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in me again.” Lasker-Schüler’s fascination with her
Jewish roots also led to her constant longing for
Jerusalem, which she visited five times during her
life.
Lasker-Schüler’s banishment from Germany
was a painful experience and one to which she re-
turns over and over in her poetry. In “Banished”
(1934) she longs for Germany, which she always
considered her homeland:“Where is the breath my
life exhaled? / Exiled dreamer I glide between pale
hours / Companion to wild game. I used to love
you.” Lasker-Schüler considered herself a German
to the end of her life.
Else Lasker-Schüler’s poetry did not become
widely popular until the end of the World War II.
Today, she is considered to be among the best poets
of Germany. In 1953, at a poetry reading dedicated
to the memory of Else Lasker-Schüler, the poet
Gottfried Benn referred to her as “the greatest lyric
poet Germany ever had.” Lasker-Schüler’s work is
not well known outside of German-speaking
countries because, as many critics and scholars
claim, the complexity of her verse renders it virtu-
ally untranslatable. Recent translations, however,
have been more successful, and her works are now
available in more than 12 languages.
Other Works by Else Lasker-Schüler
Selected Poems. Translated by Jeanette Demeestere-
Litman. New York: Green Integer, 2000.
Star in my Forehead. Translated by Janine Canan. New
York: Consortium, 1999.
A Work about Else Lasker-Schüler
Yudkin, Leon I. Else Lasker-Schueler: A Study in Ger-
man Jewish Literature. Washington, D.C.: B’nai
B’rith Book Service, 1991.
Lautréamont, comte de (Isadore-
Lucien Ducasse)
(1846–1870) poet
Isadore Ducasse, who adopted the pen name and
title of comte de Lautréamont, was born in
Uruguay on April 4, 1846, to French parents. His fa-
ther was a consular officer; his mother died when
he was 18 months old. When he was 10 years old,
his father left him with relatives in France, where he
attended school and earned a reputation as a sullen,
introverted student who disliked math and Latin.
Lautréamont, however, became interested in litera-
ture and, as an independent thinker, developed
ideas and attitudes that would eventually earn him
a permanent place in French literary history.
After leaving school at age 19, Lautréamont
traveled abroad, made some literary contacts, and
then returned to Paris to begin his first major
work, Les Chants de Maldoror (1869). The title of
this work has been subject to various interpreta-
tions, ranging from “dawn of evil” to “evil from the
beginning.” It is a macabre prose poem in which
the main character celebrates evil with religious
fervor. Themes within the work include rebellion
against God, the image of Christ as a rapist, and a
bitter protagonist whose decomposing and disfig-
ured body is a haven for animals who have taken
up residence in it while he still lives.
For the publication of Maldoror, he assumed
the pseudonym Lautréamont, a name that is taken
perhaps from Eugène Sue’s novel Lautréamont,
whose protagonist is similar in attitude to the main
character in Maldoror. Part of the work was first
printed privately in 1868, most likely with financial
assistance from Lautréamont’s father. The entire
work was printed in 1869, but the publishers, fear-
ing prosecution because of the blasphemous na-
ture of the piece, opted not to make the text
available for purchase.
Lautréamont tried in vain to convince the pub-
lishers to make his work available. He also began
another collection, this time celebrating hope and
faith, but he died before completing it.
Nine years after his death, Lautréamont’s works
were finally published. They met with little notice,
however, until members of the surrealist move-
ment in the 1920s began to focus on Lautréamont
as a thematic forerunner of their own ideals.
Another Work by Comte de Lautréamont
Maldoror; and Poems. Translated by Paul Knight.
Hardmonsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1978.
258 Lautréamont, comte de
A Work about Comte de Lautréamont
Bachelard, Gaston. Lautréamont. Translated by
Robert S. Dupree. Dallas, Tex.: Dallas Institute of
Humanities and Culture, 1986.
