Early life
Born in Shaoxing, Zhejiang province, Lu Xun was first named
Zhou Zhangshou, then Zhou Yucai, and finally himself took the name of
Shùrén (Ch.??), figuratively, "to be an educated man".
The Shaoxing Zhou family was very well-educated, and his paternal grandfather Zhou Fuqing ??? held posts in the Hanlin Academy; Zhou's mother, née Lu, taught herself to read. However, after a case of bribery was exposed - in which Zhou Fuqing tried to procure an office for his son, Lu Xun's father, Zhou Boyi - the family fortunes declined. Zhou Fuqing was arrested and almost beheaded. Meanwhile, a young Zhou Shuren was brought up by an elderly servant Ah Chang, whom he called Chang Ma; one of Lu Xun's favorite childhood books was the
Classic of mountains and seas.
His father's chronic illness and eventual death during Lu Xun's adolescence, apparently from tuberculosis, persuaded Zhou to study medicine. Distrusting traditional Chinese medicine (which in his time was often practised by charlatans, and which failed to cure his father), he went abroad to pursue a Western medical degree at Sendai Medical Academy (now medical school of Tohoku University) in Sendai, Japan, in 1904.
Education
Lu Xun was educated at Jiangnan Naval Academy ?????? (1898—99), and later transferred to the School of Mines and Railways ???? at Jiangnan Military Academy ??????. It was there Lu Xun had his first contacts with Western learning, especially the sciences; he studied some German and English, reading, amongst some translated books, Huxley's
Evolution and Ethics, J. S. Mill's
On Liberty, as well as novels like
Ivanhoe and
Uncle Tom's Cabin.
On a Qing government scholarship, Lu Xun left for Japan in 1902. He first attended the
Kobun Gakuin (Kobun Institute) (
Hongwen xueyuan, ????), a preparatory language school for Chinese students attending Japanese universities. His earliest essays, written in Classical Chinese, date from here. Lu also practised some jujutsu.
Lu Xun returned home briefly in 1903. At age 22, he complied to an arranged marriage with a local gentry girl, Zhu An ??. Zhu, illiterate and with bound feet, was handpicked by Lu Xun's mother. Lu Xun possibly never consummated this marriage, although he took care of her material needs all his life.
Sendai
Lu Xun left for Sendai Medical Academy in 1904 and gained a minor reputation there as the first foreign student of the college. At the school he struck up a close student-mentor relationship with lecturer Fujino Genkurou (?????); Lu Xun would recall his mentor respectfully and affectionately in an essay "Mr Fujino" in the memoirs in
Dawn Blossoms Plucked at Dusk. (Incidentally, Fujino would repay the respect with an obituary essay on Lu Xun's death, in 1937.) However, in March 1906, Lu Xun abruptly terminated his pursuit of the degree and left the college.
Lu Xun, in his well-known Preface to
Nahan (Call to Arms), the first collection of his short stories, tells the story of why he gave up completing his medical education at Sendai. One day after class, one of his Japanese instructors screened a lantern slide documenting the imminent execution of an alleged Chinese spy during the Russo-Japanese War (1904—05). Lu Xun was shocked by the complete apathy of the Chinese onlookers; he decided it was more important to cure his compatriots' spiritual ills rather than their physical diseases.
- "At the time, I hadn't seen any of my fellow Chinese in a long time, but one day some of them showed up in a slide. One, with his hands tied behind him, was in the middle of the picture; the others were gathered around him. Physically, they were as strong and healthy as anyone could ask, but their expressions revealed all too clearly that spiritually they were calloused and numb. According to the caption, the Chinese whose hands were bound had been spying on the Japanese military for the Russians. He was about to be decapitated as a 'public example.' The other Chinese gathered around him had come to enjoy the spectacle." (Lyell , pp 23).
Moving to Tokyo in spring 1906, he came under the influence of scholar and philologist Zhang Taiyan and with his brother Zuoren, also on scholarship, published a translation of some East European and Russian Slavic short stories, including the works of a Polish Nobel laureate, Henryk Sienkiewicz. He spent the next three years in Tokyo writing a series of essays in classical Chinese on the history of science, Chinese and comparative literature, European literature and intellectual history, Chinese society, reform and religion, as well as translating the literature of various countries into Chinese.
