and the external fuse, Lu Xun soon dropped out of school and returned to Tokyo, wanting to "steal the fire from other countries and cook his own meat." We know that Japan in the Meiji period was one of the open places where Chinese and Western cultures converged and the window of world literature was opened, the information transmission was very fast, the translation industry was based on the forefront of the world, leading the trend of social science thought, and many world-famous literary scholars longed for Tokyo like paris. Lu Xun also came to Tokyo again and began three years of independent reading and learning. He no longer goes to a special school, it is a completely reading way to study abroad. Moreover, his second brother Zhou Zuoren also came to Tokyo, and Zhou Zuoren was very proficient in English. The "hundred or so articles" we are looking for include novels that Lu Xun read in Japanese and German, as well as English. In fact, Lu Xun was exposed to English during his studies at the Jiangnan Water Teachers' Academy, and he was also able to read the English version of the work with the help of dictionaries and Zhou Zuoren's vision and help.
Why do you first pay attention to Russian literature when studying in Japan?
Jiang Yixin: In the three years since I returned to Tokyo, Lu Xun's efforts have been very large and deep, and he often read and translated foreign works all night without sleep, and what remains on the coffee table is an ashtray full of cigarette butts like a honeycomb. The "Hundred Pieces" that Lu Xun called are mainly works that were painstakingly read during this period. In fact, when he first arrived in Tokyo, Zhou Shuren had already begun to "steal fire and cook meat" and began to translate foreign science fiction novels. However, his flesh has not yet realized the desire of the soul, and is still following the school's subject selection system and making limited choices for future careers. After the transformation of Sendai, the Taoist induction of the literary and artistic soul was suddenly connected.
Since Lu Xun's seven years of studying in Japan have been based on massive reading as the main way of learning, is there a detailed bibliography of the "hundred foreign works" he mentioned? Lu Xun never explicitly stated it. This seems to constitute a mystery, and has become the code that many scholars who pay attention to Lu Xun's reading history and the literary scholar Lu Xun's founding history have exhausted the deciphering of Zhou Shuren's reason for becoming Lu Xun.
I mainly seek, explore and speculate from five aspects. To put it simply: the first is newspaper clippings; the second is the translation of works, especially the published "Collection of Novels Outside the Territory", and the publication preview intended for translation; the third is the zhou brothers' reminiscence text; the fourth is the literary textbook; the fifth is the classic peripheral and potential reading under the perspective of the book collection. Through my research, I found that at least 140 foreign works can be associated with foreign works that Lu Xun read in foreign languages during his stay in Japan.
The first part of the newspaper clippings, which is solid physical evidence, is a bound edition of ten Japanese translations of Russian novels that Lu Xun brought back from Japan, including the works of Turgenev, Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov and other writers. But I don't see it as just a newspaper clipping, I think it's a collection of Russian works compiled by Lu Xun with his own aesthetic vision, and it's also a new book that he himself has bound into a new book. We abbreviated the stories of these ten works.
The second is the novel he translated, which must have been chewed on repeatedly. Here I will only mention 16 articles in the "Collection of Extraterritorial Novels". We see that the first volume is still basically dominated by Russian literature. Why did Lu Xun first pay attention to Russian literature when he studied in Japan? I think it was the great impact of the Russo-Japanese War. This should be an external factor in Lu Xun's initial concern with Russian literature. In Meiji Japan's sense of national exuberance, which dreams of civilization, a rich country and a strong army, and territorial expansion, how to see the clouds and the sun, dispel the fog, and initially form its own view of Russia is the independent thinking of the Zhou Shu people. In fact, Russia was not the weak and small country in Eastern Europe that he later said, but one of the Western powers, and the Zhou Shu people wanted to see what kind of people were growing on the land of Russia, a Western power that rose from the vast wilderness. At first, he could only understand it in Japanese. In fact, he also learned Russian for a few days, but later gave up. When he saw that there were also small people who had been insulted and damaged, and there were peasants who had been exploited to the point that there were no shorts left, he instead gained an artistic pleasure in which the soul could be deeply communicated—the writers born in this land had such a grand vision, such a transcendent insight into human nature, and produced a truly robust literature that prompted him to understand the various phenomena that swirled and disappeared in the land of China.
More play the role of reference books, reflecting the purpose of reading
Jiang Yixin: In fact, the second time I came to Tokyo, for Zhou Shuren, it is no longer a local Tokyo, but a microcosm of the world, just like Paris in the 1920s, attracting many literary artists to gather in cafes to form a literary community, and Tokyo also has the cultural charm of attracting many writers from other countries to dive. Lu Xun also concentrated on reading here for three years. Even Japanese magazines paid attention to the Zhou brothers' reading behavior, especially their translation activities to get rid of Japan and introduce foreign stories directly to China in Chinese. Therefore, although Lu Xun only translated three of the works in the "Collection of Novels Outside the Territory", all 16 of them have been repeatedly reviewed, polished and revised by him. We organized academic forces to retranslate the Zhou brothers' translations into the vernacular based on the original Tokyo Kanda edition.