Lawson, Henry (Larsen, Henry
Hertzberg; Henry Archibald)
(1867–1922) short-story writer, poet
Henry Lawson was born on the goldfields of Gren-
fell, New South Wales, Australia. He was the eldest
son of a Norwegian sailor, Peter Lawson, and his
wife, Louisa. His mother was actively involved in
publishing and was a famous leader of the
women’s rights movement in Australia. Lawson’s
early life was difficult: His family was poor, and an
ear infection caused him to lose his hearing by the
time he turned 14. His parents eventually sepa-
rated, and his mother moved to Sydney. Lawson
later moved to Sydney as well and became deeply
influenced by his mother’s radical friends.
Lawson’s writings reflect his bitter life experi-
ences. His inability to communicate because of the
deafness led him to develop a keen habit of ob-
serving people. Lawson’s works are about watching
people and observing their actions. He used his
powers of observation and his past experiences to
enhance his writing. The major themes of Law-
son’s poems revolve around the Australian bush.
Growing up in the bushland, Lawson knew the
hardships of bush life and drew inspiration from
the lessons learned coping and living with nature
and the land, as can be seen in most of his short
stories, including “The Drover’s Wife,” published
in his collection While the Billy Boils (1896). Law-
son found an affinity with the bush that he could
not feel from human company. The celebratory
tone of such poems as “The Roaring Days” (1889)
and “Andy’s Gone with Cattle” (1888) contrasts
with the estrangement that the poet clearly felt in
observing people.
Lawson’s writings also reflect his deep concern
for political and social issues. Some of his major
poems of political and social protest include “The
Watch on the Kerb” (1888) and “The Men Who
Made Australia” (1901), which highlight the alien-
ation and despair that are shared among most of
Australia’s struggling population. These same
themes can be seen in his short stories “In the
Storm That Is to Come” (1904) and “The Union
Buries Its Dead” (1896).
Lawson’s isolation increased as he failed to find
happiness in marriage. He resorted to heavy drink-
ing and spent most of his later life in a state of
delirium and mental instability. His writing de-
clined as his health collapsed. He began to write
autobiographical works as he sought to hang on
to his sanity. At his death, he was the first Aus-
tralian writer to be granted a state funeral. Law-
son’s contribution to Australian and world
literature lies in his accurate but starkly depressing
portrayal of the difficult lives of the Australian
lower classes, especially the much neglected re-
gions of the Australian countryside and bush areas.
Other Works by Henry Lawson
The Bush Undertaker and Other Stories. Sydney:
Angus and Robertson, 1994.
Henry Lawson: Short Stories. Edited by John Barnes.
New York: Penguin, 1986.
Works about Henry Lawson
Philips, A. A. Henry Lawson. Boston: Twayne, 1970.
Wright, Judith. Henry Lawson. Melbourne, Australia:
Oxford University Press, 1967.
Léger, Alexis Saint-Léger
See PERSE, SAINT-JOHN.
Leiris, Michel (1901–1990) novelist,
nonfiction writer
Noted for his work as anthropologist and writer,
Michel Leiris was born in Paris to an upper-class
family. He became a serious student of chemistry
but was soon drawn to the Bohemian world of
Parisian cafés and cabarets where he first encoun-
tered and then became enamored with the growing
surrealist, and DADA movements.
Leiris, Michel 259
Leiris was first introduced to surrealism by his
close friend André Masson. He focused for a time
on writing poetry in the surrealist fashion but by
the 1920s abandoned the movement. With
Georges BATAILLE and others, Leiris formed the
Collège de Sociologie. Leiris had an abiding inter-
est in the cultures of Central America, Africa, and
the Caribbean, and the college formed a launch-
ing point for his extensive fieldwork in Ethiopia
and the Sudan. Many of his writings come from his
experiences there, including L’Afrique fantôme
(1933), a travel account of his voyages.
Leiris’s other writings include a four-volume
autobiography, La Règle du jeu, the first volume of
which was originally published in English as Man-
hood. The entire work was eventually translated
and titled Rules of the Game. He also wrote a de-
tailed biography of Francis Bacon and conducted
several anthropological studies.
