The 100 Most Influential Writers of All Time (34 page)

Zhou Shuren left his hometown in 1899 and attended a mining school in Nanjing; there he developed an interest in Darwin's theory of evolution, which became an important influence in his work. Chinese intellectuals of the time understood Darwin's theory to encourage the struggle for social reform, to privilege the new and fresh over the old and traditional. In 1902 he traveled to Japan to study Japanese and medical science, and while there he became a supporter of the Chinese revolutionaries who gathered there. In 1903 he began to write articles for radical magazines edited by Chinese students in Japan. In 1905 he entered an arranged marriage against his will. In 1909 he published, with his younger brother Zhou Zuoren, a two-volume translation of 19th-century European stories, in the hope that it would inspire readers to revolution, but the project failed to attract interest. Disillusioned, Lu Xun returned to China later that year.

After working for several years as a teacher in his hometown and then as a low-level government official in Beijing, Lu Xun returned to writing and became associated with the nascent Chinese literary movement in 1918. That year, at the urging of friends, he published his now-famous short story
Kuangren riji
(“Diary of a Madman”). Modeled on the Russian realist Nikolay Gogol's tale of the same title, the story is a condemnation of traditional Confucian culture, which the madman narrator sees as a “man-eating” society. The first published Western-style story written wholly in vernacular Chinese, it was a tour de force that attracted immediate attention and helped gain acceptance for the short-story form as an effective literary vehicle.

Another representative work is the novelette
A-Q zhengzhuan
(1921;
The True Story of Ah Q
). A mixture of humour and pathos, it is a repudiation of the old order; it added “Ah Q-ism” to the modern Chinese language as a term characterizing the Chinese penchant for rationalizing defeat as a “spiritual victory.” These stories, which were collected in
Nahan
(1923;
Call to Arms
), established Lu Xun's reputation as the leading Chinese writer. Three years later the collection
Panghuang
(1926;
Wandering
) was published. His various symbolic prose poems, which were published in the collection
Yecao
(1927;
Wild Grass
), as well as his reminiscences and retold classical tales, all reveal a modern sensibility informed by sardonic humour and biting satire.

In the 1920s Lu Xun worked at various universities in Beijing as a part-time professor of Chinese script and literature. His academic study
Zhongguo xiaoshuo shilue
(1923–24;
A Brief History of Chinese Fiction
) and companion compilations of classical fiction remain standard works. His translations, especially those of Russian works, are also considered significant.

Despite his success, Lu Xun continued to struggle with his increasingly pessimistic view of Chinese society, which was aggravated by conflicts in his personal and professional life. In addition to marital troubles and mounting pressures from the government, his disagreements with Zhou Zuoren (who had also become one of the leading intellectuals in Beijing) led to a rift between the two brothers in 1926. Such depressing conditions led Lu Xun to formulate the idea that one could resist social darkness only when he was pessimistic about the society. His famous phrase “resistance of despair” is commonly considered a core concept of his thought.

Forced by these political and personal circumstances to flee Beijing in 1926, Lu Xun traveled to Xiamen and
Guangzhou, finally settling in Shanghai in 1927. There he began to live with Xu Guangping, his former student; they had a son in 1929. Lu Xun stopped writing fiction and devoted himself to writing satiric critical essays (
zawen
), which he used as a form of political protest. In 1930 he became the nominal leader of the League of Left-Wing Writers. During the following decade he began to see the Chinese communists as the only salvation for his country. Although he himself refused to join the Chinese Communist Party, he considered himself a
tongluren
(fellow traveler), recruiting many writers and countrymen to the communist cause through his Chinese translations of Marxist literary theories, as well as through his own political writing.

During the last several years of Lu Xun's life, the government prohibited the publication of most of his work, so he published the majority of his new articles under various pseudonyms. He criticized the Shanghai communist literary circles for their embrace of propaganda, and he was politically attacked by many of their members. In 1934 he described his political position as
hengzhan
(“horizontal stand”), meaning he was struggling simultaneously against both the right and the left, against both cultural conservatism and mechanical evolution.
Hengzhan
, the most important idea in Lu Xun's later thought, indicates the complex and tragic predicament of an intellectual in modern society.

The Chinese communist movement adopted Lu Xun posthumously as the exemplar of Socialist Realism. Many of his fiction and prose works have been incorporated into school textbooks. In 1951 the Lu Xun Museum opened in Shanghai; it contains letters, manuscripts, photographs, and other memorabilia. English translations of Lu Xun's works include
Silent China: Selected Writings of Lu Xun
(1973),
Lu Hsun: Complete Poems
(1988), and
Diary of a Madman and Other Stories
(1990).

(b. Jan. 25, 1882, London, Eng.—d. March 28, 1941, near Rodmell, Sussex)

V
irginia Woolf was an English writer whose novels, through their nonlinear approaches to narrative, exerted a major influence on the genre. While she is best known for her novels, especially
Mrs. Dalloway
(1925) and
To the Lighthouse
(1927), Woolf also wrote pioneering essays on artistic theory, literary history, women's writing, and the politics of power.

Born Virginia Stephen, she was the child of ideal Victorian parents. Her father, Leslie Stephen, was an eminent literary figure and the first editor (1882–91) of the
Dictionary of National Biography
. Her mother, Julia Jackson, possessed great beauty and a reputation for saintly self-sacrifice. Both Julia Jackson's first husband, Herbert Duckworth, and Leslie's first wife, a daughter of the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, had died unexpectedly, leaving her three children and him one. Julia Jackson Duckworth and Leslie Stephen married in 1878, and four children followed: Vanessa (born 1879), Thoby (born 1880), Virginia (born 1882), and Adrian (born 1883).

