More problematically, he fell out with his younger brother, Zhou Zuoren ("Lu Xun" was an adopted pen name -- he had been born Zhou Zhangshou). The cause of this is still not properly understood; Lu Xun may have become romantically involved with his brother's Japanese wife. Whatever the cause, the rupture was serious enough for him to move out of the family compound and set up elsewhere. But because the brother was also a prominent literary editor -- as at the time was Lu Xun -- the two continued to colaborate professionally while avoiding personal contact.
These aspects of Lu Xun's life were for a long time taboo in China -- heroes didn't have sons by mistresses or look longingly on their brother's spouse. And now that these questions can be addressed, many of the documents that might have thrown light on the subject are lost.
Lu Xun comes across in this biography as having been subject to melancholy, and at the same time given to bouts of introspection. His 1927 book Weeds (sometimes translated Wild Grass) is a modernist collection of prose-poems involving dreams, a dramatic sketch, and expressions of frenzied despair that go back, says Pollard, to ancient Chinese forms, as well as owing much to Western writers such as Turgenev, Baudelaire and Nietzsche.
But more direct forms of writing, notably political and social invective, fill up more of Lu Xun's output. These polemical essays, Pollard judges, are already becoming dated as the topics they argue over drift further and further into the past. It's his fiction, Pollard argues, that has survived best, even though it only represents a small proportion of his total oeuvre. But there too, as in the essays, Lu Xun was essentially a moralist castigating social evils, and stupidity in general.
This is the first biography of Lu Xun in a European language apart from an adulatory Chinese one that has been translated into French. Its title is a reference to Lu Xun's famous tale The True Story of Ah Q.
Pollard is everywhere even-handed and cogent. In his preface you come across this sentence, following a reference to the burning of books and destruction of historical relics during the Cultural Revolution. "Fortunately China has recovered from these excesses, the past has been retrieved, including the more recent past in which Lu Xun lived, and the danger its culture faces is similar to that of all countries in the world, namely mass ignorance and triviality of pursuits." When you read something like that, then you know you are in good hands.
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