Leiris lived out his life in Paris with his wife, the
owner of Galerie Louise Leiris, a prominent art in-
stitution of the postwar era. It is because of her in-
terest in the arts that Leiris also wrote extensively
on the modern artists of the period, such as Miró,
Giacometti, Bacon, Lam, and Duchamp.
Other Works by Michel Leiris
Aurora: A Novel. Translated by Anna Warby. London:
Atlas, 1990.
Broken Branches. Translated by Lydia Davis. San Fran-
cisco: North Point Press, 1989.
Nights as Day, Days as Night. Translated by Richard
Sieburth. New York: Rizzoli, 1988.
Rules of the Game. Translated by Lydia Davis. Balti-
more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
A Work about Michel Leiris
Hand, Sean. Michel Leiris: Writing the Self. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Leopardi, Giacomo (1798–1837) poet,
essayist, philosopher
Giacomo Leopardi was born in Recanti, now
Marche, Italy, to Count Monaldo Leopardi and
Marchesa Adelaide Antici. His upbringing was so
sequestered that he was 20 years old before he left
his home unaccompanied. Leopardi was a preco-
cious youth and at 12 had surpassed the educa-
tional level of his tutors. He was a bibliophile and a
polyglot who learned seven languages, including,
Greek, Latin, and German. As a young man, he
made translations and wrote commentary on the
classics and at age 15 produced his first book, His-
tory of Astronomy. Although he grappled with
blindness and a hunchback, his passion for writing
saw him through his maladies.
Leopardi’s crowning masterpiece was the book
of poetry I Canti (1831). His poems were very per-
sonal statements of his life, loves, and loneliness. In
his poem “To Italy,” he states, “If but the gods be
willing / Endure as long as your renown endures.” In
his poem “The Solitary Life,” he strikes a more de-
spairing note: “On earth, unhappy people find no
friend / Or refuge left for them except cold steel.”
Giacomo Leopardi is considered the greatest lit-
erary figure of 19th-century Italy for his poetry, es-
says, and translations. According to Leopardi’s
biographer J. H. Whitfield, no Italian poet aside
from Dante has attracted such a circle of devoted
admirers as Leopardi. Whitfield summarizes Leop-
ardi’s contribution to Italian literature: “[he] sees
the poet as potentially a philosopher, and the
philosopher as potentially a poet; and though it
has been fashionable, especially in Italian criticism,
to set the two as opposites, the marriage of the
terms is most nearly achieved in the case of Leop-
ardi.”
Other Works by Giacomo Leopardi
The Canti: With a Selection of His Prose. Manchester,
U.K.: Carcanet, 1998.
Leopardi: Selected Poems. Translated by Eamon Gren-
nan. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1997.
Works about Giacomo Leopardi
Nisbet, Delia Fabbroni-Gianotti. Heinrich Heine and
Giacomo Leopardi: The Rhetoric of Midrash. New
York: Peter Lang, 2000.
260 Leopardi, Giacomo
Press, Lynne, and Pamela Williams. Women and Fem-
inine Images in Giacomo Leopardi. Lewiston, N.Y.:
Edwin Mellen Press, 1999.
Whitfield, J. H. Giacomo Leopardi. Oxford: Blackwell,
1954.
Lermontov, Mikhail (1814–1841) poet,
novelist
Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov was born in
Moscow, Russia, to Yuri Lermontov, a retired army
captain, and Maria Lermontov, a descendent of an
aristocratic family. After the death of his mother in
1817, Lermontov was sent to his affluent grand-
mother, Elizabetha Stolypin. He received an excel-
lent education from private tutors, and in 1827, he
enrolled in a prestigious academy in Moscow that
was sponsored by the royal family. Young Lermon-
tov, surrounded by the most prominent intellec-
tuals and writers in Russia, began to compose
poetry in 1828. In 1830, he traveled with his grand-
mother to the family estate outside Moscow,
where, in idyllic surroundings, he read intensively
and wrote poetry.
Lermontov was heavily influenced by
ROMANTI-
CISM. George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824)
and Aleksandr
PUSHKIN were his favorite poets.
