“Dawn blossoms plucked at dusk” by Lu Xun as Autobiography

Abstract

The book of memoirs of Lu Xun “Dawn blossoms plucked at dusk” (1928) traditionally has been considered by the Russian and foreign researchers as the most important source of biographic material about the writer. However, due to its seemingly fragmentary nature and inconsistency it not always corresponds to the autobiography as a literary genre. The purpose of this paper is to show and prove that ten parts of the collection represent not fragments of memoirs, but the integral and interconnected text corresponding to contemporary conceptions (even ambiguous) of an autobiography genre. The book has been examined at the levels of plot, composition and narration. Basing on cross-disciplinary approach to the material, authors of the paper conclude that Lu Xun managed to create the writing where the narrative discourse of the autobiography, connecting to an artistic mode of lyrical prose, creates a special type of unity of fiction and documentary. The “Dawn blossoms plucked at dusk”, written earlier than autobiographies of Guo Moro (1928), Li Ji (1930), Hu Shi (1933), not only designated a pathway for the development of this genre in China, but also mainly predetermined interest to it both in the first, and in the second half of the twentieth century.