In 1899, Lu Xun became one of many young, ambitious Chinese men who turned their backs on traditions that seemed to have led China into political disaster. He won a scholarship to study medicine in Japan岸a country that Chinese radicals reluctantly admired for transforming itself into a modern, imperialist power. 'A glorious future unfurled in my mind,' he remembered, 'in which I would return to my homeland after graduation and set about medicating its suffering sick . . . all the while converting my fellow countrymen to the religion of political reform.' Then, in 1906, at the end of a lecture, one of his Japanese teachers showed the class a slide depicting a scene from the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, partly fought on Chinese territory. It revealed a mob of Chinese watching dully, while one of their compatriots was beheaded by the Japanese as a Russian spy. Lu Xun later wrote:
1899年，鲁迅成为众多胸怀大志中国青年中的一员，他们抛弃了会将中国引入政治灾难的旧习。鲁迅获得了赴日本学医的奖学金，当时中国的激进分子都不情愿地钦佩这个将自己改造为一个现代化帝国的国家。他回忆道：“我在脑中勾画了一个美好的未来，预备在毕业后回到祖国，救治病人的疾苦...同时又促进国人对于维新的信仰。”后来，在1906年的某一天，一名日本教员在课堂快结束时给全班放映了一组幻灯片，其中一张描绘了1904至1905年间日俄战争（战争的一部分在中国领土上展开）某场景的幻灯片。它显示了一群中国人正神情麻木地围观一位被日军视作俄国间谍的同胞被砍头的景象。后来鲁迅写道：
Though they were all of them perfectly sturdy physical specimens, every face was utterly, stupidly blank. . . . I no longer believed in the overwhelming importance of medical science. However rude a nation was in physical health, if its people were intellectually feeble, they would never become anything other than cannon fodder or gawping spectators. . . . The first task was to change their spirit; and I decided that literature and the arts were the best means to this end.
“他们一样是强壮的体格，而显出麻木的神情...我便觉得医学并非一件紧要事。凡是愚弱的国民，即使体格如何健全，如何茁壮，也只能做毫无意义的示众的材料和看客...所以我们的第一要务，是在改变他们的精神，而善于改变精神的是，我那时以为当然要推文艺。”
Shortly after this Damascene conversion, Lu Xun abandoned his medical degree and began a career as China's self-appointed literary and spiritual physician岸although he did not find his voice and audience until he became one of the luminaries of the New Culture Movement more than a decade later.
在这次彻底转变后不久，鲁迅放弃学医，转而开始写作生涯，以期医治中国的精神顽疾。然而，直到十余年之后，在成为新文化运动的领导者之一时，他才得以让人们听到他的声音、被读者所认识。
At its first publication, Lu Xun's fiction was rebellious in both language and message. Until the 1910s, aspiring literati typically devoted themselves to poetry, in an opaque classical Chinese steeped in allusions, while vernacular fiction was held in disdain. Lu Xun took a different view. To him, imperial China's antiquarianism was a means of silencing the uneducated majority. Composed in a Westernized idiom, his short stories demonstrated that fiction could serve sophisticated, serious purposes.
在初版之时，鲁迅的小说在语言和内容上均是反传统的。在1910年代以前，满怀抱负的文人满篇引经据典、专注于以晦涩古文作诗，白话小说则被人嗤之以鼻。鲁迅的看法则不同，在他看来，中国旧王朝的尚古主义是一种压制未受教育的大多数百姓的手段。他的短篇小说以西化语言写成，表明小说也可以服务于深刻严肃的目的。
Ms. Davies picks up Lu Xun's story in detail in the second half of the 1920s, when the right-wing Nationalist Party began a purge against actual and suspected communists. Many of China's radical intellectuals turned leftward in response, simplistically acclaiming literature to be 'a tool of revolutionary violence.' Lu Xun was less certain. He scorned the egotism of born-again literary Marxists, whom he accused of posturing in revolutionary cafes: 'In front of each is a cup of steaming hot proletarian coffee while in the remote distance there's 'the great unwashed岸the peasants and workers.' ' Yet Lu Xun was also tough on writers who protested that literature should be apolitical, denouncing them for espousing a vapid humanism.
黄乐嫣详细描述了鲁迅在20年代后半段的经历，当时右翼的国民党对共产党员和疑似共产党员展开清洗。许多中国激进知识分子因而转向左翼，简单化地声称文学就是“革命暴力的工具”，对此鲁迅则不是那么确定。他对那些重生的马克思主义革命文学家的自大大加嘲讽，指责他们钻进革命咖啡店装模作样：“...（每个人）面前是一大杯热气蒸腾的无产阶级咖啡，远处是许许多多龌龊的农工大众”。另一方面，鲁迅对那些抗议说文学应当脱离政治的作家也毫不留情，抨击他们是支持乏味枯燥的人文主义。
Eventually, in 1930, Lu Xun sided with the communist cultural establishment by becoming titular head of the newly formed League of Left-wing Writers. But we can detect his doubts about a socialist aesthetic in his vituperative, elitist essays, which fueled sectarian feuds among leftist literati during the early 1930s. Shanghai's revolutionary writers, he concluded, were 'a thoroughly useless lot.' (He was even-handedly nasty about literati across the political spectrum: Those with right-wing connections were 'pampered pugs'; feral leftists were 'mangy dogs.')