After a few unsuccessful years at the Moscow Uni-
versity, Lermontov joined the army as a junior of-
ficer in 1832. After the death of Aleksandr Pushkin
in a duel in 1835, Lermontov wrote a commemo-
rative poem, “On the Death of the Poet,” in which
he suggested that the government had been in-
volved in the scandal that led to the duel and may
even have paid Pushkin’s opponent. The poem was
widely popular but was considered incendiary by
the authorities. Lermontov was demoted and exiled
to the Caucasus, an isolated, mountainous region
of Russia. The material for most of Lermontov’s
prose came from his experiences in the Caucasus.
Lermontov composed a heroic poem,“The Song of
the Merchant Kalashnikov” (1837), about a man
whose heroism consists in following his inner
principles rather than the pressures of society. Ler-
montov returned to St. Petersburg in 1838, after
his grandmother made numerous petitions on his
behalf. In 1840, Lermontov was sent back to the
Caucasus, as a punishment for dueling.
Lermontov enlisted in a regiment that was re-
sponsible for putting down a violent rebellion by
Chechen forces. After receiving an award for brav-
ery in combat, he was allowed to return to St. Pe-
tersburg in 1841. While in St. Petersburg, he
published a collection of poems and completed
Demon (1828–41), a long narrative poem about a
love affair between a fallen angel and a mortal. The
poem reveals Lermontov’s aversion to religion and
his love for rugged, primitive landscape.
Shortly before his death, Lermontov completed
one of the greatest novels in Russian literature, A
Hero of Our Time (1840). Based on Lermontov’s
experiences in the Caucasus, this classic work of
psychological realism examines the psyche and
emotions of the disenchanted aristocrat Pichorin.
Nearly all of Lermontov’s works were critically
acclaimed and widely popular during his lifetime,
but his personal relationships were often turbulent
and dramatic. He made many enemies during his
short life, largely because of his cynical and, at
times, cruel disposition. Like his hero Aleksandr
Pushkin, Lermontov was shot and killed in a duel.
Lermontov’s reputation as a poet is only sec-
ond to Pushkin’s in Russia. His stirring poetry is
remarkable for its lyricism and for its skillful and
ingenious use of metaphor. Lermontov made a
dramatic contribution to the poetic tradition of
Russia, revealing new ways in which the Russian
language could be extended, molded, and shaped
into a dramatic lyrical form. He is not very well
known outside Russia because his poetry is ex-
tremely difficult to translate; today, however, he is
recognized as one of the most influential and sem-
inal figures of the Russian literary landscape.
Other Works by Mikhail Lermontov
A Hero of Our Time. Translated by Vladimir
Nabokov. New York: Knopf, 1992.
Major Poetical Works. Translated by Anatoly Liber-
man. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1984.
Lermontov, Mikhail 261
Works about Mikhail Lermontov
Garrard, John. Mikhail Lermontov. Boston: Twayne,
1982.
Golstein, Vladimir B. Heroes of Their Times: Lermon-
tov’s Representation of the Heroic Self. New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992.
Levi, Primo (1919–1987) novelist, nonfiction
writer
Best known for his autobiographical If This Is a
Man (1947), an account of survival in a Nazi con-
centration camp, Primo Levi was born in 1919 to
a middle-class Jewish family in Turin. Growing up
under Benito Mussolini and his fascist, anti-Se-
mitic regime, Levi learned little about his heritage
as a child. He was able to enter the University of
Turin to study chemistry just before laws were en-
acted in 1938 to prohibit Jews from academic
study. He graduated in 1941 at the top of his class,
one year after Italy allied with Germany during
World War II.
During the war, Levi began to write articles for
Giustizia e Liberata, a resistance magazine. He was
captured in December 1943 while attempting to
make contact with a partisan group in northern
Italy. He was first interred at a transitional camp in
Fossoli but was soon deported to the major concen-
tration camp at Auschwitz. Traveling to the camp in
a convoy of 650 prisoners, he was one of only 24 sur-
vivors. Forced to work in one of the laboratories, he
was spared the gas chambers but not the memory
of those around him who did not survive.
