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Lu Xun and Gogol

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Lu Xun and Gogol The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review, 28, Nos. 1-2 (2001 [2002]), 101-12. JON EUGENE VON KOWALLIS (Sydney, Australia) LU XUN AND GOGOL During the halcyon days of Sino-Soviet friendship in the 1950s, Chinese writer and social critic Lu Xun (orig. Zhou Shuren, 1881-1936) was often described as "China's Gor'kii," although as a creative writer he has perhaps demonstrated a far greater degree of affinity to Nikolai Gogo! (1809-1852). Hailed by Japanese Nobel laureate Oe Kenzaburo in 1995 as "the greatest writer Asia has produced in the twentieth century," and often referred to in China as the Father of Modem Chinese Literature, Lu Xun began studying Gogo! at least as far back as 1906 when he was in his mid-twenties, and spent considerable time during the final years of his life working on a schol­ arly translation of Gogol's epic masterpiece Dead Souls (Mertvye dushi; Chinese: Si hun/ing). 1 He did so despite his rapidly declining health and other more pressing time commitments, such as leading the intellectual op­ position to the Kuornintang in a time of death squads and civil war, and star­ ing down the gun barrels of an encroaching Japan, which was then poised on the brink of its out-and-out invasion of China. Like Gogo!, Lu Xun came from a family of landowner literati in a back­ water town removed from the metropolitan centers of his country, but rose to prominence in the nation's capital. Unlike Gogo!, who had a rocky but relatively young start on fame, success did not come to Lu Xun until he had reached his forties, in the early 1920s. Lu Xun was acclaimed for his innovative and penetrating short stories, the mordant wit of his satiric style and the trenchant social and political commentary in the essays of his mature period. The successful Gogo! drew on his childhood memories of village life in the Ukraine, with its colorful customs and folktales of demons and witches. Lu Xun used his knowledge of folk beliefs and regional practices to ground his mental picture of China. The similarity between the two writers ends here, for Lu Xun did not rise to fame on the basis of initial acclaim as a font of local color, but rather as a satirist of the misappropriation of tradition. First exposed to popular Bud­ dhism in childhood, as was Gogo! to orthodox Christianity, Lu Xun never I. See Guo Geli (i.e., Gogo!), Si hunting [Dead souls], trans. Lu Xun (Beijing: Renmin wenxuechubanshe, 1977). Lu Xun worked from the German translation by Otto Buek Die Abenteuer Tschitschikows oder Die toten See/en in Nikolaus Gogo!, Siimmtliche Werke in 8 Biinden vol. I (Munchen und Leipzig: Georg Muller, 1909), consulting the Russian. Although he had studied some Russian and English, his strongest foreign languages were Japanese and German. 102 The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review embraced religion in the way that Gogol did, especially in.his later years. In~ fluenced more by Confucian philosophy than he would probably have cared to admit/ Lu Xun cultivated an appreciation for religion but at the same time maintained a distance from it. Like Gogol, whose surreal tale "The Nose" (Nos) is sometimes viewed as evidence of extreme sexual anxiety, Lu Xun also had a controversial sexual­ ity, at least in the eyes of his critics. Avoiding conjugal relations with his first wife, Zhu An, to whom he was wed as a result of an arranged marriage in 1903, he took up residence in late 1927 in Shanghai with his former stu­ dent Xu Guangping, a stocky, rather masculine woman whose height made her appear almost like a giant compared to him. This relationship eventually produced Lu, Xun's only heir, a son called Zhou Haiying, born to them out of wedlock in 1930. Prior to. his death in 1936, Lu Xun told his close associate Feng Xuefeng of his plan to write a full-length novel about four generations of a family of Chinese intellectuals spanning the period from the mid-Qing to the abortive attempts at reform during the late-Qing (1898), the 1911 Revolution, which overthrew the dynasty and established a nominal Republic, up through the civil war between the Communists and the Kuomintang, which began in 1927. In a sense, I would argue, under Gogol's influence, he wanted to pro­ duce for China the cultural equivalent of the "epic" Poema, as Gogol him­ self called it, that he was translating. And in this, too, they share an affmity: Lu Xun also intended to go beyond "mere literature" and the castigation of social and political abuses to point his people toward a new and righteous way of living. In his own words, he wrote "for human life and the need to better it."3 Whether or not either of the authors achieved this goal is another question; I would submit, however, that it could well be precisely the man­ ner by which they failed to meet this goal that makes them great. Lu Xun once observed: Gogol was honest and therefore predisposed to going mad. But just take a Umk at all these intelligent people who surround us here today. 2. See Jon Kowallis, Beikoku no Rojin kenkyuu ni tsuite [Concerning research on Lu Xun in America], supplement #17 in vol. 16 of Rojin zenshuu [Complete works of Lu Xun], (Tokyo: Gaku kenkyuusha, I 986); James Pusey, Lu Xun and Evolution (Albany: State Univ. ofNew York Press, 1998), p. 170. 3. From Wo zenmo =uo qi xiaoshuo lai ["How I Came to Write Fiction"] in the collection Nanqiang beidiao ["Mixed dialects"]. Lu Xun quanji [Complete works ofLu Xun] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, I 981 ), 4: 512. Hereafter cited as LXQJ. In this I 933 article he also cites "Gogo! from Russia, Sienkiewicz of Poland" and the Japanese writers Natsume Soseki and Mori Ogai as the favorite authors of his formative years (p. 51 I). .
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