Life 生平
Lu Xun (魯迅, 1881–1936), born Zhou Shuren in Shaoxing, is generally regarded as the founding figure of modern Chinese literature. He first trained as a doctor in Japan before abandoning medicine for writing after a widely told turning point: a lantern slide, shown in one of his classes, of a Chinese man about to be executed by Japanese soldiers while a crowd of Chinese bystanders looked on with indifference, convinced him that his countrymen's sickness was one of spirit rather than body, and that literature, not surgery, was the cure he could offer.
He was among the first major writers to work in baihua (vernacular Chinese) rather than the classical wenyan of the old scholar-official tradition, and his 1918 story 狂人日記 (Diary of a Madman) is usually credited as the first modern short story in colloquial Chinese. Across his two story collections, his memoir essays, his prose poems and his eight retold myths, the same unsparing eye recurs: a diagnosis of the habits of self-deception, cruelty and passivity he believed were quietly consuming the people trapped inside a decaying social order.
Lu Xun wrote through some of the most unsettled years of the early Republic — warlord politics, the disappointments that followed the 1919 May Fourth Movement, and a personal life marked by illness, political danger and a bitter break with his brother. By the end of his life he was also a mentor to younger writers, championing figures like Xiao Hong, and his reputation as both a literary stylist and a moral conscience of his generation has outlasted every political use later made of his name.
Works 作品
Legacy 遺產
Few writers in any language are as thoroughly absorbed into their country's schooling as Lu Xun is into China's: generations have met 孔乙己, 阿Q and 故鄉 as set texts, and 精神勝利法 — the 'spiritual victory' by which Ah Q reinterprets every defeat as a win — is ordinary Chinese, used by people who have never opened the story. His Shaoxing childhood home and the Beijing house where he lived are both museums, and periodic curriculum revisions that quietly drop one of his pieces still reliably start a public argument.
That ubiquity cuts both ways. He was canonized after 1949 as a revolutionary standard-bearer, a reading that flattened a writer whose deepest subject was doubt, and later readers have spent decades pulling him back out from under the statues. For a learner he remains unusually rewarding early ground: short pieces, plain vernacular sentences, and a voice that assumes you are old enough to be told the truth.