After the camp was liberated by the Soviets in
1945, Levi returned to Turin where he secured
work as a chemist. He returned to his family’s old
manor home and began to write. If This Is a Man
was written in the form of a memoir document-
ing his internment at Auschwitz. Although the
subject matter was gruesome and intense, part of
Levi’s appeal was his ability to abstract himself
from his surroundings and take on the role of an
objective, scientific observer. The work was not
without compassion, but neither did it seek to cap-
italize on the tragedy of life in a concentration
camp. The book was an instant success, selling
more than a half-million copies in Italy before
being translated into eight languages as well as
being adapted for radio broadcast and theatrical
production. A sequel to the book, The Truce
(1963), detailed Levi’s eight months spent wander-
ing the remains of a war-torn Europe immediately
after his liberation. The focus of the work is the
difficulty a survivor faces when he or she is allowed
to return, after great trauma, to a normal life.
By 1961, Levi had become the general manager
of a paint factory, which enabled him to save
enough money to retire in 1977 and devote himself
full time to his writing. All of his works are in some
way autobiographical. The Periodic Table (1975)
uses the elements as a background; each element
represents an event that is then recorded in mem-
oir form as a meditation on the past. In all, the
work is comprised of 21 separate entries, ranging
from his encounter with an official from Auschwitz
to a homage to his Jewish heritage. If Not Now,
When (1989) focuses on the emerging sense of
Jewish pride, coupled with an historical account
of Russian action against the Nazis.
Levi’s final work, The Drowned and the Saved
(1986), is a collection of essays relating the ever-
present memory of the Holocaust to the fact that
anti-Semitism still exists even though the war is
over. It was published one year prior to Levi’s
death, an apparent suicide. He struggled for much
of the last 40 years of his life to reconcile the fact
that he had survived life in a concentration camp.
Levi’s greatest contribution to world literature
is the legacy he left behind. His works give great in-
sight into the life of a Jew and a survivor.
Another Work by Primo Levi
The Voice of Memory: Interviews, 1961–1987. Trans-
lated by Robert Gordon. New York: New Press,
2001.
A Work about Primo Levi
Kremer, Roberta S., ed. Memory and Mastery: Primo
Levi as Writer and Witness. Albany: State Univer-
sity of New York Press, 2001.
262 Levi, Primo
Li Feigan
See BA JIN.
Lim, Shirley Geok-Lin (1944– ) novelist,
poet
Shirley Geok-Lin Lim was born in historic
Malacca, a small town on the west coast of
Malaysia. Lim’s childhood was marked by feelings
of abandonment, deprivation, and suffering,
caused by her mother’s abandoning her and her
five brothers when they were still young. As the
only girl in the family, Lim often felt neglected and
marginalized; she nevertheless completed her high
school education in a Catholic convent and went
on to the University of Malaya. She taught for two
years before going to the United States to obtain
graduate degrees at Brandeis University in Massa-
chusetts. Lim taught briefly at Westchester College
before moving to Santa Barbara in 1990. She is
currently professor of English and Women’s Stud-
ies at the University of California and professor of
English and head of the English Department at the
University of Hong Kong.
Lim is an animated writer who is able to draw
on her rich cultural origins and experience to ele-
vate her poetry and prose. Her writings bespeak
the emotional longing she holds for her home-
land, even as they dramatize her grappling with is-
sues of ethnicity, gender, and identity as an Asian
American living in the United States. In her poem,
“Bukit China” (Malay name for “Chinese Hill”)
(1994), for example, Lim examines the theme of
displacement and loss as experienced by her Chi-
nese forefathers who crossed the South China Sea
in the distant past to seek fortune in the reputedly
rich “Southern Ocean” in Southeast Asia. Issues
of ethnicity and identity are most poignantly ex-
pressed in her collection Life’s Mysteries: The Best
of Shirley Lim (1995). In one poem in the collec-
tion, “A Pot of Rice,” Su Yu reaffirms her own
identity as she cooks a pot of rice in her New York
apartment to offer to her dead father. In another
poem, “Transportation in Westchester,” the sub-
ject of interracial relationships takes on a new
shape when the Asian-American protagonist real-
izes her own prejudice through her interactions
with African Americans.
