Lu Xun was a short-story writer, essayist, critic, and literary theorist and considered one of the greatest figures in 20th century Chinese literature. He spent just 55 years in this world but he left behind a mountain of revolutionary writing. The Lu Xun Museum in Beijing has been celebrating the patriotic scholar's life of reading, writing and translating with an exhibition at the Wangfujing Book Store.
Lu Xu is known throughout China as a writer who pursued freedom and truth. He's a giant in 20th century literature. His essays, reminiscences, prose poetry, historical tales, classical poems, short stories and a dozen volumes of scholarly research have been translated into more than a dozen of languages.
The modest exhibition at the Wangfujing Bookstore suggests that the clues to Lu Xun's writing are in books. They are there in the classical Chinese volumes he read in his childhood and the translated scientific scholarly works he studied in his teenage years. They're also there in the Japanese and German books he thumbed through.
Of course the key displays are the masterpieces he produced and translated. The essays of Wild Grass, the volume of stories in Call to Arms, his 1918 novel Diary of a Madman, and his most celebrated work The True Story of Ah Q are all represented in the show. They sit alongside his adaptation of legends in Old Tales Retold and translations of the sci-fi works of French novelist Jules Verne.
The show also charts Lu Xun's geographical journey from student to novelist. It starts at the source of his classical education -- the famed Three Flavor Study in his hometown Shaoxing city of Zhejiang Province -- and continues on to the Jiangnan Naval Academy in Nanjing. Lu Xun has been dead at 67 years and little by little he has faded from people's memory. But there's a special reason why the Beijing Lu Xun Museum thinks the time is ripe for this show.
Sun Yu, deputy curator of Beijing Lu Xun Museum, said: "I found the language, thought and style of young writers and academics at the moment are very inferior to the literary figures of the May 4th Movement period. So we wanted to show how Lu Xun's thinking was formed and the way he accumulated his knowledge. We hope the exhibition can give the young readers and writers some advice on how to blend traditional Chinese culture with western influences."
The exhibition shows a profile of Lu Xun that not only wrote but also read, translated, collected and compiled. It's a map of his spiritual and literary journey as well as a snapshot of a man who became a literary legend.
(CCTV.com August 21, 2003)
