ABSTRACT
Generally considered to be modern China’s finest writer, Lu Xun ([Lu Hsun] pen name of Zhou Shuren, 1881–1936) wrote 25 stories between 1918 and 1925 that were published in two volumes, Nahan (generally translated as Call to Arms) in 1923 and Panghuang (Wandering) in 1926. These stories capture the pathos and agonizing complexity of a traditional world passing from the scene while a new world stuggles to be born. If Lu Xun consciously regarded himself as one thoroughly in favor of the new, the hidden difficulties of that position are revealed in close examination of his stories. They give full vent to the violations of the human spirit that their author felt to be inscribed within the ideology and social structures of traditional culture, but they are even more obsessed with the problems of creating something new out of that order, which paradoxically still possessed a profound hold over Chinese mental life while itself being in utter disarray. While Lu Xun also wrote poetry, essays both touchingly personal and sharply polemical, as well as path-breaking scholarship, it is these few stories that leave the most vivid imprint on the imagination.