Career
Returning to China, Lu Xun began teaching in the Zhejiang Secondary Normal School (????????), the predecessor of Hangzhou High School (?????????), Shaoxing Chinese-Western School Middle school of Shaojun (??????, the predecessor of Shaoxing No.1 High School) in his hometown. With the establishment of the republic, he took a post in the Ministry of Education in Nanjing and moved with the Republican Government to Beijing, where he began to write. Lu Xun remained at the Ministry of Education until 1926 becoming first a section head and then Assistant Secretary. In 1920, encouraged by some fellow associates, he took up part-time teaching positions at the Peking University and Peking Women's Teachers College.
In May 1918, Lu Xun used this pen name for the first time and published the first major baihua short story,
Kuangren Riji (????, "A Madman's Diary"). He chose the surname Lu as it was his mother's maiden family name. Partly inspired by the Gogol short story, it was a scathing criticism of outdated Chinese traditions and feudalism which was metaphorically 'gnawing' at the Chinese like cannibalism. It immediately established him as one of the most influential writers of his day.
Another of his well-known longer stories,
The True Story of Ah Q (
A Q Zhengzhuan, ?Q??), was published in installments from 1921 to 1922. The latter would become his most famous work. Both works were included in his first short story collection
Na Han (??) or
Call to Arms, published in 1923.
Between 1924 to 1926, Lu wrote his essays of ironic reminiscences in
Zhaohua Xishi (????,
Dawn Dew-light Collected at Dusk), published 1928, as well as the prose poem collection
Ye Cao (??,
Wild Grass, published 1927). Lu Xun also wrote many of the stories to be published in his second short story collection
Pang Huang (??) in 1926. Becoming increasingly estranged with his brother Zuoren, the stories are typically more melancholic than in his earlier collection. From 1926, after the March 18 Massacre, for supporting the students' protests which led to the incident, he went on an imposed exile to Xiamen, Amoy University, then to Zhongshan University at Guangzhou with his wife Xu Guangping.
From 1927 to his death, Lu Xun shifted to the more liberal city of Shanghai, where he co-founded the Chinese League of Left-Wing Writers. Most of his essays date from this last period. Xu Guangping gave birth to a son, Haiying, on September 27, 1929. She was in labor with the baby for 27 hours. The child's name meant simply "Shanghai infant". His parents chose the name thinking that he could change it himself later, but he never did so. In 1930 Lu Xun's
Zhongguo Xiaoshuo Shilue (??????,
A Concise History of Chinese Fiction) was published. It is a comprehensive overview of history of Chinese fiction up till that time, drawn from Lu Xun's own lectures delivered at Peking University and would become one of the landmark books of Chinese literary criticism in the twentieth-century.
His other important works include volumes of translations ... notably from Russian (he particularly admired Nikolai Gogol and made a translation of
Dead Souls, and his own first story's title is inspired by a work of Gogol) ... discursive writings like
Re Feng (??,
Hot Wind), and many other works such as prose essays, which number around 20 volumes or more. As a left-wing writer, Lu played an important role in the history of Chinese literature. His books were and remain highly influential and popular even today. Lu Xun's works also appear in high school textbooks in Japan. He is known to Japanese by the name Rojin (??? in Katakana or in Kanji).
Lu Xun was the editor of several left-wing magazines such as
New Youth (???,
Xin Qingnian) and
Sprouts (??,
Meng Ya).Because of his leanings, and of the role his works played in the subsequent history of the People's Republic of China, Lu Xun's works were banned in Taiwan until the late 1980s. He was among the early supporters of the Esperanto movement in China.
Last days and death
By 1936, Lu Xun's lungs had been greatly weakened by tuberculosis. In March of that year, he was stricken with bronchitic asthma and a fever. The treatment for this involved draining 300 grams of fluid in the lungs through puncture. From June to August, he was again sick, and his weight dropped to only 83 pounds. He recovered some, and wrote two essays in the fall reflecting on mortality. These included "Death", and "This Too Is Life". At 3:30 AM on the morning of October 18, the author woke with great difficulty breathing. Dr. Sudo, his physician, was summoned, and Lu Xun took injections to relieve the pain. His wife was with him throughout that night, but Lu Xun was found without a pulse at 5:11 AM the next morning, October 19. His remains were interred in a mausoleum within Lu Xun Park in Shanghai. He was survived by his son, Haiying. He was also posthumously became member of the Communist Party for his contributions to the May Fourth Movement.