Lim has received many awards, honors, and
prizes for her critical and literary contributions.
Her first book, Crossing the Peninsula and Other
Poems (1980), won the Commonwealth Poetry
Prize in 1980; a work she edited, The Forbidden
Stitch: An Asian-American Women’s Anthology
(1989), was the recipient of the 1990 American
Book Award.
Other Works by Shirley Geok-Lin Lim
Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian-American
Memoir of Homelands. New York: The Feminist
Press, 1996.
Another Country and Other Stories. Singapore: Times
Books International, 1982.
Joss and Gold. New York: The Feminist Press, 2001.
What the Fortune-Teller Didn’t Say. Albuquerque, N.
Mex.: West End Press, 1998.
Writing Southeast Asia in English: Against the Grain,
Focus on Asian English Language Literature. Lon-
don: Skoob Books Publications, 1994.
Lispector, Clarice (1920–1977) novelist
Clarice Lispector was born in Ukraine on Decem-
ber 10 but moved to Recife, Brazil, when she was
only two months old and remained there for the
rest of her life. Although it is likely that her parents,
Ukrainian Jews, spoke Yiddish at home, she often
denied it because she so strongly identified herself
as Brazilian. The family later moved to Rio de
Janeiro where she eventually completed her college
studies. At the age of 23, she married her former
classmate, Maury Gurgel Valente, who had become
a diplomat. As a result of his career, they traveled
widely, allowing her the opportunity for many new
experiences, which certainly contributed to her ca-
reer as a writer.
One year after her marriage, Lispector pub-
lished her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart. The
book was very well received, and she wrote several
novels throughout her lifetime, including among
Lispector, Clarice 263
the best-known, Family Ties and The Passion of
G.H. In addition she wrote short stories. Her final
book, a short novel, The Hour of the Star, recounts
the life story of a poor Brazilian girl and considers
the issues of otherness and understanding.
Lispector’s work has been more popularized
outside of Brazil than that of many other female
Brazilian authors who remain mostly unknown
in the United States. This is largely because of
Hélène
CIXOUS, a French writer who is currently a
university professor in the United States. She has
written several books of criticism and even a
novel inspired by Clarice Lispector’s work.
Lispector’s novels tend to concern family rela-
tionships, moral uncertainty, and social isolation
that so many 20th-century novelists have focused
on. Lispector died in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on
December 9, one day short of her 57th birthday,
having made extraordinary contributions to
Brazilian literature.
Other Works by Clarice Lispector
Family Ties. Arlington: The University of Texas Press,
1972.
The Hour of the Star. New York: New Directions, 1977.
The Passion of G.H. Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press, 1989.
Works about Clarice Lispector
Cixous, Hélène. Reading with Clarice Lispector. Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990.
Peixoto, Marta. Passionate Fictions: Gender, Narrative,
and Violence in Clarice Lispector. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1994.
Liu E (Liu Tieh Yun) (1857–1909) poet,
novelist
Liu E was born the son of a scholar official in
Liuhe in the Jiangsu Province. He was a good
student with diverse interests and was very open
to new ideas. He worked variously as a doctor, a
merchant, and a government administrator, in
addition to writing. He had friends in high
places but was also adaptive to Western influ-
ences during the late Qing (Ch’ing) dynasty
when China was especially guarded against
them. This would ultimately damage his career
and reputation.
Liu E wrote and published poetry and fiction
throughout his life but is known primarily for
writing one of the first Chinese novels in a ver-
nacular language, The Travels of Lao Can (Ts’an).
As a serial that began publication in 1903, and as
a complete book in 1907, it is considered to be
one of the first modern novels because of its ac-
cessible vernacular language and its satiric and
pointed critique of official corruption. The novel
opens with the title character Lao Can’s allegori-
cal dream that equates China with a leaking,
sinking ship. Lao Can offers potential solutions
in his dream, including the use of new technical
instruments and other Western innovations.
