Today we will talk about the literature of China. The authors of the Middle Kingdom (that is China) are not very well known to the Russian mass reader; however, the cultural contacts between our countries are expanding, and an interest in the Chinese literature is growing year after year.
At present, the Chinese literature is a real flood of book production, striking in its scale and diversity. According to a sinologist, Chinese and English translator Igor Egorov, the number of Chinese writers has exceeded one million, of whom about 10 thousand have received national recognition, and many of them have won the MAN Prize (“Asian Booker Prize”). Each year, more than 15 thousand fiction books are published in that country with a total circulation of over 160 million copies. More than 600 literary magazines, 500 specialized literary web-sites, where modern authors post their works, testify to the lively and fruitful life of Chinese writers.
What can be of interest in the Chinese literature to a Russian reader? The answer is: vivid language of images, fertile imagination, the mysterious world of a thousand-year-old national tradition, the connection with which is not lost and is manifested in everything; as well as, the variety of topics and plots, the ingenuity of the plots, and the delight of becoming acquainted with the beautiful.
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Mo Yan (1955) is the 2012 Nobel Prize winner, a writer, who, in fact, opened doors to modern Chinese literature for the whole world. It is known that Mo Yan is not the real name of the author, it can be translated as "do not speak," "be silent". The author took this pen-name as a memory of how in childhood he was advised to keep his mouth shut so as not to run into trouble. Nevertheless, Mo Yan wrote many stories and novels, the most famous of which were the surrealist novel The Republic of Wine (2012), and Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out (2014). The recent novel translated into Russian is the Frog (2020), devoted to the difficult problem of birth control in China.
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“It is a well-known fact that the richer a person, the more superstitious s/he is, as the level of wealth and the level of superstition are directly proportional. I know that such people believe in fate more than the poor, they value life more”.
As the Nobel Committee put it, Mo Yang's contribution is his "hallucinatory realism, merging folk tales, history and the modern times". The unique style of Mo Yan is characterized by original imagery, huge power of imagination doubled by mythology, and a great command of various narrative forms.
Mo Yan called his Nobel Lecture "Storeytellers". This title accurately describes the features of his writing style:
“A group of eight out-of-town bricklayers took refuge from a storm in a rundown temple. Thunder rumbled outside, sending fireballs their way. They even heard what sounded like dragon shrieks. The men were terrified, their faces ashen. “Among the eight of us,” one of them said, “is someone who must have offended the heavens with a terrible deed. The guilty person ought to volunteer to step outside to accept his punishment and spare the innocent from suffering.” Naturally, there were no volunteers. So one of the others came up with a proposal: “Since no one is willing to go outside, let’s all fling our straw hats toward the door. Whoever’s hat flies out through the temple door is the guilty party, and we’ll ask him to go out and accept his punishment.” So they flung their hats toward the door. Seven hats were blown back inside; one went out the door. They pressured the eighth man to go out and accept his punishment, and when he balked, they picked him up and flung him out the door. I’ll bet you all know how the story ends: They had no sooner flung him out the door than the temple collapsed around them”.
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Jung Chang (or Zhang Rong in another transcription) (1952) is a modern British writer of Chinese origin. Her books have been translated into 40 languages and over 15 million copies were sold outside mainland China, where they are banned, and you can only buy pirated copies. After the book about Mao, where he is presented in an extremely negative light (The Unknown Mao) in 2005, Zhang was allowed to return to China only 15 days a year (she comes there to visit her mother).
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The Wild Swans novel is a worldwide bestseller (2008) written in English and is a family history dating back over a century telling about the lives of three generations of women in China: grandmother, mother, and the heroine herself. Zhang vividly describes the political situation, military coups, the Cultural Revolution, and at the same time honestly presents the story of her family in detail.
"Once she discovered that he didn’t even read The Dream of the Red Chamber, the famous classic novel of the 18th century, known to every literate Chinese. She wasn’t hiding that she was disappointed, but without embarrassment the young Liu answered that the Chinese classic was not his hobby and that he liked foreign literature more. Trying to assert his superiority, he added: "Have you read “Madame Bovary?” This is my favourite book. In my opinion, it is the best one by Maupassant".
Nowadays, the Chinese literature are the historical excursions, avant-garde experiments, prose and drama of the absurd, women's prose (which is very developed in China), as well as adventure and fantasy, novels about warriors and martial artists. There is no doubt that acquaintance with the Chinese literature, one of the most ancient and richest literatures on our planet, will captivate with its originality, enrich the experience of our reader and arouse interest in a deeper acquaintance with the Chinese literature.
You can learn about the bestsellers of Latin America in our previous article.