Another is literature textbooks. In the three years since he returned to Tokyo, although Zhou Shuren did not go to a full-time school, he also hung up his school registration at the Duyi School. Japanese scholars have examined the school's literature textbooks and the literary bibliography of summer reading, and I have also screened out some foreign works that indirectly prove that Lu Xun may have read at that time by comparing the bibliography of Lu Xun's collection.
Finally, the works deduced from the zhou brothers' reminiscences and other clues are set as "other" series. We have selected some representative writers to abbreviate. For example, Lu Xun's favorite Natsume Shushi and Xiankeweizhi, as well as the less well-known Kierkegaard and so on.
Reading the stories that Lu Xun read when he studied abroad again, it is actually easy to find his personalized aesthetic tendencies - those works that perceive the darkness of human nature, the performance techniques that lift weights lightly and make people smile with tears, the stream of consciousness of modernism, the heroic parody of postmodernism, the realistic care for small people who are damaged and insulted, etc., obviously this is a multi-dimensional complex artistic synthesis, which Lu Xun all accepted at that time. Before compiling this book, I would feel that Lu Xun was really a genius, and it could not be copied, and I could tell the story so vividly, profoundly, and directly to the soul in the shortest possible way that the ancient Chinese literati and even the writers of modern times did not expect; after reading the novels that Lu Xun had read, I had a sudden and cheerful feeling, as if I was in the network of the spiritual genealogy that Lu Xun was in that year, feeling empathy, moving with him, happy together, growing together with aesthetic ability, and resonating with the same frequency.
Unfortunately, the book contains only 38 novels with evidence of Lu Xun's direct reading. In fact, we have also abbreviated many foreign works, which are limited in space and have no income for the time being. Today is an era of light reading, and considering making a very thick book, it may be difficult for everyone to read it. However, at the end of the book, a list of "hundreds of articles" is attached, in addition to the names of the writer's works, there is also direct and indirect evidence of Lu Xun's reading. Therefore, "The Stone of His Mountain" plays more of the role of a reference book, reflecting the purpose of reading - leading everyone to follow Lu Xun's gaze to continue to explore and deeply read the original novel. If you like it, you can continue to edit it in the future, and truly present the "hundred articles" that Lu Xun has read.
"If you want the people of a new country, you must not do without the novel of a new country"
Chen Shuyu: Today, everyone recognizes Lu Xun as a writer, and it is his novels that have laid the foundation for Lu Xun's status as a literary scholar.
In fact, Lu Xun first entered the literary world through translation activities, and the earliest achievement was to compile the "Collection of Novels Outside the Territory" with his second brother Zhou Zuoren. The book was funded by a friend and published in two volumes in Tokyo, Japan, and a satin house was found in Shanghai for consignment. The first volume printed 1,000 copies and sold 20 copies; the next volume printed 500 copies, and only 20 copies were sold. Later, the satin village caught fire, and the books and paper plates were also destroyed. One of the reasons the book was snubbed was because readers at the time were not accustomed to the genre of short stories, and somehow the article ended quickly at the beginning. Chinese used to watching the chapter back body, and I had to watch it eighty times or one hundred and twenty times before I was addicted, and I had to watch the drama to see even the stage book.
Chinese readers began to get introduced to modern short stories through Lu Xun's Diary of a Madman, published in New Youth magazine in May 1918. In ancient China, the term "novel" was not clearly concepted and lacked scientific classification, but in fact there were two traditions: literary novels and vernacular novels. It was not until Lu Xun's "Outline of the History of the Chinese Novel" from mimeographed lecture notes to academic monographs that the development of ancient Chinese novels was sorted out into a rough historical outline. Therefore, Lu Xun wrote in the "Historical Outline of the Chinese Novel" on October 7, 1923: "Chinese novels have never had a history... Although this manuscript is dedicated to history, it is also rough. ”
On April 19, 1918, Zhou Zuoren delivered a speech at the Novel Research Society of the Institute of Liberal Arts of Peking University, entitled "The Development of Novels in Japan in the Past Thirty Years". Zhou Zuoren said that in the traditional Chinese concept, writing novels is an inferior act. In 1902, Liang Qichao published the article "The Relationship between Novels and Mass Governance", advocating a "revolution in the novel world" and regarding the novel as an important tool for improving social politics. The first sentence at the beginning of the article is "If you want the people of a new country, you must not fail to write a novel of a new country." Because the new novel can cultivate a new type of morality and personality of the people, stimulate the patriotic spirit of the people, and achieve the purpose of reforming politics, it is "the best in literature." To be superior is to be superior.
