Lu Xun

(I dedicate this post to HANAFUBUKI: Lu Xun is one of her favorite authors)

I firstly encountered the name of Lu Xun sometime by the end of the 1950's. It was in an issue of Horizons, an international journal that had also a Romanian edition. It was, in that period, the only international journal originated in the West that the Communist regime allowed to be printed in a Romanian edition.

As the journal of the World Peace Council, Horizons was of course close to the Communist parties. It was in the same time, in the Communist Romania of those years, a window of opening: written by guys living in democratic countries it had a footprint of normality and decency.

So I found in one issue of Horizons a large article consecrated to Lu Xun (rendered as Lu Sin, following the old transliteration rules). I was in my early teens and it did not remain much of the article in my head, mostly a striking comparison: Lu Sin was characterized as a Chinese Gorky. And I decided that I would read sometime the books of this Lu Sin.

Years have passed, many years, and in 2005 I met with a book of Lu Xun. It was this time in Washington, DC: a large exhibition of Chinese art and culture was organized at the Kennedy Center. I bought several Chinese books, all of them elegant bi-lingual editions. Among them, guess what?

The book by Lu Xun was a collection of stories, starting with A Madman's Diary. Was Lu Xun rather a Chinese Gogol? Well, the subject of the story by Lu Xun is very different to that of Gogol, but the title is a reverence to the great Russian writer. Later I learned that Lu Xun translated Dead Souls in Chinese. So, there is a chemistry.

Was Lu Xun a Communist? Like Gorky, he was praised by them, and they tried to seize his name. Like Gorky, he was essentially his own guy, too independent, too vast, to be circumscribed. Lu Xun was compared also with Nietzsche: like him, trapped in the construction of a modernity which is fundamentally problematic (Gloria Davies).

But I owe you a presentation of some of the stories by Lu Xun. 2011 has just started.


(A Life in Books)