ABSTRACT
In the excerpt below, Lu Wenfu addresses his own group, China's middle-aged writers. Many of them have complained about having had to waste so many years during China's political turmoil, while the younger generation in many cases had a luckier start and enjoyed infinitely better working conditions. Warning against bitterness and envy, Lu Wenfu soberly evaluates both the social clout and the artistic limits of writers at his stage of life. He acknowledges that they are ignorant of world literature and even of China's own major traditions. He is in fact conscious that the vicissitudes of his times have deprived middle-aged writers of the chance to equal the best of Chinese authors, such as Lu Xun, who were active during the pre-1949 years. Authors with such handicaps should not now try, in his opinion, for a tour de force that will paint a picture of a whole epoch (as the social realism in which his generation was tutored might tempt them to try to do). We find here also the conviction that the younger generation will create the more lasting works: thoughtful counterpoint to Ba Jin's more optimistic statements in his Memoirs, which rank the literature of the 1980s above Chinese works of the Republican era, in the 1920s and 1930s.