However, despite Liang Qichao's strong advocacy, "there is no novel of new literature" and "there is no result in counting". Therefore, Zhou Zuoren hopes that Chinese novelists can learn from the experience of Japanese novels, which can be summed up in five words, which is called "the simulation of creation". What Zhou Zuoren calls "simulation" is what we call "borrowing." "Simulation of creation" is to innovate and achieve leapfrogging on the basis of reference. China's new novel must not only have a new form, but also must express new ideas, which requires starting from scratch. I think that Zhou Zuoren's new concept of novels is also agreed with by Lu Xun. If Hu Shi and Zhou Zuoren are the theoretical advocates of modern Chinese novels, then Lu Xun is the pioneer and founder of this theory in the field of creation.
There are not many novels created by Lu Xun, and only three kinds of works are published in the collection, "Scream", "Wandering" and "New Compilation of Stories", a total of 33 works are included. I thought that just by relying on the "True Biography of Ah Q", Lu Xun could add the definition of "great" before the title of "literary scholar". Ah Q, the spiritual model, soon made great strides into the gallery of typical figures in world literature, so Lu Xun became a world-class writer. He belongs not only to China, but also to mankind.
"The Stone of His Mountain" provides a new academic growth point for Lu Xun's research
Chen Shuyu: To create a novel, we must first have a solid foundation for life, rich life experience, and profound ideological penetration. But at the same time, we must also absorb the nourishment of Chinese and foreign cultures, otherwise it will become a water without a source and a wood without a root. Lu Xun clearly said in the article "How Do I Start a Novel" that he had not read theoretical books such as "novel practice" before writing novels, but "relied on a hundred or so foreign works and a little medical knowledge that he had read before." As we all know, Lu Xun studied medicine at the Sendai Medical College in Japan. He created the image of the "persecution maniac" in "Diary of a Madman", relying on some neurology knowledge.
As for which "hundreds" of foreign novels he had read before, I originally thought it was a mystery that could never be solved. Without human, physical, and circumstantial evidence, who has the ability to list these hundred or so foreign novels? Since 1989, I have begun to study Lu Xun's collection of books and published some short articles. In the early 1990s, I applied for a collective scientific research project called "Lu Xun Library Research". When my colleague and sister Yao Xipei was looking for newspaper clippings in Lu Xun's collection, he found a bound volume of Japanese-translated foreign short stories, which was the physical evidence of Lu Xun's reading of Japanese-translated foreign short stories during his stay in Japan. This discovery enhanced my keen interest in exploring the hundred or so foreign novels that Lu Xun had been exposed to before 1918. It's been almost 30 years since then. Therefore, I say that the publication of "The Stone of His Mountain" is a fulfillment of my long-cherished wish for 30 years.
If you count from the 508th issue of the magazine "Japan and the Japanese" published in Tokyo, Japan in 1909, which reported on the translation activities of the Zhou brothers, Lu Xun's research has a history of 112 years. Through the joint efforts of generations of Lu Xun research scholars, Lu Xun research has become a relatively mature comprehensive discipline, which can also be referred to as "Lu Xun Studies". The historical materials of this discipline are basically complete, and it is difficult to have any sensational discoveries in the future. The evaluation of Lu Xun is also basically correct, it is difficult to produce subversive views and can occupy the mainstream in the Lu research community.
Of course, the space for the interpretation of Lu Xun's works is infinitely broad, but Lu Xun has self-evaluated many of his masterpieces, and it is difficult for researchers to understand these works beyond Lu Xun's own self-perception. Therefore, the improvement of Lu Xun's research discipline level can be said to have encountered a bottleneck, resulting in some scholars retreating from difficulties. Some scholars have attracted the attention of the public by over-interpreting or deliberately misinterpreting it.
The publication of "The Stone of His Mountain" has provided a new academic growth point for Lu Xun's research. Readers should not only focus on which of Lu Xun's novels were specifically influenced by which writer, such as "Diary of a Madman" taken from Gogol's novel of the same name, and "Medicine" ended with Antlev's cold... Such examples are limited. Through reading this book, we should further study Lu Xun's bold stylistic explorations in the creation of modern Chinese novels, such as "Diary of a Madman", "A Q Zheng biography", "A small thing", "The Story of Hair" Why are the forms very different? In particular, why did the "New Compilation of Stories" adopt the method of crossing ancient and modern times? Lu Xun's spiritual inheritance and development of these foreign novels are more worthy of attention. Lu Xun made it very clear that what he sought in foreign literature was a voice of resistance and shouting. The great thing he understood from Russian literature was that there were two kinds of people in the world— the oppressor and the oppressed. Therefore, what we should learn from Lu Xun's cultural orientation of reading and translating is first of all Lu Xun's civilian stance and the spirit of struggle against evil forces. This is a basic quality in any era. Finishing/Rain Station