The Stephen family made summer migrations from London to the rugged Cornwall coast. That annual relocation cleanly structured Woolf's childhood world. Her neatly divided, predictable world ended, however, when her mother died in 1895 at age 49. Woolf was just emerging from depression when, in 1897, her half sister Stella Duckworth died at age 28. Then in 1904, after her father died, she had a nervous breakdown.

While she was recovering, Vanessa supervised the Stephen children's move to the bohemian Bloomsbury section of London. Leonard Woolf dined with them in November 1904, just before sailing to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to become a colonial administrator. Soon the Stephens hosted weekly gatherings of radical young people. Then, after a family excursion to Greece in 1906, Thoby died of typhoid fever. Virginia Woolf grieved but did not slip into depression. She overcame the loss of Thoby and the “loss” of Vanessa, who became engaged to Clive Bell just after Thoby's death, through writing. Vanessa's marriage (and perhaps Thoby's absence) helped transform conversation at the avant-garde gatherings of what came to be known as the Bloomsbury group into irreverent repartee that inspired Woolf to exercise her wit publicly, even while privately she was writing her poignant
Reminiscences
—about her childhood and her lost mother—which was published in 1908.

Woolf determined in 1908 to “re-form” the novel. While writing anonymous reviews for the
Times Literary Supplement
and other journals, she experimented with such a novel, which she called
Melymbrosia
. In the summer of 1911, Leonard Woolf returned from the East. After he resigned from the colonial service, Leonard and Virginia married in August 1912.

Between 1910 and 1915, Virginia Woolf's mental health was precarious. Nevertheless, she completely recast
Melymbrosia
as
The Voyage Out
in 1913. Rachel Vinrace, the novel's central character, is a sheltered young woman who, on an excursion to South America, is introduced to freedom and sexuality. After an excursion up the Amazon,
Rachel contracts a terrible illness that plunges her into delirium and then death. The book endorses no explanation for her death. That indeterminacy set the book at odds with the certainties of the Victorian era and especially the conventions of realism.

Woolf's manic-depressive worries provoked a suicide attempt in September 1913. Publication of
The Voyage Out
was delayed until early 1915. That April, she sank into a distressed state in which she was often delirious. Later that year she overcame the “vile imaginations” that had threatened her sanity. She kept the demons of mania and depression mostly at bay for the rest of her life.

In 1917 the Woolfs bought a printing press and founded the Hogarth Press, named for Hogarth House, their home in the London suburbs. The Woolfs themselves (she was the compositor while he worked the press) published their own
Two Stories
in the summer of 1917. It consisted of Leonard's
Three Jews
and Virginia's
The Mark on the Wall
, the latter about contemplation itself.

Proving that she could master the traditional form of the novel before breaking it, Woolf plotted her next novel in two romantic triangles, with its protagonist Katharine in both.
Night and Day
(1919) focuses on the very sort of details that Woolf had deleted from
The Voyage Out
: credible dialogue, realistic descriptions of early 20th-century settings, and investigations of issues such as class, politics, and suffrage.

Woolf was writing nearly a review a week for the
Times Literary Supplement
in 1918. Her essay
Modern Novels
(1919; revised in 1925 as
Modern Fiction
) attacked the “materialists” who wrote about superficial rather than spiritual or “luminous” experiences. The Woolfs also printed by hand, with Vanessa Bell's illustrations, Virginia's
Kew Gardens
(1919), a story organized, like a Post-Impressionistic painting, by
pattern. With the Hogarth Press's emergence as a major publishing house, the Woolfs gradually ceased being their own printers. In 1919 they bought a cottage in Rodmell village called Monk's House, which looked out over the Sussex Downs and the meadows where the River Ouse wound down to the English Channel. Three years later Woolf published
Jacob's Room
, in which she transformed personal grief over the death of Thoby Stephen into a “spiritual shape.” Though
Jacob's Room
is an antiwar novel, Woolf feared that she had ventured too far beyond representation.

At the beginning of 1924, the Woolfs moved their city residence from the suburbs back to Bloomsbury, where they were less isolated from London society. Soon the aristocratic Vita Sackville-West began to court Woolf, a relationship that would blossom into a lesbian affair.

Having already written a story about a Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf thought of a foiling device that would pair that highly sensitive woman with a shell-shocked war victim, a Mr. Smith, so that “the sane and the insane” would exist “side by side.” Her aim was to “tunnel” into these two characters until Clarissa Dalloway's affirmations meet Septimus Smith's negations. In
Mrs. Dalloway
(1925), the boorish doctors presume to understand personality, but its essence evades them. This novel is as patterned as a Post-Impressionist painting but is also so accurately representational that the reader can trace Clarissa's and Septimus's movements through the streets of London on a single day in June 1923. At the end of the day, Clarissa gives a grand party and Septimus commits suicide. Their lives come together when the doctor who was treating (or, rather, mistreating) Septimus arrives at Clarissa's party
with news of the death. The main characters are connected by motifs and, finally, by Clarissa's intuiting why Septimus threw his life away.

Woolf wished to build on her achievement in
Mrs. Dalloway
by merging the novelistic and elegiac forms. As an elegy,
To the Lighthouse
—published on May 5, 1927, the 32nd anniversary of Julia Stephen's death—evoked her childhood summers. As a novel, it broke narrative continuity into a tripartite structure and thereby melded into its structure questions about creativity and the nature and function of art.