Шэнь Цунвэнь: Жизнь и творчество китайского писателя

Chinese writer

Shen Congwen (28 December 1902 – 10 May 1988), formerly romanized as Shen Ts'ung wen, was a Chinese writer who is considered one of the greatest modern Chinese writers, on par with Lu Xun. Regional culture and identity plays a much bigger role in his writing than that of other major early modern Chinese writers. He was known for combining the vernacular style with classical Chinese writing techniques. Shen is the most important of the "native soil" writers in modern Chinese literature. Shen Congwen published many excellent compositions in his life, the most famous of which is the novella Border Town. This story is about the old ferryman and his granddaughter Cuicui's love story.

He was born Shen Yuehuan on 28 December 1902 in the town of Fenghuang (then known as Zhen'gan) in west Hunan Province. In late adolescence he chose the name Shen Congwen. He was the fourth of nine children born to Shen Zongsi, a Han Miao, and Huang Suying, a Tujia. His grandfather, Shen Hongfu, was a local hero who became a decorated general before being named acting commander in chief of Guizhou province at the age of 25. Due in large part to his grandfather's fame and fortune, Shen Congwen was born into a relatively well off household. Following the founding of the Republic of China in 1912, his father hoped to become elected to the provincial assembly, but was instead forced to go into hiding in Inner Mongolia after joining a failed plot to assassinate President Yuan Shikai. The fact of Shen's mother's Tujia ethnicity and his paternal grandmother's Miao ethnicity, he keep secret until the 1980s. Owing to his father's sudden disappearance, the family fortunes gradually diminished. Most of their land was sold off, and in 1917, after graduating from primary school, Shen Congwen was made to leave home. working as a clerk.

Shen Congwen and his wife Zhang Zhaohe were married in 1933. In 1929, Shen Congwen was hired by Hu Shi to teach in Shanghai. During this period, his student Zhang Zhaohe (known as "Black Peony") attracted Shen's attention, and he became one of Zhang's many suitors. However, Zhang had a poor impression of Shen, and his constant love letters also caused her some inconvenience. Shen's persistence finally touched Zhang and her family, and the two married in 1933. After their marriage, conflicts arose between them and they lived apart for a long time. Shen Congwen's scandal also caused a rift in their relationship, but they still accompanied each other through their lives.

Shen died of a heart attack on 10 May 1988 in Beijing at the age of 85.

Although almost entirely unknown outside of China, Shen Congwen's oeuvre is considered vitally important inside China. He was a very prolific writer, producing more than 20 volumes of prose and fiction between 1933 and 1937. Later, his works included several novels and novellas and eventually, after he stopped writing fiction in 1949, many scholarly, non fiction volumes about calligraphy, art history, museum preservation and other topics relevant to the history of Chinese art and culture. Two major thematic focal points of his early writing include military excesses and abuses in the country which he witnessed first hand and the vanity of the urban bourgeoisie. The later is presented in contrast to his portrayal of the strength of the struggling commoner. Shen Congwen's style of creation tends to romanticism, and he demands the poetic effect of the novel, which combines realism and symbolism together. The language is simple with strong local color, which highlights the unique charm and charm of rural human nature. Shen Congwen's rural novels are typical rural cultural novels, which are not only in contrast with the urban "modern civilization" on the whole, but also always pay attention to the rural people's living mode, life footprint and historical destiny stipulated by different cultural collisions in the process of the western Hunan world's transition to modern times. His works of fiction set in west Hunan have attracted the most critical attention. In these works he focuses on unassimilated Miao people who live in a traditional culture in the frontier region with the dominant Han culture and the modern world. With little first hand experience of Miao life, Shen based these stories on his own imagination, life experiences and Miao legends told to him by his nursemaid and his country relatives. The descriptive nouns in the novel contain a great deal of western Hunan folk culture and skillfully apply proverbs and folk songs into the novel. His 1929 short story Xiaoxiao (萧萧), about the life of a child bride in rural west Hunan was first published in Fiction Monthly. Shen revised the story in 1935. A film version of the story was made in the 1950s. In 1986 another, more popular film adaptation of the story was released. The film was one of the first mainland Chinese films commercially released in the U. S., where it was published under the title A Girl from Hunan. The film was screened in 1987 at the Cannes film festival in the "Un Certain Regard" section. Long River , written during the Sino Japanese War, is considered the best of his long fiction while Lamp of Spring and Black Phoenix are his most important collections of short stories. The love dispute that the story revolves round Cuicui. Two brothers, Tianbao and Tangsong, who were always on the boat at Chatong' Dock, fell in love with Cuicui at the same time. Cuicui only fell in love with Tansong. Her grandfather only knew that Tianbao had come to ask for a bride, but he did not know what his granddaughter was thinking. The two brothers meet to sing to get Cuicui, Tianbao know to brother also like Cui Cui, change out of the competition but unfortunately encountered an accident. Shunshun and Tansong misunderstanding Cuicui grandfather, Shunshun looking for another rich marriage to Tansong. But Tansong still fond of Cuicui, he left city of Chatong along the river. Grandfather has been aware of this, depressed in the heart of a thunderstorm died one night, while Cuicui has been waiting for Tansong. In addition, Some of Shen's works focus on religion. For example, his 1941 novel The Candle Extinguished (Zhu Xu), is concerned with religiosity: with discovering God in life. Shen Congwen's career as a scholarly writer, beginning after 1949, has received relatively little critical attention, but the works he produced in this period of more than thirty years are still notable because there have been three branches of modern Chinese rural literature: one is the Enlightenment literature represented by Lu Xun; one is the left wing revolutionary rural literature; another is Shen Congwen's beautiful and quiet Xiangxi style literature. Five out the thirty two volumes of The Complete Works of Shen Congwen are devoted to his later scholarly work.

Shen Congwen. A Portrait by Kong Kai Ming at Portrait Gallery of Chinese Writers (Hong Kong Baptist University Library).