After the dream ends, the novel then follows Lao
Can, an itinerant and eccentric doctor, on his
travels through the country. Inspired by his
dream to effect change, Lao Can encounters cruel
officials who are insensible to the plight of the
Chinese people and closed to the possibility of
improvements.
Liu E suffered at the hands of official corrup-
tion himself, and the parallels to Lao Can are
many; in fact, many of the officials in the novel
bear names very similar to Liu E’s own colleagues.
When Liu E suggested building a railway in the city
of Zhili, he was attacked by conservative officials.
Eventually, in 1908, he was banished to Xinjiang,
China’s western barren lands, for associating with
foreign merchants during the Boxer Rebellion. He
died in exile.
A Work about Liu E
Holoch, Donald. “The Travels of Laocan: Allegorical
Narrative.” In M. Dolezelova-Velingerova, ed., The
Chinese Novel at the Turn of the Century. To r o n t o :
University of Toronto Press, 1980.
Lorca, Federico García
See GARCÍA LORCA, FEDERICO.
264 Liu E
Lu Xun (Lu Hsün; Zhou Shuren)
(1881–1936) short-story writer, essayist
Zhou Shuren, who adopted the pen name Lu Xun,
was born September 25 into a family of declining
social status in Shaoxing, Zhejiang province. His
grandfather directed his schooling, which was less
rigid than a traditional education. By age 11, he was
an avid reader of popular literature and nonfiction
but lacked interest in classical Confucian texts.
In 1893, when Zhou Shuren’s grandfather was
charged for taking bribes in the examination sys-
tem and imprisoned, he went to live with his
mother’s family. He was deeply affected by the shift
from a wealthy lifestyle to a poor one, later writing
that it illuminated his understanding of the world.
In 1902, Zhou Shuren moved to Japan. Eager
to better the conditions of China’s people, he stud-
ied medicine at Sendai Medical College but main-
tained interests in literature and philosophy and
read Western publications. He was especially influ-
enced by Russian writers such as
GOGOL and
CHEKHOV. However, when he watched a newsreel
from the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05 of a cap-
tured Chinese spy being tortured, he changed his
course of study; the inhumanity in the footage af-
fected Lu Xun deeply. Subsequently, he partici-
pated in democratic and nationalistic activities and
focused on writing as a means to effect social
change, believing that literature would uplift the
collective Chinese “spirit.”
While still in Tokyo, Lu Xun edited the journal
New Life and published essays in the Communist
journal Henan on Western philosophy, sometimes
collaborating with his brother, the writer Zhou
Zuoren. In 1909, he returned to China and taught
middle-school biology in Hangzhou and Shaoxing.
After the Nationalist Revolution in 1911, Lu Xun
accepted a position with the education ministry,
where he studied and compiled Buddhist sutras. He
began to publish poems and fiction in the popular
journal New Youth in 1918, including “The Diary of
a Madman,” a short story about a man who suffers
from paranoid delusions of the widespread practice
of cannibalism. It is considered the first Chinese
modernist short story because of its subjective,
first-person narrative. He also submitted “random
essays” and “random thoughts,” which were pub-
lished as such in the magazine. He accepted a lec-
tureship at National Beijing University in Chinese
literature in 1919 but soon returned home to take
care of personal matters. There, he was moved to
write stories about the debilitating effects of the old
Chinese way of life on conditions in his hometown.
By 1921, back in Beijing and teaching at Beijing
Normal University, he became established as a fic-
tion writer and one of the leading writers of the
May Fourth Movement, with more than 50 stories
published in New Youth. He also wrote his first col-
lections of stories, The Outcry (1923) and Hesita-
tion (1926). The stories in these collections were
inspired by the folk tales and myths of Lu Xun’s
childhood, but they were often dark and brooding.
Perhaps his most famous work is the novella The
True Story of Ah Q (1922), about a lonely laborer
from a poor village. Despite failing at all his en-
deavors, Ah Q blindly interprets each failure as a
victory and is eventually unfairly executed because
of his foolishness. The story demonstrates Lu
Xun’s contempt for the similar myopia of Chinese
society toward its sociopolitical and economic
plight.
