Lu Xun's Stories and Modern Chinese Literature

Abstract

One of the most famous figures in the world literature of the twentieth century is Lu Xun. Lu Xun has an irreplaceable place in the history of Chinese literature not only as a writer, but also as one of the signatures that shaped modern literary thought and introduced Chinese literature to the world. The writer began his artistic career with essays, and later wrote different kind of stories, and published a book of poems. Lu Xun, who was interested in European and Russian literature from a young age, underwent a fundamental change in his literary thinking by translating various writers, and later tried to reflect it in his stories. The author of the books "Call to Arms", "The True History of Ah-Q" and  numerous critical articles and essays, always tried to demonstrate the problems of his people. Bringing the shortcomings that hindered the development of society to the literary level, Lu Xun considered literature to be the best method of struggle. The article examines Lu Xun's life and creativity,  the socio-political events that brought him to literature, and analyzes his stories from different periods. He enunciated the realities of his time and the difficult life of an oppressed Chinese man in his stories. The author, who turned ordinary people into heroes of the story, fought for modern thought without forgetting the tradition and denying Confucianism. Writing his stories in a colloquial Bay-Hua language was also a new phenomenon in the history of Chinese literature. Throughout the article, Lu Xun’s stories that differ in plot and composition, such as "Kong Yiji", "Medicine", " A Madman’s diary"", "An incident", are taken as the subject analysis. The ideological and artistic features of these stories were studied, the theme and content were analyzed.