Lu Xun
1881–1936
Biography
Lu Xun (1881–1936) was the pen name of Zhou Shuren, a writer born in Shaoxing in Zhejiang. His family had once been prosperous but was in decline when he was young, and he trained at government schools that taught Western science. He went to Japan to study medicine, gave the subject up for literature, and afterwards combined writing with teaching and editing in China. He died in Shanghai, by then the most admired and most argued-about writer of modern China.
He worked as a novelist, short-story writer, essayist, critic, poet and translator. His short story Diary of a Madman, printed in 1918, is usually counted as the first important work of modern Chinese fiction written in the vernacular. His essays, many of them sharp and satirical, were written for magazines during the New Culture movement and the May Fourth period. In the late 1920s he moved closer to Marxist and left-wing politics, and in the 1930s his dealings with leftist writers' groups were close but uneasy.
The True Story of Ah Q (阿Q正傳), published in 1921 and 1922, is his best-known fiction. Its hero, a poor and self-deceiving villager, meets every humiliation by inventing a victory in his own mind, and the phrase spiritual victory entered everyday speech from this story. The satire looks at a national mood of defeat mixed with pride. The site holds the book under its title 阿Ｑ正傳, which is the usual entry point to his fiction for readers who have not met it before.
This biography was written by a language model. The sources below are where to check it; treat details with care.
Books
阿Ｑ正傳
by Lu Xun
Ah Q, a village odd-job man who turns every humiliation into a private victory, drifts toward the 1911 Revolution without understanding it. Lu Xun's novella is a comic and merciless portrait of a man and, through him, of a nation. This book uses the racial and other slurs of its…
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.