A Cold Eye on the Literary World: Lu Xun Comments on Modern Figures
by Lu Xun
About This Novel
Lu Xun's character commentary has unique "archaeological" qualities. He is like an ideological physician holding a scalpel, always able to accurately cut through the surface of a character and get straight to the spiritual core. Regarding Sun Yat-sen, what he saw was not the deified "Father of the Nation" but the essential existence of "the eternal revolutionary"; in his commentary on Taiyan, he deplored his life path of retreating from a revolutionary to a scholar, but still regarded his "achievements in the history of revolution" as his position; regarding Cai Yuanpei, he had both a cold judgment of a "puppet" and a warm description of "nostalgia for old acquaintances." This dual style of writing that both tears away pretense and retains warmth constitutes the unique tension of Lu Xun's style of character criticism. This book specially collects Lu Xun's different evaluations of the same character, aiming to show the complex aspects of his thoughts. Readers can see not only his admiration for Chen Duxiu as the standard bearer of the New Culture Movement, but also his reservations about his political choices; both recognition of Hu Shi's academic status and more criticism of his political tendencies. These seemingly contradictory expressions exactly constitute Lu Xun's three-dimensional cognitive picture.
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