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Rating: The first half of the Chinese twentieth century was one of the bloodiest periods in history: the fall of the empire and the tumultuous rise of the Guomindang (the Chinese Nationalist Party), the exhausting internal wars, the barbaric Japanese invasions, and the oppressions of colonialist West. But it was also a period of exceptional cultural fervor at times, witnessing China opening itself for the first time to Western philosophical and literary currents.
Luxun was a product of all this: a young and brilliant intellectual who studied abroad in Japan, he came from a disgraced family that experienced the derision and contempt of a society that was hypocritical and petty, ready to fiercely lash out at itself to remain immobile in its own decay, chained for centuries to the same schemes and conventions.
The "Diary of a Madman", written and published in 1918, is a keystone of modern Chinese literature: a short, sparse, chilling tale. Like a retouched photograph, it displays in black and white the "backwardness" of society, while simultaneously highlighting the dull colors of blood, decay, and disease. Although the title and form of the work are borrowed from Gogol, the content is entirely original: the diary of a paranoid man, with persecution delusions, whose incoherent and not always clear phrases gradually shape the harrowing awareness of living in a society of cannibals.
"I realized they were a gang, all human flesh eaters, yet they did not all think the same way. Some thought that since it had always been so, one must eat it. Others thought it should not be done, yet still, they desired it. The latter were people afraid their secret might be discovered..."
The madman who writes these pages lives every single instant of his social daily life as a psychological war in which he must defend himself from the traps and deceptions of everyone around him, brothers and parents included, who, according to him, would like to back him into a corner, kill him, and finally eat him. In reality, from Luxun's pen comes a macabre metaphor of what Chinese society has been reduced to, whose blind cruelty, as mentioned, he experienced firsthand.
"Waiting in anticipation to eat men, and simultaneously living in fear of being eaten in turn, everyone looks at the other with the deepest suspicion..."
By giving voice to the despair of his mad protagonist, Luxun issues the common appeal that all the young Chinese intellectuals of the era would have liked to launch in unison, whose new ideas, whose hopes, were frustrated by the apathy, resignation, and narrow-mindedness of the ruling classes and society itself.
"You must change, change from the depths of your hearts. You must understand there will no longer be a place for human flesh eaters in the future. If you do not change, you will all end up being eaten by one another... you will end up being killed like wolves by hunters, like reptiles!"
The heartfelt call for change that transpires from these lines made the "Diary of a Madman" interpreted in a revolutionary light, giving rise to politically tinged readings that the author himself probably never envisioned. The fact is that Luxun, thanks also and above all to this work which had extraordinary success, became the main spokesman of the new intellectual movement that in the following years ignited the soul of China.
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