Lu Xun: the Chinese “Gentle” Nietzsche. By CHIU-YEE CHEUNG. [Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2001. 178 pp. £24.00. ISBN 3-631-38073-9.]

Extract

This is the first intellectual biography of Lu Xun (1881–1936) published in English in nearly 20 years. Arguably, it may be the first one ever. Cheung skilfully utilizes the prism of Lu Xun's interest in Nietzsche to examine not only his influence on the development of the Chinese writer's thought, but also a host of other issues from the interpretation of Lu Xun's works to his marital status. In order to do this, Cheung must first come to terms with Nietzsche's intellectual legacy, which he defines as that of the “gentle” Nietzsche – the Nietzsche sans Nachlass familiar to us through Walter Kaufmann, not the Nietzsche of the Will to Power created posthumously by his sister and others from fragments of the philosopher's unpublished manuscripts. In fact, it is best to read Nietzsche as rumination, Cheung tells us, or to pick up his Leitworte or main terms (p. 9). Cheung then asserts that Lu Xun was the “chosen one” to realize Nietzsche's influence on China (p. 17).

Central to all this was Thus Spake Zarathustra and Lu Xun's understanding of it as well as what he had gleaned from secondary sources during his years of study in Japan, probably Takayama Chogyuu's 1901 essay “Bunmei hihyooka to shite no bungakusha” (“The litterateur as cultural critic”), derived from Ziegler's Die geistigen und sozialen Stroemungen Deutschlands in neunzehnten Jahrhundert [The German Intellectual and Social Movements in the Nineteenth Century] (Berlin: Georg Bondi, 1911), which, Cheung informs us, is based on Nietzsche's Untimely Meditations (p. 23). If that is the case, the young Lu Xun is to be commended for his choice of sources.