Lu Xun left Beijing in 1926 for Guangdong and
Macau and often engaged in debates with the new
breed of communist writers who advocated
SO-
CIALIST-REALISM in literature. He grew disillusioned
with the Nationalist Party and became a Commu-
nist in 1929. He was active as a founder of the
League of Left-Wing Writers in 1930 but never
joined the Communist Party itself. He turned to
translating Soviet theory and attacking National-
ists, antileftists, and Western writers. He became
one of the leading socialist intellectuals, teaching at
various universities, including Xiamen and
Zhongsan, and editing numerous journals, includ-
ing Wilderness, Tattler, and Torrent. Even when he
contracted pulmonary tuberculosis in 1933, he
continued to contribute articles on a near-daily
basis to the newspaper Shen Pao. He died on Oc-
tober 19 in Shanghai. At his funeral, he was eulo-
gized as the “national soul,” and the Communist
Lu Xun 265
Party canonized him posthumously. Today, he is
revered as one of China’s greatest writers whose
contributions to modernism and communist liter-
ature are held up as the highest literary ideals.
Other Works by Lu Xun
Call to Arms (Chinese/English Edition). Beijing: For-
eign Language Press, 2000.
Diary of a Madman and Other Stories. Translated by
William Lyell. Honolulu: University of Hawaii
Press, 1990.
Lu Xun: Selected Poems. Translated by W. J. F. Jenner.
Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1982.
Selected Stories of Lu Xun (Chinese/English Edition).
Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 2000.
Works about Lu Xun
Lee, Leo Ou-fan. Voices from the Iron House: A Study
of Lu Xun. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1987.
Lyell, William A. Lu Hsun’s Vision of Reality. Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1976.
266 Lu Xun
267
Machado de Assis, Joaquim Maria
(1839–1908) short-story writer
Machado de Assis was born in Rio de Janeiro,
Brazil, on June 21. The son of a mulatto father and
a white mother, Machado de Assis’s racial back-
ground has often been remarked upon. He lost his
mother when he was very young and became ex-
tremely attached to his stepmother, who encour-
aged his education and put him through public
school. After his father died in 1851, she accepted
a job in a local college, and Machado de Assis was
forced to leave school and work, but it is likely that
he continued attending some classes intermittently
at her place of employment. Machado de Assis
published his first poem, “Ela,” in a journal at age
16, thus beginning a long and prolific literary ca-
reer. He became one of the most important Brazil-
ian literary figure of the second half of the 19th
century.
Machado de Assis published 200 short stories in
newspapers and magazines and chose 68 to be
published in anthologies. Many critics consider
him to be the master of the Brazilian short story,
and his influence on other writers has been wide-
spread. In his short stories, he takes up many
themes from Brazilian life and also addresses vari-
ous areas of the human psyche; for example, in
“The Fortune-teller,” published in a collection ti-
tled Various Stories, from 1897, he writes about the
question of destiny. The story tells about three
friends: a couple and their single male friend. The
wife and the male friend are having an affair, and
they are afraid the husband may have found out.
Each goes separately to see a fortune-teller about
their destiny, with surprising results. In an earlier
story, “The Mirror,” from an 1882 collection, he
writes about the interior and exterior life of one
man. The story is told in the first person; the main
character recounts the process of his realization
that all humans are actually two people. The per-
son we are inside is not the person we dress in the
mirror. His narrative is psychologically compelling,
again with a startling finish. Although Machado de
Assis rarely touches on the issue of race in his sto-
ries (something for which Gilberto
FREYRE criti-
cized him, stating that his style was too
Europeanized), he does treat the question of slav-
ery in some of his short stories. Brazil was the last
country in the Northern Hemisphere to abolish
slavery in 1888, so this was a public question that
marked the author’s lifetime. In an 1899 collection
of short stories, Machado de Assis published the
story “Father against Mother” that examines the
struggle between a poor man and a mulatto slave
woman. He and his wife will be forced to give up
their baby because of lack of finances if he cannot
M