最终，鲁迅在1930年成为新成立的左翼作家联盟名义上的旗帜人物，站在了共产党文化组织的一边。不过，我们还是能在他那些精英做派的骂文中察觉到他对社会主义审美趣味的质疑，这些文章也在30年代初期激化了左翼文学界的派别纷争。他说上海的革命作家是一帮一无是处的废物。（他对整个政界的文人全部一视同仁，比如他骂与右翼有关联的文人是“叭儿狗”，某些凶狠的左翼文人则是“赖皮狗”。）
Through his last years, Lu Xun continued to shelter in Shanghai's urbane, privileged foreign enclaves: enjoying family life, browsing favorite bookshops, hosting dinners, going to Tarzan movies. In 1927, he admitted that he would rather sit down with 'a glass of reconstituted evaporated milk' than join a revolution. When Lu Xun died of tuberculosis in Shanghai in 1936, he was mired in quarrels with left-wing functionaries and especially with Zhou Yang, the literary politico who would become Mao's cultural czar after 1949.
鲁迅在整个晚年一直住在上海都市化并享有特权的外国租界中：享受天伦之乐，逛逛自己最喜欢的书店，举办晚宴或者是看看《人猿泰山》(Tarzan)的电影。1927年，他承认与参加革命相比，他倒宁愿“静静地坐下，调给一杯罐头牛奶喝”。在1936年因结核病去世前，他正身陷于和一群左翼阵营的官员特别是文人政客周扬的论战中，后者在1949年后成为了毛泽东在文化事务上的帮凶。
But as soon as Lu Xun was safely dead of tuberculosis, he was adopted by Mao Zedong as an exemplary Servant of the Proletariat. Lu Xun was a fine trophy: the lampooner-in-chief of early 20th-century China who failed to live long enough to say anything nasty about Mao's brave new world. Because Mao claimed him for communism, a Lu Xun industry has developed on the mainland岸museums, plaster busts, spinoff books, journals, television adaptations, even a musical岸lionizing the writer as a great proletarian revolutionary. Ms. Davies does an admirable job of reclaiming the literary, psychological and political complexities that Mao did his best to erase. Far from just an angry polemicist, Ms. Davies's Lu Xun is also an exceptional prose poet, 'creating a turbulent aesthetics' out of vernacular Chinese.
就在鲁迅因结核病平静地去世后不久，他就被毛泽东奉为无产阶级公仆的典型代表。确实，鲁迅是一个上佳的门面人物：这位20世纪初期首屈一指的讽刺作家寿命不长，因此还来不及对毛泽东描绘的美好新世界说出任何令人恼怒的话。由于毛泽东称赞他有共产主义精神，与其相关的产业也在中国大陆兴起，比如他的纪念馆、半身石膏像、衍生作品、杂志和改编的电视剧等，甚至还有将其捧为伟大的无产阶级革命家的音乐剧。黄乐嫣做了一项令人敬佩的工作，那就是她复原了毛泽东竭力想抹去的鲁迅在文学、心理和政治上的复杂性。她笔下的鲁迅绝非只是一个愤慨好辩之人，还是一个卓越的散文诗人，借助中国白话文“营造出一种动荡不安之美”。
In later decades, Mao quoted from Lu Xun's vendettas to validate his own intellectual purges. It would be unfair to blame Lu Xun for the posthumous distortion of his words. Yet there is an uncomfortable link of some sort between the writer's literary pugilism and Mao's later justification of violence, a connection perhaps underplayed by Ms. Davies. But it is a testament to Lu Xun's importance as a writer and thinker that there are multiple ways of reading his legacy to Chinese letters. In 'Lu Xun's Revolution,' Ms. Davies has created a fascinating account of the final years of the writer's life and the beginning of his literary afterlife.
在后来数十年间，毛泽东借鲁迅与他人的恩怨为他自己对知识界的肃清做佐证。鲁迅的言语在死后被人歪曲，若将错误归咎于鲁迅，则有失公允。然而，这位作家与他人的文学交锋和毛泽东日后对暴力的辩护存在某种令人不安的关联，这个关系似乎被黄乐嫣淡化处理了。但是，它是对鲁迅作为作家和思想家的重要地位的印证。有多种方法去解读他给中国文学留下的遗产。总之，在《鲁迅的革命》一书中，黄乐嫣对这位作家的晚年生活及其文学新生命开端的叙述算得上引人入胜。